The planet Uranus was given its tilt after being hit in a "cataclysmic collision" by a massive object roughly twice the size of Earth, new research has suggested. A study by researchers at Durham University believe that a collision in the planet's history left it rotating on a tilt – potentially explaining its freezing temperatures. Uranus is unique among the solar system's planets for rotating on an axis set almost 90 degrees off of the sun's orbital plane, meaning its poles experience 42 years of continuous sunlight and darkness over the course of its orbit.

One of the big questions about the universe is how the first matter formed after the Big Bang. Because particles and antiparticles annihilate one another when they come into contact, if there were exactly equal measures of both, the universe wouldn’t exist – at least not in the form we see it today. As such, there must be an imbalance between particles and antiparticles, even if it is only by the tiniest fraction. But this is not the case.
All experiments designed to find this asymmetry have come up blank. This is also true of the latest, which were recently carried out at CERN by an international team of researchers. The findings from the BASE (Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment) are published in the journal Nature.

"All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,"
first author Christian Smorra, from Japan’s RIKEN institute, said in a statement.

In the study, researchers used antiprotons that had been isolated in 2015. The antiprotons were measured using the interaction of two traps that use electrical and magnetic fields to capture them. The team was able to measure the magnetic force of the antiproton to a level that is 350 times more precise than ever before.
If there was an imbalance between protons and antiprotons, this level of precision would be the best bet for finding it. "At its core, the question is whether the antiproton has the same magnetism as a proton," said Stefan Ulmer, spokesperson of the BASE group. 'This is the riddle we need to solve."

"An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is. What is the source of the symmetry break?" Smorra said.

One of the rules of the Universe is that “angular momentum” can’t go anywhere — even if individual pieces speed up, slow down, or change direction, the sum total of angular momentum cannot change. The Earth loses angular momentum when the Moon slows it down, so the Moon has to gain it — and it does, by moving further away in its orbit. The Moon is currently receding from the Earth by about one and a half centimeters per year.

Exactly the opposite thing is happening to Mars’ innermost moon, Phobos. Phobos revolves around Mars faster than Mars rotates, so Phobos is speeding up Mars’ rotation —
and is also slowly spiraling inward as a consequence. As a result, Phobos will crash into Mars in just a few million years’ time.

BC/BCE, certain cycles of our home planet combine to give a specially warm period for the northern hemisphere (Holocene) with significant effects. These cycles are:

Note: maximum temperatures during our last interglacial period were higher than the current interglacial period, and certain Greenhouse gases, principally CO₂, were more abundant then than is so today. Within this continuing process many minor fluctuations do occur for reasons that are still largely speculative.

Also, contrary to much popular science, the latest analysis of geological evidences has found no correlation between carbon dioxide levels and changes in world climate. But, variations in the level of cosmic radiation correlate directly with major wet and dry cycles in earth history. Cosmic rays provide the ionization needed in the atmosphere to stimulate cloud formation and thus rainfall.

Japanese scientists say that silicon is likely the mystery element in the Earth's inner core, claiming progress on solving one of the planet's deepest secrets. Consensus has long been that the centre of the planet is composed of about 85 percent iron and 10 percent nickel, with sulphur, oxygen and silicon prime candidates for the other five percent. But geophysicist Eiji Ohtani at Tohoku University in northern Japan and his research team suggest that silicon is the most likely candidate. The core comprises an outer layer of liquid iron and nickel, and an inner layer — a hot dense ball of mostly iron.

Ohtani presented his team's work at a meeting in December 2016 of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

sun’s core rotates four times faster than its surface. So the Sun’s magnetic fields get so tangled up between varying speeds of surface rotation coupled with varying speeds of the sun’s interior.

the relative behaviour of our sun, not only seasonal in the equinox-progression, as in 1 above, but also by its sun spot cycles appears to trigger changes in earth climate. For instance, for seventy years from 1645 AD there was no recorded sun spot activity, which, it is alleged, led to a cold period becoming a minor ice age. The sun spot cycle usually averages at 10.28 years, varying between nine and fourteen years. This sun spot cycle seems to be affected by the magnetosphere of planet Jupiter influencing the stability of loops forming in the sun's magnetic field which give rise to sun spots.

sun also appears to have a brightness cycle of 206 years of which we are now about midway, which may explain a 150 year Yucatan dry period which appears to have helped collapse the Mayan civilization. (See 900 AD).

Some major earthquakes are also noted below as they account for more than 10% of deaths from natural hazards; although worldwide the earth actually experiences about 500,000 earthquakes each year if all are counted.

In Mossel Bay, Western Cape, South Africa – high quantity of microlith spear-points at Pinnacle Point cave 13B in the coastal cliffs and cave deposits indicate that at this time abundant game was available to its hunter-gatherer population in a time of very low sea levels and higher rain fall in this area which provides a broad well-watered grassy coastal plain, while most of Africa is desert and the earth endures an ice age.
(The stone used was apparently heat-treated with fire so that it would flake properly and could then be fashioned to give a sharp edge down one side and a blunt back on the other which allowed them to be glued onto a wooden shaft, creating a deadly yet lightweight spear).

Photographed by the Hubble telescope, April 3, 2017, Jupiter, to the right, is 4.45 Astronomical Units from Earth (415 million miles or 668 million km)

A science team led by Sander van der Kaars of Monash University in Australia using information from a sediment core drilled in the Indian Ocean off the coast of southwest Australia to help reconstruct past climate and ecosystems on the Australian continent, showed the core contains layers of material blown and washed into the ocean over time, and so looking deeper in the sediments is the same as looking deeper into the past. The team’s paper on this subject was published online January 20, 2017 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications which states that some of the large creatures that once roamed Australia – what scienitsts call Australia’s ancient megafauna – didn’t disappear due to climate change as had been proposed earlier. Instead, the evidence suggests that humans were the primary cause of these unique creatures’ sudden extinction some 45,000 years ago.

Prior to that time, there were 1,000-pound kangaroos in Australia, 2-ton wombats, 25-foot-long lizards, 400-pound flightless birds, 300-pound marsupial lions and Volkswagen-sized tortoises. After this time, these huge creatures had disappeared.

A swarm of comet fragments strike earth, decimating animal populations and triggering a mini ice-age.

suggests that, on a day about 12,800 years ago, Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating comet, igniting fires across the globe. The large study, of geochemical and isotopic markers from 170 different sites around the world, was published in two papers in the Journal of Geology on February 1, 2018. At the time, the Earth had emerged from an ice age. Things were warming up, and the glaciers had retreated. In a statement, the researchers imagined what it might have been like for humans at the time: Out of nowhere, the sky was lit with fireballs. This was followed by shock waves. Fires rushed across the landscape, and dust clogged the sky, cutting off the sunlight. As the climate rapidly cooled, plants died, food sources were snuffed out, and the glaciers advanced again. Ocean currents shifted, setting the climate into a colder, almost “ice age” state that lasted an additional thousand years. Finally, the researchers said, the climate began to warm again. This world had fewer large animals, evidenced by, for example, completely different kinds of spear points left behind by North American people of that time. The researchers believe the data suggests the disaster was touched off when Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating comet that was roughly 62 miles (100 km) in diameter – the remnants of which persist within our solar system to this day.

Monsoon rains begin to penetrate into northern Africa changing the Sahara area to lush green vegetation.

In Britain,
the DNA of a skeleton discovered in a cave and dated as about 9100 years old (before present) indicates that his eyes were blue and that his skin was dark of this earliest traceable Briton, as represented in this artist's redition.
In 1996, Bryan Sykes of the University of Oxford sequenced his mitochondrial DNA of 'Cheddar Man', with DNA extracted from one of Cheddar Man's molars. Cheddar Man was determined to have belonged to Haplogroup U5, which has also been found in other Mesolithic human remains in Europe.
Sykes obtained DNA from the 9,000-year-old Cheddar Man's tooth and from a 12,000-year-old tooth found from the same cave. Around 10% of Europeans belong to Haplogroup U5. The 1996 results were not subjected to peer review and it has been suggested that the sequence was from contaminating modern DNA

A 290 km length of coastal shelf of the Møre coast in the Norwegian Sea collapses (total volume of 3,500 km3 of debris) causing a huge tsunami, striking Scotland and depositing sediment in Montrose Basin, the Firth of Forth, up to 80 km inland and 4 metres above current normal tide levels

Britain becomes an island.

In Mesoamerica – planting of maize begins in forest-cleared land.

Human migration from the Sahara into the Nile valley begins as a result of climate changes.

In Egypt – A period of significantly higher Nile floods begins, continuing until c.2500 BC.

World sea level stabilizes to approximately its present level. 

The drying out of the Sahara area destroys its cattle culture and drives its inhabitants away, adding to the population of the Nile valley, and bringing the cattle-cult and mummification of the dead (including the dog/jackal-headed Anubis) with them. (University of Rome archaeological research).

Catastrophic Black Sea land subsidence, according to dendrochronology (tree-ring dating), which drowns all Early Bronze Age settlements in that region under what is now 8-10 metres of water.

Earth climate cools, putting once flourishing settlements in the higher latitudes, such as in the Orkney islands north of Scotland, under great stress.
In Mesoamerica – Farming of domesticated sunflower seeds and cotton spreads.

There is evidence of a huge meteor strike devastating southern 'Iraq'/Mesopotamia at this date according to tree-ring dating (dendrochronology) which would have led to the breakdown of these kingdoms (other date estimates vary between c.2400-2100 BCE). Dead Sea level now drops by about 100 metres.

East Africa, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Gulf of Oman, Aegean, Indus experience an abrupt climate change.

In Egypt – A period of low Nile floods begins that includes periodic severe famines, until c.1950 BC.

In Egypt – Climatic changes hasten the end of Egypt's Old Kingdom.

In Southern Mesopotamia – Ur civilization collapses under extended severe drought caused by an extended El-Niño in the Pacific Ocean.

The arid period of severe periodic famines, which began from c.2180 BC, now ends.

Drought begins throughout North Africa and the Middle East. The Nile does not rise for seven years.

In Egypt – The Great Seven-year Famine ends with the Egyptian administration restructured over three regions of Egypt and its people grouped into cities, under vizier Joseph.

In Egypt – A period of exceptionally high Nile floods begins, continuing until c.1780 BC/BCE.

Mount Vesuvius in Italy erupts violently.

In Eastern Mediterranean – Minoan island Thera (Santorini) north of Crete explodes (Caphtor=Crete, migration of the Philistines, Amos 9:7), causing volcanic ash, a huge tidal-wave/tsunami, and helping the collapse of Minoan civilization.

In Iceland, the volcano Hekla erupts blanketing Europe in dust that radically changes the climate causing the collapse of Mycenaean Greek civilization, and probably affecting the economies of the Near East.

Mesopotamia is utterly devastated by a long drought which leads to an almost complete breakdown of civil authority.

An abrupt cooling of earth-climate begins.

June 4: The Chinese witness the first recorded solar eclipse.

June 15: Total eclipse of the sun.

March 19: The Babylonians report an eclipse of the sun.

July 17: Chinese astronomers report an eclipse of the sun.

In Jutland, Denmark area – A woman about 50-years old is buried in a bog, probably as a ritual human sacrifice, which preserves it from decay (during earliest part of Iron Age in northern Europe), and after its discovery in 1835 it becomes known as the 'Haraldskær Woman' (It is kept today in Vejle, Denmark).

In Eastern Mediterranean – A tsunami during the Persian invasion of Greece helps protect the northern Greek village of Potidaea (modern Nea Poteidaia) from its Persian attackers by drowning many of the invading soldiers. (The incident is referred to by Greek historian Herodotus, and verified in 2012 by German scientists from Aachen University).

In Mesoamerica – Intense drought.

An especially cold wave during the expansion of ancient Greece.

Summer: A series of earthquakes off Greece generate a tsunami in the Maliakos Gulf which affects the course of the Peloponnesian War by forcing the advancing Spartans to abort their planned invasion of Attica. Ancient geographer Strabo reports that throughout Greece parts of islands are submerged, rivers permanently displaced and towns devastated. The tsunami itself hit the coast in the Maliakos Gulf at three different places, reaching towns as far as three quarters of a mile inland. The force of the tsunami was such that at one place a trireme was lifted out of its dock and thrown over a city wall.

An earthquake and a tsunami destroy the prosperous Greek city Helike, lying 2 km away from the sea. The fate of the city, which remained permanently submerged, is often commented upon by ancient writers.

The Colossus of Rhodes (a 107 feet tall statue of the Greek god Helios, which stood in the city of Rhodes in Greece), one of the seven wonders of the aqncient world is destroyed by an earthquake.

A Catastrophic rise in the ocean's eustatic sea level occurs approximately between the years 40 BC/BCE to 100 AD/CE. as a result of an abnormal change in world climate. Evidence for this occurrence of a sudden and abnormal rise of the Dead Sea level during this period, consists of various morphological data, and dendrochronology.

Two thousand years earlier a similar rise of the sea level is estimated to have occurred.

Earthquake destroys Qumran (Mesad Hasidim, 'Stronghold of the Pious'), and shakes Jerusalem.

World sea level is about 2 metres (7 feet) below its present level.

• Earthquake shakes the Middle East destroying towns in Anatolia (Ephesus, Sardis).

• Severe famine strikes Judaea (Josephus Ant.20.101), as Agabus had prophesied to the Christians in Antioch, Syria, to prepare relief supplies for the Jewish Christians in Judaea (Acts 11:28-30).

• In Italy, an earthquake seriously damages the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. (The cities have not yet recovered from this catastrophe when they are completely destroyed in 79 AD).

• In Greece, Corinth is devastated by an earthquake.

• August 24: In Italy, Mount Vesuvius erupts destroying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.

• In Mesoamerica – Intense drought.

A period of low sunspot activity begins.

Low sunspot activity triggers a period of global cooling.

• Drought across the steppes of Eastern Europe causes migrations of pastoral nomads and serious shrinkage of the Aral and Caspian seas. Salt laden winds from the Aral sea area may have affected climate elsewhere.
This is probably caused by an extended severe El- Niño effect, which also causes the complete collapse of the Moche civilization in South America.

• In Britain – The Thames River feezes for nine weeks.

Bishop of Carthage Cyprian (in his rebuttal of Demetrian) declares the Death of the World, that the end of world is approaching because of the visible effect of climate cooling –

This onset of global cooling also forces the Goths to migrate southward to survive, which triggers the Gothic war when the Gothic tribes collide with the Roman empire, and in the following years plague ravages the empire.

• In Britain – The Thames River feezes for nine weeks.

• In Cyprus an unending 36-year drought causes its inhabitants to leave.

The entire Back Sea freezes over.

• Sunrise, July 21: a devastating earthquake in the Hellenic trench off the coast of Crete, estimated at 8 or higher on the Richter scale, causes a tsunami that strikes the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, particularly Alexandria and the Nile Delta, killing thousands and hurling ships nearly two miles inland. It causes widespread destruction in central and southern Greece, northern Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, and Sicily, and in Crete nearly all towns are destroyed. The quake was generated in a steep fault in the Hellenic trench near Crete. (The anniversary of this disaster was still commemorated annually at the end of the 6th century in Alexandria as a "day of horror).

The relatively numerous literary references to earthquakes in this time which is otherwise characterized by a paucity of historical records strengthens the case for a period of heightened seismic activity. Kourion on Cyprus, for example, is known to have been hit by five strong earthquakes within a period of eighty years, leading to its permanent destruction.

• The Migration Period Pessimum (MPP, also known as Dark Ages Cold Period) begins in large areas of central Europe and Scandinavia, causing the retreat of agriculture, including pasturing, with consequent reforestation, and decline of the Roman Empire. (It lasted to about 900 AD, and is followed by the Medieval Warm Period from about 950 to 1250 AD).

• May 20/29: Earthquake strikes Antioch, Syria, followed by fire, killing about 250,000, and causing an uplift of its port of Seleucia-Pereia of ~0.7–0.8M and subsequent silting up which makes it unusable.

• A violent storm shatters Mecca's sacred Ka'ba (meaning cube). 

• November 29: An earthquake estimate at 8.4 magnitude strikes Japan off the shore of the Kii Peninsula, Nankaido, Shikoku, Kii, and Awaji region, followed by a huge tsunami.

• September 11: An earthquake wrecks Jerusalem, collapsing the eastern and western sides of the Dome of the Rock. The 'Nea' church complex is also destroyed and not rebuilt. 

• In Mesoamerica – A dry period.

A blast of gamma rays striking earth causes a spike in the formation of C-14 in the atmosphere, about 20 times higher than the normal rate of variation in the last 3,000 years, probably lasting about 2-seconds. Scientists speculate that it could have been cause by two 'black holes' colliding and converging. (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records a "red crucifix" in the sky after sunset in 774 which may point to an unrecognised astronomical event which caused the radiation burst).

• An earthquake seriously damages the dome of the Anastasis in Jerusalem, and a locust plague devastates the countryside which leads to severe famine in Palestine. 

• In Mesoamerica – Mayan cities are abandoned as drought destroys their economy.

In Roopkund, India (about 16,000 feet above sea level) – An exceptional powerful hail storm kills about 300 people. Trapped in the valley with nowhere to hide or seek shelter, the "hard as iron” cricket ball-sized [about 23 centimeter/9 inches circumference] hailstones come by the thousands, resulting in bizarre sudden death.

Their remains lie in the lake for 1,200 years until their discovery in 1942 by a British forest guard H K Madhwal.

• December 22: c.200,000 die in Damghan, Iran; and 45,000 die in an earthquake in Corinth, Greece, but this is sometimes given as being in November.

Folke Vilgerdson of Norway names Iceland 'Iceland' from his experience of a severe winter and its sea-ice filling the fjord in a failed attempt to settle. (In 874, Ingolf Arnason succeeded).

• July 13: The Sendai region of northern Honshu, Japan is struck by a major earthquake of an estimated magnitude of 8.6 on the surface wave magnitude scale, followed by a tsunami that causes flooding extending 4 km inland from the coast. The town of Tagajo is destroyed, with an estimated 1,000 casualties.

• March 23: c.150,000 die in an earthquake near Ardabil, Iran, near the Caspian sea.

• Collapse of the Mayan civilization in the Yucatan Peninsula resulting from a 150 year drought precipitated by the 206 year cyclical brightening of the sun.

There is evidence in North Africa for low Nile discharge during the years 930 to 1070 AD/CE.

Erik the Red discovered new land West of Iceland and calls it 'Greenland'.

• Europe enjoys 300 years of warmer weather that increases harvests and allows wheat to be cultivated much further north and at higher elevations.

• An earthquake disturbs the surface area of Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The subsidence around 'Solomon's Stables' is filled up with archaeologically rich debris.

• A star explodes in the constellation of Taurus which later forms the Crab nebula.

• A seven year famine begins in Egypt during which the Nile does not rise.

• c.230 000 die in an earthquake in Aleppo, Syria.

There is evidence in North Africa for low Nile river discharge from 1180 to 1350.

As related by astronomers Clube and Napier in their book The Cosmic Serpent, a strange event is observed to affect the Moon, which may be explained by a large impact on its hidden face, originating the Giordano Bruno crater.

A number of observations suggest that catastrophic cometary or meteoritic impacts around the same time
also affects the Pacific Ocean basin:

• Maori legends of great fires destroying forests and the moa bird, to be associated to the recently found Tapanui craters;
• dynastic changes and migrations throughout Polynesia;
• very intense El Niño activity with flooding of the coastal Peruvian regions;
• demise of the local Moche civilizations, and the birth of the Incas civilization higher in the Andes;
• the emigration of the Aztects from the Pacific coast to the interior in the most well protected area from tsunamis;
• unusually intense typhoon activity in the Chinese-Japanese sea;
• unusually strong floods in Northern China with diversion of the course of the Huang Ho river;
• unusually cold weather in the Mongolian plateau, probably a main reason for the Mongolians invading nearby areas;
• a great sign in the sky seen by the boy Gengis Khan forecasting his future of world master;
• the number of comets seen in the sky as recorded by Chinese astronomers is unusually high.

• Atlantic pack ice begins to grow, making passages between Norway, Iceland and Greenland more difficult.

• c.60 000 die in an earthquake near Silicia, Turkey.

• Earth cooling worsens, leading to the collapse of Greenland civilization.

October: In China – The fleet of KUBLAI KHAN, carrying 23,000 Mongol Chinese and Korean soldiers with 7,000 sailors sail to the Japanese island of Tsushima, and land near Hakata Nay.

October 20: A storm wind causes the KHAN's fleet to drag anchors and a third of his fleet (300-ships) are lost and and half his army drowns.

• Life expectancy as reflected in the records of the British royal family (the best-off in society) is 35.28 years.

In China – Three separate invasion fleets of the KAHN sail for Japan to rendezvous in Takeshima Bay. But –
July 30: Another terrible storm strikes the area and thousands of the KAHN's ships sink.

In China – KUBLAI KHAN builds a third invasion fleet but abruptly cancels the invasion of Japan.

• c.100 000 die in an earthquake near Chihli, China.
• In southern Africa, the iron-age Mapungubwe civiliation of Greater Zimbabwe dies as rainfall decreases.

•  A magnitude 7.1 quake and tsunami hit Kamakura, Japan's de facto capital, killing 23,000 after resulting fires.

• Warm summers in Europe are no longer dependable.

• A large tsunami strikes Crete, Rhodes, Alexandria and Acre in Palestine.

The Great Famine
10–25% of many cities die.

