Wednesday, October 8, 2025

Gaia solves the mystery of tumbling asteroids and reveals what’s inside them

By combining Gaia’s massive asteroid dataset with AI modeling, scientists discovered that asteroid rotation depends on how often they’ve been hit. A mysterious gap in rotation speeds marks where collisions and internal friction balance out. This insight reveals that most asteroids are loose rubble piles, not solid rocks, and could behave very differently if struck by a deflection mission like NASA’s DART.

from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/D7tHVK8

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First stellar stream beyond the Milky Way could reveal dark matter

Astronomers have discovered the first globular cluster stellar stream beyond the Milky Way, opening a new way to study dark matter in distan...