Over 4.6 billion years ago, Earth took shape from a spinning cloud of dust and gas surrounding the young sun. Tiny particles within this cloud collided and clumped together, driven by gravity and ...

I asked my friend Julie Ménard how Earth formed. She’s a planetary scientist at Washington State University. She told me it started with the Big Bang. That was nearly 14 billion years ago. “The Big ...

The solid inner core at the center of the Earth, surrounded by the outer core, mantle and crust. Here’s why: While it is well known that a material must be at or below its freezing temperature to be ...

A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this ...

Where did all the water come from? Water, water everywhere. It covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface and earns it the nickname “the blue planet.” And yet… where did it come from? How is it so abundant ...

Scientists have long believed that the Moon was formed by a massive object crashing into the Earth billions of years ago and sending chunks hurtling into space that ultimately coalesced. But what was ...

Andrew Tomkins receives funding from the Australian Research Council. The rings of Saturn are some of the most famous and spectacular objects in the Solar System. Earth may once have had something ...

Billions of years ago, in the giant disk of dust, gas, and rocky material that orbited our young sun, larger and larger bodies coalesced to eventually give rise to the planets, moons, and asteroids we ...

Crystals hidden in Australia’s oldest rocks have revealed new clues about how Earth and the Moon formed. The study suggests Earth’s continents didn’t begin growing until hundreds of millions of years ...

A number of hypotheses have been used to explain how free oxygen first accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere some 2.4 billion years ago, but a full understanding has proven elusive. Now a new model offers ...

Today, more than 70% of Earth is covered in liquid water. But long before the sea became a familiar feature of our planet’s surface, the water that now fills our oceans, lakes, and streams was ...