• In Britain and Northern Europe, torrential rain and floods cause a general famine. Hundreds of thousands of peasants die of starvation. (Europe does not fully recover until 1325). These years begin a period of unpredictable weather which lasts into the 19^th century.

The futility of prayer undermines the institutional authority of the Church.
Incidents of cannibalism occur in Ireland and other parts of Northern Europe.

• March 3: A solar eclipse.

• August: Epidemics of pneumonia and bubonic plague sweep Britain until the end of 1349. Life expectancy for the period until 1375 AD/CE drops to 17.33 years.

• The Black Death reappears in England and ravages Europe. The survivors of the first wave of Black Death are better able to resist the disease than were people in general during the first wave in 1348, and the second wave of plague is less severe than the first wave.

• October, Comet 55P/1366 U1 (Temple-Tuttle) passes Earth at only 8.9 lunar distances.

• October, A comet, breaking away from the large comet (Napier and Clube) which entered the solar system about 20,000 years ago, now enters the Earth’s atmosphere travelling at 216,000 km per hour, passing over SE Australia and hits the Earth at 48.3º S, 166.4º E. It penetrates the ocean bed creating an impact crater 20 ± 2 k.m. wide, and 153 metres deep. (Dallas Abbott and team have named it Mahuika crater).
The impact is about 90 k.m. from Zhou Man’s Chinese fleet. His masts are smashed off; many ships catch fire and sailors on the upper decks have their ear drums blown out by the pressure pulse. The ships are turned into helpless hulks. A tsunami is created with waves 200 metres high, travelling at 1000 miles per hour. Zhou Man’s wrecked fleet is hurled NW to Australia and N to New Zealand. When the tsunami strikes New South Wales, huge boulders are carried on top of cliffs 32 metres high. Several junks are carried over sandbars far inland (Warrnambool; Wollongong where Chinese blue and white has been found in tsunami debris far inland). One of the wrecked treasure ships is impaled in a cliff at Moeraki, 45 degree bows up, and with a 45 degree list to starboard. Two burning junks are hurled into the cliff-face at Wakanui Beach, Ashburton, where their wreckage is buried deep beneath a Tsunami formed cliff, which also covers a stone built Chinese canal.
The scene in New Zealand resembles a fleet of aircraft crashing simultaneously. The tsunami radiates across the Pacific. Waves reaching Easter Island are 10 metres high. Many people drown, civilisation, including Chinese, destroyed.
Waves reaching Peru and Chile devastate society along the coast, including Chinese settlements in north Peru. Junks are wrecked. People on Altiplano escape. The Inca community migrates inland as a consequence.

• March 15: Earthquake located in Amer, Catalonia, Spain, with intensity estimated between 8 and 9 on the Richter scale, destroys the town.
• May 15: Earthquake epicentre located in Olot, Catalonia, Spain, with intensity estimated at 9.

• December 5: Earthquake strikes Naples, Italy, killing about 35,000.

• April 4: A meteor shower strikes over the Chinese city of Ch'ing-yang killing more than 10,000 people.

February 13: A comet/asteroid appears to have struck the Pacific Ocean 250 km SW of New Zealand creating a huge tsunami.

• September 20: An earthquake and tsunami hit the port in Wakayama, Japan. Between 30-40 thousand deaths are estimated. The building around great Buddha of Kamakura (7m above sea-level) is swept away by the tsunami.

• England experiences foul weather, a poor harvest, and high mortality from 'sweating sickness' (profuse sweat, foul smell, thirst, delirium, death within a few hours of onset).
• An earthquake destroys San Salvador, capital of El Salvador, Central America.

• February 26: Over 200,000 people are killed in an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal.

• The first Spanish settlement in Venezuela, Nueva Cádiz, with a population between 1000 and 1500, is destroyed in an earthquake followed by tsunami.

• Probable beginning of worldwide glacial expansion.

Much of the earth endures the so-called Little Ice Age. Global average temperature drops between 1° and 2° Celsius, ice sheets advance over farms and valleys in Greenland, the Baltic sea and Thames river freeze regularly, crops fail, and famine and disease affect Europe.
Iceland becomes isolated as its sea ice does not melt in summer.

• January 23: in Shaanxi c.830,000 die in an earthquake in Shen-shu, China, measuring ~8 on the Richter scale. An 840km wide area in the provinces of Shaanxi, Henan, Gansu, Hebei, Shandong, Hubei, Hunan, Jiansu and Anhui is destroyed, which is larger than 24 countries, including Singapore, Tonga and Bahrain.

• In England, Elizabethan preacher, John King, declares –

"Our years are turned upside down; our summers are no summers; our harvests are no harvests".

• February 3: An earthquake of 8.1 in Japan followed by a tsunami hits 700 houses (41%) of Hiro, Wakayama Prefecture. More than 5,000 are drowned in an enormous tsunami with a maximum known rise of water of 30m is observed on the coast from the Boso Peninsula to the eastern part of Kyushu Island. The eastern part of the Boso Peninsula, the coast of Tokyo Bay, the coast of the prefectures of Kanagawa and Shizouka, and the southeastern coast of Kochi Prefecture suffered especially heavily.

• In England, the Thames freezes over.
• January 30, Tuesday morning: A huge tidal surge strikes Britain from the south west driving more than six miles inland and drowning more than 3,000 persons, hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep, and destroying the local economy on both sides of the Bristol channel.

German astronomer Johannes Kepler discovers that the planets move around the sun in an elliptical path instead of in circles as it was commonly thought at the time. The discovery helps astronomers predict the motion of the planets more accurately than before.

• A total eclipse of the moon coincides with the northern hemisphere winter solstice.

1662, German-Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius named a star Mira, which means wonderful in Latin. Lying in the constellation Cetus, the brightness of this star varies for about 11 months. Mira's changeability pattern is discovered by Frisian astronomer Johannes Holwarda in 1638. In 2007, NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) reveals Mira's luminous tail of gas that's more than a dozen light-years long. This is the material that Mira has shed, leaving it behind as it speeds through the galaxy at some 80 miles per second (130 kms per second).

Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens is the first person to observe the disks surrounding Saturn. Composed of billions of particles of ice and rock, the rings are about 167,770 miles (270,000 kms) in diameter but relatively thin a maximum thickness of about 0.62 miles (1 km). NASAs Voyager spacecraft later finds that the planet's rings are made up of ringlets, and sends back data that leads to the further discovery of the existence of nine moons of the planet.

Jupiter's Red Spot is a giant, raging storm which is about three and a half times the size of Earth and is in Jupiter's southern hemisphere. This most famous feature of the giant gas planet was first seen by English scientist Robert Hooke in 1664. According to a research published in the Nature journal in July 2016, the hurricane is responsible for blasting the planet's upper atmosphere with heat, which is as high as 2,732 F (1,500 C).

• c.80 000 die in an earthquake near Shemakha, Azerbaijan.

• August 17: c.8,000 die in an earthquake in Turkey measuring ~8 on the Richter scale.

• Mount Etna in Sicily erupts.

• Utrecht, in The Netherlands, is struck by a violent hurricane which demolishes most of the famous Dom Church.

• c.60 000 die in an earthquake in Sicily, Italy.

• December 22: A large tsunami strikes Seikaido-Nankaido, Japan.

• January 26, at 21h00 (9pm): an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale tears about 1,000km along the Cascadia fault line, from mid Vancouver Island, Canada, to northern California, causing a huge tsunami across the Pacific and causing destruction along the Pacific coast of Japan.

On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the tsunami completely destroys the winter village of the Pachena Bay people with no survivors.

• October 28: An 8.4 earthquake and tsunami 25.7-meter-high strikes the Kochi Prefecture, Japan. More than 29,000 houses are wrecked and then washed away, causing about 30,000 deaths. In Tosa, 11,170 houses are washed away and 18,441 people drowned. In OsakaAbout about 700 drown and 603 houses are washed away. The tsunami is 20M high at Tanezaki, Tosa, and 6.58 at Muroto.

• Seventy years of virtually no sun-spot activity now ends, which had caused a mini ice age across our planet, in which, among other, the Norwegian/Norse/Vicking settlements in Greenland are annihilated by attacks of Eskimos/Inuits forced South by the cold.

• c.77,000 die in an earthquake near Tabriz, Iran.

• c.300,000 die in an earthquake in Calcutta, India.

• The Thames river freezes over.

• August 29: Western Hokkaido, Japan, is hit by a tsunami associated with the eruption of the volcano on Oshima island. The cause of the tsunami is thought to have been an undersea landslide triggered by the eruption. 1,467 people are killed on Hokkaido and another 8 in Aomori Prefecture.

• October 28: An earthquake completely destroys Lima and Callao, in Peru.

• November 1, 10h16: An earthquake near Lisbon, Portugal, measuring ~8.7 on the Richter scale, is followed by a tsunami with a maximum height of 15 metres (49 ft), which goes far inland. Between 60,000 and 100,000 people die in Lisbon alone, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.The tsunami takes just over 4 hours to travel over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) to Cornwall, UK. An account by Arnold Boscowitz claimed "great loss of life." It also hits Galway in Ireland, and causes some serious damage to the Spanish Arch section of the city wall.

• April 4, ~8AM: An undersea earthquake of estimated magnitude 7.4 occurred near Yaeyama Islands in Okinawa, Japan. The earthquake is not believed to have directly resulted in any deaths, but a resulting tsunami is thought to have killed about 12,000 people, (9,313 on the Yaeyama Islands and 2,548 on Miyako Islands according to one source). Estimates of the highest seawater run up on Ishigaki Island, range between 30 meters and 85.4 meters. The tsunami put an abrupt stop to population growth on the islands, and was followed by malaria epidemics and crop failures which decreased the population further. It was to be another 148 years before population returned to its pre-tsunami level.

• February 28: c.200,000 die in an earthquake in Iran.

Uranus is identified by German-British astronomer William Herschel. The gas planet gets its bluish surface color from tiny frozen ammonia crystals. The atmosphere is believed to be hydrogen and helium. To date, NASA's Voyager 2 probe is the only spacecraft to visit the planet. A Hubble Space Telescope view reveals Uranus is surrounded by its four major rings and by its satellites.

• Iceland (Laki eruption) is seriously affected by two huge eruptions of lava. Volcanic ash covers the island and 75% of livestock die; 8 months of lava flows and explosions that eject ~14.7 km3 of basaltic lava out of 140 vents along a 23-km-long set of fissures and cones.
• c.50,000 die in an earthquake in Calabria, Italy.

• Iceland suffers terrible famine and about 10,000 people die.

• Major volcanic eruption in Unzen, Japan. Tsunamis are the main cause of death for Japan's worst-ever volcanic disaster, due to an eruption of Mount Unzen in Nagasaki Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan. It begins towards the end of 1791 as a series of earthquakes on the western flank of Mount Unzen which gradually moved towards Fugen-daké, one of Mount Unzen's peaks. In February 1792, Fugen-daké starts to erupt, triggering a lava flow which continued for two months. Meanwhile, the earthquakes continue, shifting nearer to the city of Shimabara.

21 May, two large earthquakes are followed by a collapse of the eastern flank of Japan's Mount Unzen's Mayuyama dome, causing an avalanche which sweeps through Shimabara and into Ariake Bay, triggering a tsunami. It is not known to this day whether the collapse occurred as a result of an eruption of the dome or as a result of the earthquakes. The tsunami strikes Higo Province on the other side of Ariake Bay before bouncing back and hitting Shimabara again. Out of an estimated total of 15,000 fatalities, around 5,000 is thought to have been killed by the landslide, around 5,000 by the tsunami across the bay in Higo Province, and a further 5,000 by the tsunami returning to strike Shimabara.

The waves reached a height of 330 ft, classing this tsunami as a small mega-tsunami.

• November 5: A violent storm strikes Table Bay, Cape Town, South Africa, wrecking many ships and drowning more than 300 passengers and crew of the destroyed ships.

The bodies recovered are buried in mass graves on Table Bay beach (which is today buried under Cape Town's Foreshore).

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Discovered by Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi on January 1 this year, the celestial body was earlier considered a planet but when more similar objects were found in the belt, it was reclassified as an asteroid.

(In February 2017, NASA's spacecraft Dawn found evidence of organic material on Ceres).

• Major volcanic eruption in Tambora, Indonesia which causes the 1816 "Year Without a Summer" in the northern hemisphere.

The year without a summer...

• November 25: A massive earthquake estimated at between 8.8-9.2 on the moment magnitude scale, strikes Sumatra, Indonesia. The coast of Sumatra near the quake's epicentre is hardest hit by the resulting tsunami

• In Jerusalem: many Christian monasteries are damaged by an earthquake.

The Sun newspaper publishes a series of articles later called "The Great Moon Hoax" that vividly describe an ecosystem of trees, rivers, beaches, bison, goats and unicorns, as well as winged, bat-like humanoids living on the moon. Claiming them to have been discovered by astronomer Sir John Herschel using a magnificent new telescope at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, the paper generates a lot of interest owing to its sensational reporting. They later say that the series was

an attempt to satirize the multitude of ridiculous scientific news stories that were going around at the time.

• November 4: A magnitude 8.4 earthquake strikes near what is today Aichi Prefecture and Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, followed by a tsunami.
• November 5: A magnitude 8.4 earthquake strikes in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, generating a tsunami of 28 meters at Kochi, Japan. The earthquake and tsunami kill 3,000 people. The tsunami washed 15,000 homes away. The number of homes destroyed directly by the earthquake is 2,598; in which 1,443 people died
• November 7: A 7.4 earthquake in Ehime Prefecture and Oita Prefecture, Japan.
The total death-toll from the three quakes and their tsunamis is between 80,000 and 100,000 people.

• November 11, about 22h00 local: An earthquake strikes Ansei Edo (Tokyo region), Japan, killing between 4,500 to 10,000 people. The Japanese era name is changed to bring good luck after 4 tragic quakes and tsunamis in 2 years.

• January 9, 16h24 UTC: earthquake with a magnitude of 7.9 near Fort Tejon in Southern California.
• December 16, 21h00: c.11,000 die in an earthquake in Naples, Italy, measuring ~6.9 on the Richter scale.

• September 1-2: Solar storm during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867) shorts telegraph wires, and starts fires in North America and Europe, and causes bright aurorae to be seen in Cuba and Hawaii.

February 20: A Great Storm ravages England.

In China the provinces of Jiangxi, Hubei, An­hui, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu are the hardest hit in a famine exacerbated by the Taiping civil war. An estimated 70 million people die, and cannabalism becomes rife between 1851 and 1864.

• An earthquake strikes San Francisco, California,

• April 2, 4PM: earthquake rocks the Hawaiian islands of an estimated magnitude between 7.5 and 8.0 rocks the southeast coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. It triggers a landslide on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano, five miles north of Pahala, killing 31 people. A tsunami then takes 46 additional lives. The villages of Punaluu, Ninole, Kawaa, Honuapo, and Keauhou Landing are severely damaged and the village of 'Apua is destroyed.
• August 16: An earthquake of magnitude estimated at 8.5 strikes the Peru-Chile oceanic trench. The resulting tsunami strikes the port of Arica, Chile, then part of Peru, killing an estimated 25,000 in Arica and 70,000 in all. Three military vessels anchored at Arica, the US warship Wateree and the store ship Fredonia, and the Peruvian warship America, are swept up by the tsunami.

• August 26-27: Major volcanic eruption in Krakatau, Indonesia, causing tsunamis that kill more than 36,000 people on the islands of Java and Sumatra. The island volcano of Krakatoa in Indonesia explodes with devastating fury blowing its underground magma chamber partly empty so that much overlying land and seabed collapses into it. A series of large tsunamis are generated from the collapse, some reaching a height of over 40 meters above sea level. Tsunamis are observed throughout the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and even as far away as the American West Coast, and South America. On the facing coasts of Java and Sumatra the sea flood goes many miles inland and causes such loss of life that one area is never resettled but reverts to jungle and is now the Ujung Kulon nature reserve.

• October 27, 21h38: c.7,273 die in an earthquake in Mino-Owari, Japan, measuring ~8 on the Richter scale.

• June 15, about 19h36 local: A large undersea earthquake off the Sanriku coast of northeastern Honshu, Japan, triggers a tsunami which strikes the coast about half an hour later with waves, which reached a height of 100 feet, killing about 27,000 people.

• June 12, 11h06: c.1,500 die in an earthquake in Assam, India, measuring ~8.3 on the Richter scale.

• An earthquake strikes San Francisco, California,

• An earthquake strikes San Francisco, California,

• Major volcanic eruption of Mount Pele, Martinique, killing some 28,000 people in two minutes.

• January 31, 15h36: c.1,000 die in an earthquake in Colombia-Ecuador, measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale.
• April 7: Near Naples, Italy – Mount Vesuvius erupts killing hundreds living in the vicinity. Lava from the volcano devastates areas near the town of Ottaiano, collapsing buildings.

• Tuesday, 18 April: 05:13 San Francisco is hit by violent earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, destroying 512 blocks in the four square mile (10 sq km) areain the central business district. Homeless survivors take refuge in the Golden Gate Park to the west of the town. About 700 people are feared dead, and a further 250,000 made homelss.

• January 14: An earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica, destroys most of the capital and kills more than 1,000 people.

• June 30: A small asteroid explodes over Tunguska, Siberia. It released the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT, devastating an area of about 800 square miles (about 2,000 square km), the size of a major metropolitan city.

• December 28, 04h20: more than c.70,000 die in an earthquake and an associated tsunami near Messina, Italy, measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale.

• May 20: The earth passes through the fiery tail of Halley's comet. Many people expected the world to end, and miners in Britain refused to go underground. In America "comet pills" were on sale, claiming to give protection from the comet's effects.

The comet, 13 million miles away, iit up the night sky.

• Major volcanic eruption in Kelud, Java.

• December 16, 12h05: c.200 000 die in an earthquake in Ningxia-Kansu, China, measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale.

• March 24: c.5,000 die in an Earthquake in China measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale.
• September 1, 02h58: c.143,000 die in an earthquake near Kanto, Japan, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale. Many die from the Great Tokyo Fire caused by the quake which destroyed over half the brick buildings in the city. Later death toll is given more than 300,000.

• March 7, 09h27: c.3,020 die in an earthquake in Tango, Japan, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale.
• May 22, 22h32: c.200,000 die in an earthquake near Tsinghai, China, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale.

• July 11, earthquake kills over 400 in the Palestine-Jordan area leaving "not a house in Jerusalem or Hebron… without some damage".

• November 18: An earthquake of magnitude 7.2 beneath the Laurentian Slope on the Grand Banks is felt throughout the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, as far west as Ottawa, and as far south as Claymont, Delaware. The resulting tsunami measures over 7 meters in height and takes about 2½ hours to reach the Burin Peninsula on the south coast of Newfoundland, where 28 people lose their lives in various communities. It also snaps telegraph lines laid under the Atlantic.

• c.70,000 die in an earthquake near Gansu, China, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale.

• March 2, 17h31: c.2,990 die in an earthquake in Sanriku, Japan, measuring 8.4 on the Richter scale.
• March 11, 01h54: 115 die in an earthquake in Long Beach, California, USA, measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale.

• January 15, 08h43: c.10,700 die in an earthquake in Bihar, India, measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale.

• c.60 000 die in an earthquake near Quetta, Pakistan, measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale. Quetta is almost completely destroyed.

Photograph of Niagara Falls during this winter –

• December 26, 23h57: c.32,700 die in an earthquake in Erzincan, Turkey, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale.

An asteroid, dubbed 5535 Annefrank, is first discovered in March 1942, a few months before Jewish teenager Anne Frank went into hiding with her family in an attic in Amsterdam, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Writing down her experiences in her now famous diary, she remained hidden for two years until the Germans discovered their “secret annex” and sent her to a concentration camp. She died in Auschwitz, the most notorious Holocaust camp, shortly before World War II ended. The asteroid is later named in her honour, on the 50th anniversary of her death in 1995.

• June 20: The V-2 guided ballistic missile, MW 18014, was test launched at the Peenemünde Army Research Center in Nazi Germany. It went up to 109 miles (176 km) above the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere.

• December 7, 04h35: c.1,223 die in an earthquake in Tonankai, Japan, measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale.

• April 1: The Aleutian Islands tsunami kills 159 people on Hawaii and five in Alaska (the lighthouse keepers at the Scotch Cap Light in the Aleutians). It results in the creation of a tsunami warning system known as the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC), established in 1949 for Oceania countries. The tsunami is known as the April Fools Day Tsunami in Hawaii due to people thinking the warnings were an April Fools prank.
• December 20, 19h19: c.1,330 die in an earthquake in Nankaido, Japan, measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale.

• February: In England the Thames river freezes.

• October 5: c.110,000 die in an earthquake in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale.

• August 22: Off the West Coast of British Columbia, Canada, the Queen Charlotte Island's West coast is struck by an 8.1 magnitude earthquake, Canada's largest quake since 1770.

• August 15, 14h09: c.1,526 die in an earthquake in Assam-Tibet, measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale.

• November 5: A tsunami from an undersea earthquake kills 2,336 on the Kuril Islands, USSR.

• December 5: A cold fog descends upon London, combining with air pollution and killing at least 12,000 in the weeks and months that follow.

• In London the Thames river freezes.

on the night of Saturday, 31 January 1953 and morning of Sunday, 1 February, with a combination of a Spring tide and low pressure leads to a sea level of more than 5.6 metres (18.4 ft) above mean sea level in some locations. The flood and waves overwhelm sea defences and caused extensive flooding. The Netherlands, a country with 20% of its territory below mean sea level and 50% less than 1 metre (3.3 ft) above sea level and which relies heavily on sea defences, is worst affected, recording 1,836 deaths and widespread property damage. Most of the casualties occur in the southern province of Zeeland.
• In England, 307 people are killed in the counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.
• 19 are killed in Scotland.
• 28 people were killed in West Flanders, Belgium.

• March 2: In Australia floods kill 200 people and leave 400,000 homeless.

• On the Kamchatka peninsula in eastern Russia, the Besymjanny volcano awakes with a bang following 1,000 years of dormancy and continues to be active, with huge clouds of ash rising on a regular basis. The explosion is one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in the 20th century. Three tectonic plates – the North American Plate, the Okhotsk Plate and the Pacific Plate – collide beneath Kamchatka, with the peninsula's coastal range boasting 30 active volcanoes.

• A flu virus kills nearly four million people in a world pandemic.

• October 4: Weighing 184 pounds (84 kgs), the 23-inch (58 cm) diameter metal sphere, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union into an elliptical low Earth orbit, giving the Russians their first win in the Space Race. Sputnik completed an Earth orbit every 96.2 minutes and transmitted a series of beeps that could be monitored around the world.

• November 3: Laika, a three-year-old stray dog from the streets of Moscow, U.S.S.R., was the occupant of Sputnik 2. Scientists believe animal launches are important to understand the effect of space flights on humans, however they hadn't figured out the technology to de-orbit so the mutt wasn’t expected to return.

Laika died within hours from overheating and panic, possibly caused by a malfunction.

• July 9: An earthquake causes a mega-tsunami to reach a height taller than the Empire State Building, measuring over 520 metres (1,706 ft), killing two at Lituya Bay, Alaska, USA. (An earthquake along the Fairweather Fault in the Alaska Panhandle loosened about 40 million cubic yards (30.6 million cubic meters) of rock high above the northeastern shore of Lituya Bay).

• February 29, 23h40: c.12,000 die in an earthquake in Agadir, Morocco, measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale.
• May 22, 19h11: c.5,700 die in an earthquake in Chile, measuring 9.5 on the Richter scale, the largest quake ever recorded.

• March 27: A magnitude 9.2 Good Friday Earthquake, causes tsunamis which strike Alaska, British Columbia, California, and coastal Pacific Northwest towns, killing 121 people. The waves are up to 100 feet huigh, and kill 11 people as far away as Crescent City, California.

• The first successful flyby of Mars was on July 15, by NASA's Mariner 4. The spacecraft also sends the first-ever images of the Martian surface. It was also the first close-up photo of any other planet.

• Surtsey Island, Iceland: This island simply didn't exist until it sprouted from the ocean following a volcanic eruption in 1967. But rather than let tourists traipse through the rocky outpost roughly 20 miles south of the mainland, the Icelandic government immediately closed it to all visitors in order to examine how nature colonized the virgin land on its own.

• Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, enters lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24. This evening, the astronauts — Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders — hold a live broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they show pictures of the earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. Said Lovell, "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth."

They end the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the Bible book of Genesis.

• July 21: Neil Alden Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 mission, becomes the first man to set foot on the Moon, on the Sea of Tranquillity, at 2:56 and 15 sec GMT. He is followed out of the lunar module Eagle by Col. Edwin Eugene Buzz Aldrin, Jr, USAF, while the command module Columbia piloted by Lt-Col. Michael Collins, USAF orbits above.

• May 31, 20h23: c.66,000 die in an earthquake in Peru, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale.

• The fishing port of Pozzuoli, Italy, rises by over 3 metres, probably due to the subterranean build up of volcanic magma.

• November 6, 11AM the USA explodes a 5 megaton nuclear bomb under Amchika island, Alaska, on a tectonic fault-line, which registers 7 on the Richter scale.

• June 30: First leap second is added to our time to keep atomic clocks in line with changes in the Earth's slowing rotation.

the six US moon missions from 1969, its astronauts, in order to take rock samples back to earth, unloaded some weight onto the moon's surface, which included human faeces (96 bags of poop, pee, and puke, and core samples, tools, golf balls, photographs, cameras, a gold-plated telescope and random symbolic objects), for the Apollo missions brought back a total of 842 pounds of moon rocks, dust.

US astronaut Eugene Cernan re-entered the Apollo 11 lunar module Challenger in 1972, he cemented his place in history as the last man to set foot on the moon. He later described –

• February 4, 11h36: c.10,000 die in an earthquake in Haicheng, China, measuring 7 on the Richter scale.

July 20: seven years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon – NASA's Viking lands on Mars. They were not the first to do so for in 1971 the USSR’s Mars 3 mission’s lander reached the surface. However, it operated for just 20 seconds before losing contact.

William D. Nordhaus, a Yale University professor of economics in the US, in his paper,

“Economic Growth and Climate: The Carbon Dioxide Problem” introduces the idea of global warming from carbon dioxide emission.

Nordhaus’s thesis is that uncontrolled emissions “will lead to very large increases in temperature in the coming decades. An increase of more than 2°C goes beyond the “normal range of variation,” he writes, and it will take the world’s temperature to a level unseen in the last 100,000 years. But, understably, Nordhaus fails to note the natural fluctuations of global climate due to the planet Jupiter's magnetic-field-effect on earth's sun. See above.

NASA launches the two Voyager spacecraft: Voyager 2, on Aug. 20, and Voyager 1 on Sept. 5. (See: 2012).

• c.15 000 die in an earthquake in Iran.

• May 19: In the U.S. the dormant volcano, Mount St Helens exoplodes, destroying 10 million trees, and killing about 60 people.

• October 11: An earthquake of 7.5 magnitude strikes the city of El Asnam (formerly Orleansville) in Algeria, killing thousands.

• December 26, in Rendlesham, UK – the skies above Suffolk are ablaze with strange lights in the biggest UFO sighting in the UK as dozens of witnesses allegedly see an alien aircraft land, a "triangular shaped craft", landing in neighbouring woods in the early hours.

• May: Comet C/1983 H1 ( IRAS-Araki-Alcock ) passes earth at 12.2 lunar distances.
• July 21: The lowest temperature on the planet is recorded at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica –

-128.6 degrees Fahrenheit (-89.2 degrees Celsius).

• September 19, 13h17: c.10,000 Mexicans in Michoacan, die in a major earthquake off the Pacific coast.

• November 13: In Colombia, South America, Nevado del Ruiz erupts causing a sudden surge of meltwater sent massive mudflows down canyons on both the east and west sides of the volcano which kills 25000 people in Armero area.

• Major volcanic eruption in Lake Nyos, Cameroon.

• February 24: A supernova explosion is observed (in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud).

• October 1, 07:40: I Los Angeles, USA, an earthquake of 6.1 on the Richter scale rocks the city for 20 seconds killing seven people and injuring at least 100.

• October 15: In the UK – On this night and the early hours of October 16 a storm travelled at speeds of up to 120 mph, claims 22 lives and costs billions worth of damage. The Home Secretary at the time, Douglas Hurd, calls it the "worst, most widespread night of disaster" since the Blitz. Every road in Hampshire is closed, the London Fire Brigade answers 6,000 calls and an estimated £7 billion of damage in the UK is caused – and even more than that in France. Overall 15 million trees are felled by the storm, with 70 per cent being on private gardens and estates. The strongest gusts are recorded along the south-east, devastating Sussex, Suffolk and Kent. Six of the seven oak trees after which the town of Sevenoaks is named are blown down.

• December 7, 07h41: c.25,000 die in an earthquake in Spitak, Armenia, measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale.

• March: In Quebec, Canada – A strong solar storm knocks out the power grid causing 6 million people to lose power.

• October 18: An earthquake of 7.1 magnitude strikes San Francisco bay area, California, USA.

• June 20: c.40,000 die in an earthquake near Gilan, Iran, measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale. Iran was willing to accept aid from any country except Israel and South Africa.

• July 16: At least 100 people die in an earthquake in the Philippines.

• Major volcanic eruption in Pinatuba, Philippines.

• May 11: In Bangladesh – the death toll reaches nearly 250,000 from cyclone which devastated the coastal plain, sweeping away whole communities.

• March 28: A type Ib supernova explosion (massive star that undergoes core collapse) is observed in the M81 spiral galaxy.

• September 29, 22h25: c.9,748 die in an earthquake in Latur-Killari, India, measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale.

• A solar storm causes major malfunctions to two communications satellites, disrupting television and radio services throughout Canada.
• March 27: the second-biggest earthquake ever recorded reaching a magnitude of 9.2 – significantly bigger than 7.9 on this occasion.
• July: Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 breaks apart and collides with the planet Jupiter

when a pair of Swiss astrophysicists discover a planet orbiting a sun-like star about 50 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pegasus. For decades, scientists had suspected that other planets existed in the cosmos, and they finally had the proof. The discovery of 51 Pegasi b, as it was called, was just the beginning. The astronomy community was witnessing "A Parade of New Planets," declared a headline in Scientific American in 1996. In the months since the exoplanet discovery had been announced, the publication reported, astronomers had reported finding at least four more planets. More than two decades later, the parade is still going. Today, there are 3,717 known exoplanets, and nearly 4,500 other suspected exoplanets waiting to be verified.

More than 900 of them are thought to have a rocky surface like Earth’s.

asteroid discovered in 1996 is named after the veteran actor Tom Hanks, and it has been a cheeky little space rock. 12818 Tomhanks is more than 3 miles across and is the namesake of the man who portrayed astronaut Jim Lovell in the movie "Apollo 13," based on the NASA moon mission in which an equipment failure caused the astronauts to turn back for Earth before their lunar landing.

• The rotation of the earth changes from a long term slow-down (an extra second in a little less than a year due to a gradual increase in the moon's orbit) to a short term acceleration, most probably from the descent of a large mass in the molten interior of our planet.

• July 17, 08h49: c.2,183 die in an earthquake in New Guinea, measuring 7 on the Richter scale.

• November 20: The International Space Station (ISS) is launched into permanent orbit. America's NASA and the Russian Space Agency (RSA) worked cooperatively to establish the space station as a living laboratory in space. ISS is the only habitable laboratory currently operating in microgravity. In August 2016 NASA celebrates 100,000 orbits of the ISS.

• November 23: An Arctic cold wave is reported to have killed 71 people across Europe over the last three days. 36 deaths were in Poland and 24 in Romania and Bulgaria.

• January 25, 1819: c.1,185 die in an earthquake in Colombia measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale.
• May 10-12: The solar wind virtually stops (98%+ reduction) during Jupiter's perihelion (closest to the sun), allowing earth's magnetic field to expand with a temporary cooling effect.
• August 17, 00h01: c.14,118 die in an earthquake in Izmit, north-western Turkey, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, leaving hundreds of thousands without homes or essential services..
• September 20, 17h47: c.2,400 die in an earthquake in Chi-Chi, Taiwan, measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale.
• November 12, 16h57: c.894 die in an earthquake in Duzce, Turkey, measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale. The August and November in Turkey quakes killed about 20,000 people.

• Tide-gauge records suggest an average global sea-level rise over the past century of 0 to 3mm per year, though there is no firm evidence of acceleration in these rates.

B15 is the largest iceberg ever recorded to break away from Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf. Iceberg B-15 was about the size of the U.S. state of Connecticut when it broke from Antarctica. It’s still the biggest iceberg recorded so far from Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf.

• January 13, 17h33: c.844 die in an earthquake in El Salvador. measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale.
• January 26, 03h16: c.20,085 die in an earthquake in Gujarat, India, measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale.
• February 15: Our sun reverses its magnetic polarity as it reaches the peak of its 11-year sunspot cycle.
• Saturday, June 23, 20:33:14 UTC (15:33:14 local time): and earthquake strikes Peru measuring 8.2 on the Richter Scale killing 75 directly and 26 more in the resultant tsunami and disappearance of a further 64.

• March 25, 14h56: c.1,000 die in Hindu Kush Region, Afghanistan, in an earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale.

• May 21: c.2,266 die in an earthquake in Boumerdes, Algeria, measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale.
• August 10: Temperatures peak at 38.1° Celsius in England.

• Sunday 26, December: 00:59 GMT (7.59 am local time): 283,106 die in ten countries hit by tsunamis resulting from an undersea earthquake off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia, measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale.

Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Sumatra, and Thailand, elephants, disregarding the authority of their handlers trumpetted a warning and bolted for higher ground about about hour before the devastating tsunami struck. In some places dogs (Sane beach, near Phuket, and Galle in Sri Lanka) and buffalo (Bang Koey, Thailand) are reported to have done similar things.

Cassini probe spots geyser-like jets of water vapor and other volatile materials blasting from the south pole of the Saturn's moon Enceladus. The observation shows that the ice-crusted moon is geologically active, and the discovery that it probably has a subsurface ocean makes it an important target for the search of life elsewhere in the solar system.

• Friday 14, January: The Huygens spacecraft separates from its orbiter and lands with a fully instrumented robotic laboratory on Titan, a moon of the planet Saturn.
• Tuesday 22, February: 00:59 GMT? (7.59 am local time?): c.400 die and 1000s are left homeless in Iran from an earthquake in the region of Takara.
• Monday 28, March: 1,313 die in an earthquake in Northern Sumatra, Indonesia, measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale.
• Thursday 28, July: an exceptionally heavy monsoon kills more than 700 in the state of Maharashtra in India.
• October 8: Nearly 87,000 die in an earthquake in the Islamabad and Kashmir region of Pakistan and India, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale.

• Thursday, 19 January: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard a fast-moving Atlas V rocket carrying the ashes of Clyde W Tombaugh (died January 17, 1997), discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's 'third zone'. (The new Horizons spacecraft beams back photos of Pluto in 2015.)

• Wednesday, 3 May: 15:26 GMT (04:26 local time): near the island Tonga, a major quake of 7.9 on the Richter scale.
• Friday, 26 May: 22:53 GMT (Saturday 27 May 05:53 local time): 5,749 die and many thousands are injured and property destroyed in Bantul-Yogyakarta area of Java, Indonesia, in a strong quake of 6.3 on the Richter scale.
• Sunday, 15 October: earthquake (07:07:48 local time): 10 miles NNW of Kailua Kona, Hawaii, USA, measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale, with one after-shock measuring 5.8.
• Tuesday, 26 December: 12:26:21 GMT (8:26:21 pm local time): undersea quake disrupts 7 fibre-optic cables in the Bashi channel between Taiwan and the Philippines slowing communications across southeast Asia and Australia, measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale. Worldwide, internet Spam drops by 10% and viruses drop by 3% in January 2007 as a consequence. Total number of earthquakes worldwide for the year: 29,568

• Thursday, 8 March: 11:14:31 GMT: east of the South Sandwich Islands, a quake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale.
• Sunday, 25 March: 00:40:02 GMT: about 115 km (75 miles) south of Isangel, Tanna, Vanuatu in the South Pacific, a quake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale.
• Sunday, 25 March: 00.42 GMT: one dead and about 150 injured in a quake near the west coast of Honshu, Japan, measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale, followed by aftershocks.
• Sunday, 25 March: 01:08:19 GMT (12:08:19 pm local time): about 135 km (85 miles) south of Isangel, Tanna, Vanuatu in the South Pacific, a quake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale.

August: Hurricane Dean wipes out 99% of Dominica's banana crop, putting further pressure on the island's struggling main industry.

• Wednesday, 15 August: 6:40 p.m. local time, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale in Peru, where many Roman Catholics were in churches celebrating the Assumption of Mary, killing more than 510 and injuring more than 1500.

• Monday, 1 October: the Antarctic sea ice reaches its all-time maximum as, at the same time, the Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum.

• Wednesday, 14 November: an earthquake of 7.7 on the Richter scale strikes Chile killing two, causing much damage, and halting production at some of the world's largest copper mines. Aftershocks continue for days.

• Thursday, 15 November: the cyclone Sidr causes the death of more than 3,000 people in Bangladesh, with many thousands missing (including a number of fishermen), and affecting some 2.74 million people, with winds of 250kph (155mph) and a storm surge as high as 6 meters (20 feet) along the low lying coast.

• Saturday, 3 May: the devastating cyclone Nargis destroys part of Myanmar/Burma, particularly its rice-growing heartland, causing the death of up to 138,000 people but the military government, reluctant to allow foreign aid workers into the country, decides to go ahead with a May 10 political referendum, and maintains its isolationist attitude supported by China. Some foreign aid allowed in is re-labeled with the names of Myanmar's military rulers as though it is a gift from them.

• Monday, 12 May: a series of earthquakes, one as much as 7.9 on the Richter scale, strike across Eastern and Northern Sichuan, China, with its epicentre in Wenchuan County, killing about 87,000 people, injuring more than 281,000, destroying about 80% of buildings, damaging about 400 dams, and displacing about five million people.

Many schools collapsed in the quake, killing more than 9,000 students and teachers.

(The disaster area houses China's main nuclear weapons research lab in Mianyang, and several secretive atomic sites, but no nuclear power stations. In Sichuan's Shifang city, the quake buries hundreds of people in two collapsed chemical plants, and more than 80 tons of ammonia leaks out).

• Saturday, 30 August: an earthquake of 6.1 on the Richter scale kills 36, injures hundreds, damages about 400 homes in West China's Sichuan and Yannan provinces.

• Saturday, 3 January: an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6 on the Richter scale strikes off Indonesia's eastern coast, around 135 kilometres from Manokwari the capital of the province of West Papua, causing electricity blackouts and sending residents fleeing for high ground.
• Monday, 12 January: Durham University-led scientists use a computer model to analyse changes in Helheim Glacier, in southeast Greenland and conclude that Helheim which retreated by 7 kilometres (4 miles) over three years ending in 2005, losing 15 million tons more of ice than in 2000 at its peak (according to a February 2007 study in the journal Science) has since advanced about 4 kilometres, reversing the well publicized trend.
• Wednesday, 25 February: Shunichi Akasofu – Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) reports "It seems that global warming and the halting of the temperature rise are related to solar activity. Currently, the sun is "hibernating". The end of Sunspot Cycle 23 is already two years late: the cycle should have started in 2007, yet in January 2008 only one sunspot appeared in the sun's northern hemisphere, after that, they vanished completely (new sunspots have now begun to appear in the northern hemisphere). At the current time, it can clearly be seen there are no spots in the photosphere. Lately, solar winds are at their lowest levels in 50 years. Cycle 24 is overdue, and this is is worrisome. So, have there been other historical periods with an absence of sunspots? As a matter of fact, from 1650 to 1700 approximately, there were almost no sunspots. This time period has been named for the renown English astronomer Maunder, and is called the Maunder Minimum. "

• Monday 6 April: an earthquake strikes across central Italy at 03.42 of 6.3 on the Richter scale centring under the village of Onna near L'Aquila (northeast of Rome), lasting several minutes, which kills more than 278 persons, injuring several thousands and making more than 100,000 homeless.

June 18: United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket roars off the launch pad at Launch Complex 41 to begin the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite missions to the moon.

30: At least 1,100 people are killed by a powerful magnitude-7.5 temblor that hits Indonesia. The quake starts at sea and ripples through Sumatra, the westernmost island in the Indonesian archipelago.

Most of the confirmed deaths are in the town of Padang, where more than 500 buildings are severely damaged.

sun defines the climate, not carbon dioxide. So says eminent Russian space scientist, Habibullo Abdussamatov (Dr. Sc. – Head of Space research laboratory of the Pulkovo Observatory). Also Head of the Russian/Ukrainian joint project Astrometria, Abdussamatov (pictured) is featured on page 140 of the 2009 U.S. Senate Report of More Than 700 Dissenting Scientists Over Man-Made Global Warming. Dr Abdussamatov explains why carbon dioxide is "insignificant" in climate change –
Observations of the Sun show that as for the increase in temperature, carbon dioxide is "not guilty" and as for what lies ahead in the upcoming decades, it is not catastrophic warming, but a global, and very prolonged, temperature drop. […] Over the past decade, global temperature on the Earth has not increased; global warming has ceased, and already there are signs of the future deep temperature drop.

• Tuesday, 12 January: Earthquake strikes Haiti at 16:53 local, with magnitude of 7.0 killing about 316,000 people, injuring an estimated 300,000 and leaving about 1,000,000 homeless. Some right-wing Christians in the United States shamefully spread the rumour that am 18th century covenant with Satan was the cause of the earthquake, thereby dishonouring the authority of God over His creation. (See: What is Heaven For?).

• Saturday, 27 February: Earthquake strikes Maule, near Concepción, Chile, at 3.34 AM local, with a magnitude of 8.8, killing about 700 people, and tsunami warnings are issued for the whole Pacific.
• Monday, 8 March, 4:32 AM: Earthquake of magnitude 6.0 at a 5 kilometre depth strikes eastern Turkey near the Karakocan town in Elazig province, killing at least 51 people.
• March 20: The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajoekull erupts for the first time since 1821, spewing ash into the air. Millions of air-travellors are affected and many left stranded in different parts of the world.

• November: The British government warns that this winter is expected to be the coldest since 1963.
• December: Total eclipse of the moon coincides with the solstice (the first time in 372 years).
• Britain experiences its coldest Christmas since 1890.

