The atmosphere’s habitable zone is so small, several mountain ranges extend beyond it.
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60% of all potentially dangerous asteroids remain undetected.
Saturn’s Iapetus, discovered way back in 1671, has three bizarre features that science still can’t fully explain.
Whether they’re gas giants or rocky planets makes all the difference for life. Over the past 30 years, we went from not knowing if there were planets like ours around other […]
The guilt-free air conditioning, called “cooling paper,” is made from recyclable paper and doesn’t use any electricity.
Life finds a way — particularly if it has a moon.
The first world that humans should inhabit beyond the Earth is the Moon, not Mars. Here’s why terraforming our lunar neighbor is so appealing.
The eclipse season is starting with a bang.
Volcanic activity caused the end-Triassic mass extinction 200 million years ago. The dinosaurs survived and rose to dominance.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
Due to a crust of carbon, the absence of oxygen, and constant bombardment from meteorites, the planet Mercury may be littered with diamonds.
Not nearly well enough. And we should all be concerned. In 1859, the science of solar physics truly began with the largest eruption in recorded history: the Carrington event. Prior […]
9 minutes of cruel history may cure the anti-progress delusion.
Big Think Business columnist Eric Markowitz prefaces his new series on long-term thinking with the experience that almost cut his life short.
NASA will use energy from Earth’s gravity to launch the Lucy spacecraft in October of this year.
With sodium-sensitive eyes, we’d see it every new Moon. With no detectable gases, the Moon appears to be atmosphere-free. The Moon as seen from a view above the majority of Earth’s […]
More than 1,000 years ago, Mesoamerican societies conducted one of history’s most interesting experiments in commodity money.
Unexpected images of galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope do not disprove the Big Bang. There are other likelier explanations.
Contrary to common experience, not everything needs a medium to travel through. Overcoming that assumption removes the need for an aether.
Astronomers have been looking for radio waves sent by a distant civilization for more than 60 years.
There’s an extra source of massive “stuff” in our Universe beyond what gravitation and normal matter can explain. Could light be the answer?
An effect called the “urban heat island” means that temperatures are often 10 degrees higher in cities, according to NASA.
When we are more focused on the good things we enjoy in life, we have more to live for.
Already 14 billion miles from the Sun, Voyager 1 is speeding away at 38,000 mph.
A newly discovered “ultrahot Jupiter” has the shortest orbit of any known gas giant.
The most common element in the Universe, vital for forming new stars, is hydrogen. But there’s a finite amount of it; what if we run out?
Ultracold gases in the lab could help scientists better understand the universe.
Mass determines a star’s fate… except when it doesn’t. Supernova events are common, visually spectacular astronomical cataclysms. In 1987, a supernova just ~168,000 light-years away was observed in the Large Magellanic […]