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MIT researchers have devised a framework for deciding which type of mission would be most successful in deflecting an incoming asteroid, taking into account an asteroid’s mass and momentum, its proximity to a gravitational keyhole, and the amount of warning time that scientists have of an impending collision.

Artist’s impression of one of the two stars in the FU Orionis binary system, surrounded by an accreting disk of material. What has caused this star — and others like it — to dramatically brighten?

Artist impression of a red-dwarf star’s magnetic interaction with its exoplanet.

Optical image of Titan taken by NASA Cassini spacecraft.

Citizen Scientists Discover Rare Cosmic Pairing

The globular cluster Omega Centauri contains as many as ten million stars. A new study has found five millisecond pulsars at its core.

The image shows a thermokarst lake in Alaska. Thermokarst lakes form in the Arctic when permafrost thaws.

Three-dimensional view of the Martian surface temperature around an idealized boulder at latitude 30°S. On the side opposite to the Sun, temperatures are around -128° Celsius, and as the sun rises, this area heats up rapidly, so frost melts on salt-containing ground before it sublimates into the atmosphere.

A Southwest Research Institute team performed high-resolution, smoothed-particle simulations of a large, differentiated projectile hitting early Mars after its core and mantle had formed. The projectile’s core and mantle particles are indicated by brown and green spheres respectively, showing local concentrations of the projectile materials assimilated into the Martian mantle.

Artist's conception of a massive planet orbiting a cool, young star. In the case of the system discovered by RIT astronomers, the planet is 10 times more massive than Jupiter, and the orbit of the planet around its host star is nearly 600 times that of Earth around the sun.