Our magnetosphere plays the role of gatekeeper, repelling unwanted energy that's harmful to life on Earth, trapping most of it a safe distance from Earth's surface in twin doughnut-shaped zones called ...

For a long time, scientists assumed that Earth's water was delivered by asteroids and comets billions of years ago. This coincided with the Late Heavy Bombardment (ca. 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago), a ...

Imagining every drop of Earth’s water hurled into the Sun sounds like a last-ditch cosmic fire extinguisher, but the physics points in a very different direction. Instead of snuffing out our star, ...

A long-standing idea in planetary science is that water-rich meteorites arriving late in Earth’s history could have delivered ...

Ryugu’s samples reveal that water activity on asteroids lasted far longer than scientists thought, possibly reshaping theories of how Earth gained its oceans. A billion-year-old impact may have melted ...

Bad news, earthlings. Computer simulations of the solar system’s future reveal a new risk facing us all: The gravitational tug of a passing star could either cause another planet to smack into Earth ...

Earth may have a moon today because a nearby neighbor once crashed into us, a new analysis of Apollo samples and terrestrial rocks reveals. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...