Asteroids come in all shapes and sizes, and now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have observed an asteroid so heavily cratered that they are dubbing it the "golf ball asteroid."

There should be interstellar comets hiding in our solar system after making a journey of many light-years. Maybe we have already seen one but believed it was a "normal" comet formed in the solar system, according to Tom Hands, astrophysicist at the University of Zürich and member of the NCCR PlanetS.

Some of the Earth's building material was stardust from red giants, researchers from ETH Zurich have established. They have also explained why the Earth contains more of this stardust than the asteroids or the planet Mars, which are farther from the sun.

The first map showing the global geology of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has been completed and fully reveals a dynamic world of dunes, lakes, plains, craters and other terrains.

Astronomers using ESO's SPHERE instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed that the asteroid Hygiea could be classified as a dwarf planet. The object is the fourth largest in the asteroid belt after Ceres, Vesta and Pallas. For the first time, astronomers have observed Hygiea in sufficiently high resolution to study its surface and determine its shape and size. They found that Hygiea is spherical, potentially taking the crown from Ceres as the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar […]

RUDN University mathematician has proposed a method for calculating the optimal trajectory of spacecraft with electric propulsion, whose thrust is thousands times less than chemical one has, but it is able to work for years. These motors are best suited for interplanetary missions. Mathematicians calculated the flight parameters of the space probe with such motor to Mars and Mercury. The paper is published in the journal Cosmic Research.

This image, based on observations from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows the largest mountain on the dwarf planet Ceres.

A team of researchers from Australia, Switzerland and Japan has found evidence suggesting that the asteroid Vesta was stuck by a very large rock approximately 4.5 billion years ago. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the group describes their study of the asteroid and what they believe is material from it.

The mission to the smallest asteroid ever explored will employ the same main camera as the mission to the largest asteroids of all. ESA's proposed Hera spacecraft to the Didymos asteroid pair has inherited its main imager from NASA's Dawn mission to the Vesta and Ceres asteroids.

Scientists who study the solar system tend to ask big questions: How was our solar system formed? Where did the building blocks of life come from? What hazards from above threaten life on our planet? To find answers, they're looking more and more at small worlds.