Amidst all the wonders of our solar system — and as we know now, other solar systems — it may be all too easy to overlook the asteroids. But each asteroid is a whole world unto itself. And because there are more than a million known asteroids, our universe's wonders and mysteries exist in great abundance.
Indeed, asteroids brought some of this year's most fascinating astronomy stories. From asteroids with strange materials and missions returning pieces of distant rocks to Earth all the way to traces of RNA getting found in asteroid bits from the dawn of the solar system, here are 12 ways asteroids fascinated us in 2023.