• Monday, 21 February: Earthquake hits Christchurch, New Zealand, measuring 6.3 at 23:51GMT (12:51PM local) at a depth of only 4km (2.5 miles), killing 185 people and injuring many; the second such within five months. (New Zealand, which sits between the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates, records on average more than 14,000 earthquakes a year, of which about 20 would normally top magnitude 5.0). Large portions of the Central Business District are levelled,

buildings crumbled, roads cracked and split, basic infrastructure torn apart.

• Friday, 11 March: A huge earthquake strikes north Japan at 5:46 GMT measuring 8.9 (the strongest in Japan since recording began) at a depth of 24km, triggering a major tsunami which strikes the coast (Iwate Prefecture) at nearly 15m high (98ft in some areas), devastating huge areas, killing more than 18,000 and displacing more than 500,000 people. Many powerful after-shocks follow. The tsunami, which reached as high as 98-ft in some areas, killed nearly 18,000 people across Japan and triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant. The 41-ft concrete wall replaced a 13-ft breakwater that was swamped in the March 11, 2011 disaster.

China launches its prototype space station 10 metres long and 3 metres wide, Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace”, into earth orbit, 380km high and travelling at 27,500km per hour.

• Sunday, 23 October: Earthquake hits eastern Turkey, measuring 7.2 killing at least 270 and injuring many more.

• NASA launches “Curiosity” – a robotic rover – as a part of its ambitious Mars Science Laboratory mission. Armed with 17 cameras and a robotic arm, Curiosity’s objective is to ascertain if there is, or was, any possibility of life on the Red Planet, and also to explore its environment.

When a certain kind of dying star, called a type 1a supernova, explodes, they only shine for a few weeks. They are bright and consistent, but they eventually fade away. Type 1a supernovae are important, despite their brief glimmer. Their existence, after all, was used by astronomers to prove that the universe wasn’t just expanding, but that its expansion is actually speeding up.

That group of astronomers earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011.

• January, 31: The asteroid 433 Eros passes safely at a distance of 26,778,019/16,639,090 miles (0.1790 astronomical units, or 70 times the distance of our moon).

SpaceX became the first private space company (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) to dock with the International Space Station.

Voyager mission celebrates 40 years in space in 2017, and humanity has much to thank it for. Voyager brought to Earth the first close-up views of Uranus and Neptune. It revealed "spokes" in the rings of Saturn and details of Jupiter’s storm that had never been seen or even imagined. It imaged Io’s volcanic plumes and found the potential for life on the moons Enceladus and Titan.
In 2012, Voyager 1 left our solar system and entered interstellar space. It is the most distant man-made object from Earth and continues to collect and transmit valuable information to scientists — still using its antiquated 8-track tape recorder.

2012, humankind has been driving a nuclear-powered sciencemobile the size of an SUV on another planet. This engineering marvel, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, has revolutionized our understanding of the red planet. And thanks to the intrepid rover, we now know that ancient Mars had carbon-based compounds called organic molecules — key raw materials for life as we know it.

• February, 6, 01:12 GMT/UTC: Magnitude 8.0 earthquake strikes near the Santa Cruz islands, part of the Solomon Islands nation, killing at least five persons.

• February, 15, 03:20 GMT/UCT 09:20 local time: In Ural (Chelyabinsk) region, Russia – a meteorite explodes with the power of about 20 Hiroshima scale nuclear devices, injuring about 1200 people mainly from shattered glass. The shock wave damages about 3,000 buildings amid temperatures as low as minus 18 degrees Celsius (zero degrees Fahrenheit).

European Space Agency (ESA) launches the Swarm satellite trio to study Earth’s magnetic field. ESA launches this trio of Swarm satellites to measure and untangle earth's different magnetic fields.

Tracking changes in the magnetic field can tell researchers how the iron in earth's core moves
and provide information about Earth’s interior

• 19:24 GMT/UTC: An asteroid 2012 DA₁₄ (discovered February 22, 2012, by La Sagra Sky Survey observatory, in the southeast of Spain, near Granada) passes earth at 27,700 km/17,200 miles, closer to earth than many TV and weather satellites and far closer than our moon, at a speed of up to 30,000kph/18,641mph. It's closeness to earth is believed to cause seismic tremours on the asteroid itself.

• August 16: Across central New Zealand a magnitude of 6.5, strikes close to the South Island town of Seddon at 14:31 (02:31 GMT) and is followed by a 5.7 aftershock.

• September 11, 8.07 GMT/UT: A 400kg (63st) meteorite about a metre in diameter travelling at 61,000 km/h (40,000 mph) strikes the moon's surface punching a fresh crater about 40 metres wide in an ancient lava-filled basin called Mare Nubium.

• September 24: A 7.7-magnitude earthquake in a remote part of south western Pakistan (Baluchistan) kills 825, injuring at least 373, collapsing about 50% of the houses, and prompts a new island to rise from the sea just off the country's southern coast.

• September 28: A 6.9-magnitude earthquake strikes the same area of Pakistan, killing at least 15, and together leaving more than 100,000 people now homeless.

• October 12: at 13:11:52.40 UTC: Near Chania in Crete, Greece – A 6.4 quake strikes the region.

• October 15: near Tagbilaran, Bohol, Philippines (633 km/394 miles SSE of MANILA) at 00:12:37.20 UTC (8:12 AM local) a 7.1 earthquake strikes killing at least 183 people and destroying 8,600 homes in Quezon City.

• October 26: near Fukushima Prefecture Coast, Japan, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake strikes 6.2 miles deep, about 231 miles east of the main Japanese island of Honshu (295 miles east northeast of Tokyo, 3:10 a.m. Saturday Tokyo time) about 290 kilometers off Fukushima.

• Friday, November 8: Typhoon Haiyan strikes the central Philippines with wind speeds of 235kph (147mph) gusting up to 275kph (170mph), with a storm surge of 6 meters (20 feet) killing more than 5,235 people and causing widespread devastation displacing about 3 million people.

• Sunday, December 15: China's first moon rover, Yutu (Jade Rabbit), separates successfully from it's parent spacecraft Chang'e-3 in the Bay of Rainbows (Sinus Iridum) on the lunar surface for its three month mission.

Africa – Scientists from the University of the Witwatersrand prove that, despite predictions, tropical storms are not increasing in number and that while global warming is causing frost to be less severe, late season frost was not receding as quickly as flowering was advancing, thus debunking two significant climate change myths. Regarding data for the south-west Indian Ocean over the past 161 years, PHD student Jennifer Fitchett and Professor Stefan Grab confirm results of previous studies, which had found that there was no increase in the number of tropical cyclones and much of the perceived change in numbers was a result of improved storm detection methods.

The sun completes magnetic pole "field reversal" with its north and south poles changing places as it marks the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24 (the 1755–1766 solar cycle is traditionally numbered "1"). The north pole has changed its polarity from positive to negative and the south pole changed from negative to positive. The north pole finished the change in June 2012 and the south pole change completed in July 2013.

a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, did the math for Metal Floss in 2013. According to LeMone, an average cumulus cloud – the fluffy ones you typically see on a sunny day – has a water density of half a gram per cubic meter and a volume of one billion cubic meters. When you calculate the cloud's total water content, you end up with 500,000,000 grams of water, or about 1.1 million pounds.

• January 13: Monday: A magnitude 6.4 earthquake strikes Puerto Rico at 04:01:04 UTC/GMT.

• Monday, January 20: North island New Zealand is rocked by a 6.3 magnitude quake 38km (24 miles) north-east of Masterton at 15:52 local time (02:52 UTC/GMT)

• Tuesday, 25, at 2 a.m. UK time: asteroid 2000 EM26 (270-metres/885-ft wide) is flies past Earth about 2.1 million miles distance, traveling at 27,000mph.

• Sunday night,9: Northern California is rocked by an undersea 6.9 quake 50 miles west of Eureka. No injuries or serious damage reported.

• Tuesday, 1: In Chile – A 8.2 magnitude earthquake strikes at 20.46 local off the coast 60 miles northwest of Iquique, triggering a tsunami and the evacuation of about 900,000 people.

• Friday,30: In Indonesia – A volcano erupts explosively about 08:30 UTC on the island of Sangeang Api. A subplinian eruption column rose quickly to an estimated 50-65,000 ft (15-20 km) altitude and drifted several hundred km to the east and southeast. Ash fall is reported in areas up to 30 km downwind from the volcano. The island itself is largely uninhabited although visted by farmers who cultivate some land. Evacuations were ordered within 1.5 km radius from the volcano. Seismic activity preceding the eruption, including a nearby magnitude 4.5 earthquake at 03:05 UTC, was reported felt in the nearby city of Bima (Sumbawa Island) and even on Flores. (Today's explosion was the first at Sangeang Api volcano since its eruptions during 1997-99).

3: at 4:30 p.m., In South-West China – At 700 dead and more than 1,800 injured after thousands of homes collapse in 6.1-magnitude quake in Yunnan province at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles),

Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) warns of the strong possibility of a major drought in 2014 from a developing El Niño in the Pacific Ocean.

• Sunday, August 24: In northern California, USA – a magnitude 6.0 earthquake strikes at 3:20 am local time at a depth of less than 7 miles, across the Napa valley injuring at least 172 people and causing extensive damage to buildings and infrastructure.

• 6: Saturday night, near Managua airport, Nicaragua – A meteorite strikes causing tremors mistaken for an earhquake.

• September 11, 12: Thursday night and midday Friday – two solar magnetic storms hit Earth's magnetic field (rated G2, on a scale G1 to G5, with G5 being the stringest).

• 19, Sunday 2:27 pm (18:27 GMT/UT): The comet Siding Spring (C/2013 A1) hurtles past Mars (on its way toward our sun) at a close distance of about 88,000 miles (141,600 kilometers) and speed of 122,400 miles per hour. NASA manuevered its Mars orbiters to the far side of the planet so they would not be damaged by the comet's high-speed debris. The interval before, during and after the Comet Siding Spring encounter with Mars was one of the most disturbed periods of the current solar cycle. The CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) was launched from the largest sunspot group observed in the last 24 years and several additional solar flares were detected that would have impacted on Mars around this time.

of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, says: "Our data and modelling show that the upper layers of the martian atmosphere were disturbed by the passing comet. The precipitation from the comet was mainly water, either in the form of neutral molecules or broken down into ions through interactions with light. However, the Mars Express ASPERA-3 instrument results show that the amount of ionised water interacting with the martian atmosphere was much smaller than expected, compared to the amount of neutral water molecules and the charged particles from the solar wind. This means that there were less of the ions interacting with the upper atmosphere and more water molecules interacting at lower depths. We think that, because of the relatively large size and activity of the comet, the majority of ionised water was carried away by the solar wind rather than dropping down into Mars’s atmosphere."

• 15, Saturday 02:31:40 UTC, M7.3 earthquake strikes 156km NW of Kota Ternate, Indonesia. The quake struck at 10:31 a.m. local time at a depth of 47 kilometres (29.2 miles). No Pacific-wide destructive tsunami is expected, but "hazardous tsunami waves are possible for coasts located within 300 km (186 miles) of the earthquake epicentre," according to the National Weather Service Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

               NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter called the LRO is hit by a meteoroid.

• In Russia – Observation from space reveals "giant craters", and many smaller ones, that have appeared in northern Russia – sparking fears over a looming natural disaster in the Arctic. The dramatic mushrooming of the holes, is believed to be caused by methane gas eruptions in melting permafrost due to climate change. A leading Russian expert sounds an alert over safety because one new Siberian crater, surrounded by at least 20 "baby holes", is just six miles from a major gas production plant.

• 27 Friday 13:45:05 (UTC): Magnitude 7 earthquake (552.3km deep) 131km (81mi) N of Nebe, Indonesia.

• 3 Tuesday 10:37:31(UTC): Earthquake M6.4, 50km NW of Sikabaluan, Indonesia.

• 20 Friday: The northern hemisphere experiences an eclipse of the sun. The ancient Greeks believed that a solar eclipse was a sign that their gods were angry and death and destruction were on the way, and today some foolish End-time 'Christian' teachers also use it to secure attention to their forecasts.

• 25: Saturday: 06:11:26 (UTC) Magnitude 7.8 earthquake, 15.0km deep – 80km, Northwest of Kathmandu, Nepal, killing more than 7,675 people in Nepal, and several in the surrounding countries, caused by the India tectonic plate moving northward at about 45mm a year in pushing under the Eurasian plate beneath the Himalayas.

Palestine-Israel-Jordan region, the tectonic movement of the Arabian plate continues northward at 20mm a year to build pressure against the Africa plate which could release in a serious earthqake. Sediment analysis from under the Dead Sea indicates that past earthquakes above magnitude 7 have tended to occur in this region about every 1,000-years, and the last such took place in 1033 AD/CE.

"Every day that passes without an earthquake brings us closer to a big one," says Dr. Rivka Amit, head of Israel’s Geological Survey in a telephone interview. A 2007 report (link in rightmargin) says "The most heavily populated areas of Israel, Jordan and West Bank/Gaza are vulnerable to strong earthquakes, which are inevitable in the region". (emphasis mine).

study in California based on tree-ring data suggests that the current drought, which most consider to have started in 2011, is the worst that the area has seen in 1,200 years: as the experts say "understanding past drought and precipitation variability through paleoclimate data may prove useful for adapting to climate change despite continuing uncertainties regarding regional precipitation in a warmer future." (emphasis mine).

level rise since 1993 has been estimated to be on average +2.6 mm and +2.9 mm per year ± 0.4 mm.

drought, coupled with desperate farmers drilling for water, is causing the central valley of California to sink, which is putting inflexible infrastructure, such as roads, railways, pipelines, and canals, at serious risk. (see June 4).

Experts at the European Science Foundation warn that volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) – pose more of a threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.

26: In India – The death toll in the heatwave sweeping India now exceeds 1,100, with temperatures nearing 50C (122F) in some areas.

30: In Japan – At 20:30 local time (11:30 GMT) a 7.8-magnitude undersea earthquake, centred 874km (543 miles) south of Tokyo, at a fairly safe depth of more than 660km.

A force-12 cyclone strikes the area, capsizing a ferry with 458 people on board (most were tourists aged 50 to 80). The ship began to list after heavy rain seeped into the cabins, according to the most detailed eyewitness account. A survivor says the ship went down so quickly that passengers didn’t have a chance to grab life jackets.

Thursday, in California, USA – New details of the rate at which the State is sinking are published: reportedly by up to 2 feet per year, largely as a consequence of the abnormal drought and the pumping of ground-water. The sinking is starting to destroy bridges, crack irrigation canals and twist highways across the state, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The sinking was first reported in the 1930s and ontinued until the 1970s when a massive irrigation canal system was built to move water from wetter parts to the dry. Sinking was reported again in 2012 and has increased since.

Friday, in Malaysia – At 07:15 local time (23:15 GMT), a magnitide 6.0 earthquake strikes at a depth of 10km (32,800ft), killing eighteen persons. The epicentre is 54km (33 miles) from Mount Kinabalu, which stands at 4,095m. Locals blame tourists for the disaster, for posing naked on the mountain for photographs, urinating, and so upsetting the 'spirit of the mountain' where the ancestral spirits are thought to lodge. The tourists are later charged in court.

Monday, Mount Sinabung, on the island of Sumatra. Indonesia – Begins erupting in at least 28 pyroclastic flows – surges of hot ash and gas that rush down the side of the mountain at high speed. Before 2010 it had been dormant for 400 years. More than 3,000 people in the vicinity have had to flee their homes. But not all flee –

In the Sindh province of Pakistan – A heatwave causes the death of more than 1,000 people over this last week. Nearly 1,700 people died in a heatwave in neighbouring India last month.

The last minute of this day receives a one-second addition (a leap second) to adjust to the earth's rotation, which will mean that the last minute of June will have 61 seconds; so when 23:59:59 usually becomes 00:00:00, this leap second will now ensure the time becomes 23:59:60.

1: At Heathrow airport in the UK – The UK records the hottest July day on record, with temperatures hitting 36.7C (98F).

New Horizons, the fastest spaceship ever launched, races past Pluto, spectacularly revealing the wonders of that newly seen world. This coming New Year’s Eve 2018 — if all goes well on board this small robot operating extremely far from home — it will treat us to images of the most distant body ever explored, provisionally named Ultima Thule. We know very little about it, but we do know it’s not a planet.

Pluto, by contrast — despite what you’ve heard — is.

8: In Taiwan – The powerful typhoon Soudelor batters Taiwan with strong winds of more than 230km/h (142mph) and heavy rain, leaves at least four people dead.

17: In California – A magnitude 4.0 quake just before 7am Pacific Time (2.49pm BST) in Piedmont, near the city of San Francisco. It appears to have occurred along the Hayward fault, around 20 miles east of the infamous San Andreas fault that US Geological Survey experts have long said is at risk of producing 'the big one'.

29: In the Caribbean – Tropical storm Erika causes serious damage in Dominican Republic and the loss of at least 20 lives.

Several interplanetary spacecraft have provided abundant evidence of water on Mars, dating back to NASA’s Mariner 9 mission during the 1970s. The robotic rover Opportunity found initial signs in 2004 that rocks at one of the Martian craters were exposed to water at one point of time: it may have been a salty lake or an ocean. Findings from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provides the strongest evidence that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.

1: In the East Atlantic – A hurricane with winds of up to 135km/h (85mph) has hit the island nation of Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa.

10: In Japan – Heavy rainfall caused by Typhoon Etau bursts the banks of Kinugawa River causing widespread flooding and landslides in the city of Joso, north of Tokyo.

14: California Governor Jerry Brown declares a state of emergency for Lake, Napa, Amador and Calaveras counties, where fires burn an estimated 65,000 acres (26,305 hectares) of land and destroyed at least 86 homes and 51 outbuildings. The so-called Valley fire burned largely unchecked after incinerating hundreds of homes and other buildings throughout rural communities north of California's Napa Valley, leaving at least one person dead and sending tens of thousands fleeing from the flames.

16, 06.45pm (22:54:33, UTC): 46km West of Illapel (north of Valparaiso), Chile – An 8.3 magnitude earthquake strikes of the coast killing eight, and generating a tsunami. The port city of Coquimbo is hit by waves of up to 15ft (4.5 metres). It is the result of a thrust faulting on the interface between the Nazca and South America tectonic plates in Central Chile. At the latitude of this event, the Nazca plate is moving towards the east-northeast at a velocity of 74 mm/yr with respect to South America, and begins its subduction beneath the continent at the Peru-Chile Trench, 85 km to the west. The Nazca tectonic plate which lies off the coast plunges beneath the South American plate, causing major seismic activity.

Indonesia – on at least 38 days in September and October, Indonesia's fires release more carbon dioxide than the entire United States economy. The fires have been a public health nightmare, forcing widespread evacuations, killing at least 19, and triggering respiratory illnesses in more than half a million people. Small farmers are legally allowed to burn up to 2 hectares, although enforcement is poor, and experts say a great many people set fires illegally to grab land. This year's fire season has been especially bad because there's been a lack of rain to quench those peatland fires because of the gigantic El Niño brewing in the Pacific Ocean, which has led to an unusually long dry spell in Indonesia.

In California, USA – An underground storage field of SoCal Gas in Porter Ranch, on the outskirts of Los Angeles begins leaking gas from Aliso Canyon. The company hopes to fix it by late March 2016. More than 10,000 people are eventually moved from their homes and many reporting nausea and headaches, with a further 7,000 expected, according to SoCal Gas. A broken injection-well pipe about 500 ft (152.4m) below the surface is thought to be to blame. Tim O'Connor, a lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund, has called it "an environmental and public health catastrophe. ...In terms of timelines this is going to surpass the gulf oil problem by a mile." He said –

It's the same amount of pollution as 4.5 million cars put out every day..

17: in the Philippines – Typhoon Koppu makes landfall near the town of Casiguran on the island of Luzon, bringing winds of close to 200km/h (124mph). Two persons are reported to have died and more than 16,000 displaced as a result.

In South West Mexico – Hurricane Patricia, one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever measured in the Western Hemisphere, hits Mexico’s Pacific coast. The strong winds travelled at the speed of 165 mph (266 kmph) and the heavy rains destroyed homes and caused flooding and mudslides.

In Afghanistan – A magnitude 7.5 earthquake strikes 48km (30mi) SSW of Jarm, Badakhshan, Afghanistan and 51 miles (82 kilometres) southeast of Feyzabad, at a depth of about 210km in the Hindi Kush mountains near the border with Pakistan and south of Tajikistan. The quake was followed by three aftershocks measuring 4.8, 4.4 and 4.7 on the Richter scale. Over 260 people have been killed and thousands injured across the region. In India patients shifted outdoors at the government medical college hospital in Jammu.

In the Afghan city of Taloqan, 12 schoolgirls were reported to have been killed in a stampede while trying to escape from shaking buildings. Hundreds more may have been injured but most of those affected live some way from communications so precise figures will take some time to emerge.

releases "Journey to Mars," an ambitious report that detailed the space organization’s strategy for establishing permanent settlements on Mars by 2030. It explains NASA’s plan to create "deep-space habitation facilities" which will act as stepping stones to the Red Planet. The following year, the space organization invites proposals for the development of prototypes for deep space habitats, inching a step closer to its 2030 dream.

A four hundred-metre-wide asteroid, 2015 TB145, passes just 302,500 miles (486,800 kilometres) or 1.3 lunar distances away from Earth. The high orbital inclination and eccentricity suggest 2015 TB145 may be an extinct comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the Sun.

