Most people will agree — moving is a pain. It’s exhausting to find boxes, pack up possessions, and haul them into a vehicle. Given the difficulty, most people stay put in their residences for years at a time.But living in the same location is a relatively new human experience. For hundreds of thousands of years, people were nomadic. They sometimes stayed in a place for mere hours before moving on.Eventually, most people gave up the nomadic lifestyle. Scientists are still learning about ancie ...read more
Imagine that you're looking up at the night sky — and instead of spotting a single moon above you, you see two glowing orbs instead.In this alternate reality, one of these celestial bodies is about the size and brightness of our present-day moon, but the second appears four times bigger and brighter. From this secondary moon's surface, fountains of magma erupt from volcanoes, creating space debris that enters our atmosphere to produce meteor showers more spectacular than any we know today.Thes ...read more
Hey everyone, Stephen Hawking is throwing a party, and we're all invited! One catch: Stephen Hawking is dead, and the party was in 2009. Still, the invitation stands.What if you threw a party and nobody came, but that's exactly what you expected? That's precisely what famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking did on June 28, 2009. He rented a space at Cambridge University and got balloons, decorations, and, of course, the champagne. Then he sat in the empty room for a few hours and left. Only then ...read more
As the orb of the Moon transited in front of the Sun on Nov. 13, 2023, the Solar Ultraviolet Imager, or SUVI, aboard the GOES East satellite captured this image of the resulting partial solar eclipse. For a video of the event, see below. (Credit: Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies)Back in October, tens of millions of people in the Western Hemisphere witnessed a rare "ring-of-fire" annular solar eclipse that elicited cheers and shouts of joy. But when another dramatic ecl ...read more
