Related papers: Minimoon still on the loose
On 2023 February 27 at 18:15:55.77 UT, a bright fireball streaked across the sky above northern Sweden. The event offered a valuable opportunity to study the phenomenon using an optical system primarily designed for auroral studies, the…
To date only very few meteor clusters have been instrumentally recorded. This means that every new detection is an important contribution to the understanding of these phenomena, which are thought to be evidence of the meteoroid…
During the last stages of the terrestrial planet formation, planets grow mainly through giant-impacts with large planetary embryos. The Earth's Moon was suggested to form through one of these impacts. However, since the proto-Earth has…
The earliest confirmed interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was discovered in the Solar System by Pan-STARRS in 2017, allowing for a calibration of the abundance of interstellar objects of its size $\sim 100\;$ m. This was followed by the…
On October 8th, 2011 the Earth crossed the dust trails left by comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner during its XIX and XX century perihelion approaches with the comet being close to perihelion. The geometric circumstances of that encounter were thus…
Giant planet migration appears widespread among planetary systems in our Galaxy. However, the timescales of this process, which reflect the underlying dynamical mechanisms, are not well constrained, even within the solar system. Since…
The physical composition and structure of meteoroids gives us insight into the formation processes of their parent asteroids and comets. The strength of and fundamental grain sizes in meteoroids tell us about the environment in which small…
Asteroid 2024 XA$_1$ was discovered on 3 December 2024 at 05:54 UTC by the Bok telescope in Kitt Peak, Arizona, and impacted Earth about 10 hours later over a remote area of the Sakha Republic (Russia). The estimated size of the object was…
On 2020 September 18 US Government sensors detected a bolide with peak bolometric magnitude of -19 over the western Pacific. The impact was also detected by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument on the GOES-17 satellite and…
Summary: In the past decade both scientists and laymen have probably heard at least once through the newspapers, TV and Internet that a new asteroid has been discovered with non-zero (sometimes "high") probability of collision with the…
On October 8, 2011 the Earth crossed dust trails ejected from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner in the late 19th and early 20th Century. This gave rise to an outburst in the activity of the October Draconid meteor shower, and an international team…
The Ursid meteor shower is an annual shower that usually shows little activity. However, its Zenith Hourly Rate sometimes increases, usually either when its parent comet, 8P/Tuttle, is close to its perihelion or its aphelion. Outbursts when…
Small bodies in the solar system are conventionally classified into asteroids and comets. However, it is recently found that a small number of objects can exhibit properties of both asteroids and comets. Some are more consistent with…
Sungrazing comets have always captured a lot of interest and curiosity among the general public as well as scientists since ancient times. The perihelion passage of comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) at the end of this year (on 2013 November 28) is an…
Minimoons are asteroids that become temporarily captured by the Earth-Moon system. We present the discovery of 2024 PT$_5$, a minimoon discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) Sutherland telescope on 2024…
A new meteor shower $\lambda$-Sculptorids produced by the comet 46P/Wirtanen was forecast for December 12, 2023. The predicted activity was highly uncertain, but generally considered to be low. Observations in Australia, New Zealand, and…
The asteroid (3200) Phaethon is widely recognized as the parent of the Geminid meteoroid stream. However, it has never shown evidence for on-going mass loss or for any form of comet-like activity that would indicate the continued…
The probability is investigated that the meteorites originating on Earth are transferred to other planets in our Solar System and to extra solar planets. We take the collisional Chicxulub crater event, and material that was ejected as an…
Given the compositional diversity of asteroids, and their distribution in space, it is impossible to consider returning samples from each one to establish their origin. However, the velocity and molecular composition of primary minerals,…
The collision history of asteroids is an important archive of inner Solar System evolution. Evidence for these collisions is brought to Earth by meteorites, which can preserve impact-reset radioisotope mineral ages. However, as meteorites…