(This article, originally published Tuesday, was updated Wednesday to add all-time heat records at Mount Washington, N.H., and Tbilisi, Georgia set since Monday. On Thursday, the story was updated to include information on heat-related deaths in Canada and extraordinary heat in Siberia. On Friday, it was updated to add the likely all-time heat record in […]
A giant asteroid the size of a car showed up on the University of Hawaii’s survey telescopes mere hours before it entered the Earth’s atmosphere about 240 miles south of San Juan, Puerto Rico. At the time of first observation, the asteroid was just farther out than our Moon – at about 500,000 km from Earth (the Moon sits […]
Every once in awhile, as a person who writes about space, I encounter folks who don’t believe in it. Or don’t believe we’ve ever been there, anyway. Or that our robots have been there. Or that the Earth is round (but that’s a whole other thing.) But while tweets about how “astronauts” on the “International” “Space” […]
The earth is at risk of being hit by an asteroid as wide as a football field in September this year. The rock has a one in 7,000 chance of hitting the planet on September 9 at 7.03am, according to the European Space Agency’s list of the most concerning space objects. Known as asteroid 2006QV89, it has a diameter of 40m […]
Earth’s magnetic North Pole has drifted so fast that authorities have had to officially redefine the location of the magnetic North Pole. The extreme wandering of the North Pole caused increasing concerns over navigation, especially in high latitudes. Earth’s magnetic field is known to have wandered and flipped in the geologic past. Earth’s magnetic field […]
In Christopher Nolan’s epic 2014 science fiction film Interstellar, a rogue splinter group of scientists constituting the collapsed remnants of NASA hatch a plan to save Earth from environmental collapse by searching for potentially habitable planets in a distant galaxy. They get there by traveling through a wormhole and using the gravitational slingshot velocity of a […]