A solar day is a measure of how long it takes the Earth to rotate from one noon to the next, and today’s summer solstice also happens to be the longest solar day of the year.
The mass of the Earth is big enough that the gravitational force it creates can pull the hard shape of ice, rock and metal into a sphere.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data from Miguel Román, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Imagine the Earth pulling everything it is made up of, all of its mass, towards its centre. This happens evenly all over the Earth, causing it to take on a round shape.
Lasers being shone from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
These lasers help remove the twinkles in the night sky and help astronomers see stars clearer on Earth than ever before.
F. Kamphues/ESO
Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland; Belinda Nicholson, University of Southern Queensland; Brad Carter, University of Southern Queensland, and Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland
How exactly do the stars twinkle in the night sky? As it turns out, the answer is full of hot air… and cold air.
A solar eclipse observed over Grand Canyon National Park in May 2012.
Grand Canyon National Park
A new detector could work out what’s causing a heat flow from the Earth’s interior. It may even solve the mystery of what powers the Earth’s magnetic field.
Composite image of moments before, during and after totality.
NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
An astronomer explains how. why and when eclipses happen, what scientists can learn from them, and what they would look like if you were standing on the Moon.
The Sun is currently middle-aged, having celebrated its 4,568,000,000th birthday at some point in the last million years.
Flickr/ChopWood CarryWater
Canadians love to paddle on them and camp beside them, but our boreal lakes offer more than just peace and beauty. They could provide clues to how life on Earth began.
You would not recognise Earth if you saw it 500 million years ago - the lands, oceans, climate and life were all very different. Scientists now have a new map of the deep history of Earth.
To get us to Mars and beyond, a team of students from around the world has a plan involving lunar rovers mining ice and a space station between the Earth and the moon.
A scale model of one of the two LAGEOS satellites.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Earth is a relatively dry planet compared to some of the other ocean worlds in our Solar system. Life needs water so what about life on these other places?
Have we really discovered other “Earth-like” planets orbiting around other stars? Understanding what we do and do not know about exoplanets is the key to answering this question.
ESO/L. Calcada/N. Risinger/Reuters
Over the last 20 years, advances in the field of exoplanet discovery have excited the imaginations of scientists and enthusiasts alike. But we’re in position to know yet whether a planet is habitable.
Are we headed to a magnetic reversal and all the global disruption that would bring? Enter archaeomagnetism. A look at the archaeological record in southern Africa provides some clues.
Artist’s impression of an ice age.
Ittiz/wikimedia