Earth | featured news

Canadian circus billionaire Guy Laliberte returned to Earth on Sunday wearing his trademark clown's red nose, landing as planned in Kazakhstan after a landmark space performance to highlight water scarcity.

An asteroid once predicted to have a reasonable chance of striking Earth in 2036 is now far more likely to be a "near miss".

Landscapes are usually associated with rolling hills and lush meadows, the tranquil quiet broken only by occasional birdsong. Not these landscapes...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft buzzed Titan last year, coming close enough to taste the Saturnian moon's atmosphere. The data acquired has implications for our understanding of life throughout the galaxy, as well as Earth's own past.

Scientists say mineral deposits created by lightning strikes are full of rare forms of phosphorus that may have been crucial in getting life started billions of years ago.

Astronomers have spotted a burst of energy from a dying star, setting a record for the oldest and most distant object seen by Earth yet.

The 10-second blast was from when the universe was only 630 million years old.
NASA's Swift satellite spotted the gamma-ray burst, an explosion of high-powered radiation, on April 23. Then ground telescopes watched the afterglow and calculated it had traveled about 13.1 billion light years to get here. It beat old records by 100 or 200 hundred million light years.