At first, the universe was like a hot stew. Instead of carrots and potatoes, it had particles. As the soupy universe cooled, ...

I asked my friend Julie Ménard how Earth formed. She’s a planetary scientist at Washington State University. She told me it started with the Big Bang. That was nearly 14 billion years ago. “The Big ...

The solid inner core at the center of the Earth, surrounded by the outer core, mantle and crust. Here’s why: While it is well known that a material must be at or below its freezing temperature to be ...

Over 4.6 billion years ago, Earth took shape from a spinning cloud of dust and gas surrounding the young sun. Tiny particles within this cloud collided and clumped together, driven by gravity and ...

Crystals hidden in Australia’s oldest rocks have revealed new clues about how Earth and the Moon formed. The study suggests Earth’s continents didn’t begin growing until hundreds of millions of years ...

Geologists from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have made a breakthrough in understanding how Earth's early continents formed during the Archean time, more than 2.5 billion years ago. Their findings ...

Recent simulations and research have unveiled a fascinating new insight into the history of the solar system’s terrestrial planets. For years, scientists speculated about how the rocky planets—Earth, ...

Billions of years ago, in the giant disk of dust, gas, and rocky material that orbited our young sun, larger and larger bodies coalesced to eventually give rise to the planets, moons, and asteroids we ...

For most of its history, Earth has existed in a greenhouse state—warm, ice-free, and rich in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The ...

Remnants of a liquid layer of magma near Earth's core, formed in the first few hundred million years of the planet's history, may still persist today as odd anomalies in the mantle. When you purchase ...