Life on Earth depends on six critical elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur. These elements are referred to as CHNOPS, and along with several trace micronutrients and liquid water, they're ...
Our solar system and everything within it—including the Earth—will look very different when the sun dies.
If you've ever been taught about how Earth orbits around the sun, you might well think our planet travels along an oval-shaped path that brings it much closer to the sun at some times of the year than at others. You'd have ...
Potential signs of the rainbow-like "glory effect" have been detected on a planet outside our solar system. Glory are colorful concentric rings of light that occur only under peculiar conditions.
Earth was long thought to be the only planet in our solar system with an ocean, but it is beginning to look as though there are underground oceans inside even the most surprising icy bodies.
In medieval and Renaissance society and culture, celestial events were not mere spectacles in the sky. Rather, they were omens, predictors of the future, and windows into the workings of the universe.
North America is on the verge of another masking of the sun.
Our sun is both our best friend and our worst enemy. On the one hand, we owe our very existence to our star. Earth and the other planets in the solar system formed out of the same cloud of gas and dust as the sun.
If there is life in the solar system beyond Earth, it might be found in the clouds of Venus. In contrast to the planet's blisteringly inhospitable surface, Venus' cloud layer, which extends from 30 to 40 miles above the surface, ...
Universe Today has examined the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, and planetary atmospheres, and how these intriguing scientific disciplines can help ...
