On Monday, February 6, 2017, around 1:30am local time, many inhabitants of the Midwest saw a bright fireball shooting across the night sky. Some even heard a sonic boom. The Field Museum's Invertebrate Collections Manager Paul Mayer woke up from the sonic boom: "I was staying in Fredonia, Wisconsin and was woken up by a large boom that shook the whole house. It sounded like thunder and I thought maybe it was a train hitting something. I got up and looked out the window, but did not see anything. Read more about Bright Fireball Over the Midwest
Four hundred and sixty-six million years ago, there was a giant collision in outer space. Something hit an asteroid and broke it apart, sending chunks of rock falling to Earth as meteorites since before the time of the dinosaurs. But what kinds of meteorites were making their way to Earth before that collision? In a new study in Nature Astronomy, Field Museum scientists have tackled that question by creating the first reconstruction of the distribution of meteorite types before the collision. Read more about Today’s rare meteorites were once common
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet on August 24, 2006. While many grieved the loss of the ninth planet, we’re now learning more than ever about this ball of ice and its faraway neighborhood at the edge of the solar system.
So, what ended Pluto’s run as a planet? The International Astronomical Union, or IAU, defines a planet by three qualities:
1. Orbits the Sun
2. Big enough for gravity to shape it into a sphere (which is called “hydrostatic equilibrium”) Read more about Learning from Pluto as a Dwarf Planet