True or false ... It takes eight and a half minutes for light from the Sun to travel to our planet?
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Physical processes - Light - The Sun as
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Learning Points
It takes eight...

Stellar astronomer and TED Senior Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz works on NASA's Kepler mission, searching for places in the universe that could support life. So it's worth a listen when she asks us to think carefully about Mars. In this...

Satellite imaging has revolutionized our knowledge of the Earth, with detailed images of nearly every street corner readily available online. But Planet Labs' Will Marshall says we can do better and go faster -- by getting smaller. He...

Besides the blue of the oceans, the dominant color of our planet, as we know it, is green. But imagine a time when the Earth looked a little .... purple.

It may seem like Earth isn't as well-decorated as its ring-bearing neighbors in the solar system, but new research suggests that may not always have been the case. Not only did our planet maybe once have a ring, but our ancient bling...

Watch the changing dust density and the growth of structure in this simulated debris disk. Dust quickly collects into clumps and then forms arcs and rings, structures similar to what astronomers observe in actual debris disks....

Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of planets beyond our solar system. But while some of them might be the right size and mass to be some kind of Earth 2.0, we don't know if any of them is truly...

Explore the four gas giant planets, as Jessi and Squeaks take you on a tour of our solar system!

As a diver in the 1970s, marine ecologist Enric Sala saw once-lush oceanscapes reduced to underwater deserts -- but later, in marine preserves across the globe, he also witnessed the ocean's power to rejuvenate itself when left to its...

About 1.8–0.8 billion ago, the Earth went through a period known as the Boring Billion, where not a lot changed in terms of geology, evolution, or even the number of hours in a day. Some scientists call it “the dullest period in Earth’s...

The International Astronomical Union should ‘rescind their non-scientific definition’ of Pluto as a dwarf planet, according to a five-year study

The Milky way galaxy is composed of up to 400 billion stars, and at least that many planets. Our star, the sun is one of those billions, about a third to halfway out from the galactic center....

LISA Pathfinder, a mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, has successfully demonstrated critical technologies needed to build a space-based observatory for detecting ripples in...

Although no one's actually seen the planet that supposedly lurks in the outer solar system, planetary scientists at the California Institute of Technology presented evidence for Planet Nine's existence in January. As a spacecraft...

If we are going to learn about the Earth, we had better start from the beginning! The Hadean, Archean, and Proterozoic eons will take us all the way from the formation of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago, until about half a billion years...

This video features a geology professor from the University of Texas who discusses his exciting career as a geologist. He talks about his travels around the world and the interesting problems he solves in his lab. He also shares his...

The earth has an axial tilt of about 23.5 degrees. While this tilt is responsible for shaping our planet's climate and seasons, it also played a crucial role in shaping life on earth. What would have happened if the...

You may have heard that a kilogram of feathers weighs the same as a kilogram of steel, but that all depends on where you weigh them. This video is all about the difference between mass and weight, and how weirdly awesome Earth’s gravity...

The Arctic may seem like a frozen and desolate environment where nothing ever changes. But the climate of this unique and remote region can be both an early indicator of the climate of the rest of the Earth and a driver for weather...

Do Aliens exist? Are we alone in the universe? Where is everyone? Fermi Paradox and Drake Equation: Where is everyone? You probably already know that there are more stars in the universe than all the...

On Sept. 18, 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photo of Earth and the moon.



It was the first time both the Earth and the moon were captured in a single frame. At the time, Voyager 1 was more than 7 million miles away...

The video explains the concepts of revolution and rotation in relation to celestial bodies. The video also provides information about the time it takes for the Earth and other planets to complete a revolution around the sun, as well as...

This video is a quiz covering the Planets series. It includes topics such as the unique characteristics of Earth, the orbits of planets around the sun, the number of planets in our solar system, the relationship between a planet's...

Life on Earth has adapted to our 24 hour day, but the Earth’s spin is slowing down. What would it be like to live on an Earth that stops spinning? Watching YouTube Isn’t Helping You Wind Down, It’s Ruining Your