In South Africa – The sugar-growing province of KwaZulu-Natal is the driest it has been in over a century, underscoring the scale of a drought scorching Africa's most advanced economy, due to an El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific, and threatens South Africa's diverse farm sector including its key maize crop, which may fuel food prices and inflation at a time when its central bank is in a tightening cycle. Its 2014-2015 season was the driest since at least 1900 (according to the SA Weather Service), and the third-driest for South Africa as a whole since the early 1930s when the country was hit by a historic drought in the midst of the Great Depression.

3, Thursday: In Sicily, Italy – Mount Etna begins erupting, pushing out ash and lava, choking the Mediterranean sky above Sicily. The display of volcanic lightning inside giant smoke and ash cloud over Europe’s tallest active volcano is the Voragine crater’s first eruption in two years

2015 Paris Climate Agreement reached by 200 nations committing to limit the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by human activity to the same levels that trees, soil and oceans can absorb naturally, beginning at some point between 2050 and 2100, and then to review each country's contribution to cutting emissions every five years so that they scale up to the challenge,

is apparently completely unaware of the long-term history of climate change and the coming cooling period.

(about 02h00 UTC) Monday: Very early morning, the earth passes through the orbital debris of asteroid 3200 Phaëthon producing the annual Geminid meteor-shower (above left from Orion).

There is no need to fear – for the rainbow means Never Again (Genesis 9:13).

In the UK – A research team writes in the Royal Astronomical Society journal, Astronomy and Geophysics that large comets (known as centaurs) are a potential threat to earth. These balls of ice and dust, typically 50-100 kilometres (31-62 miles) wide, have unstable, elliptical orbits that start way beyond Neptune, the most distant planet from the Sun. Their orbits cross those of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, whose gravity fields occasionally deflect a comet towards Earth – once about every 40,000-100,000 years.

A large asteroid 163899 (also known as 2003 SD220) comes closest to Earth at a safe distance of about 11 million km. Preliminary estimates are a size of 0.7 miles to 1.5 miles (1.1 km to 2.5 km), and the asteroid is thought to have a very slow rotation of about one week.

A full moon appears on Christmas day, for the first time in decades. The last time there was a full moon on 25 December was 1977, and there won't be another one until 2034.

Watch the time-lapse from 1984 to 2016 – of cities grow and the glaciers shrink in a satellite photographic time-lapse. (May take time to load)

4: In India – An earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale strikes the northeastern Indian state of Manipur in the early hours. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake originated 34 miles (55 km) underground in the Tamenglong district, 18 miles (29 km) from state capital Imphal. Tremors are felt in adjoining Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and parts of eastern India. Reports claim that at least four people have been killed, and hundreds more injured.

Africa annouces that it has endured its driest summer in more than 110-years.

In the United States – The East Coast is battered by a blizzard, known as Storm Jonas. A state of emergency is declared across a vast swathe of the eastern seaboard, with individual states in near-shutdown after thousands of flights are cancelled, schools and government offices closed and sports and entertainment events called off.

local time: In Alaska – A 7.1-magnitude earthquake strikes 52 miles east of Old Iliamna near the coast at a depth of 79.4 miles (127.8 km). At least 10,000 people were reportedly without electricity in the Anchorage area on Sunday morning.

05:22 local time (04:22 GMT): Near Spain – A 6.3-magnitude undersea earthquake strikes the region between Morocco and Spain at a depth of 10km – damaging hundreds of properties and closing schools. It struck 39 miles north of the Moroccan city of Al Hoceima and 102 miles east-southeast of Gibraltar. About 15 people are treated for minor injuries.

Saturday 6, 03:57 (Friday 19:57:27 GMT): In Tainan, south Taiwan – A magnitude 6.4 earthquake at a depth of only 10 km (6 miles) kills at least 38 people, 120 missing, and more than 400 injured.

1: NASA astronaut and Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko return to Earth after a historic 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station.

They land in Kazakhstan at 11:26 p.m. EST (10:26 a.m. March 2 Kazakhstan time).

particular research project examined fluid shifts that occur when bodily fluids move into the upper body during weightlessness. These shifts may be associated with visual changes and a possible increase in intracranial pressure, which are significant challenges that must be understood before humans expand exploration beyond Earth’s orbit. The study uses the Russian Chibis device to draw fluids back into the legs while the subject’s eyes are measured to track any changes. NASA and Roscosmos are already looking at continuing the Fluid Shifts investigation with future space station crews.

2: 12.49pm GMT: 600km (370 miles) off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia – A magnitude 7.8 earthquake at a depth of 10 km. The tsunami threat has led to evacuations in Sumatra with residents urged to make their way to higher ground.

The asteroid 2013 TX68 – whose precise trajectory was unknown – passed Earth at 13:42 UTC (8:42 ET) at some 10 times the moon’s distance.

The new moon, one day before the moon reaches lunar perigee – the moon’s closest point to Earth in its orbit, on the second anniversary of the tragic loss of Malaysian passenger airliner H370. This new moon counts as a super-moon due to its apparent size. It won’t be visible in everyone's sky, but it’ll line up with the sun to create a larger-than-average effect on Earth’s ocean tides.
This new super-moon swings right in front of our sun, so if you’re at the right place on Earth (see animation to the right), you might be able to view the new moon silhouette in front of the sun (but remember to use proper eye protection).
   life on earth is not threatened, although damage may occur, for there is a rainbow around the Throne of God, to remind us of His promise after the global tsunami of Noah, that never again would a wipe-out of life on earth be allowed to happen.

(Genesis 9:11-13; and Revelation 4:3)

A Japanese weather satellite captures an solar eclipse view from space,
and NASA uses the footage to produce this animation.

An asteroid (2016 EF195), of between 16 to 49 meters diameter, safely passes earth, at about the distance of our geostationary satellites, travelling at 22,369 miles per hour (36,000 km/h).

Across England – A meteor flashes northward across the sky over Hampshire, Stafford and the east coast of England, at 03:16 local time (GMT/UT).
• A pair of comets, showing very similar orbits, are also approaching Earth, and, while both will pass at a safe distance, both will have record-breaking close flybys. Observers are reporting that one of the comets has become so bright, it’s already visible using binoculars. The two are Comet 252P/LINEAR and Comet P/2016 BA14.

Melting ice sheets, especially in Greenland, are changing the distribution of weight on Earth. And that has caused both the North Pole and the wobble, which is called polar motion, to change course, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances. Scientists and navigators have been accurately measuring the true pole and polar motion since 1899, and for almost the entire 20th century they migrated a bit toward Canada. But that has now changed with this century,

and it’s moving toward England, according to a study by lead author Surendra Adhikari at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

In Ecuador, South America – A 7.8 earthquake strikes. As the national death toll climbs past 600, Ecuador's government has estimated that the overall cost of the damage will rise to between $2bn and $3bn.

Asteroid 2016 HO3 is spotted by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii, as it loops around our planet, but never ventures very far away as we both go around the sun, so it may be referred to as a quasi-satellite of Earth.

Eta Aquarids meteor shower. Named after the brightest star of the constellation, Eta Aquarids formed from Comet Halley’s debris. A new Moon on May 6 will help observers experience the event. This meteor shower, which is usually active between April 19 and May 28 every year, will peak on May 6-7 this year.

NASA's Kepler space telescope has now discovered 1,284 new exo-planets, including nine rocky worlds that might be capable of supporting life as we know it, astronomers announce. This is the largest haul of alien planets ever unveiled at one time.

The total exo-planet tally now stands at about 3,200, and Kepler has found 2,235 of them.

The planet Mars will make its closest approach to Earth.

The ringed-planet Saturn appears bright and illuminated by the sun as it reaches its orbital opposition to our sun.

In New Zealand – Geophysicist Ian Hamling says that since 1950, enough magma (molten lava) to fill 80,000 Olympic-size swimming pools has squeezed up beneath the surface near the coastal town of Matata, about 200km (120 miles) south-east of Auckland. The discovery explains a spate of earthquakes between 2004 and 20011.

In Iceland – Hekla, a volcano in South Iceland that has not erupted in 16 years, and experts in the field have warned that high pressure readings could point to an imminent explosion. From 1970 to 2000 Hekla erupted approximately once every 10 years, but has remained dormant ever since. University of Iceland Geophysics Professor Páll Einarsson has told Icelandic news agency that people should not visit the volcano, which is now a popular tourist destination, due to an increased risk of eruption.

In Beijing, China – Excessive pumping of groundwater is causing the geology under the city to collapse, according to a new study using satellite imagery that reveals parts of Beijing – particularly its central business district – are subsiding each year by as much as 11 centimetres, or more than four inches. The study on Beijing’s subsidence has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing and is based on InSAR, a type of radar that monitors land elevation changes. It was written by a team of seven researchers, including three who explained their findings to the Guardian: Chinese academics Chen Mi [Capital Normal University, China] and Li Zhenhong [Newcastle University, UK], and Spanish engineer Roberto Tomas [University of Alicante, Spain].

The Juno spacecraft, which has arrived at Jupiter, is just one of many groundbreaking NASA missions to study the far reaches of our solar system. Other spacecraft have been deployed to study Pluto, Saturn, and even Ceres – a dwarf planet in the inner solar system. The information being gathered by these missions is completely changing the way we think about the composition of our solar system. Juno slipped into a highly elliptical, 53-Earth-day-long orbit around Jupiter when it arrived at the giant planet. The probe was supposed to perform an engine burn in October to reduce its orbital period to 14 days, but an issue with two helium valves postponed that maneuver. The engine burn has since been canceled, meaning Juno will stay where it is through to the end of its mission.

Juno has conducted four close flybys since arriving at Jupiter – on August 27, October 19, and December 11, 2016, and February 2, 2017. These encounters have already revealed that Jupiter's magnetic field and auroras are more powerful than scientists had thought, and that the bands and belts visible at the planet's cloud tops actually extend deep into the interior.

America's NASA reports that the 6-month period from January to June this year was our planet’s warmest half-year in the modern temperature record since records began in 1880.

SpaceX's unmanned Dragon cargo ship arrives at the International Space Station, carrying nearly 5,000 pounds (2,200 kilograms) of gear and supplies for the astronauts living in orbit. US space agency astronauts Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins reach out and grab the spacecraft, using the space station's 57.7-foot (17.5 meter) long robotic arm known as the Canadarm2, at 6:56 am (1056 GMT). "We have confirmed capture," a NASA commentator says. The key piece of equipment on board is the first of two international docking adaptors, which will allow commercial crew spacecraft to latch onto the research outpost in the coming years.

China – Heavy rains in northern China cause extensive flooding, overwhelming levees and killing at least 72 people in one province, with many others missing. The death toll in Xingtai, an industrial city in Hebei Province, rises sharply on Saturday 23, days after a wall of water descended on one village in the middle of the night with little or no warning. In addition to the 25 people in Xingtai who were confirmed dead, 13 were missing

The sun emits three mid-level solar flares, the strongest peaking at 1:16 a.m. EDT on July 23. The sun is currently in a period of low activity, moving toward what’s called solar minimum when there are few to no solar eruptions. These flares were the first significant events observed since April. They are categorized as mid-strength flares, substantially less intense than the most powerful solar flares.

At "0440 UTC" (equivalent of 12:40am on the US East Coast, or 9:40pm on the West Coast) parts of California, Nevada, and Utah witness an unusual space show as a giant fireball streaks across the Las Vegas sky. It is thought by some to be the remains of a large Chinese rocket burning up as it falls back into the atmosphere. This is the first time that China's space program has launched this particular type of rocket. China is planning to use the rocket on future missions to carry astronauts to the space station they plan to launch later this year.

$1.1 billion Juno spacecraft successfully slips into orbit around Jupiter on a 20-month mission to learn more about how the gas giant formed, and to probe the origins of the solar system. Last year, data from the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed that Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, has an underground ocean that contains more water than Earth's, broadening the hunt for places in the solar system where life might be able to exist.

a continent on the move. The land down under is currently moving north by about 7 centimeters (2.75 inches) annually due to normal tectonic movements, and, as a result, the nation’s local coordinates are out of sync with those from the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) by over 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) – which, incidentally, is the average height of a kangaroo. Australia is currently the fastest-moving continental tectonic plate in the world. That is why, the country’s local coordinate system had to be updated four times in the last 50 years in order to align it with global coordinates – which, since they are calculated based on global lines of latitudes and longitude, do not shift even when the continents do. The new update in 2017 will “overcorrect” the datum by about 20 centimeters (7.8 inches) as it would be based on projections of where the country would be in 2020.

According to NASA, researchers found 866 bursts of light between Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR)’S launch in June 2015 and August 2016. The researchers believed if the flashes were caused by sunlight, they would be limited to certain spots where the angle between the sun and Earth is the same as that between the spacecraft and Earth, thus allowing the spacecraft to pick up reflected light, NASA said in a statement. When the researchers plotted out their theory, the points matched. NASA researchers said a statement that the source of the lights is a reflection from high-altitude, horizontally oriented ice crystals. "The source of the flashes is definitely not on the ground. It’s definitely ice, and most likely solar reflection off of horizontally oriented particles" said Alexander Marshak, DSCOVR deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

12-13: The Perseid meteor shower becomes visible (named after the constellation Perseus). It is made from debris of the comet Swift-Tuttle. One of the brighter meteor showers of the year, the Perseids will occur under very favorable conditions of dark skies after the moon sets around the midnight.

24: Wednesday at 3:36 AM – In Central Italy near the town of Accumoli, 4km north east of Norcia and 40km north of Amatrice, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake strikes, killing at least 281 people and 365 injured, more than 360 missing, and destroying homes, devastating parts of Lazio, Umbria and Le Marche. It is felt as far away as Rome. On Friday morning, the Prime Minister of Italy, Matteo Renzi, declares a state of emergency in the area, as a 4.7-magnitude aftershock strikes near the worst-hit town of Amatrice, and authorises an initial €50m in crisis funding to start the rebuilding process and offers to cancel taxes for those affected. At least 388 people remain in hospital, with around 40 of them in a critical condition.

27: The two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, have a close encounter in our evening sky, coming within 0.06 degrees of each other viewed from earth. Observers can experience this rare celestial event after the sunset in the western sky.

The Juno probe captures images of Jupiter's north pole skimming 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops during the first of three dozen close flybys of the solar system's largest planet. "It's bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms," Bolton added. Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said – "There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to; this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We're seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features." Saturn has a huge hexagonal storm swirling at its north pole. But Jupiter lacks such a vortex, the new photos show.

the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory (CNRS) believes planet Proxima b (orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, and estimated to be 1.3 times the mass of Earth, and 4.22 light years away) has seas and could even be an “ocean planet” with water covering its whole surface. Current spacecrafts would take around 70,000 years to reach Proxima b.

1: Annual solar eclipse – also known as the “Ring of Fire” – is very similar to a total eclipse. In this event, as the moon is farther away from Earth, it fails to cover the entire sun. This will be visible from certain parts of Africa, including Madagascar and Congo.

OSIRIS-REx is launched on the back of an Atlas V rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. NASA scientists later use a slingshot manoeuvre around the Earth in their mission to land the spacecraft on asteroid 101955 Bennu. It will be the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid and return a sample to Earth if its mission is a success, and in Seoyember 2017 completes a carefully calibrated slingshot move around Earth which will let it land on Bennu.
The rocket gave OSIRIS all the momentum it required to reach Bennu, but it needed to use Earth's gravity to swing towards the asteroid. As a result of the flyby, the velocity change to the spacecraft was 8,451 miles per hour (3.778 kilometers per second), according to NASA.

OSIRIS-REx will arrive at Bennu in late 2018 and subsequently return samples to Earth in 2023 for analysis.

A penumbral lunar eclipse. This eclipse happens when the moon passes through the outermost edges of Earth’s shadow, known as 'penumbra'. Although the moon will look darker, it won’t take the usual reddish hue like it does during a total lunar eclipse (the 'blood moon' effect which Pastor John Hagee exploited as the 'sign of the End', in violation of its Biblical context, which says it will be a consequence of the sun being darkened). This second penumbral eclipse of the year will be experienced by Eastern Europe, Eastern Africa, Asia and Australia.

In China's Guizhou region the world's largest radio telescope begins searching for signs of extra-terrestrial life in outer space. The £138m dish, measures 500 metres in diameter and took five years. Hundreds of astronomers and enthusiasts watched the launch of the Five-Hundred-Metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). Qian Lei, a researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said –

"The ultimate goal of FAST is to discover the laws of the development of the universe.
In theory, if there is civilisation in outer space, the radio signal it sends
will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar (spinning neutron star) is approaching us."

Hundreds of villagers who lived near the site have been forced to relocate and will be compensated with cash or housing. State media reports that the relocation budget was £210m – more than the cost of the dish itself. The project is part of China's multi-billion pound space programme, which includes plans for a permanent orbiting space station and a manned mission to the moon.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta (beginning January 2014, when Rosetta "woke up" after hibernating for nearly three years to conserve energy on her 10-year journey from Earth to Comet 67P, a six-billion-kilometre journey to the comet) now makes a planned crash-landing on the surface of Comet 67P, after 12-years of space exploration, on which robotic Philae has also ended its mission..

the Caribbean – Major Hurricane Matthew strengthens to a rare Category 5 late Friday, before weakening to a strong Category 4 hurricane overnight. Matthew is the first Category 5 hurricane since Hurricane Felix in 2007 (Attaining Category 5 status in the Caribbean Sea, Felix barreled into Nicaragua and Honduras in early September, claiming at least 130 lives and destroying thousands of homes and buildings along the coast). According to Colorado State University tropical scientist Dr. Phil Klotzbach, Matthew became the lowest latitude Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic on record (beating the old record set by Ivan in 2004).

announces SpaceX’s plan to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars.

3: A paper entitled "Young People's Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions" by James Hansen, a former senior NASA climate scientist, and 11 other experts, claims the global temperature has just reached a level similar to that in the interglacial (Eemian) period, 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, when Earth’s sea level was several meters higher than today. The paper focusses on carbon emissions stating that research shows that the rapid rise of global temperature – beginning in around 1975 – continues at a rate of about 0.18°C per decade. The growth rate of climate change, due to human-caused greenhouse gases, increased over 20 percent in the past decade.

Unfortunately, the paper ignores the cyclic nature of long-term fluctuations in solar radiation.

5: Nearly 2 million people along the coast of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas are urged to evacuate their homes, in a mass exodus ahead of a major storm packing power the U.S. hasn't seen in more than a decade. At 5 p.m. EDT, Matthew is centered about 400 miles (640 kilometers) southeast of West Palm Beach and moving northwest, according to the National Hurricane Center. Hurricane-force winds extend 45 miles (72 kilometers) from the center. In South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley reversed the lanes of Interstate 26 so that all lanes of traffic were headed west and out of Charleston. It is the first time the lanes had been reversed. Plans to reverse the lanes were put in place after hour-long traffic jams during Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

– A swarm of nearly 200 small earthquakes shakes Southern California in area of the shallow, inland Salton Sea. At the same time, scientists publish their recent discovery of a potentially significant fault that lies along the eastern edge of the Salton Sea, to the west of the San Andreas fault, in the earthquake-prone region that includes the greater Los Angeles area.

The new fault, dubbed the Salton Trough Fault, is not one of those that moved during the swarm.

NASA releases pictures taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, which has been mapping the Moon since 2009, indicating the effect that asteroids and comets crashing into Earth's only natural satellite create, on average, 180 new craters at least 10 metres (33 feet) in diameter every year.
Earth is also constantly pelted by asteroids and meteors, but is protected by its thick atmosphere. More than 100 tonnes of dust and sand-sized particles rain down on this planet every day. The Moon's ultra-thin atmosphere only contains about 100 molecules of gases and elements per cubic centimetre (0.6 cubic inch).

Whereas earth's atmosphere at sea level, by contrast, is packed with about 100 billion billion molecules per cubic centimetre.

The planet Uranus will reaches its opposition point to our sun and closest to Earth. It now reaches its prime viewing position and is highly illuminated by the sun.

China’s Shenzhou 11 manned spacecraft is successfully docked with China’s Tiangong 2 space laboratory and its two astronauts (Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong) enter. China’s is the third country after the United States and Russia to complete space rendezvous and docking procedures. In a manned space mission in 2013, three Chinese astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with a space laboratory, the Tiangong 1.

European Space Agency (ESA) succeeds in placing a methane-sniffing spacecraft in orbit around Mars. The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), is part of the European-Russian ExoMars 2016 mission.
Schiaparelli Mars lander enters Mars' outer atmosphere at 1442 GMT on Wednesday, as scheduled, for what should have been a six-minute dash to the surface, but contact is lost.
Schiaparelli has on-board batteries designed to last at least four sols (a sol is a Mars day of about 24 hours and 40 minutes), and at up to 10 or 12 sols.

Orionids meteor shower. Created by the debris from Comet Halley, the Orionid meteor shower is active every year in October, and this year it peaks on the evening of October 21. During the shower, observers see up to 20 meteors every hour.

In central Italy – At 17:10:37 UTC, a 5.4 magnitude earthquake, at a depth of 10.0 km, hits near Visso, about 100 miles northeast of Rome.
Tremors are felt from Perugia to Rome, and also in the town of L'Aquila.
It comes just two months after an earthquake in the same area killed nearly 300 people and destroyed hilltop villages.
An hour later a 6.1 magnitude earthquake strikes central Italy.
The first quake strikes at 7.10pm local and could be felt across central Italy and as far south as Caserta. The second, stronger quake, strikes at 9.18pm local and could be felt strongly in Rome. Both are regarded by seismologists as aftershocks to the earthquake on 24 August that struck a broad swath of central Italy, demolishing buildings in three towns and their hamlets.

