Earth

An astrophotographer captured a huge solar eruption over the weekend. Chuck Ayoub, who captured the eruption, believes it was roughly the same height as three Earths stacked on top of each other. Ayoub shared a video of the eruption on Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube. The Sun just let out another solar eruption big enough to envelop the Earth The Sun is a lot bigger than the Earth. And, in case you ever forget that there are videos like this latest huge solar eruption to remind you. In the video, which was…

The universe is full of enigma and mysteries. Millions of objects move around undetected. In fact, there's no dearth of such objects lurking in our very own Milky Way galaxy. We know very little of them, yet they continue to impact our lives in a number of ways. While the effort to study these objects continues, astronomers have detected a new object, roughly 3,000-4,000 light-years away, giving out mysterious flashes of light. They suspect that this object could be the elusive “black widow” star, a rapidly spinning…

There's something wonderful about sitting under the night sky, watching a meteor shower play out overhead. However, observers in the Southern Hemisphere usually get the short end of the stick, with most of the best showers strongly favoring those north of the equator.  Every May, however, southern observers get a special treat – the Eta Aquariid meteor shower. This year conditions promise to be perfect, making it the ideal opportunity for some autumnal meteor observation.The forecast peak for this year's Eta Aquariids…

A powerful solar flare just erupted from the surface of the Sun – and NASA captured stunning footage of it.The X-class flare, the strongest produced by our star, was recorded by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory as it burst from a sunspot on the lower left limb of the Sun at 9:25 am EDT (13:25 GMT) on Tuesday (May 3).  Sunspots are areas on the Sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, knot into kinks before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts…

There are water molecules and ice up on the Moon, so how did they get there? Asteroid and comet collisions are likely to have produced some of it, but a new study suggests another source of lunar water: the Earth's atmosphere.  Hydrogen and oxygen ions escaping from our planet's upper atmosphere and then combining on the Moon could have created as much as 3,500 cubic kilometers (840 cubic miles) of surface permafrost or subsurface liquid water, scientists say.The thinking is that hydrogen and oxygen ions are driven into…

SpaceX isn’t the only company looking into reusable rockets, though it was the first. One of the latest companies looking into it is Rocket Lab. The company recently used one of its Electron rocket boosters to deliver satellites into orbit. After the launch, the booster dropped back down through the atmosphere, where a helicopter attempted to catch it. Trying to catch reusable rockets with a helicopter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nODVPGHQcc SpaceX was one of the first companies to push for…

The Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera will take enormously detailed images of the night sky from atop a mountain in Chile. Down below the mountain, high-speed computers will send the data out into the world. What happens in between?When the Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins photographing the night sky in a few years, its centerpiece 3,200 megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera will provide a massive amount of data useful to everyone from cosmologists to individuals who track asteroids that may strike Earth.You may…

There's something wonderful about sitting under the night sky, watching a meteor shower play out overhead. However, observers in the southern hemisphere usually get the short end of the stick, with most of the best showers strongly favouring those north of the equator.Every May, however, southern observers get a special treat – the Eta Aquariid meteor shower. This year conditions promise to be perfect, making it the ideal opportunity for some autumnal meteor observation.The forecast peak for this year's Eta Aquariids…

Unexpected damage zone found along the currently strike-slip Futagawa fault. Credit: KyotoU The 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes shocked inhabitants of the western island of Kyushu, causing hundreds of casualties and serious damage to vital infrastructure. The epicenter of the quake was traced to the Futagawa fault in a region neighboring Mount Aso, an active volcano in Kumamoto Prefecture that last erupted in October 2021.…

Lead author Alta Howells (left), co-author Alysia Cox (standing right) and co-author James Leong (seated) take a gas sample for H2 analysis, review field notes and analyze aqueous chemistry on a spectrophotometer in Oman for this study. Credit: Kirt Robinson In Oman, on the Persian Gulf, there is a large slab of ancient seafloor—including ultramafic rocks from Earth's upper mantle—called the Samail Ophiolite. These unique…