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The United States hasn't always had the closest relationship with China or Russia. But give us a few hundred million years, and we could be a lot more unified: A new prediction for the motion of the continents suggests that the Americas and Asia will smoosh together at the north to form the supercontinent dubbed Amasia. More »
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Last week, NASA unveiled the highest-resolution photograph of Earth ever taken... or, rather, the highest-resolution photograph of half the Earth. More »
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NASA has just released this mind-blowing photograph Earth, which was captured earlier this month by the Agency's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. More »
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About 2.5 billion years ago, our planet had virtually no oxygen, and lifeforms were primitive. Then, oxygen levels suddenly spiked, the entire landscape of the planet changed, and we were on our way to complex life. Now, at last, we know why. More »
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You're looking at a section of the first image to be compiled from measurements made by the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard NPP — NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite. (In case you were wondering, "NPP" is the drastically shortened acronym for the agency's National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project). More »
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All planets are vast clumps of dust and gas packed together by gravity. If there's lots of material, a gas giant is the result. If there isn't much material, you get a rocky planet. At least, that's what we thought. More »
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It's decently likely that, sometime in the future, a major solar storm will hit Earth, wreaking havoc on our infrastructure and crippling our satellites. But there's a more long-term danger: space could become too dangerously radioactive to stay there. More »
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We know that ancient organisms crawled out of the sea onto land, not the other way round. We know that the earliest life predates the existence of true continents. But life might just have began on land after all...sort of. More »
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NLTT 43806 is a white dwarf, the dying remnants of a star like our own. But there's a problem. Its composition doesn't make any sense...unless there was a cataclysm just like the one Earth experienced four billion years ago. More »
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The Moon was long considered an essential stabilizing presence in the development of life on Earth. Without its satellite, the Earth would have tilted too much on its axis, making life impossible. But maybe the Moon wasn't needed after all. More »
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The two sides of the Moon look nothing like each other: the near side is flat and low, while the far side is incredibly mountainous. We may now be able to solve this topographical mystery...and it involves a second moon. More »
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Trojan asteroids are objects that share a planet's orbit around the Sun but reside in what are basically gravitational dead zones. We've discovered Earth's first Trojan asteroid...but how did it get there, and why have we only just found it? More »
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Earth runs on massive amounts of heat, enough to melt iron in the core and create our magnetic field, enough to power the constant movement of plate tectonics. Where all this heat comes from is a mystery...but we're getting closer. More »
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Last week saw Neptune Day, the first anniversary - in Neptune years - of the planet's discovery on September 23, 1846. That got us thinking: what are the "birthdays" for all the other planets? Here's a handy, mildly insane guide. More »
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Located just 4.3 light-years away, the Alpha Centauri star system is our closest neighbor. But theirs is a very different solar system, as it's home with not one, not two, but three stars. Here's the short guide to Alpha Centauri. More »
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When you hear predictions about climate change, scientists often refer to simple models of gradual transformation. But new evidence suggests that climate change is likely to be abrupt, with the temperature of the planet rising quickly over only a few decades. More »
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The Moon is ridiculously big relative to the size of Earth, and this was thought to be a cosmic rarity. Now it looks like rocky planets with huge moons are actually extremely common, which might help us find alien life. More »
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In this astounding video narrated by Dr. Justin Wilkinson of NASA, we see familiar geographical landmarks from across the globe as filmed by astronauts. Even the commonplace looks divine when you're cruising in the orbital firmament. More »
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How we see the universe is defined by where we're standing, and that can create some fundamental misconceptions about the cosmos. Case in point: this time-lapse video that reminds us it isn't the stars that are moving...it's the Earth itself. More »
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About 4.4 billion years ago, a Mars-sized planet crashed into Earth. This cataclysmic event actually made Earth melt, and the fallout from the collision became the Moon. So how did Earth's earliest organic molecules hang on during these apocalyptic times? More »