Another earthquake strikes central Italy, this time a 6.6 magnitude, but more than 100km deep, so less damage was done. Dozens of historic buildings have been destroyed or seriously damaged, with around a dozen people reported to be injured. The epicentre of the quake was about 40 miles (68km) south-west of Perugia and close to the town of Norcia, which was already reeling from a series of large quakes. Many of the town’s residents had been evacuated after quakes on Wednesday, so they avoided the worst of the damage on Sunday morning.

3, Thursday: In central Italy – A magnitude 5 earthquake 10km deep strikes damaging dozens of buildings and monuments. About 10km outside Rome is the Colli Albani dormant volcano and some fear that it may be affected by the earthquakes and become active. Studies indicate that volcanic chambers located below the towns of Ariccia, Castel, Gandolfo and Albano are slowly filling up with magma and pushing the ground up by 2-3mm per year. In general an earthquake would not cause a volcanic eruption, but if the volcano has already become active an earthquake could trigger its eruption.

Just after midnight local time, near Christchurch, New Zealand – A magnitide 7.8 earthquake strikes, 57 miles north-northeast of the city.

On Monday at 6:15 a.m. EST, the moon is at its closest point to the Earth in 2016: a distance of 221,524 miles (356,508 kilometers) away. This distance, which is measured from the center of the Earth to the center of the moon, is within 85 miles (137 km) of the moon's closest possible approach to Earth. Two hours and 37 minutes after this (the moon's closest point to Earth), the orb will officially turn full.This month's full moon is the closest since January 26, 1948.

The near coincidence of this month's full moon with its perigee will result in a dramatically large range of high and low ocean tides: an unusually lower-than-normal low tide, followed about 6 hours later by an unusually higher-than-normal high tide.

In the latter case, any coastal storm at sea around this time will certainly aggravate coastal flooding problems.

About 2,20am local, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake strikes New Zealand’s South Island.
About 7am local, a second earthquake, 5.8 magnitude, strikes New Zealand. Huge damage caused to property and two deaths reported.

4: In New Zealand – A magnitude 5.5 earthquake strikes South and lower North Island at a depth of 12km centred 10km East of Seddon.

The Solomon Islands is hit by a 7.7 magnitude earthquake with a warning of a possible tsunami. Among the countries most at risk are the Solomon Islands themselves, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and several other low-lying Pacific islands.

NASA scientists gear up for the launch of the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), a dedicated fleet of storm-watching microsatellites that will track hurricane evolution over Earth's oceans in future.

Geminids meteor shower. The biggest and the brightest shower of the year, the Geminids will take place amidst the unfavourable full moon. With the possibility of viewing 120 meteors per hour at its peak, the meteor shower derives its name from the constellation Gemini because they seem to come from that direction. Unlike the usual meteor showers, the Geminids are associated with an asteroid, the 3200 Phaethon — which takes about 1.4 years to complete its revolution around the sun.

The Landsat 7 satellite acquires this image of snow in Morocco, North Africa, showing an area near the border of Morocco and Algeria, south of the city of Bouarfa and southwest of Ain Sefra.

Agency publishes the results of its magnetic field survey of planet earth in the journal Nature Geoscience, resulting from its 2013 launch of its Swarm trio of satellites, indicating a jet stream in the liquid iron core of earth.

magnetic field is constantly changing and shifting.

Other sources of magnetism come from minerals in Earth’s mantle and crust,
while the ionosphere, magnetosphere and oceans also play a role.

Together, they form the magnetic field which helps protect earth from cosmic radiation and charged particles that stream towards Earth in solar winds.

was the hottest year since records began 167 years ago, as planet Earth experienced warmer land, warmer seas, warmer air and melting ice as never before, according to new research. Scientists at the Met Office and East Anglia University found 2016 was 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than the average between 1850 and 1900.

January 18: Central Italy is rocked by three earthquakes measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale, and requiring the evacuation of Rome's metro system and some schools.
• In the town of Farindola on the Gran Sasso mountain in the central Abruzzo region an avalanche of snow, believed to have been triggered by an earthquake, hits the remote, three-storey Hotel Rigopianoa spa hotel. Up to 30 people are feared dead.

Tuesday 24: A newfound asteroid about the size of a bus zips safely by Earth late Tuesday, just days after its discovery.
The asteroid 2017 BX buzzed by Earth at a range of 162,252 miles (261,119 kilometers) – about 30 percent closer than the distance between the Earth and the moon – at 11:54 p.m. EST (0454 Tuesday GMT), according to online Slooh observatory, which tracked the object late Tuesday in a live webcast at Slooh.com.

The asteroid was first discovered on Friday (January 20, 2017).

Voyager I (launched in September 1977) has broken through the heliopause boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, the spacecraft will be able to obtain measurements of interstellar fields, particles and waves that have not been interfered with by the solar wind.

Voyager is making direct contact with plasma expelled by other stars.

Voyager is powered by an RTG (Radioisotope Thermal Generator) – a nuclear battery. It becomes a little weaker each day.

Sometime after 2020, maybe as late as 2025, the power will become too little to transmit the 23 watt signal towards Earth and we will lose track of Voyager I. It will continue to travel through the Milky Way – now fully independent of our sun, it may outlast our own solar system.

11: (1) a partial eclipse of the moon (beginning at 10.34pm UK time on Friday 10, to reach its maximum at 12.43am early Saturday morning, to end at 2.53am);
(2) a comet 45P/Honda–Mrkos–Pajdušáková (with a 200 year orbi) will pass close to earth; and
(3) the moon will become full at 2.32am.

Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is seen breaking apart via the Slooh telescopes in Chile.

India launches a record 104 satellites from a single rocket as its famously frugal space agency looks to zoom ahead in the commercial space race. The rocket is launched from the southern spaceport of Sriharikota. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle will be carrying a 714 kilogram main satellite for earth observation, and 103 smaller "nano satellites" which would weigh a combined 664 kilograms. Nearly all of the nano satellites are from other countries, including –

Israel, Kazakhstan, The Netherlands, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates and 96 from United States.

Russia launched 39 satellites in a single mission in June 2014.

An exoplanet is a celestial body that orbits a star other than our sun. Astronomers now identify more than 3,500 such planets in 2,687 planetary systems and 602 multiple planetary systems. (In July 2015, NASAs Kepler space telescope identified the famous exoplanet Kepler-452b, which is described as Earth's cousin because of its close similarities to our planet).

In Washington, DC – NASA announces that its Spitzer Space Telescope has observed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star.
Three of these planets are firmly located in what’s called the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water – key to life as we know it.
The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of known planets in a star’s habitable zone. After all, our solar system has only two planets in the habitable zone: Earth and Mars.
This exoplanet system – called TRAPPIST-1 – has three. Only about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, in the direction to our constellation Aquarius, TRAPPIST-1 – classified as an ultra-cool dwarf.
It’s so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system.
All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun in our solar system.
The newly discovered exoplanets orbiting this nearby star are likely to be bathed in high-energy ultraviolet radiation, which is not good for human life.

The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.

A new moon on February 26, 2017 ushers in the first of two solar eclipses in this year. It will be an annular eclipse, often called a ring of fire eclipse. During an annular eclipse, the outer edge of the sun appears as a thin ring (annulus) of sunshine around the moon. An annular eclipse is, essentially, a special type of partial eclipse. At no time will the sky grow dark, and you’ll need continual eye protection to watch it, assuming you’re in a place on Earth where the eclipse is visible.

This eclipse is visible from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, mainly over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Elon Musk announces that his company SpaceX plans to launch two paying customers on a weeklong mission around the moon by the end of 2018. Just a few days later, word leaks that Bezos' Blue Origin aims to start delivering science experiments, human habitats and other gear to the moon by mid-2020 or so.

In the Aleutian islands of Alaska, USA – the Bogostof volcano erupts, ejecting ash about 35,000 feet (10.6 km) into the atmosphere. At the same time there is a huge new lava outbreak at #Kilauea volcano, Hawaii.

In Sicily, Italy – Mount Etna begins erupting from a crater on the south-eastern side of the 3,000-metre peak. It is the third time in less than three weeks that Europe’s most active volcano, which overlooks the city of Catania, has erupted, spewing lava almost 200 metres into the sky.

Watch the space walk from the International Space Station on NASA TV of Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough and Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson of NASA reconnecting cables and electrical connections on PMA-3 at its new home on top the Harmony module. A 1.5m (5ft) debris shield being installed on the International Space Station has floated away during the space-walk by two veteran US astronauts. At the time, Whitson (57), and station commander Shane Kimbrough (49), were about midway through a planned 6.5-hour space-walk to prepare a docking port for upcoming commercial space taxis and to tackle other maintenance tasks. NASA said engineers determined it posed no safety threat to the astronauts or to the facility,

a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles (402 km) above Earth.

SpaceX became the first entity to successfully launch and fly a reusable orbital class rocket.

In Mocoa, Colombia, South America – Near midnight, three flooding rivers converge near the Ecuador border to send a wall of water through the town. President Juan Manuel Santos said 193 people had been killed and authorities said as many as 220 were feared missing.

In Southern Africa – A 6.5 magnitude earthquake strikes central Botswana at a depth of 12km, and is felt as far as Johannesburg in South Africa.

At 07:34 (UT) asteroid 2017 GM makes a close pass of our planet. It is one of the 10 closest asteroids known so far to sweep past Earth, and then keep going. At its closest, it was less than 1/20th of the moon’s mean distance, within 10,000 miles of Eath (16,000 km, about 0.04 lunar distances).

Asteroid 2014 JO25 passes safely at 4.6 times the moon’s distance (around 7:24 a.m. Central Time / 12:24 UTC), at some 1,098,733 miles (1,768,239 km).

It’s 60 times the diameter of the asteroid that penetrated the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013.

In Chile, South America – 6.9 magnitude earthquake strikes about 41 km from Valparaíso, even causing buildings in Santiago to sway.

The American Cassini spacecraft contacts Earth after its successful first-ever dive between the planet Saturn and its rings. The spacecraft is now in the process of beaming back science and engineering data collected during its historic dive. As it dove through the gap, Cassini came within about 1,900 miles (3,000 km) of Saturn’s cloud tops and within about 200 miles (300 km) of the innermost visible edge of the rings. Cassini has now begun began what mission planners call its Grand Finale during which the spacecraft loops Saturn approximately once per week, making a total of 22 dives between the rings and the planet.

Cassini’s next dive through the gap is scheduled for Tuesday (May 2, 2017).

The spacecraft, which is almost out of fuel, is on a trajectory that will eventually plunge it into Saturn’s atmosphere –

ending its mission – on September 15, 2017.

The gap between the rings and the top of Saturn’s atmosphere – a region that has never been explored – is about 1,500 miles (2,000 km) wide.

of four planets orbiting a distant star is discovered, with the help of citizen scientists around the world. In a new paper, researchers reveal some fascinating features of this alien solar system, including the presence of a fifth planet. The planetary system K2-138 is home to at least five "sub-Neptune" planets, meaning they are between the size of Earth and that of Neptune, according to the new study. The planets all orbit extremely close to their parent star, even closer than Mercury orbits the sun. The paper suggests that these planets may have formed farther away from their parent star than they are now, then journeyed inward together in an exceptionally calm manner. K2-128 was discovered using data from the K2 mission, which has observed over 280,000 stars in three years, according to a statement from the California Institute of Technology. The mission utilizes the Kepler space telescope, which suffered a series of hardware failures and could no longer operate the way it was initially intended.

The K2 mission allowed Kepler to continue operating in another way. 

In Alaska, USA – A magnitude 6.2 earthquake strikes 37km WSW of the Tanaga Volcano at a depth of 10km.

Astronaut Peggy Whitson repairs a critical International Space Station system during a nearly three-hour spacewalk that moves her into second place on NASA’s career list for most spacewalking time. Joined by NASA’s Jack Fischer, Whitson swapped out a computer relay box that had failed on Saturday (20). Known as a multiplexer-demultiplexer, or MDM, the box helped control the station’s solar arrays, radiators and cooling loops, among other systems. A backup box remained in good shape, but NASA on Sunday (21) ordered the unplanned "contingency" spacewalk to minimize the risk of a backup failure.

spots monstrous 'Earth-sized' cyclones churning over of the poles of Jupiter. The chaotic weather systems were observed by the Juno probe, which has been exploring the gas planet's cloud tops since last year. Scientists say there are clusters of cyclones near Jupiter's poles which, combined, are as big as Earth. The largest individual cyclone has a diameter of around 870 miles.

The Arietid meteor shower, radiating from the direction of constellation Aries, is now exceedingly near the sun andnow begins before dawn travelling across the sky with the sun during our day. The encounter is causing a daytime meteor shower as meteoroids hit the top of Earth’s atmosphere traveling 39 km/s (87,000 mph). A meteor radar in Canada [CMOR] is tracking strong activity in the constellation Aries not far from the sun. The display is mostly invisible to the human eye – but not entirely. It may be possible to see some of these strange meteors during a narrow window of darkness before sunrise,

especially on June 7, when the shower is expected to peak …

In British Columbia, Canada, 1:38 pm – A 4.7 magnitude earthquake strikes 162 kilometres west of Port Hardy, early Saturday afternoon at a depth of 10 kilometres.

12:28 GMT/UT; 3:28am local time: On Lesbos, Greece – an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 killing one woman and injuring at least 10 people. It was also felt in western Turkey, including in Istanbul, and on neighboring islands. Lesbos mayor Spyros Galinos and the fire service said the woman was found dead in the southern village of Vrisa that was worst-hit by the quake, which had its epicenter under the sea at a depth of 7km (4 miles). At least 10 people were injured in the village, many of whose roads were blocked by rubble.

In Bangladesh – At least 140 people are killed in lanslides caused by heavy rian. With some roads collapsed and others blocked by mud, soldiers are erecting a portable bridge to reach the worst-hit district of Rangamati, where government shelters house about half of the 4,500 people whose homes were swamped by mud and debris unleashed by the landslides. Rescuers are using boats to reach some areas where roads were cut off. Elsewhere, villagers join firefighters and soldiers in cutting fallen trees and clearing debris in remote areas where rescuers have been unable to get heavy machinery, military spokesman Rezaul Karim said.

The injured are being taken to area hospitals where doctors work by candlelight.

ten asteroids that the US space organization NASA said this month have been classified as "potentially hazardous" based on their size and their orbits in our Solar system. NASA has dentified 693 near-Earth objects thanks to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft that’s been looking for potential threats to Earth since 2013.

announces SpaceX’s plan to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars. He’s authored a 15-page commentary adapted from his original announcement – titled Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species – published in the journal New Space, which describes itself as "the only international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the era of new space innovation." The manifesto is available for free until early July and is a must-read for space and sci fi fans.

In Mexico – The Popocatépetl volcano, 80km south-east of the capital, Mexico City, erupts belching ash and smoke 2,500 metres above the crater.

planet appears to be lurking at the edge of our solar system, scientists have announced. The "planetary mass object" seems to be disrupting the orbits of other, smaller rocky bodies within the Kuiper Belt — a disc-shaped region of icy bodies beyond Neptune that encircles the whole solar system and extends around 2.3 billion miles. This "planetary mass object" is different from the hypothetical Planet Nine — a huge object believed to be orbiting the sun from the outer solar system. Evidence for this planet was announced in 2016, when scientists from Caltech, California, found several objects with highly unusual orbits.

These orbits could, however, be explained by the existence of a giant planet with a mass about 10 times that of Earth.

the planets in our solar system orbit the Sun and the moon orbits Earth. So when astronomers find bodies that are not orbiting in the way they should be, it suggests something else is influencing them. Michele Bannister, from the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, U.K. says Planet 10 could be located in one of the only areas of the sky that you could hide any large object — a region covered by the Milky Way. "At that point it becomes a lot harder to find distant moving objects because there’s just so many stars," she says. "It’s a region of the sky where you could potentially hide an object."

preparing its first ever mission to deflect an asteroid, a move the space agency hopes will provide lessons for how Earth can be protected from a potentially planet-destroying impact. The spacecraft for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is now moving to the design phase, and aims to demonstrate the "kinetic impactor technique" in which it will strike an asteroid and physically knock it into a different flight path. The Didymos asteroid – named after the Greek word for "twin" – is being targeted because it is an asteroid binary system which consists of two bodies orbiting each other as well as the Sun.

Didymos A is the larger body, and is about a half mile across (780 metres) with the smaller body,
Didymos B, being only 530 feet across (160 metres).

6: In the US a 5.8-magnitude earthquake at a depth of 4km hits western Montana just after midnight, local time. It wakes people up near the epicenter and is felt throughout the region, more than 30 miles from its epicenter, and even felt as far away as Spokane, Washington.

Idaho reports power outages around the earthquake’s epicenter.

Scientists behind NASA's Kepler K2 mission recently unveiled hundreds of new planet candidates for NASA’s exoplanet catalog, including 10 that could be rocky planets in the "just right" Goldilocks zone of their stars. "We’re up to just over about 4,000 planet candidates once you add this catalog in," says Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist at the SETI Institute and lead author of the new research. So far, more than 2,300 have been confirmed as actual exoplanets.

01:30 am: A 6.7 earthquake strikes Turkey’s Aegean coast, with the worst hit on the Greek island of Kos, where both confirmed that deaths occurred, along with most of the injuries reported. So far, officials say more than 200 people have been injured, at least 120 on Kos and 70 in Turkey. The epicentre was only 10km (6.2 miles) below the seabed, off the southwestern coastal city of Marmaris in the Mugla province, 10km south of the Turkish resort of Bodrum and 16km east-northeast of Kos.

passes earth at 03:33 UTC (11:33pm EDT) at one-third the earth-moon distance or about 123.031 km (76,448 miles) and travelling at 37,303 km/h (23,179 mph). Asteroid 2017001 is about three times bigger (between 25 and 78 metres or 82 and 256 feet) than the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabink, Russia, in Feberuary 2013, causing damage in six Russian cities and injuring more than 1,000 people.

Near Japan (01:27 JST 27 Jul), a magnitude 6.1 earthquake strikes off the coast of Japan near the island of Okinawa.

In northern Siberia, rising temperatures cause giant craters – and even more dire consequences could be in store, say climate scientists. The Russian province's long-frozen ground, called permafrost, is thawing, triggering massive changes to the region's landscape and ecology.

In China – A 6.3 magnitude earthquake strikes killing at least 13 and injuring 175.

No matter where you live worldwide, the 2017 Perseid meteor shower will probably produce the greatest number of meteors on the mornings of August 11, 12 and 13. In a dark, moonless sky, this shower often produces 50 or more meteors per hour. But, in 2017, we’ll have to contend with the light of a bright waning gibbous moon, which rises at mid-evening and washes the sky during the peak hours of the shower, between midnight and dawn. A good number of Perseid meteors will be bright, so you should be able to see some Perseids, despite the moonlit glare. And, although the Perseid numbers are few and far between in the evening hours, you’ll have some moon-free viewing time between nightfall and moonrise.

the Philippines – A 6.6 magnitude earthquake strikes at 6.28am BST (1.28pm local time) centred near the Lubang islands, 74 miles west of Batangas, 93 miles south west of Manila, at a depth of 99 miles..

SpaceX's unmanned Dragon cargo vessel, carrying the first super-computer to space as part of its 6,400 pound (2,900 kilograms) payload arrives at the International Space Station. The Space Station's robotic arm grabbed the spaceship at 6:52 am (1052 GMT) carrying food, science experiments and other gear for the astronauts living in orbit. A key part of the cargo is a sophisticated supercomputer made by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), called The Spaceborne Computer. Researchers want to see if the computer can survive the harsh conditions of space, and whether it could one day help astronauts navigate long missions in deep space, whether around the Moon or to Mars.

21: A total eclipse of the sun will be visible from within a narrow corridor that traverses the United States.
The path of the moon’s umbral shadow begins in the northern Pacific and crosses the U.S. from west to east through parts of the following states:
Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina.

The moon’s penumbral shadow produces a partial eclipse visible from a much larger region covering most of North America.

jets (a pair of modified WB-57F's from the 1960s) perform a tricky science experiment on the Sun and its closest companion, Mercury. A pair of them take off this morning from Houston's Johnson Space Center and follow the path of of the eclipse, allowing them to see "totality" for three and half minutes, nearly a minute longer than Earth observers. Equipped with a pair of infrared telescopes each, they'll examine the sun's corona and Mercury's chemical signatures to find out what lies below its surface.

A seven-month-old baby has been pulled alive from rubble after an earthquake hit the Italian holiday island of Ischia, killing at least two people. The 4.0 magnitude quake hit the island, in the Bay of Naples, at 8.57pm on Monday. Up to 40 people were injured, including one seriously. An elderly woman was killed by masonry falling from a church, while a second woman was found dead beneath the rubble of her home.

German company Part Time Scientists, which originally competed for the Google Lunar X Prize race to the moon, plans to send a lander with a rover in late 2018 to visit the landing site of Apollo 17. (Launched in 1972, this was NASA's final Apollo mission to the moon.)
Instead of using a complex dedicated telecommunication system to relay data from the rover to the Earth, the company will rely on LTE technology —

the same system used on Earth for mobile phone communications.

