Believe it or not, debris from Mars has frequently made its way to Earth after powerful impacts hit the Red Planet’s surface and launch it into space. There have been at least 10 of these meteorite-forming events in Mars’ recent history. When these massive impacts occur, meteorites can be flung away from the Red Planet … Read more
Earth’s days once got more than two hours longer, thanks to the moon drifting thousands of miles farther away in its orbit over two periods, researchers have discovered. The extra hours of sunlight, in turn, may have led to oxygenation events that ushered in a period when life’s complexity exploded, the study researchers say. “Daylength … Read more
The remarkable aurora in early May this year demonstrated the power that solar storms can emit as radiation, but occasionally the sun does something far more destructive. Known as “solar particle events”, these blasts of protons directly from the surface of the sun can shoot out like a searchlight into space. Records show that around … Read more
The “Eye of the Sahara” — also known as the “Eye of Africa” or the Richat structure — is a giant rock dome, carved with concentric rings, that looks like a giant bullseye when seen from above. The eye is visible from space and has been known to astronauts and scientists since the earliest crewed … Read more
A private Japanese company has taken the world’s first close-up photo of an individual piece of space debris, by parking another satellite next to it in orbit. This orbital photo op is the first step in an ongoing mission to capture and destroy potentially hazardous pieces of space junk that are clogging up our sky. … Read more
A collection of rocks scattered on an ancient shoreline on Mars might indicate that the Red Planet was once far more Earth-like than scientists previously thought. The rocks, discovered by NASA’s Curiosity rover, are unusually rich in manganese oxide — a chemical that adds to growing evidence that the once-habitable Mars may have sported Earth-like … Read more
It would appear that the so-called “great instability” event that wreaked chaos among the planets, sending the gas giants careening through space until they settled into the orbits we know today, occurred between 60 and 100 million years after the birth of the solar system. This is the conclusion of some careful scientific detective work … Read more
Sea levels are rising as climate change rapidly melts glaciers and ice sheets and the water within the oceans expands in a warming world. But have sea levels ever been higher than they are today? And when were they the highest? In short, sea levels have easily been higher than they are today. But it’s … Read more
Other Worlds Ink has a new near-future sci-fi anthology out: Earth 2100. Earth on the Cusp of the Twenty-Second Century How the world has changed in the last seventy-six years. In 1948, scientists ran the first computer program, and “the Ultimate Car of the Future,” the futuristic, three wheeled Davis Divan, debuted. Since then, a … Read more
Mars’ gravitational pull on Earth may be influencing the climate on our planet, new research hints. Geological evidence tracing back more than 65 million years and taken from hundreds of sites across the world suggests that deep-sea currents have repeatedly gone through periods of being either stronger or weaker. This happens every 2.4 million years … Read more
