When discussing the magnetosphere, the plasma in question is the hot material of the sun that escapes the gravitational field of the sun as a result of its extreme energy. As it travels through space, the plasma particles are called solar wind....
Earth, which you are likely to remember on your own, is included here for completeness. It orbits the sun at an average distance of 93 million miles. It is a sheer accident of astronomical geometry that the disk of the sun and the disk of the moon appear to be almost exactly the same...
Once Voyager had passed beyond Neptune, Astronomer and NASA Scientific adviser Carl Sagan persuaded the mission team in 1990 to turn voyager back towards the Sun and take a “family portrait” of the whole Solar System. There we were – a “Pale Blue Dot” on a vast sea of black. ...
Dust from meteorites that crash-landed on Earth have revealed that Earth's precursor, known as proto-Earth, formed much faster than previously thought, a new study finds. An analysis of this meteorite dust showed that proto-Earth formed within about 5 million years, which is extremely fast,...
Leather, if you’ve ever had that. They’re actually quite yummy and better yet, will last for years as long as they’re kept in a dark dry place. I’m storing mine in some mason jars, but I doubt they’ll last more than a few days on account of how fast they are goi...
Earth is the only planet in the Solar System with plate tectonics. The outer crust of the Earth is broken up into regions known as tectonic plates. These are floating on top of the magma interior of the Earth and can move against one another. When two plates collide, one plate...
The biggest challenge to core accretion is time — building massive gas giants fast enough to grab the lighter components of their atmosphere. Recent research on how smaller, pebble-sized objects fused together to build giant planets up to 1000 times faster than earlier studies. "This is the fi...
Neptune Smallest of the four gas giants, Neptune shares a lot of physical similarities with its neighbour Uranus, including its blue colouring. It’s considered the windiest planet, with speeds recorded at around 2,414km/h (1,500mph). Extreme storms are also known to occur in its atmosphere...
Mars and Jupiter (which might have congealed into its own planet but never could because of the energy from Jupiter’s nearby gravity), 2) the much larger Kuiper belt surrounding Neptune’s orbit, and 3) the much, much larger Oort Cloud, a huge sphere of objects surrounding the Solar ...
Arriving as a Category 4 storm on the week of the 15th anniversary of a catastrophic hurricane that devastated the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Laura is the strongest storm to make landfall in Louisiana in 160 years, says a coastal engineer who teaches at North