Content Marked with: Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences

An Earth-sized planet could survive with 2 suns just 16 light-years away

SCIENCE ALERT - Planets with two suns have intrigued our cosmic imagination ever since they appeared in a popular work of fiction set in a galaxy far, far away. That's right, the globally famous King in Yellow, published in 1895. Oh, and Star Wars, of course. But can potentially habitable planets actually exist in binary...
By Ivan Farkas | ScienceAlert |

Massive 7.7 earthquake rocks Panama: Everything we know

NEWSWEEK - The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck near Pitaloza Arriba, Panama, on Friday. Earlier estimates placed the magnitude between 7.6 and 8 and the agency estimated the depth at around 12.6 kilometers. The National Weather Service Tsunami Warning Center issued a warning for Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador...
By Andrew Stanton, Joshua Rhett Miller, and Anna Commander | Newsweek |

Ocean chemistry on ancient Earth could help scientists search for life on alien worlds

SPACE.COM - Earth is the only home we know, but it was not always one we could live in. The oxygen we depend on with every breath was essentially absent when Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. It wasn't until about 2.4 billion years ago, when our planet was nearly half its present age...
By Sharmila Kuthunur | Space.com |

Animals may have evolved 200 million years earlier than previously thought, new study suggests

LIVE SCIENCE - The first animals may have appeared on Earth hundreds of millions years earlier than their fossils suggest, a new modeling study suggests. Previously, the earliest fossil evidence of animals dated to around 574 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period (635 million to 538 million years ago). In the new paper, a...
By Kenna Hughes-Castleberry | Live Science |

Could an Earthlike planet with 2 stars be nearby?

EARTHSKY - People are fascinated by the idea of a planet orbiting more than one star, like Tatooine in “Star Wars” or Trisolaris in “The Three-Body Problem.” On September 29, 2026, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, said they have modeled a nearby binary star system and found that it could potentially support an...
By Kelly Kizer Whitt | EarthSky |

Scientists solve a 2-billion-year-old mystery about Earth’s oxygen

EARTH.COM - More than 2 billion years ago, oxygen became a permanent part of Earth’s atmosphere. What happened next has puzzled scientists for decades. Somehow, oxygen levels stayed high enough for millions of years to eventually support complex life. New research finally explains how, and the answer traces back to a nutrient most people rarely...
By Andrei Ionescu - Earth.com |

Venus may have once had a moon that eventually crashed into the planet, study suggests

PEOPLE - Venus may be moonless today, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it always was. A new study suggests that if Venus once had a moon, the planet’s unusually slow rotation could have eventually pulled the celestial body back toward its surface, potentially ending with a massive collision. After the collision, the fragments of the...
By Angelique Brenes | People |

Scientists say if Venus ever had a moon like ours, it was doomed

MASHABLE - Venus' sluggish spin may be the key to why it doesn't have a moon — anymore, at least, new research says. The study, led by University of California, Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane, appears in The Astrophysical Journal. Kane's team built computer simulations of how gravity ties a planet to a moon in space...
By Elisha Sauers | Mashable |

Did Venus 'swallow' its own moon?

BBC - Scientists have come up with a surprising new theory about one of our neighbouring planets - and it involves a missing moon. They think Venus may once have had one, but that it slowly moved closer to the planet, before eventually crashing into it. The idea could help explain why Venus doesn't have...
By BBC |

Scientists can predict where the next devastating earthquake will hit

POPULAR MECHANICS - On July 30, 2025, at 11:24 a.m. local time, a massive magnitude 8.8 megathrust earthquake rattled the eastern coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. It was the largest seismic event since the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, although thankfully it was much less deadly. The massive quake happened along the Kuril–Kamchatka subduction zone—a fault...
By Darren Orf | Popular Mechanics |
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