When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Asteroids have long been regarded as planetary building blocks. But they may actually be ...

Microscopic analyses of chondrites, the oldest rocks in the solar system, are filling in details of what our neighborhood in space was like shortly before the planets formed I pity Astronomers. They ...

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 process that formed the giant planet Jupiter may also have spawned some of the tiniest and oldest members of our solar system -- millimeter-sized spheres called chondrules, the major part of the ...

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 ...

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system (so large, in fact, that some scientists think it might have even consumed other worlds), a gas giant so massive that it shaped the orbits and ...

The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI. Figure 2: Timing and location of chondrule-forming impact. The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

Mysterious spherical droplets in meteorites aren’t just cosmic oddities. They’re evidence of planetary formation. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here ...

In 1877, when English geologist Henry Clifton Sorby first examined samples of meteorites under a microscope, he saw small, spherical rocks and described them as “drops of fiery rain.” Now known as ...

Jupiter has a new birthday thanks to raindrops preserved in asteroids. These raindrops, known as chondrules, have allowed a team of scientists to accurately date the origin of Jupiter's formation for ...

The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI. In order to investigate the trapping site of subsolar gas in Yamato-791790, we performed a laser-microprobe noble-gas analysis. We ...