Watch the 2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson at the American Museum of Natural History, on Wednesday, March 20, at 7:30 pm EDT on amnh.org/live. 

Astronomers have conducted a remote reconnaissance of a distant solar system with a new telescope imaging system that sifts through the blinding light of stars. Using a suite of high-tech instrumentation and software called Project 1640, the scientists collected the first chemical fingerprints, or spectra, of this system’s four red exoplanets, which orbit a star 128 light years away from Earth.

Talk about an eventful Friday night! Tomorrow night, a small asteroid will travel nearer Earth than any astronomers have identified beforehand. “It’s the closest that we’ve seen ahead of time,” says Denton S. Ebel, curator in the Division of Physical Sciences (Earth and Planetary Sciences).

For more about the asteroid flyby, participate in a live Twitter chat with Ebel, this Friday, February 15, at noon ET. Post your questions here or use hashtag #asteroidchat on Twitter.

Space dust and asteroid fragments reach Earth’s surface every day, but only rarely do extraterrestrial objects cause serious harm. In this podcast from the spring, MIT professor Richard Binzel evaluates the threat of asteroids and makes a case for how they might actually be useful to humans.

Dr. Binzel’s talk, “Tracking Asteroids,” from the Frontiers in Astrophysics lecture series, took place at the Hayden Planetarium on April 16, 2012.

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes ( 1 hour, 9 mins, 86 MB)