Conventionally, the moon is thought to have formed during one big impact, but a three-impact model might make more sense ...

The moon is weird. It's completely unlike anything else in the solar system. So how did our planet end up with such a special ...

Roughly four and a half billion years ago the planet Theia slammed into Earth, destroying Theia, melting large fractions of Earth’s mantle and ejecting a huge debris disk that later formed the moon.

"During the early solar system's game of cosmic billiards, Earth was struck by a neighbor,” said Dauphas. “It was a lucky shot. Without the moon's steadying influence on our planet's tilt, the climate ...

Over 4.6 billion years ago, Earth took shape from a spinning cloud of dust and gas surrounding the young sun. Tiny particles within this cloud collided and clumped together, driven by gravity and ...

"The most convincing scenario is that most of the building blocks of Earth and Theia originated in the inner solar system. Earth and Theia are likely to have been neighbors." ...

Timing is everything these days. Our communications and GPS networks all depend on keeping careful track of the precise timing of signals—including accounting for the effects of relativity. The deeper ...

Perhaps the greatest, mind-bending quirk of our universe is the inherent trouble with timekeeping: Seconds tick by ever so slightly faster atop a mountain than they do in the valleys of Earth. For ...