Sentences with phrase «by rocky asteroids»

That's because the higher speed of comets and the high volatility of their constituents would create giant plumes on impact, so more of the iridium would escape into space, compared with impacts by rocky asteroids.

Not exact matches

Further calculations by Catling and his team conclude that no abiotic methane sources on a rocky planet could produce enough of the gas to counteract this process — whether it is volcanic outgassing from a planet's interior, chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents, even asteroid impacts.

Such elements are normally captured in the metallic cores of rocky worlds, and their existence hinted that Mars had been pelted by asteroids throughout its early history.

Most of the proposed defense methods would require careful study of an asteroid's composition — you might simply create a rocky doughnut by trying to blast one apart.

Though they look pretty different, P5 and R3 are both evidence that small, rocky asteroids might die by spinning apart.

One middle - aged star, known as HD 69830, appears to be surrounded by an asteroid belt that is 25 times as dense as the one in our solar system, possibly the remnants of a rocky planet that never formed.

All families have their rocky patches, but a new family found in our solar system is as rocky as they come: a few dozen asteroids, all born from a parent blasted by an impact less than 6 million years ago.

Artist's impression of a rocky and water - rich asteroid being torn apart by the strong gravity of the white dwarf star.

«It may give us clues to the formation of Earth's moon and the moons of the other planets, and the role played by asteroid impacts in shaping the terrestrial [rocky] planets,» says Alexander Zakharov of the Moscow - based Space Research Institute and chief scientist for Fobos - Grunt.

What little rocky material occurs in today's ring system probably is the debris of collisions between icy ring particles and asteroids and comets swept up by the planet's huge gravitational field, says Canup.

The rocky body — the largest yet to get a close flyby — seems to have been just large enough to avoid being reduced to a flying pile of rubble by eons of collisions with other asteroids.

A rain of asteroids hurled into the inner solar system by a wandering Jupiter could have swept up a family of large rocky planets huddled up close to the sun, researchers report online March 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Psyche would be a mission to something never examined before up close — a metallic asteroid, the metallic core of a protoplanet where the outer rocky layers (and any atmosphere) had been «stripped away» by a violent impact with another object, according to planetary scientists.

Such an intriguing metallic planetary body has not been studied before by any spacecraft; other asteroids visited have been of the rocky variety.

Artist impression of a rocky and water - rich asteroid being torn apart by the strong gravity of the white dwarf star GD 61.