#rotation-changes

#rotation-changes

Venus suffered a massive runaway greenhouse effect, filling its atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide, resulting in 90 times the surface pressure of Earth and temperatures above 460 degrees Celsius.

Discovered in December 2024, asteroid 2024 YR4 was briefly considered the most dangerous asteroid in decades after scientists initially estimated it had a 3.1% chance of colliding with the Earth in 2032. Closer observations quickly ruled out a city killer scenario, but instead astronomers calculated there was a 4.3% chance that the moon lay in the path of impact.

Since every planet spins at a different speed, the gears are built with different ratios: Earth takes about 24 hours to spin once, Mars takes about 24.6 hours, Jupiter spins much faster, and Saturn spins fast too. Because of this, each dial shows the real day cycle of that planet, so the clock doesn't calculate time digitally.

We found that life is more likely to survive an asteroid impact, so it's definitely still a real possibility that life on Earth could have come from Mars. Maybe we're Martians! The idea that life could have spread through the solar system or even the universe on rocks is known as the lithopanspermia hypothesis.

The population of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes, and the origin of the radius valley that separates these two classes of planets, is best explained by cores that are made of an Earth-like composition without a substantial amount of accreted ice8,9,10,11. For sub-Neptunes, the hydrogen-rich envelope overlies the rocky core for billions of years, whereas for super-Earths, the envelope may be retained for about 100 Myr (refs. ).

Soon after it was spotted in December 2024, worldwide telescopic observations quickly positioned it as the most dangerous space rock ever discovered—one that stood a 3.1-percent (or 1-in-32) chance of crashing into Earth on December 22, 2032. If it were to hit one of the cities potentially in its path, this 60-meter asteroid would have unleashed a force comparable to several atomic bombs, devastating the unfortunate metropolis.

The first time that University of Oxford astronomer Lyla Jung saw the cosmic configuration on her monitor, she almost didn't believe it was real. But it wasand Jung and her colleagues went on to identify one of the largest rotating structures ever found in space: a chain of galaxies embedded in a spinning cosmic filament 400 million light-years from Earth. The finding, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may give astronomers new insights into galaxies' formation, evolution and diversity, Jung says.

Okay, first thing first: the universe is in fact expanding. We've known this for more than a century now, and it's the basis for modern cosmology. This idea is called the big bang modelwhich is an unfortunate name because it brings to mind a cosmos expanding like an explosion, with galaxies moving away from each other through space like shrapnel. But in fact space itself is expanding, and that's different.

With Webb, we are able to see farther than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting,