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A defunct, 5,050-pound (2,290 kilograms) satellite has tumbled uncontrollably back to Earth after spending three decades in space.  After slowly falling to Earth for more than 12 years, the European Space Agency's (ESA) ERS-2 satellite reentered Earth's atmosphere at 12:17 p.m. ET (5:17 p.m. GMT) on Wednesday, Feb. 21, burning up over a remote patch of the North Pacific Ocean roughly halfway between Alaska and Hawaii, according to ESA. No damage to property has been reported, and it is unclear if any debris survived the fiery plunge through the atmosphere. The dead satellite — which studied Earth's climate from its launch in 1995 until it was retired in 2011 — is one of hundreds of pieces of space debris that will fall back to Earth this year. Most pieces of space debris that reenter Earth's atmosphere are smaller than 3.2 feet (1 meter) across, according to ESA; however, even large objects like ERS-2 pose virtually no risk to people or property on the ground. ...

In 2006, astronomers with the NASA-backed Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona discovered a peculiar body floating amid the sea of thousands of human-made satellites orbiting our planet. After taking a closer look, they determined that the object wasn't just another piece of space junk. Rather, it was a natural satellite that had been temporarily yanked into a tagalong orbit with the Earth, similar to the moon. This "minimoon," designated 2006 RH120, was just a few meters in diameter. But unlike the actual moon, this cosmic body was a transient Earth companion, traveling around the planet for only a year before being ejected from our planet's orbit. More than a decade later, scientists with the Catalina Sky Survey spotted another minimoon (2020 CD3) — this one about the size of a small car — roaming through Earth's orbit , before it was flung out of the Earth-moon system's influence in March 2020. Because of their proximity to Earth, these minimoons have war...

There is no known record of when the first UFO was sighted on Earth. Now, we have an enormous amount of data to confirm the sightings, but there is much more lost to History . Ancient alien theorists collected several examples that might suggest some medieval UFO sightings. But what is the oldest record of a UFO sighting? About 780,000 years ago (or 790,000-800,000), a strange object entered the solar system with speeds well over 20,000 miles per hour, which was far less than other space objects. It was about 2 kilometers wide, 110 times larger than the Chelyabinsk meteor that hit Russia in 2013. There are two conceivable outcomes when a huge body falls towards Earth at such enormous speeds: either the object will be accelerated by our planet’s gravity or it will hit the surface. The nature of the second scenario is devastating. However, studies by NASA showed that the object had placed itself in orbit, perhaps with the ability to slow down...

Twenty additional moons have been identified around Saturn, raising the total to 82. This surpasses the previous record holder, Jupiter, which has 79 moons. One of the new moons has the most distant known orbit around Saturn, and their sizes are all around three miles (5 kilometers). Two of the moons orbit the planet in around two years, while the remaining 18 require more than three. Seventeen of the newly discovered moons circle Saturn in the opposite direction of the planet’s other natural satellites. The orbit s of the retrograde moons are comparable to those of Saturn’s other known moons. And based on their inclinations, astronomers assume that these moons previously belonged to a much bigger moon that split apart eons ago.   The moons were identified by a team led by Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science using the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. By observing these tiny moons and their interactions with the major planets, astronomer...