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Fifty years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. In doing so, he didn't just take humanity into a bold new era of exploration - he also got to see our planet in a way no one else ever had before. More »
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A European Space Agency's satellite has mapped out gravitational pull on earth and constructed an image of the lumpy Earth that might have been - if history had been different. More »
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Check out the stark difference between these two satellite images, taken on March 19, 2010 and March 19, 2011. The left image shows much more ozone (in red) over the Arctic than the right image. What's happened? More »
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The recent exoplanet spotting by NASA's Kepler probe revealed there might be more than a million Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Now a new estimate says as many as 1 out of every 37 sun-like stars has an Earth-like world. More »
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Earth is surrounded by two huge regions of charged particles like protons and electrons, and these areas are known as the Van Allen radiation belts. These belts can mysteriously change their intensity, posing a threat to astronauts and sensitive electronics. More »
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We've considered the possibility that aliens could invade. Sometimes they fly, sometimes they walk, sometimes they sprout and take over our bodies when we're sleeping, but only rarely do they swim. There's a dearth of water-based aliens in media, despite the fact that statistics prove that in 60% of regular comic book continuity Aquaman's wife is an alien. These alarming numbers show that we need to pay more attention to how many exoplanets could have large oceans. To do that, we have to take a look at how oceans form. More »
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There were many reasons why Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet status, one of which was that it couldn't clear its orbit of asteroids and other debris. But Earth's orbit is also crowded...too crowded for Earth to be a planet? More »
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NASA's Messenger probe is currently orbiting close around the Sun in preparation for its mission to Mercury. While making its lonely orbit, Messenger snapped this amazing photo that shows all the planets (plus our Moon) in one big family photo. More »
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This video starts with the Moon, runs through our solar system's rocky and gas planets, and then takes us from our regular-sized Sun to the biggest hypergiant star, all to a pulse-pounding beat. Prepare for a crash-course in cosmic scale. More »
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Earth's continents are constantly changing, moving and rearranging themselves over millions of years - affecting Earth's climate and biology. Every few hundred million years, the continents combine to create massive, world-spanning supercontinents. Here's the past and future of Earth's supercontinets. More »
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Even the fiercest opponents of science can sometimes make brilliant discoveries...just not quite in the way that they intended. Like Italian priest Giovanni Riccioli, who in his zeal to prove Copernicus wrong unintentionally discovered the Coriolis effect 200 years early. More »
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Billions of years ago, a Mars-sized body smashed into the young Earth, causing a chain reaction that created the Moon. Earth's atmosphere became full of rock vapor and the sky rained down magma. Yes, it was literally Hell on Earth. More »
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This photo captures the sun setting over Spain's Canary Islands, and it reveals two phenomena that are often dismissed as myths: the fabled green flash, and the even rarer blue flash. Here's how these strange lights appear. More »
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Vietnam's Hang Son Doong cave is the largest in the world, with caverns big enough to fit an entire city street inside them. These awe-inspiring photos take you inside the beautiful, alien world of the Hang Son Doong cave. More »
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The Coriolis Effect pushes objects clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere. And yet hurricanes spin in exactly the opposite direction. Why? More »
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Despite what you may have heard, it doesn't make water go down the drain one direction or the other. But it does have an effect: The Coriolis Effect can turn ships off course and change the weather. More »
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Earthquakes, asteroids, floods - these are ordinary disasters. Find out what horrors would beset the Earth if the moon disappeared, or the planet stopped turning. More »
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At the center of our planet, heat and pressure are so tremendous that even the structure of iron is transformed. Now, using lasers and diamonds, researchers have reproduced those conditions in the lab. And discovered something they'd always suspected. More »
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Saturn's moon Titan could hold life's building blocks in its hazy atmosphere. New simulations reveal amino acids and nucleotides could be forming there - and that perhaps we should look to the atmosphere for the source of life on Earth. More »
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1800 miles underground lies a mysterious zone between the Earth's mantle and core. Nobody is quite sure what's down there, but new evidence suggests the area reaches temperatures of 7000 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning it could be a vast magma ocean. More »
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