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Earth has a new moon - or at least a 'quasi-moon', a new study has revealed. A quasi-moon is a space rock that circles the Earth, but is gravitationally bound by the sun. This quasi-moon, called 2023 FW13, was discovered by experts using the Pan-STARRS telescope at the top of the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii, and is one of a handful of known quasi-moons. Experts think the ancient cosmic companion has been in Earth's vicinity since 100 BC and will keep circling our planet for at least another 1,500 years, until AD 3700. Thankfully, neither 2023 FW13 or a similar...

Earth is far from a solid mass of rock. The outer layer of our planet – known as the lithosphere – is made up of more than 20 tectonic plates; as these gargantuan slates glide about the face of the planet, we get the movement of continents, and interaction at the boundaries, not least of which is the rise and fall of entire mountain ranges and oceanic trenches. Yet there's some debate over what causes these giant slabs of rock to move around in the first place. Amongst the many hypotheses put forward over the centuries, convection currents generated by...

Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 hit film “Hidden Figures,” about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died. She was 101. Johnson died Monday of natural causes at a retirement community in Newport News, Virginia, family attorney Donyale Y. H. Reavis told The Associated Press. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement that Johnson “helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color.” Johnson was one of...

From the University of WisconsinFrom rocks in Colorado, evidence of a ‘chaotic solar system’Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.Alternating layers of shale and limestone near Big Bend, Texas, characteristic of the rock laid down at the bottom of a shallow ocean during the late Cretaceous period. The rock holds definitive geologic evidence that the planets in our solar system behave...