"We are cooperating with Vodafone in order to provide LTE base stations on the moon," Karsten Becker,
who heads embedded electronics development and integration for the startup, told Space.com. "What we are aiming to do is to provide commercial service to bring goods to the moon and also to provide services on the surface of the moon," Becker added.

the first time, astronomers detect evidence of a cocoon of material blasting out from a pair of merging neutron stars. Such mergers may be the source of many of the universe's heaviest elements. In August, astronomers witnessed the never-before-seen phenomenon of two neutron stars merging. Neutron stars are corpses of large stars that perished in catastrophic explosions known as supernovas. Although neutron stars are usually small, with diameters of about 12 miles (19 kilometers) or so, they are extremely dense. A neutron star's mass may be about the same as that of the sun; a teaspoon of neutron-star material has a mass of about a billion tons, making neutron stars the universe's densest objects besides black holes.

Hurricane Harvey slams into the Texas coast as a Category 4 storm, bringing life-threatening winds and the likelihood of catastrophic flooding as the most powerful storm in over a decade hits the mainland of the United States. The storm then moved on to Louisiana

plant in Crosby, Texas, lost all power when storm Harvey struck leaving volatile chemicals unable to be refrigerated as they needed to be. A spokeswoman said before reports of two explosions emerged: "The fire will happen. It will resemble a gasoline fire. It will be explosive and intense in nature." The fears of a blast came as the confirmed number of those killed rose to 31, including six members of the same family – four of them children.
• Harvey makes landfall for a third time. The tropical storm reaches land just west of Cameron, Louisiana, at 4 a.m. local time Wednesday, according to the National Hurricane Center

a mark on the atmosphere well after they've left, and SpaceX may have learned that first-hand. Researchers have determined that a Falcon 9 launch in August 2017 (the Formosat-5 mission above) not only created circular shockwaves, but cut a 559-mile hole in the plasma of the ionosphere that lasted for up to 3 hours – it was akin to a localized magnetic storm. The phenomenon was produced by virtue of the rocket's light payload. As Ars Technica noted, most rockets have a curved trajectory to reduce the effect of gravity and alleviate stress. SpaceX's rocket, however, was carrying such a light payload (Formosat-5 weighed just 1,047 pounds) that it could and did take a near-vertical path. Think of it as dropping a rock in the water instead of skipping it – you're going to create a much bigger splash.

merger of two neutron stars, the gamma-ray burst that is produced would get brighter for a short period of time, and then fades away, according to other observations of short gamma-ray bursts. But that is not what happened in the case of GW170817, the first neutron star merger observed by scientists in August 2017, an event that also sent gravitational waves rippling through the universe. If anything, the X-ray emission from the merged object has continued to grow in intensity, as have radio emissions from it. Radio wave data from the merger was tracked since the event occurred, but X-ray observations had to be suspended just over two weeks after it happened because the object’s location in the sky was too close to the sun.

1: Asteroid 1981 ET3 – also known as 3122 Florence – is a huge space rock at least 2.7 miles (4.35 km) in diameter. Florence is the largest asteroid to pass this close to our planet since the first near-Earth asteroid was discovered over a century ago. Asteroid 3122 Florence will safely pass by our planet on September 1, 2017 at over 18 times the Earth-moon distance. It might be big enough to be seen in small telescopes, and maybe even in binoculars, as a small, very slow-moving star

by NASA's Juno spacecraft capture the solar system's largest planet in all its complex glory. The four photos – which Juno took over an 8-minute span, during its most recent close flyby of Jupiter – show the gas giant's many cloud bands and countless swirling storms (but not the famous Great Red Spot).
"At the times the images were taken, the spacecraft ranged from 7,545 to 14,234 miles (12,143 to 22,908 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude range of -28.5406 to -44.4912 degrees,"
The new photos represent a collaboration between Juno and citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt Sean Doran, who processed raw imagery collected by the probe's JunoCam instrument into these dramatic, color-enhanced views.

order a mandatory evacuation in the Burbank area as the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) tackles a raging wildfire near La Tuna Canyon. The fire was first reported around 1.30 p.m. Friday and initially affected about one acre. Within eight hours, it had spread to encompass 2,000 acres in the La Tuna Canyon Park area of the Verdugo Mountains, fanned by strong erratic winds pushing it in four different directions. Around 260 firefighters have been working through the night to put out the fire while helicopters perform water drops.

A shallow, 6.3 magnitude earthquake shakes North Korea, suggesting it had detonated a sixth nuclear device, hours after it said it had developed an advanced hydrogen bomb that possesses "great destructive power."

The earthquake struck 75 km (45 miles) north northwest of Kimchaek.

The most powerful Atlantic Ocean hurricane in recorded history makes landfall in the Caribbean. The eye of Hurricane Irma passes over Barbuda around 1.47am local time

"significant" solar flares blast out of the Sun, including one which is the most powerful since 2006. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation and they disrupted radio communications over large areas of the Earth, said the Space Weather Prediction Centre (SWPC). The SWPC said high-frequency radio experiences a wide area of blackouts, loss of contact for up to an hour over the sunlit side of Earth, and low frequency communication, used in navigation, was degraded for an hour. One was clasisfied as an X2.2, while the second which happened three hours later was an X9.3 – the strongest since an X9.0 in 2006. X-class flares are the most intense. The number indicates its strength. An X2 is twice as powerful as an X1, while an X3 is three times as intense.

Atlantic Ocean storm in recorded history is sweeping across the Caribbean leaving destruction in its wake. Hurricane Irma howls past Puerto Rico after thrashing several smaller islands with tree-snapping winds, drenching rains and pounding surf on a collision course with Florida.

A 8.1 magnitude earthquake strikes Mexico's southern coast (15.068°N 93.715°W), offshore Chiapas (87km SW of Pijijiapan), at a depth of 69.7km, killing at least 61 people and injuring 200.

In Tibet – A hillside starts to melt like lava – engulfing a house and a car. It started as a result of waterlogged soil sitting on top of the permafrost, causing it to slide on a downwards slope due to gravity. The mud appears to completely engulf a car, and a small farmhouse or outbuilding situated in the field.

The 20-year-old Cassini mission ends, with a dramatic plunge into the planet Saturn. Cassini speed at loss of signal: 111,637 kph.
Cassini had discovered methane seas on Saturn's huge moon Titan and geysers of water vapor blasting from fellow moon Enceladus. Both of these moons are worthy of much further study, as is the ringed planet itself and the diverse Saturn system as a whole.

Hurricane Maria (category 5 storm) hits Dominica in the Caribbean with 160mph winds, ripping the roof off even the prime minister's residence and causing what he called "mind-boggling" devastation Tuesday as it plunged into a Caribbean region already ravaged by Hurricane Irma. Millions more people in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, are still reeling from Hurricane Irma earlier this month

is on a track to wallop Puerto Rico on Wednesday

"with a force and violence that we haven't seen for several generations," the territory's governor said.

In Mexico (1.15pm local time) – a 7.1 magnitude earthquake strikes about 120km from Mexico City, killing over 300 people and damaging a large number of buildings including about 200 schools.
People in central Mexico are accustomed to the ground shaking. Since 1980, 40 perceptible earthquakes have hit this region. This September 19 quake actually occurred on the 32nd anniversary of the magnitude 8.1 earthquake that killed at least 10,000 people in and around Mexico City in 1985. That catastrophe marked an entire generation of Mexicans. Now, we have discovered that the 2017 earthquake, called Puebla-Morelos, was fundamentally unlike its 1985 predecessor. In fact, it was different than most big Mexican earthquakes, which typically happen along the country’s Pacific coast, where two tectonic plates collide. The Puebla-Morelos quake occurred well inland – just 70 miles (113 km) south of Mexico City, in Puebla state.

Since the 1920s, only five other large earthquakes have originated in central Mexico.

In Japan a 6.1-magnitude quake strikes roughly 175 miles east of the shattered Fukushima nuclear plant – at roughly 2:30 a.m. local time.

is affected by the slipping and sliding of several of Earth's tectonic plates, including the North America plate, Pacific plate, Philippine Sea plate, and Eurasia plate. Whenever these chunks of crust grind or butt up against one another, earthquakes happen. Over the past century, Japan has been struck by nine earthquakes, each of which have killed more than 1,000 people.

In Mexico a strong new earthquake shakes Mexico, causing new alarm in a country reeling from two still-more-powerful quakes this month that had killed nearly 400 people, centred about 12 miles (19 kilometres) southeast of Matias Romero in the state of Oaxaca, which was the region most battered by a magnitude 8.1 quake on September 7.

hurricane season — not yet even close to finished — generates more destructive, land-falling storms than the past few years combined. Four of this year’s monsters went on to become Category 4 or 5, and three of those made landfall in U.S. territory.

The U.S. has never been hit by three storms this strong in the same season in modern records.

the European Space Agency-driven "Moon Village" scheme's goal. which it says is not only reasonable but feasible, that by 2040, a hundred people will live on the Moon, melting ice for water, 3D-printing homes and tools, eating plants grown in lunar soil, and competing in low-gravity, "flying" sports. Experts argue that the future lies in collaboration between increasingly cash-strapped national space agencies and the private sector, which can profit from selling resources such as Moon-derived rocket fuel. Robotic exploration is already underway, with several Moon landers and rovers planned for the coming years.

New Scientist, Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, and Anna de Graaff, from the University of Edinburgh, U.K., have in two separate papers found the missing baryons in the hot filaments of gas that link galaxies together. The teams looked galaxies mapped in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey predicted to be connected by baryons. They then took data from the Planck satellite, which maps the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the afterglow from the Big Bang. As this light moves through hot gas, some of it scatters, leaving a patch in the CMB. This phenomenon allowed the researchers to see strands of matter that are normally far too dim to observe. Both teams, looking at over a million pairs of galaxies, found evidence of gas filaments in the space between galaxies. Furthermore, they found the matter was far denser than average — in Tanimura’s paper it was up to three times denser, while in Graaf’s paper it was as much as six. “The missing baryon problem is solved," Tanimura told the magazine. “We expect some differences [between the density] because we are looking at filaments at different distances. If this factor is included, our findings are very consistent with the other group."

Kraft, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, said the findings help align the discrepancy between observations and simulations of the universe. He said the studies go "a long way" in showing that many of our fundamental ideas about space appear to be right. "Everybody sort of knows that [the missing matter] has to be there, but this is the first time that somebody — two different groups, no less — has come up with a definitive detection," he said.

In North Hamgyong Province in North Korea – An earthquake strikes with a magnitude of 2.7 with a depth of 3 km (but the US Geological Survey measured the quake at 2.9 magnitude at a depth of 5 km.)

North Korea’s nuclear tests have become so big that they appear to have altered the geological structure of the land. Some analysts now see signs that Mount Mantap, the 7,200-foot-high peak under which North Korea detonates its nuclear bombs, is suffering from "tired mountain syndrome." The mountain visibly shifted during the last nuclear test, an enormous detonation that was recorded as a 6.3 magnitude earthquake in North Korea’s northeast.

Since then, the area, which is not known for natural seismic activity, has had three more quakes.

North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests since 2006, all of them in tunnels burrowed deep under Mount Mantap at a site known as the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Facility. Intelligence analysts and experts alike use satellite imagery to keep close track on movement at the three entrances to the tunnels for signals that a test might be coming. After the latest nuclear test, on September 3, Kim Jong Un’s regime claimed that it had set off a hydrogen bomb and that it had been a "perfect success."

the USA – The Glasgow Science Centre (GSC) team launch "Terry" the Teacake from Houston, Renfrewshire, at lunchtime. The sweet treat, attached to a weather balloon, was airborne for two hours and four minutes. It took one hour and 29 minutes to reach a peak altitude of 37,007 metres. The teacake, which landed in a tree in Galloway Forest Park, was said to be "pretty intact" after the adventure. The experiment was streamed on Facebook, with 33,000 people watching. GSC chief executive Dr Stephen Breslin said: "We engage people with space science every day, and we thought what better way to spark people's imaginations and interest in STEM than for us to launch something into space ourselves."

directly measured a blazing-bright object on the opposite side of the Milky Way, almost doubling the record for the most distant object measured in our own galaxy. The researchers used a system of 10 radio telescopes in New Mexico called the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to pinpoint the distance to the glowing, star-forming region. Humans have detected and measured objects 13.3 billion light-years away, at the very edge of the observable universe. (One light-year is the distance light travels in year, about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers.)

So why is it so difficult to measure objects across the Milky Way, which is a mere 100,000 light-years wide?

The answer has to do with location. Our solar system is positioned about halfway out on one of the galaxy's massive spiral arms, so the only view we get of the Milky Way is side-on. It's like trying to map a forest you're standing in by measuring the distances between the trees around you. Except, you can't walk around in these "woods," because the Earth isn't moving fast enough to give Earthlings much of a different perspective on a human timescale.

This is why the constellations look the same today as they did thousands of years ago.

Dust, gas and stars in the galactic disk obscure our view of objects farther away, just as the trees obscure a person's view in the analogy, researchers said in a statement about the new study from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). But we can twist and turn to get a better look at the woods around us and see how the features appear to move as we change our perspective, the researchers said. This phenomenon, called parallax, is what makes your finger seem to jump when you hold it in front of your nose and alternate which eye you use to look at it.

Many observatories simultaneously announced two spectacular firsts on Monday (October 16, 2017). One is that the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Europe-based Virgo detector have now both detected gravitational waves from the collision of two neutron stars; previously, they’d seen gravitational waves only from black hole collisions. The other is that some 70 ground- and space-based observatories observed the event, too, plus it was seen in optical light within 11 hours of the gravitational wave detection.

Many scientists are hailing this discovery as the beginning of: a new era in astronomy.

A study published in Geophysical Research Letters says that a hole in the moon’s Marius Hills – a region with a set of volcanic domes – is a skylight of a large open lava tube that could be used to protect astronauts from hazardous conditions on the surface. It could be large enough, the researchers say, to house an underground lunar city.
No one has ever been on the moon longer than three days, largely because space suits alone can’t shield astronauts from its elements: extreme temperature variation, radiation, and meteorite impacts. Unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere or magnetic field to protects its inhabitants.

The safest place to seek shelter on the moon is the inside of an intact lava tube, according to the study.

2016 HO3 is a small near-Earth object (NEO) measuring no more than 100 meters (330 feet) across that, while orbiting the sun, also appears to circle around the Earth as a quasi-satellite. Only five quasi-satellites have been discovered so far, but 2016 HO3 is the most stable of them. The provenance of this object is unknown. On timescales of a few centuries, 2016 HO3 remains within 38 to 100 lunar-distances from us. Observations also show that the HO3 rotates once every 28 minutes and is made of materials similar to asteroids. The astronomers know this because light reflected off the surface of 2016 HO3 is similar to that of other near-Earth objects and to meteorites on Earth’s surface

A small asteroid or comet that has been spotted racing through our solar system may have come from elsewhere in the galaxy, U.S. space scientists say, possibly marking the first such interstellar visitor observed from Earth. The mystery object, so far known only as A/2017 U1, was discovered earlier this month by a researcher using a sophisticated telescope system at the University of Hawaii that continually scans the universe for such phenomenon.
"It is going extremely fast and on such a trajectory that we can say with confidence that this object is on its way out of the solar system and not coming back," NASA's Davide Farnocchia said. Astronomers are urgently tracking A/2017 U1 with telescopes as it makes its journey through our solar system,

hoping to use that data to confirm the object's interstellar origins and learn what they can about its composition.

Astronomers have finally detected X-rays blazing from Jupiter's mysterious southern lights, a new study finds. But unexpectedly, the giant planet's northern and southern lights do not pulse in time with each other, but beat out of sync, according to the new work. This finding raises questions about how these auroras are generated, the researchers said. NASA's Voyager 1 probe first detected auroras on Jupiter in 1979, concentrated near the planet's north pole. Auroras occur when energetic winds of electrically charged particles — say, from the sun — get captured by a planet's magnetic field and collide with atoms in that world's atmosphere.

This results in colorful streamers of light in the planet's sky, usually near the body's magnetic poles.

artists beam a message to GJ 273, a red dwarf star also known as Luyten's star that lies 12.36 light-years from Earth, project team members reveal (Nov. 16). Luyten's star hosts two known planets, one of which, GJ 273b, may be capable of supporting life as we know it. Though the message is designed to provoke a response from the hypothetical denizens of GJ 273b, the main goal in sending the communication involves laying a foundation for the future, said team member Douglas Vakoch, president of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.

(collaboration involving METI International; the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia in Spain;
and Sónar, a music, creativity and technology festival in Barcelona, Spain.)

The October transmissions represented the first phase of "Sónar Calling GJ 273b." The group also plans to send an "expanded tutorial" to Luyten's star in April 2018 at several different radio frequencies, turning the EISCAT antenna into something like a musical instrument.

A 7;3 magnitude earthquake strikes at 21:18 local time (18:18 GMT), about 30km (19 miles) southwest of Halabjaat, a depth of 23.3 km in Iran near the Iraq border, killing at least 530 people and injuring thousands more. One Iranian aid agency reports that 8,000 people need shelter after the quake, one of the largest this year. Also in Iraq near its Iran border at least eight people are killed.

In the south-east of the country, the Arabia tectonic plate is actually pushing under the Eurasia tectonic plate,
but in the Northwest these great slabs rub directly against each other.

The quake, recorded at 9:18 p.m. on Sunday, was felt as far away as Turkey and Pakistan. The epicentre was near Ezgeleh, Iran, about 135 miles northeast of Baghdad.

In the UK – the planets Jupiter and Venus appear to be so close together before sunrise at 7.15am that they appear to be virtually on top of each other. But the unusual sight will fade very quickly, however, as the sky gets brighter.

A planet with some similarities to Earth has been discovered "only" 11 light-years (that's a mere 64 trillion miles) from our solar system, astronomers announced in a study published this day. The new world is named Ross 128b (the star is known as Ross 128) and is now the second-closest planet yet detected that may have a surface temperature similar to Earth. Only the planet Proxima b, which orbits around the star Proxima Centauri, is closer, at 4.2 light-years away. The planet is also roughly the same size as Earth.

SpaceX reports: "Though we’ve preserved the range opportunity for tomorrow (17 November),

we’ll take the time needed to complete the data review and then confirm a new launch date."

Between 8PM and 10PM (US Eastern time), SpaceX sends a secret payload called "Zuma" beyond our atmosphere. The aerospace corporation test-fired a Falcon 9 rocket on November 11th with the intention of launching the mission on the 15th. While the latest target date was moved by a day, and it could be delayed again, Zuma needs to launch by November 30th. Why it absolutely needs to be in position by the end of this month isn't clear, though — not when we know next to nothing about the mission. According to Space, SpaceX is launching the payload,

which was commissioned by defense technology company Northrop Grumman, for the US government.

November 17 and Saturday, November 18 show the optimum number of Leonid meteors, no matter where you live on the globe, try watching between midnight and dawn. The new moon on November 18 will provide deliciously dark skies for the 2017 Leonid meteor shower

Mars: "Recurring slope lineae" (RSL) are dark streaks, first discovered in 2011, that appear seasonally on parts of the Mars landscape. In 2015, researchers took RSL as evidence of active salt water flows on the red planet.

But now (20/11/2017), new findings suggest RSL may actually be from shifting sand and dust.
America's NASA had titled its 2015 release "NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today's Mars."
This release is called "Recurring Martian Streaks: Flowing Sand, Not Water?"

It shows how new evidence can cause scientists to reevaluate previous findings

Mount Agung, Indonesia, erupts. Mount Agung belches smoke as high as 1,500 meters above its summit, sparking an exodus from settlements near the mountain. Hundreds of flights are grounded as the main international airport is shuttered for a second day on Tuesday, leaving 120,000 stranded visitors in need of shelter — or an exit plan.

An earthquake of M 6.0 – strikes 25km SE of Taron, Papua New Guinea, at 07:11:12 UTC (4.619°S 153.211°E) at a depth of 57.8km.

cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) may have discovered the first case of alien life after allegedly finding bacteria on the hull of the space station. This bacteria was not there at the launch of the ISS and therefore could have come from outer space. "Bacteria that had not been there during the launch of the ISS module were found on the swabs," confirmed Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, who was part of a team of scientists aboard the orbiting station –

"That is, they came from somewhere in outer space and settled on the outside of the station," he told a Russian news outlet.

They are currently being analysed to find out if they really are extra-terrestrial in nature. Some bacteria originating from Earth (specifically, Madagascar) have been found to survive the vacuum of space after being lifted off our planet by a phenomenon known as "ionosphere lift".

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft — cruising interstellar space billions of miles from Earth — is back on the right track Friday thanks to thrusters that were fired up for the first time in 37 years. The unmanned spaceship was launched along with its twin, Voyager 2, more than 40 years ago to explore the outer planets of our solar system, traveling further than any human-made object in history. But after decades of operation, the "attitude control thrusters" that turn the spacecraft by firing tiny "puffs" had degraded. The small adjustments are needed to turn Voyager's antenna toward Earth, allowing it to continue sending communications.

"At 13 billion miles from Earth, there's no mechanic shop nearby to get a tune-up," NASA said in a news release.

