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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists have long believed that the Moon was formed by a massive object crashing into the Earth billions of years ago and sending chunks hurtling into space that ultimately coalesced. But what was ...

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, ...

The origin of life on Earth is still enigmatic, but we are slowly unraveling the steps involved and the necessary ingredients. Scientists believe life arose in a primordial soup of organic chemicals ...

Nearly 5 billion years ago, a dense cloud of gas and dust occupied this corner of the Milky Way. The planets we know today, including Earth, were nowhere to be found. Scientists think that a nearby ...