NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks to astronomer Sarah Greenstreet about her team's new discovery of the fastest-spinning large asteroid known to man.

The huge 1,600-mile (2,500-kilometer) wide expanse of the South Pole–Aitken Basin extends considerably onto the far side of ...

Mysterious driftwood high in Grand Canyon caves hints at the legacy of Arizona’s huge impact crater.

But only in the last 70 years have we known for certain they were there. In 1956, physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines ...

Scientists have discovered the fastest-spinning asteroid sized over 0.3 miles in diameter, which is rotating about once every two minutes. Dubbed 2025 MN45, the space rock is some 2,300 feet across ...

An artist’s conception zeroes in on a main-belt asteroid called 2025 MN45, which makes a full rotation in less than two minutes. (Credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / AURA / P.

If you were to ask a group of dedicated amateur astronomers to list their favorite telescopic targets, few if any would mention asteroids. That’s easy to understand. The typical asteroid lacks the jaw ...

In 2021, a global survey of 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 found that 75 percent were fearful of the future. More than half believed that humanity is doomed to extinction. There’s ...

The chances of a devastating asteroid impact briefly spiked in 2025, after astronomers discovered a building-sized asteroid hurtling towards Earth. The asteroid, named 2024 YR4, was first detected by ...

Talk about a sugar rush! NASA may have just come a little closer to cracking one of science’s most enduring mysteries — how life on Earth got started. The space agency has reportedly discovered ...

Samples taken from the asteroid Bennu are continuing to shed light on the origins of the solar system. Scientists have been studying the samples since NASA's Osiris-REx spacecraft carried them back to ...

An asteroid named YR4 is on a potential collision course with the moon, with NASA estimating a 4% chance of impact in 2032. While the scenario might sound like a Hollywood plot, scientists are ...