It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s an asteroid-comet hybrid called a ‘centaur’ that might not even be that. Asteroids are metallic rocks that form close to the sun, while comets are ...
Since Chiron possesses characteristics of both an asteroid and a comet ... I'm not so sure we have a standard centaur," Pinilla-Alonso says. "Every active centaur that we are observing with ...
But NASA’s top asteroid expert, Paul Chodas, quickly suspected it was the Centaur upper rocket stage from Surveyor 2, a failed 1966 moon-landing mission. Size estimates had put it in the range ...
In the distant space out beyond the orbit of Jupiter lurks a strange object. Its name is Chiron, a type of outer Solar System body known as a centaur. But even among its fellow centaurs, Chiron is ...
Furthermore, advances in observational technology have revealed that many other celestial bodies besides planets also have rings, such as the centaur asteroid Chariklo, which lies outside the ...
Other than that, we have the asteroid belt, which stretches from Mars to Jupiter. This also means that Oumuamua wasn’t the first interstellar visit and neither was Borisov. The Centaur asteroids ...