How much warning will we really have if a Near Earth Asteroid (NEO) is about to hit Earth? The answer is pretty grim. “With so many of even the larger NEOs remaining undiscovered, the most likely warning today would be zero,” NASA informs us. We would see nothing at all until suddenly, just as the…
Four years ago, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in an attempt to learn just how common Earth-sized worlds are in the Milky Way galaxy. Now, scientists have unveiled part of the answer: About 17 percent – one in six – of Kepler’s target stars have Earth-sized worlds orbiting closer to their parent stars than…
Earth should have been an ice cube in the very early days of our solar system, when the sun was cooler than today. Yet the primordial Earth was a watery sphere. This “faint young sun” paradox has puzzled researchers for decades, but now a look at the atmosphere of one of Saturn’s moons suggests a…
Scientists analyzing Australian rocks have discovered traces of bacteria that lived a record-breaking 3.49 billion years ago, a mere billion years after Earth formed. If the find withstands the scrutiny that inevitably faces claims of fossils this old, it could move scientists one step closer to understanding the first chapters of life on Earth. The…
This year has been a spectacular one for exoplanets. New discoveries and new insights have truly pushed the gateway to other worlds even further open. In the past 12 months we’ve gained increasingly good statistics on the incredible abundance of planets around other stars and their multiplicity. We also finally seem to have evidence that…
An exploding meteor that blasted its fragments across California’s Gold Country in April has revealed rare evidence of its origin in a single family of asteroids hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, astronomers report. Seventy-seven bits of space debris collected around Sutter’s Mill in El Dorado County, where they fell on April 22, have…
NASA concluded its Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) moon mission by crashing two probes into the lunar surface — on purpose. The goal of the mission is to map the moon’s gravitational field. To do this, NASA launched two washing-machine-size probes to orbit the moon in September 2011. After both craft achieved orbit, they…
With the temperature at a balmy midsummer -17c, drilling has started in Antarctica in an attempt to find evidence of life under a sheet of ice two miles thick. The scientists and engineers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) hope to find signs of life in the pitch black, intensely cold, nutrient poor, and pristine…
Over the past couple of days, two asteroids ‘2012 XE54’ and ‘4179 Toutatis’ passed close to Earth. 4179 Toutatis, a lumpy shaped asteroid which is roughly 3 miles long, is classified as a potentially hazardous object (PHO) by astronomers and has passed closed to Earth several times before, in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008….
There is, in this crazy world, one thing we know for sure: Our world is the world. Our planet is the planet — for creating life, for supporting life, for letting us humans and our fellow species become what we are. And so, as we take our first tentative steps from a warm, watery Earth…