There are nearly 8 billion people (opens in new tab) living on Earth today, but our planet wasn’t always so crowded. Around 300,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens likely first appeared, our total population was small, between 100 and 10,000 people. There were so few people at the start, that it took approximately 35,000 years … Read more
In 2012, a shriveled white star in a nearby galaxy reached the end of its life and exploded in a violent, thermonuclear supernova. Such explosions — known as type 1a supernovas — are a common end for billions of stars in our universe, typically resulting in the utter obliteration of the old star at the … Read more
It’s springtime on Mars and the mysterious polygons are in bloom, a new image from the orbiting High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HIRISE) camera shows. Recorded on March 30, 2022, the image reveals a patchwork of white zig-zags cracking across the Martian soil at high latitudes, with occasional sprays of black and blue mist fanning out … Read more
Jupiter’s innards are full of the remains of baby planets that the gas giant gobbled up as it expanded to become the behemoth we see today, scientists have found. The findings come from the first clear view of the chemistry beneath the planet’s cloudy outer atmosphere. Despite being the largest planet in the solar system, … Read more
A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a vast cloud of electrically charged particles from the sun’s upper atmosphere or corona that’s heated to enormous temperatures and launched with a huge burst of speed by the energy released in a solar flare. These hot blobs of plasma can have spectacular effects on planets that lie in … Read more
Whether you call our planet the Earth, the world or a terrestrial body, all of these names have an origin story deep in history. Like many names of solar system objects, Earth’s original namer is long lost to history. But linguistics provide a few clues. Ertha is an approximate spelling for “the ground” (meaning, … Read more
A pulsar is a special kind of neutron star, which is the ultra-dense leftover core of a massive star. Pulsars emit beams of radiation that sweep out in circles as the pulsar spins. When those beams flash over Earth, we see them as regular, repeating pulses of radio emission. “Pulsars are spectacular objects themselves — … Read more
Our species faces a pivotal moment in human history. Either we develop the technology to safely harness the energy needed to escape our planet, or we kill ourselves in some great cataclysm, a stark new study claims. But, the new paper argues, if we can achieve the former and avoid the latter, then we might … Read more
NASA has photographed the crash site of the mysterious rocket that smashed into the far side of the moon in March, and the unidentified spacecraft left behind a weird double crater that has scientists puzzled. Images of the crash site were taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on May 25 and released on June … Read more
Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and the smallest planet in our solar system. With a diameter of about 3,032 miles (4,880 kilometers), the planet is less than half the size of Earth, which is about 7,926 miles (12,756 km) in diameter. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in … Read more
