The June 2024 new moon occurs tonight, making it a great night to enjoy a sky free of moonshine. A new moon occurs approximately every 28.5 days as the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth during its orbital journey. More formally, new moon is when the Sun and Moon share the same celestial… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A piece of debris launched from the International Space Station unexpectedly survived a fiery re-entry from orbit last month and punctured the roof of a Florida home, according to NASA. When the federal agency disposed… Read More »
No matter what stock market analysts, political pollsters and astrologers say, we cannot predict the future. In fact, we cannot even predict the past. That’s all for the works of French mathematician, philosopher and king of determinism, Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1814, LaPlace declared that if it were possible to know the speed and position of… Read More »
The environmental impacts of spaceflight are becoming increasingly clear as more and more spacecraft are launched into Earth’s orbit. The increasing number of satellites burning up in Earth’s atmosphere has worried scientists for years, and now a new paper explores how the resulting crust of “conductive dust” around the planet resulting from the re-entry of… Read More »
Simulated image of a satellite collision and the resulting debris.ESA / ID&Sense / ONiRiXEL, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO NASA’s TIMED satellite narrowly avoided a collision with Russia’s dead Cosmos 2221 spacecraft this week. In a worst-case scenario, the impact would launch 7,500 bits of debris into low Earth orbit. As the amount of space debris… Read More »
Stars intruding into the Sun’s cosmic backyard may have altered Earth’s orbit in the distant past, triggering major climatic events in our planet’s history. The gravitational influence of these intruding stars also affected the orbits of other planets in the solar system, causing small deviations called perturbations. New research examines the impact of these encounters… Read More »
Spring, summer, autumn and winter; Seasons on Earth change every few months, around the same time each year. It’s easy to accept this cycle as it is on Earth, but not every planet has a regular change in seasons. So why does Earth experience regular seasons that do not exist on other planets? I am… Read More »
Spring, summer, autumn and winter; Seasons on Earth change every few months, around the same time each year. It’s easy to accept this cycle as it is on Earth, but not every planet has a regular change in seasons. So why does Earth experience regular seasons that do not exist on other planets? I am… Read More »