Imagine for a moment that Earth suddenly shrank to the size of the Moon, while the Moon expanded to the size of Earth. How would life on our planet change? Could humans survive this dramatic cosmic ...

Black holes are commonly depicted as the giant "vacuum cleaners" of the cosmos that gobble up everything around them. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*, is located ...

The sun has been Earth's constant companion ever since our planet emerged. But if the sun were to suddenly disappear, what would happen to our home planet? To understand the fate of a sunless Earth, ...

Like you, I'm given to wondering about "what ifs" to better understand the assumptions we make about the world. One of my favorites is what if the Earth stopped rotating? Let's just say things would ...

The gleaming moon hanging in our sky has been the subject of countless songs, poems, myths, and legends. But in reality, what would happen if the Earth suddenly lost the moon? Quite a few things, ...

I will assume you’re referring to what would happen if Earth stopped rotating all at once, without any gradual reduction in velocity. In that event, most things on Earth would be almost immediately ...

What would happen if Earth were struck by another catastrophic asteroid? While such an event would be devastating, researchers at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University ...

Suppose you could speed up Earth’s rotation so that a day was only half as long? What would happen? Well, for starters we’d have to make new clocks that only have hours 1 to 6 for am and pm. If you ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. An asteroid between about 130 and 300 ft. (40 and 90 meters) ...

What if the Earth were actually for sale? It sounds absurd, but we decided to take the idea at face value. If someone tried to put a price tag on Earth, what would that number even be based on? Land, ...