European Association for Astronomy Education

Source:University of Central Florida

An artist conception of asteroid 24 Themis.
Credit: G. Pérez (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Spain)

The first-ever discovery of ice and organic molecules on an asteroid may hold clues to the origins of Earth’s oceans and life 4 billion years ago.

University of Central Florida researchers detected a thin layer of water ice and organic molecules on the surface of 24 Themis, the largest in a family of asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.

Their unexpected findings will be published Thursday, April 29 in Nature, which will feature two complementary articles by the UCF-led team and by another team of planetary scientists.

“What we’ve found suggests that an asteroid like this one may have hit Earth and brought our planet its water,” said UCF Physics Professor Humberto Campins, the study’s lead author.

Some theories suggest asteroids brought water to Earth after the planet formed dry. Scientists say the salts and water that have been found in some meteorites support this view.

Using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, Campins and his team of researchers measured the intensity of the reflected sunlight as 24 Themis rotated. Differences in intensity at different wavelengths helped researchers determine the makeup of the asteroid’s surface.

Researchers were surprised to find ice and carbon-based compounds evenly distributed on 24 Themis. More specifically, the discovery of ice is unexpected because surface ice should be short lived on asteroids, which are expected to be too warm for ice to survive for long.

The distance between this asteroid and the sun is about three times greater than between Earth and the sun.

Researchers will continue testing various hypotheses to explain the presence of ice. Perhaps most promising is the possibility that 24 Themis might have preserved the ice in its subsoil, just below the surface, as a kind of “living fossil” or remnant of an early solar system that was generally considered to have disappeared long ago.

Campins’ team is made up of scientists from UCF, the University of La Laguna in Spain, University of Southern Maine, University of Maryland, Universidade Federal Do Rio De Janeiro in Brazil, NASA-Ames Research Center and NAIC-Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Source: NASA

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought that the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.(read more)

Source: NASA/JPL

The red dot at the center of this image is the first near-Earth asteroid
discovered by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has spotted its first never-before-seen near-Earth asteroid, the first of hundreds it is expected to find during its mission to map the whole sky in infrared light.

The near-Earth object, designated 2010 AB78, was discovered by WISE Jan. 12. After the mission’s sophisticated software picked out the moving object against a background of stationary stars, researchers followed up and confirmed the discovery with the University of Hawaii’s 2.2-meter (88-inch) visible-light telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea. (read more)

Source: Skymania

Astronomers are watching what they believe is a remarkable collision between two asteroids deep in space. If they are right, it is the first time a high-speed crash has ever been witnessed between massive space rocks.

The cosmic hit-and-run is happening 250 million miles away in a band of debris lying between planets Mars and Jupiter – the main asteroid belt.

An automatic sky camera called LINEAR in New Mexico snapped a newly discovered object there that looks fuzzy with a tail like a comet rather than a dot of light like a normal asteroid. It has been labelled P/2010 A2.(read more)

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Source: Space Weather

Is it an asteroid or a derelict spacecraft? Mystery object 2010 AL30 is flew past Earth last night only 1/3rd the distance to the Moon, and telescopes around the world were watching.

2010 AL30 is the faint object that comes down to the right.
This image was made in Colombia, using a 14-inch Meade LX200.
Credit: Alberto Quijano Vodniza (Amateur Astronomer)

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.