Tag Archives: earth

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already captured some incredible images of our universe, with some game-changing insights to boot. But researchers at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute believe the observatory would be capable of even more if it had been designed differently. Published Sunday in Frontiers in Astronomy …

Google Earth turns 20 this Saturday, and to celebrate, Google is giving it a new feature: historical street view. In addition to exploring up-to-date ground-view versions of places around the world, users will soon have the option to jump back in time, whether it’s to watch a growing city sprout …

The latest mission out of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) will examine not one, but two space bodies. After Tianwen-2 launches Wednesday afternoon, it will rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, then send samples to Earth before setting out to meet with a distant comet.If all goes according to plan, …

Just 5.96 light-years from Earth sits Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf with a fifth of the Sun’s diameter and even less of its mass. Considered a solitary star for its lack of stellar companions, Barnard’s Star is notoriously lonely—signs of any exoplanets in its orbit have come and gone without …

The past few centuries have yielded an abundance of information about Earth’s atmosphere, from the weather that manifests in the troposphere and stratosphere to the vast amounts of heat absorbed by the thermosphere. Sandwiched between those layers, though, lies the mesosphere, an atmospheric region roughly 35 kilometers (22 miles) thick. …

The Earth of today is a lush garden that supports countless living organisms, but give it a few billion years, and Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun. Or maybe not. Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like world 4,000 light-years away that shows another way forward. This world remains intact, …

It’s only a matter of time before a large asteroid hits Earth—it’s happened before, and it will happen again. The more we know about asteroids, the more likely it is that humanity could do something about it, though. The European Space Agency (ESA) has just kicked off a new project …

In the 1980s and 1990s, the world’s governments came together in a rare show of cooperation to rid Earth’s atmosphere of certain ozone-depleting substances (ODSs). Used mainly in air conditioning and refrigeration, these chemicals had been proven to harm the ozone layer, or the stretch of ozone and other gasses …

Waterloo-based SkyWatch was among the first startups to recognize that the key to unlocking the real benefits of the space economy lay in making Earth observation data accessible and portable, and now the company has raised a $17.2 million Series B to help it further that goal. Fresh on the …

Once the Earth was fully formed about 4.5 billion years ago, its subsequent evolution was governed by complex geophysical processes. The planet, however, was not in isolation from the rest of the Solar System, and these processes were strongly affected by interplanetary collisions for hundreds of million years. Planetary scientists …