Most scientists think that Earth and Mars took shape this way from rocky pieces swirling around the young sun around 4.5 ...

Earth and Mars began side by side, but their volatile elements reveal sharply different paths from dust and rock to finished planets.

Earth’s core has been holding onto materials from the planet’s earliest days for roughly 4.5 billion years. Now, scientists ...

Neither famous number is as simple as it first sounds. The real question is how much uncertainty each one can realistically ...

Earth and Mars may have formed through very different processes, despite developing as neighbors in the early solar system.

A peculiar property of the Earth's magnetic field could help us to work out how our planet was created 4.5 billion years ago, according to a new scientific assessment. There are several theories about ...

Billions of years ago, in the giant disk of dust, gas, and rocky material that orbited our young sun, larger and larger bodies coalesced to eventually give rise to the planets, moons, and asteroids we ...

New research sheds light on the earliest days of the earth's formation and potentially calls into question some earlier assumptions in planetary science about the early years of rocky planets.

Tectonic map of the Earth. The first continental crust on Earth formed more than 3 billion years ago. Likely the first fragments formed by partial melting and re-crystallization of the primordial ...

There are several theories about how the Earth and the Moon were formed, most involving a giant impact. They vary from a model where the impacting object strikes the newly formed Earth a glancing blow ...