Science, Earth | featured news

If scientists detected a major asteroid headed for Earth now, it would take at least five years and billions of dollars to develop an effective defense system to either alter its course or destroy it, scientists say.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: The best way for most of us to watch asteroid 2012 DA14 come within 17,200 miles of Earth, and then recede harmlessly into the cosmos, is to watch the show online.

Upon further review, a big scary-sounding asteroid is no longer even a remote threat to smash into Earth in about 20 years, NASA says....

A giant asteroid will make a flyby of Earth over the next few days, and armchair astronomers can watch the action live on their computers.

It sounds like the plot of a bad Bruce Willis movie, but some experts are saying it should be a reality. In order to prepare for massive asteroids that could aim for Earth in the future, researchers should ram a spaceship into a real asteroid to see if the space rock would shift course, scientists say.

Climate scientists agree the Earth will be hotter by the end of the century, but their simulations don’t agree on how much. Now a new study suggests the gloomier predictions may be closer to the mark.

A city-block size asteroid will fly by Earth this weekend, well beyond the orbit of the moon, and you can watch it zip safely by live in an online webcast.

Two-and-a-half billion years ago, the Earth's atmosphere was rich in hydrocarbons, similar to Saturn's moon, Titan. Before Earth's atmosphere ditched methane and began accumulating oxygen, though, our planet appears to have cycled back and forth every few million years between the two states years a hydrocarbon haze and clear skies. A sunlight-blocking haze most certainly affected the evolution of microbes that depend on light to photosynthesise and contributed to the delay before the final oxygenation of the atmosphere.

A pair of Earth-size worlds orbiting a dying star may be the fractured remnants of a single Jupiter-like gas giant, a new study says.

Two years ago, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., released a study claiming that inconsistencies between satellite observations of Earth's heat and measurements of ocean heating amounted to evidence of "missing energy" in the planet's system.