From here on Earth, looking farther away in space means looking farther back in time. So what are distant Earth-watchers seeing right now?
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You searched for: Asteroid Belt
Compared to Earth, Mars is small, cold, dry, and lifeless. But 3.4 billion years ago, a killer asteroid caused a Martian megatsunami.
Each year in mid-August, Earth plows through the debris stream of an enormous comet, creating the Perseids. 2023’s show will be magnificent!
Yes, NASA’s Perseverance rover found organics on Mars. So did Curiosity. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean anything in the search for life.
And the one step we can take to show extraterrestrials we’re figuring it out. Every year, Earth’s meteor showers accomplish two important tasks. This composite photograph shows a large number of […]
Peaking on the night of August 11/12, up to 100 bright meteors per hour will be visible. Here’s how to make the most of it.
If there are human-sized creatures walking around on other planets, would we be able to view them directly?
The Moon is the most likely place for evidence from the dawn of life on Earth to be preserved in cold storage.
And what can it teach us about our Solar System’s earliest days? In many ways, astronomy is unique among the sciences. In every other field, you have the ability to design […]
Newborn stars are surrounded only by a featureless disk. Debris disks persist for hundreds of millions of years. So when do planets form?
Phobos and Deimos only have two explanations, and neither one adds up.
Once science operations begin for James Webb, we’ll never look at the Universe the same way again. Here’s what everyone should know.
Scientists find routes using arches of chaos that can lead to much faster space travel.
Our Solar System’s outer reaches, and what’s in them, was predicted long before the first Oort Cloud object was ever discovered.
The most unique interloper into our Solar System has a natural explanation that fits perfectly — no aliens required.
In the largest star-forming region close to Earth, JWST found hundreds of planetary-mass objects. How do these free-floating planets form?
Based on the atoms that they’re made out of, the innermost planet should always be the densest. Here’s why Earth beats Mercury, hands down.
Newton thought that gravitation would happen instantly, propagating at infinite speeds. Einstein showed otherwise; gravity isn’t instant.
On the morning of June 30, 1908, an explosion of more than 10 megatons occurred above the sparsely populated Siberian Taiga. What caused the so-called Tunguska event?
The stars, planets, and many moons are extremely round. Why don’t they take other shapes?
Think there are habitable super-Earths out there? Think again. Here in our Solar System, we have two very distinct types of planets: small, terrestrial, rocky worlds, with thin (or no) atmospheres […]
If a large asteroid strikes Earth, it has the potential to release an enormous amount of energy, leading to local or even global catastrophes. The strike that led to the […]
Since the time of Galileo, Saturn’s rings have remained an unexplained mystery. A new idea may have finally solved the longstanding puzzle.
Valles Marineris is the Solar System’s grandest canyon, many times longer, wider, and deeper than the Grand Canyon. What scarred Mars so?
The definitive answer requires better, unbiased data. Despite all the advances that have occurred in human history, one extraordinary puzzle still remains right in our own backyard: we aren’t sure how […]
Astronomers possibly solve the mystery of how the enormous Oort cloud, with over 100 billion comet-like objects, was formed.
While Mars is known as a frozen, red planet today, it has all the evidence we could ask for of a watery past, lasting for approximately the first 1.5 billion […]
Debris from Pluto-sized collisions, not aliens, are streaming through the galaxy. In 2017, scientists discovered an object passing through our Solar System that was unlike anything else we had ever seen. […]
Finding alien technology on the seafloor would be truly incredible. This extraordinary claim, however, is debunked by the actual evidence.
If dark energy gets stronger with time, our fate could be an utter catastrophe. When it comes to the entire Universe, one of the biggest existential questions we’re capable of […]