41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, officially named after its three discoverers, or known this year as the April Fool’s Day Comet, passed by our planet at a distance of approximately 13 million miles. 41P was first discovered by Horace Tuttle in 1858, it was determined then that 41P was a periodic comet, (a comet that orbits the sun) but, […]
No one knows for certain why the Clovis people and iconic beasts — mastodon, mammoth and saber-toothed tiger — living some 12,800 years ago suddenly disappeared. However, a discovery of widespread platinum at archaeological sites across the U.S. by three University of South Carolina archaeologists has provided an important clue in solving this enduring mystery. The research […]
Mars’ largest moon, Phobos, has captured public imagination and been shrouded in mystery for decades. But numerical simulations recently conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have shed some light on the enigmatic satellite. The dominant feature on the surface of Phobos (22-kilomters across) is Stickney crater (9-km across), a mega crater that spans […]
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured one of the sharpest, most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart, which occurred 67 million miles from Earth. In a series of images taken over a three-day span in January 2016, Hubble revealed 25 building-size blocks made of a mixture of ice and dust that are drifting […]