Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate, reads the gates to the Inferno. “Abandon all hope, you who enter,” which is a pretty nice way of saying “welcome to Hell.” But there’s a real underworld, albeit one with fewer dogs and less being blown around by the wind or wading through shit. Scientists are working on a…
If you made a building out of bricks and cinderblocks, then hundreds of years later you’d expect it to still be, well, a building made of bricks and cinderblocks. But planets are not buildings if you haven’t noticed. Earth, for instance, just doesn’t seem to have the same composition as the meteors thought to have…
Humans have had such a dramatic impact on Earth that some scientists say we’ve kickstarted a new geological era known as the Anthropocene. A fascinating new paper theorizes that alien civilizations could do the same thing, reshaping their homeworlds in predictable and potentially detectable ways. The authors are…
With all the fascinating planets in our solar system, it sometimes feels like the Sun gets overlooked. The Sun is amazing! People still worship the Sun, and that actually makes a certain amount of sense. So, what would happen if you took a small piece of the Sun and brought it back to Earth? Well, whoever’s left would…
What was life really like here on planet Earth before animals were big enough to leave fossils behind? How did living things turn from dinky capsules of genetic material into the intelligent, complex organisms that do things like fart and type curse words into posts on the internet? Scientists think they’ve found the…
Earth’s magnetic field does way more than guide our compasses and cause occasional worry. It’s part of the reason there’s life at all on this planet—it protects us from harmful solar radiation that might otherwise blow our ozone layer away.
Last night, planet Earth rumbled in a place where it usually doesn’t rumble: Montana. But it also rumbled in the Philippines. Come to think of it, it rumbled in Vanuatu and Japan too. The Earth rumbles a lot.
Xenon is a peculiar element. It certainly has one of the most mysterious names (from the Greek xenos, or “stranger”). As a noble gas, it refuses to bond with other elements except under exotic conditions. And its uses are all about as creepy as its name: Folks use it for its eerie glow, to detect radiation, or in its…
You might think you were born in Duluth, or Detroit, or some sleepy suburb on Long Island—but let me tell you, friend, you’re wrong. In a sense, we were all spawned on a tiny island full of trash, floating miserably far, far out there. Only now are we beginning to understand the horrifying gravity of what our garbage…
What better way to start off your day with a nice, hot cup of existential uncertainty? Forget everything you think you know about yourself or reality, because a gorgeous new video of the Grand Canyon is about to irrevocably fuck you up. In a good way, we think.
Earth is exhausting—excruciatingly so, if you’re a young curmudgeon like me. At times, performing even the most mundane tasks, like commuting on a crowded, smelly subway car, feels like an Olympic marathon designed to test one’s patience. Space compels us because it forces us to think outside this myopic view of…
Sometimes, the majesty of the final frontier—a cold, unfeeling space—has the power to make our eyes misty. The images from NASA’s Cassini mission have often been able to do this, and since the spacecraft is dying soon, it makes the experience all the more emotional. Before it goes out in a blaze of glory, Cassini has…
Earth has been the Airbnb for some questionable guests over the years, but none have been more deplorable than humans. Our bad habits are screwing up the planet big time, causing arctic glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise eight inches over the last century alone. At this point, getting adopted by some alien…
Last month, the solar system lost its collective chill when NASA announced the discovery of a seven-planet system called TRAPPIST-1, just 39 light-years from our Sun. The system is particularly exciting, not only because of its proximity to our planet, but because it has three planets within the habitable zone, where…
Bad news if you’re looking to ditch this planet for another one far, far away. According to new research from NASA, planets in the habitable zone in red dwarf star systems—including much-hyped exoplanet Proxima b—might lose too much oxygen to support liquid water, and therefore, life. Goddammit.
Right now, OSIRIS-REx is one of the busiest spacecrafts in the solar system. OSIRIS-REx, which blasted off in September 2016, has been getting ready to rendezvous with the object of its mission—an asteroid called Bennu—in order to bring back samples to Earth. But before the spacecraft links up with Bennu in 2018, it’s…
The man in the Moon knows a lot more about us than we think. For instance, it’s keeping tabs on the air we breath by collecting samples of it.
When the solar system was in its rebellious stage about 466 million years ago, two massive asteroids collided in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, sending tiny pieces of shrapnel flying all over the solar system. After examining bits of crystals that fell to Earth just before the collision, an international…
Earth has some battle scars from back in the day. When the solar system was still young and wild, roughly 4 billion years ago, Earth, its Moon, and Mars were attacked by a series of asteroid assailants. It’s long been assumed that the space rocks involved in the assault—called the Late Heavy Bombardment—are now…
Earth’s very clingy friend, the Moon, has long been an object of human fascination. It makes sense, considering we’re just a hop, skip and a 238,855-mile jump from our celestial pal.
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