A normally staid scientist has stunned many of his colleagues with his radical solution to a 135-year-old mystery in cosmochemistry. At issue is how numerous small, glassy spherules had become ...

Figure 1: Jetting of melted material during an accretionary impact. An important aspect of our model is that, although chondrules accumulate to form chondrites on small bodies, the chondrules ...

Figure 1: Abundance ratios of noble gases. In order to investigate the trapping site of subsolar gas in Yamato-791790, we performed a laser-microprobe noble-gas analysis. We prepared five polished ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Asteroids may be a byproduct of planet formation rather than planetary building blocks, according to a recent paper in Nature. Research done at Purdue University suggests ...

Analysis of samples from asteroid Bennu has revealed objects resembling chondrules, though not identical to those found in meteorites, suggesting greater asteroid diversity than previously understood.

You and I got here by way of the stars. They fused simple elements like hydrogen and helium in their cores into more complicated ones like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron crucial for ...

The toaster-sized capsule hit our atmosphere at 12 kilometers per second, enduring temperatures of 3,000 degrees Celsius during its fiery descent before deploying a parachute to slow its velocity. It ...