A large asteroid once considered the greatest known risk to Earth may now be on track for a direct hit — not on our planet, ...

Initially flagged as a potential Earth threat, asteroid 2024 YR4, a 200-foot space rock, is now predicted to potentially ...

The Giant Impact Hypothesis has long fascinated scientists as the leading explanation for the Moon's formation. Around 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth and a Mars-sized protoplanet called Theia ...

The impact that carved out the moon's huge South Pole-Aitken basin may explain the puzzling differences between the lunar ...

When high-velocity asteroids land on Earth, they can form a meteor impact crater. Such collisions have occurred throughout ...

From the distribution and shapes of those mountain-like features, the team realized that the impact should have created a more circular crater from which significant chunks of planet-forming ...

But the most successful ones involved a moon-forming impact that sent the Earth spinning extremely fast–as much as twice the rate predicted by other models.

Over 4.6 billion years ago, Earth took shape from a spinning cloud of dust and gas surrounding the young sun. Tiny particles within this cloud collided and clumped together, driven by gravity and ...

The South Pole-Aitken basin is the moon's oldest and largest visible crater—a massive geological wound 4 billion years old that preserves secrets about the moon's early history, much like a ...