* Astronomy

For the last few years, astronomers have faced a puzzle: The vast majority of asteroids that come near the Earth are of a type that matches only a tiny fraction of the meteorites that most frequently hit our planet.
Since meteorites are mostly pieces of asteroids, this discrepancy was hard to explain, but a team from MIT and other institutions has now found what it believes is the answer to the puzzle. The smaller rocks that most often fall to Earth, it seems, come straight in from the main asteroid belt out between Mars and Jupiter, rather than from the near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population.
The puzzle gradually emerged from a long-term study of the properties of asteroids carried out by MIT professor of planetary science Richard Binzel and his students, along with postdoctoral researcher P. Vernazza, who is now with the European Space Agency, and A.T. Tokunaga, director of the University of Hawaii's Institute of Astronomy.

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