The case for looking for life on Europa runs through the bottom of Earth's own ocean.
Saturn's moon Titan runs Earth's weather cycle with the wrong chemicals: mountains of water ice hard as granite, seas of liquid methane and ethane, and beaches darkened by organic soot falling from an orange sky.
The received idea about boy bands is that they are built for one audience and disposable by design.
The Sun outweighs the Moon by a factor of 27 million, yet contributes only 46 percent of Earth's tidal force. The reason is a cube-law that punishes distance far more than gravity itself does.
Isaac Newton worked out in 1687 why the ocean bulges on both sides of Earth at once. The near-side bulge is pulled toward the Moon. The far-side bulge exists because the solid Earth itself is being tugged out from under the water — and the geometry of that stretching is slowly pushing the Moon away at 3.8 centimeters a year.
Earth's inner core grows by about a millimetre a year as molten iron freezes onto its surface, and the latent heat and buoyant fluids released by that slow crystallisation drive the convection in the outer core that generates the planet's magnetic field.
Roughly 99.999 percent of Earth's gold and platinum sank into the core during the magma ocean phase 4.5 billion years ago. The gold humans mine today was delivered later — in a rain of asteroids called the late veneer.
The cosmic microwave background is supposed to be directionless in the statistical sense.
Once a year, on a Thursday in November, South Korea reorganises its national infrastructure around a single exam.
In 1980, a science documentary hosted by an astronomer became the most watched series in the history of American public television.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, whose suggestion that the interstellar visitor ʻOumuamua could have been artificial made him one of astronomy's most…
From a distance, Europa looks like a frozen world. Its surface is a pale shell crossed by rust-coloured bands, ridges and fractures, with few of the impact craters that scar most old moons.
An object that looks unusually cold and faint on a map of the stars need not be a star at all.
On 17 March 1958, a three-stage rocket lifted a polished aluminium sphere from Cape Canaveral and placed it in a long, elliptical orbit around Earth.
On 28 November 2017, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent Voyager 1 a command to fire four thrusters that had been silent since November 1980.…
Dogs do not see only in black and white. That is one of the most stubborn myths in popular biology, and it is wrong.
