Scientists investigating a large crater in a field in northern Latvia, believed to have been caused by a meteorite, now suspect it was a hoax.

The Latvian media reported on the fall of the meteorite near the city Mazsalaca Valmiera District. In the area of the fall of the meteorite crater width 20 and depth of 10 meters.

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The night sky will sparkle with “falling stars” on Tuesday and Wednesday as Earth passes through a trail of dusty debris from the Swift-Tuttle Comet, say scientists.

The light show, called the Perseid meteor shower, kicks off each year in late-July and increases in intensity, peaking a couple of weeks later.

On a clear night in a dark sky “you should see dozens of meteors per hour,” notes Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.

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Many of the primitive bodies wandering the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter are former comets, tossed out of orbit by a brutal ballet between the giant outer planets, say a team of astrophysicists.

A commonly accepted theory is that the asteroid belt is the rubble left over from a “proto-planetary disk,” the dense ring of gas that surrounds a new-born star.

But the orbiting rocks have long been a source of deep curiosity. They are remarkably varied, ranging from mixtures of ice and rock to igneous rocks, which implies they have jumbled origins.

The answer to the mystery, according to a study published by the British journal Nature , is that a “significant fraction” of the asteroid population in fact comprises ex-comets.

Famously described as “dirty snowballs” of ice and dust, comets are lonely, long-distance wanderers of the Solar System whose elliptical swing around the Sun can take decades.

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Planetary scientists have found the first solid evidence for a moderate-size black hole in a distant galaxy, backing up the idea that smaller black holes merge into huge ones.

A black hole is an object with such a powerful gravitational field that it absorbs all the light that passes near it and reflects nothing.

Until now, identified black holes have been either super-massive (several million to several billion times the mass of the Sun) in the centre of galaxies, or about the size of a typical star (between three and 20 Solar masses).

Now, an international team has discovered the black hole HLX-1, 290 million light years from Earth, which it is more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, using the European Space Agency’s telescope.

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