space time

  A sizable space rock will make its closest approach to Earth in four centuries on Wednesday evening (Feb. 15), but there's nothing to fear. The near-Earth  asteroid  2005 YY128 will zoom within 2.8 million miles (4.5 million km) of our planet at 7:46 p.m. EST on Wednesday (0046 GMT on Feb. 16) — closer than it's gotten to us in more than 400 years,  according to EarthSky.org (opens in new tab) . Still, that's about 12 times the distance from Earth to  the moon , so there's no chance the asteroid will hit us on this pass, experts stress. As its name suggests, 2005 YY128 was discovered in 2005, by astronomers at Kitt Peak Observatory in southern Arizona. Over the past 17 years, researchers have mapped its orbit with a high degree of precision. Their observations, however, haven't nailed down 2005 YY128's size. The best astronomers can give us is a diameter range — somewhere between 1,903 feet (580 meters) and 4,265 feet (1.3 km), according to EarthSky. 2005...

Astronomers have developed a new technique for identifying "starspots" — cool, dark regions of stars akin to the sunspots on our star, the  sun . These regions are believed to form on the surfaces of  stars  when strong magnetic fields tangle and suppress the churning of plasma, thus impeding light from escaping from that region of the star.  The research could shed light on why some stars are highly active, and could eventually help astronomers better define stars'  habitable zones , the regions around stars where planets could sustain liquid water at their surfaces and thus have the potential to support life.  "Our study is the first to precisely characterize the spottiness of stars and use it to directly test theories of stellar magnetism," Lyra Cao, an astronomer at The Ohio State University and lead author of the research, said in a  statement (opens in new tab) . "This technique is so precise and broadly applicable that it can become a powerful n...

An international team of scientists, including NYU Abu Dhabi researchers, and others from the United States of America, Japan, and China, has developed new insights that may explain the numerical a symmetry f l4 and L5 Jupiter trojan swarms, 2 clusters containing more than 10,000 asteroids that move along Jupiter's orbital path around the sun. For decades, scientists have known that there are significantly more asteroids in the L4 swarm than in the L5 swarm but have not fully understood the reason for this asymmetry. in the current configuration of the solar system, the 2 swarms show almost identical dynamical stability and survivability properties. scientists propose an outward in terms of distance to the sun fast migration of Jupiter can distort the configuration of trojan swarms, resulting in more stable orbits in the L4 swarm than the L5. this mechan...