asteroid

To the people of Chelyabinsk, we would like to offer our heartfelt sympathy and wish all injured a swift recovery.

"As of late afternoon local time, the Interior Ministry said about 1,000 people had been hurt, though the vast majority of injuries are not thought to be serious.

Find out more at CNN.

Observations at many sites in South America, including the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) La Silla Observatory, have made the surprise discovery that two dense and narrow rings surround the remote asteroid Chariklo. This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the solar system — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disk of debris.

This beautiful and eerie photograph is evidence of what astronomers believe could be remnants of a head-on collision of 2 asteroids, resulting in an X-shaped debris pattern ahead of a long stream of dust that's usually indicative of a comet.