Experts at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California decided to turn to four backup thrusters that were last used on November 8, 1980.

no water on distant planet WASP-18b. But the good news: The planet's atmosphere is keeping scientists on their toes — in fact, they say it's like nothing they have ever seen before. Although the planet was first spotted in 2009, a team of astronomers is doing new research on its atmosphere and have published a new paper on the topic in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A little-known planet, 111 light years away, could be a ‘scaled-up version of Earth’ which is able to host alien life, according to new research. The distant exoplanet is known as K2-18b and has been described as being a potential ‘Super-Earth’ – a large rocky planet with the potential to support life. It orbits within its star’s habitable zone, which means there’s a chance it could hold liquid water on its surface, which is a key component for the possibility of life as we know it. The new study, by researchers at the University of Texas, Scarborough, and University of Montreal, Canada, was carried out using data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). They also discovered for the first time that the planet has a neighbour, called K2-18b.

Both planets orbit the red-dwarf star K2-18, which is 111 light years from Earth in the Leo constellation.

In Midvaal, Gauteng, South Africa – A tornado rips through the area destroying about 500 shack-homes, causing extensive damage, and injuring at least 50-people.

A solar system with as many planets as our own is been discovered with the help of NASA's Kepler space telescope and artificial intelligence, the US space agency says. "Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star," NASA said in a statement. However, none of the planets are expected to be hospitable to life. The eight-planet system – the largest known outside of ours – orbits a star called Kepler 90 some 2,545 light-years away. "The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system," said Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin. "You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer." The newly identified planet, Kepler-90i, is a rocky planet like Earth, but orbits its star once every 14.4 days, meaning a full year there is the same as two weeks on Earth.

Phaethon (named after the son of Helios, the sun god in Greek mythology, who nearly set the world on fire after losing control of his father's chariot) will pass by the planet at around 10 pm GMT [5 pm EST] on Saturday night and will travel within 6.4 million miles of our little piece of the universe. With a diameter of 5 km Nasa have labelled the floating hunk of space rock as "potentially hazardous," but to quote Douglas Adams. 3200 Phaethon, as discovered on 1983 October 11 by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite. With a diameter of about 5 km, Phaethon is the third largest near-Earth asteroid classified as "Potentially Hazardous" after 53319 1999 JM8 (7km) and 4183 Cuno (5.6 km).

Phaethon's approach is within 0.069 au of Earth on 2017 December 16
when it will be a strong radar imaging target at Goldstone and Arecibo.

Nasa is refocusing its efforts to land on the moon, and this could mean building a settlement or a gateway to the rest of the solar system that can sustain human life. Building a moon base might not be as simple as carrying construction material in a rocket and laying it out. Before even thinking of settling on the lunar surface, it is necessary to understand how the environment on the Moon works. In an interview with Newsweek, Nasa senior technologist and expert in building planetary outposts, Robert P. Mueller, detailed how it might be possible to set up a permanent habitat on the Moon.
The first aspect of construction on the Moon, according, to Mueller is the building of the two-dimensional features like roads, parking lots, landing pads, and thermal areas that can hold warmth from the Lunar daytime.
Then comes the three-dimensional projects like the hangars and habitats.

Such structures are more than just sheds, they need to be pressurised and airtight to make it possible for people to live and work on site.

As far as water is concerned, there is plenty of it in on the Moon as well as Mars, said Mueller. It has to be mined from the soil. Once water is extracted from the soil, it has to be purified after which it can be consumed. Water is the most important resource in space, he noted.

Stephen Hawking has warned that the human race will perish on Earth after we turn it into a sizzling fireball in less than 600 years. He declares that humans must "boldly go where no one has gone before" if we fancy continuing our species for another million years. If we don’t, the world will become overcrowded and increased energy consumption will turn the planet into a ball of fire because of our soaring energy consumption as the population rises.

with a mass almost three times that of Earth, making it a super-Earth, was discovered in 2017 by A. Suárez Mascareño and her team with with the HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo off the coast of Spain. It is located 21 light years away and orbits its M dwarf star in only two weeks. Scientists have their eyes set on these common planet types as a possibility for life.

have unearthed the remains of a 150 million-year-old plesiosaur in Antarctica—and it bears a striking resemblance to the legendary Scottish monster of Loch Ness.

the Southern Philippines – A tropical storm, Kai-tak (Urduja), stikes causing the death of more than 40 people, cutting power supplies in many areas, forcing the cancellation of several flights, stranding more than 15,000 people in various ports in the region and prompted nearly 88,000 people to seek shelter in evacuation centres.

the Southern Philippines – A powerful storm, Tembin, strikes causing landslides and flooding, and killing 200 people.

Earth currently takes about 24 hours to complete its day – that is, a rotation on the planet's axis. However, Earth once spun far more quickly, perhaps taking only 2 to 3 hours to complete a day. The gravitational pulls of the sun and moon helped slow Earth's spinning over many years to its current speed, an effect known as tidal braking.
Earth's spin continues to slow, with the planet's day increasing by about 1.8 milliseconds per century. Previous research has found that a variety of different factors can also speed up and slow down how fast Earth whirls. 

For example, prior work found that rising sea levels from melting glaciers can shift Earth's axis, increasing the rate at which the planet spins.

Earth’s global surface temperatures in 2017 ranked as the second-warmest since 1880, according to an analysis by NASA. In a separate, independent analysis, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that 2017 was the third-warmest year in their record.

December, Google and NASA researchers announced they’d found two new exoplanets using a neural network. Now, the code used to make the discovery has been released for free. "We hope this release will prove a useful starting point for developing similar models for other NASA missions, like K2 (Kepler’s second mission) and the upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission," Chris Shallue, a Senior Software Engineer at Google, wrote on the company's Research Blog. Researchers can now use (and adapt) the computer code to look for new worlds hidden in the vast reams of data gathered by the Kepler space telescope.

As of January 1, More than 3,700 planets have been found; about 2,500 of those were discovered by NASA’s Kepler satellite missions. We’ve also found 2,794 planetary systems and 622 "multiple planet systems," according to the Extra-solar Planets Catalog, which tracks humankind’s hunt for planets. Despite the thousands of planets we’ve found, though, we don’t know a lot. We know sizes, masses… and that’s about it. "If you take a step back and ask what do we know, we know there are thousands of planets out there,” Sara Seager, an MIT professor who’s one of the lead exoplanet researchers in the world, told The Daily Beast. “We don’t know a lot about them." At this point, those planets aren’t much more than a few points of numerical data. But soon we might know more, as astronomers prioritize quality over quantity of exoplanet discoveries and dive into their compositions in our hunt for the next Earth. In 2016, astronomers announced the discovery of Proxima Centauri b, heralded as the closest we’d come to finding an Earth twin: It was found orbiting the closest star to Earth, was just a little more massive than Earth, and appeared to be in the habitable "Goldilocks zone" around its star where — if everything went right — it could hold liquid water in some areas and maybe, just maybe, life.

A state of emergency is declared across New York, after a fierce winter storm hit the eastern United States bringing heavy snow and freezing temperatures. Storm Grayson has impacted millions along the East Coast, with states of emergency also in place in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Seventeen deaths have so been blamed on the extreme weather, including two men killed when their pick-up truck overturned in North Carolina and a passenger who was unable to escape a vehicle that crashed through a railroad crossing 20 miles north of Philadelphia.

Hurricane force winds have led to power cuts in more than 100,000 homes and businesses across the north east of America.

waves are likely causing Jupiter's jet stream to change direction, a new study suggests. The new results could reveal information not just about clouds in the atmospheres of planets in our own solar system, but also about those moving above the surfaces of alien worlds, researchers said.
"Jupiter is much bigger than Earth, much farther from the sun, rotates much faster and has a very different composition, but it turns out to be an excellent laboratory for understanding this equatorial phenomenon," study lead author Rick Cosentino (a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland) said in a statement.

On Kadovar Island, Papua, New Guinea – An apparently domant 365 metre tall volcano begins erupting. All residents of the island are evacuated with no loss of life, said the US-based charity Samaritan Aviation, which operates seaplanes to remote areas of Papua New Guinea. An estimated 500-600 people live on the island.

The eruption may become explosive, with a risk of tsunamis and landslides

At 10:39:37.730 (UTC), in the San Francisco Bay area of the USA – A 4.4 magnitude earthquake, strikes at a depth of 12.3 km, 2km SE of Berkeley.

successfully completes its first launch of 2018, sending a highly secretive U.S. government spacecraft into orbit before carrying out an upright landing of the rocket’s first stage. The classified payload, named Zuma, takes off at around 8 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket and is sent into low-earth orbit. But it fails to reach orbit and is assumed to be a total loss. Little is known about the mission’s objectives but it must be assumed

to be a spy satellite focussed on South Africa in terms of its name.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp, led by entrepreneur Elon Musk, launched its first satellite for the U.S. military with its Falcon 9 rocket in May 2017.

flash "turning night into day" seen over a wide swathe of Russia (primarily over the regions of Bashkortostan, Udmurtia, and Tatarstan), from a disintegrating asteroid striking the earth's atmosphere, causes speculation of a US airstrike on North Korea.

In Groninge province, Netherlands – A 3.4 magnitude earthquake strikes at a depth of 3km (which some blame on Gas extraction). Its epicenter was detected near the village of Zeerijp. Since the 1960s, the Netherlands has been extracting natural gas from the soil in the north of the country. Gas (crude oil) extraction is responsible for virtually all earthquakes in that region, according to the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

In California, USA – A powerful storm unleashes a torrent of water causing serious mudslides which claim the lives of at least 17 people. The heavy rain triggers debris flows and flash flooding in areas hit hard by recent wildfires, including the massive Thomas Fire, which had burned nearly 282,000 acres across Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and is the largest wildfire in state history.

International astronomers have spotted a few dozen fast radio bursts (FRBs) – and as many as 10,000 may occur daily — but only one has repeated sporadically, known as FRB 121102, allowing it to be studied (the blasts which emit more energy in a single millisecond than our sun does all day). Researchers reported in the journal Nature that it appears to come from in an extreme environment, "among the most highly magnetized regions of space ever observed." Similar environments are known to exist around massive black holes, but that may not be the only answer. The radio bursts from FRB 121102 could also originate from a young neutron star inside a powerful nebula, or a supernova remnant, said the report. FRB 121102 was discovered in 2014 by Laura Spitler, a postdoctoral researcher who now works for the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

The mysterious burst lasted three one-thousandths of a second.

02:51:31 (UTC) Off the coast of Honduras, 44km East of Great Swan Island – A 7.6 magnitude earthquake strikes at a depth of 10km.

ozone layer protects the planet's surface from some of the sun's more harmful rays that can cause cancer and cataracts in humans, and damage plant life, according to NASA. In the mid-1980s, researchers identified a massive hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica and determined that it had been caused largely by human-produced chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Previous satellite observations have observed changes in the size of the ozone hole, noting that it can grow and shrink from year to year. But the new study is the first to directly measure changes in the amount of chlorine – the main CFC byproduct responsible for ozone depletion – in the atmosphere above Antarctica, according to a statement from NASA.
The study shows a 20-percent decrease in ozone depletion due to chlorine between 2005 and 2016. [Earth's Atmosphere: Composition, Climate & Weather] The new study looks at ozone data collected between 2005 and 2016 by the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument aboard the Aura satellite. The instrument cannot directly detect chlorine atoms, but instead detects hydrochloric acid, which forms when chlorine atoms react with methane, and then bond with hydrogen. When Antarctica is bathed in sunlight in the Southern Hemisphere's summer, CFCs break down and produce chlorine, which then break apart ozone atoms. But

during the winter months (early July to mid-September),
the chlorine tends to bind with methane "once all the ozone has been destroyed" in its vicinity, according to the statement. 

The US journal Science publishes a report of the discovery of eight ice sites of buried glaciers on the planet Mars, based on data from the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, launched in 2005. They are all near the poles, which slip into frigid darness during the Martian winter. NASA plans to send the first human explorers to Mars by the 2030s.

Chinese scientists have an audacious proposal to clean up Earth’s cluttered orbit using giant lasers to obliterate old satellites and other space junk. A paper, titled Impacts of orbital elements of space-based laser station on small scale space debris removal, by researchers at the Air Force Engineering University in China describes how space debris could be zapped into smaller, less-harmful pieces using space-based lasers. Space junk is an issue that has been occupying international space agencies for years, with NASA considering a variety of options to track, detect and remove man-made debris.
The Chinese scientists conducted a simulation of the laser station, concluding that it would be an effective method for clearing up Earth’s orbit. "[The simulation] provides necessary theoretical basis for the deployment of space-based laser station and the further application of space debris removal by using space-based laser [sic]," the paper’s abstract states. Research by U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin in 2014 found that every day there were around 200 threats to orbiting satellites.

The high-speed debris orbiting the planet, which continues to increase with each passing year,
is viewed as a serious threat to future space missions and
has been described by experts at the European Space Agency as a "deadly cascade."

a company led by the chief of satellite provider Talia, is launching a free satellite broadband service in the second quarter of 2018. It's promising speedy, low-latency Ka-band data in developing countries where income inequality and a lack of infrastructure (especially in rural areas) make conventional internet access impractical for most. Service will begin with Afghanistan, Iraq and most of Africa, but there are promises of more countries afterward. The strategy behind this no-charge access isn't terribly complicated: Quika is planning to support its free plan through its paid services for enterprises and internet providers. Also, while the service itself will be free,.

Quika notes that customers may have to pay for setup or make a deposit on the necessary hardware.

solar system may be an oddball in the universe. A new study using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope shows that in most cases, exoplanets orbiting the same star have similar sizes and regular spacing between their orbits.
By contrast, our own solar system has a range of planetary sizes and distances between neighbors. The smallest planet, Mercury, is about one-third the size of Earth — and the biggest planet, Jupiter, is roughly 11 times the diameter of Earth. There also are very different spacings between individual planets, particularly the inner planets. This means our solar system may have formed differently than other solar systems did, the research team suggests, although more observations are needed to learn what the different mechanisms were. "The planets in a system tend to be the same size and regularly spaced, like peas in a pod. These patterns would not occur if the planet sizes or spacings were drawn at random," Lauren Weiss, the study's lead author and an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal, said in a statement.
The research team examined 355 stars that had a total of 909 planets, which periodically transit across their faces (as seen from Earth). The planets are between 1,000 and 4,000 light-years away from Earth. 

The so-called Humanity Star is launched by Rocket Lab, a one-metre geodesic sphere, made up of 65 highly reflective carbon fibre panels (magnitude 4.6). The Humanity Star will not be visible from Northern Hemisphere locations until early March.

The Humanity Star will only be in orbit for about nine months.

asteroid larger than any skyscraper yet built is hurtling toward Earth, the Daily Mail informs. If it hits on February 4, the paper continues, scientists predict a decade of cold and darkness, skies choked with soot, and misery across the planet. Between these paragraphs, the Mail inserts occasional reminders that asteroid 2002 AJ129 will not hit Earth, according to NASA. In fact it is predicted to get no closer than 2.6 million miles from Earth, despite NASA’s scary-sounding classification of the rock as "potentially hazardous" — a term which the Mail has paired with horrific illustrations of an asteroid careening straight into the planet.

11:47 (UCT) In Alaska – A 5.6 magnitude eaarthquake strikes 240km away from Kodiak at a depth of 23km.

Off the East Coast of Taiwan – A shallow magnitude 6.1 earthquake strikes 9 miles northeast of the city of Hualien, at a depth of only 4.9 miles. Taiwan’s Central News Agency said the island’s earthquake monitoring agency registered seven tremors around that time, with the strongest recorded at a magnitude of 5.8 and a depth of 10 miles.

Off the coast of Hualien, Taiwan (East Coast) – Taiwan experiences magnitude 6.4 earthquales. 19 earthquakes today, all occurring just off the coast of Hualien, according to the Central Weather Bureau (CWB). National Central University Institute of Applied Geology professor Lee Chyi-tyi describes this cluster of earthquakes as a "earthquake swarm".

Multiple aftershocks are continuing to strike the area. 

billionaire Elon Musk launches the world's most powerful rocket — the SpaceX Falcon Heavy — towards an orbit near Mars.
Thanks to the successful Falcon Heavy launch, SpaceX shoots a midnight cherry-red Tesla Roadster into space, with the top down, blaring David Bowie, and being "driven" by a male mannequin in a SpaceX spacesuit.

the desert of Oman, the Austrian Space Forum, a mainly volunteer collective, with the backing of the Omani government, the AMADEE-18 Mars Analog Mission has brought together researchers, inventors, space professionals and enthusiasts.
Would-be astronauts in aluminium-coated suits venture out in rovers from a sprawling camp in Oman's barren desert: a simulation by a European venture aiming to one day help humans survive on Mars. Behind a barbed wire fence protected by soldiers from the Gulf sultanate, researchers in prefab facilities work away on experiments —

that include trying to grow vegetables in inhospitable terrain chosen for its resemblance to the red planet, Mars.

NASA releases a record-breaking photograph taken by the New Horizons spacecraft when it was 3.79 billion miles away from the Earth. New Horizons flew past Pluto in July 2015, taking pictures which revealed an even more diverse landscape than scientists had previously imagined. After the fly-by, the spacecraft continued into the Kuiper Belt — similar to the asteroid belt but further out from the Sun and composed of dwarf planets and frozen ice, rather than rocky bodies. Now, using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), the spacecraft has photographed several Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and dwarf planets at unique angles.
New Horizons is only the fifth man-made spacecraft to ever travel beyond the outer planets, and many of its activities are setting distance records, according to NASA. In December 2017 it successfully carried out the most-distant course-correction manoeuvre ever, with the mission team guiding it towards a close-encounter with a KBO scheduled for 1 January 2019.

The solar system’s strange cigar-shaped visitor 'Oumuamua' — Hawaiian for "scout" or "messenger" — is tumbling chaotically as the result of a violent collision. And the interstellar object will continue to spin for billions of years as it journeys through space, scientists have reported in a study published in Nature Astronomy. This is the latest of several revelations following the first-ever discovery of a solar system invader last October. Initially believed to be a comet, then an asteroid, scientists think the wandering "interstellar object" is a hunk of ice wrapped in organic sun-blocking material. "At some point or another it's been in a collision," Queen's University, Belfast, research fellow and lecturer Wes Fraser told the BBC. The research team watched 'Oumuamua’s brightness change over time to model exactly how it was spinning. 'Oumuamua' "appears to be in an excited rotational state undergoing non-principal axis rotation" the study authors wrote. This unusual "excited" movement is better known as "tumbling." "Tumbling is an unusual state of rotation," Fraser said during Sunday’s episode of the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night show. "It quickly starts to wobble around chaotically."

Yusuke Yamada, a professor at Osaka City University, said his team has managed to use protein from egg white as a 'tool" for producing hydrogen, a powerful source of clean electricity. The new method "brings us closer to our ultimate goal of producing hydrogen from water," Yamada told AFP. "This lays the groundwork for the clean production of hydrogen in the future," added the scientist. When it reacts with oxygen, hydrogen produces electricity, releasing only water and heat in the process. But hydrogen is currently mass-produced using natural gas or fossil fuels, which themselves result in harmful emissions.

There are 95 additions to the ever-growing list of exoplanets, as researchers analyzing data collected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope discovered them scattered around our home galaxy, the Milky Way. About 3,600 exoplanets are known to exist outside our solar system now, most of them thanks to Kepler. Some planets have also been discovered recently outside the Milky Way. An international team of researchers made the discovery while analyzing 275 potential exoplanet candidates that showed up in the Kepler data during the spacecraft’s second mission, called K2. In 2013, four years after its launch, there was a malfunction in Kepler that ended its first mission. But a repair was affected in 2014, and the second phase of its planet-hunting mission, which is still ongoing, was called K2. Of the 275 candidates in the dataset — being compiled since the first K2 data release in 2014 — 149 were verified to be actual exoplanets, and of those, researchers found 54 had already been discovered earlier, leaving them with 95 previously unknown exoplanets.

in Oaxaca, Mexico – A 7.5 magnitude earthquake strikes, at a depth of 26.7 miles (43 km), as a result of shallow thrust faulting on or near the plate boundary between the Cocos and North America plates

A 6.1 magnitude earthquake for the second time in three days in the southern city of Oaxaca, Mexico at a depth of 10km at 6.56GMT – sparking two aftershock quakes in California –

as Pacific Ring devastation looms.

In North Sumatra, Indonesia, about 8:53 am – Mount Sinabung erupts sending massive columns of steam and ash into the sky.

The most distant human-made object is the spacecraft Voyager 1, which (in late February 2018) is over 13 billion miles (21 billion km) from Earth. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched 16 days apart in 1977. Both spacecraft flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 also flew by Uranus and Neptune. Now both Voyagers are heading out of our solar system, into the space between the stars. Voyager 1 officially became the first earthly craft to leave the solar system, crossing the heliopause, in 2012. Both Voyager spacecraft were designed back in the early 1970s. They were built to take advantage of a rare grouping of planets on a single side of the sun in our solar system.

This grouping, which happens only every 176 years, let the Voyagers slingshot from one planet to the next, via gravitational assists.

Hubble Space Telescope findings suggest that the universe is expanding much faster than expected – and astronomers say the rules of physics may need to be rewritten in order to understand why. Scientists use the Hubble Space Telescope to make precise measurements of the universe's expansion rate. However, observations for a new study don't match up with previous predictions based on the universe's trajectory following the Big Bang, according to a statement from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
The Hubble Space Telescope measures the distance to other galaxies by examining a type of star that varies in brightness. These stars, called Cepheid variables, brighten and dim in a predictable way that lets researchers judge the distance to them. This data is then used to measure the universe's expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant. The new findings show that eight Cepheid variables in our Milky Way galaxy are up to 10 times farther away than any previously analyzed star of this kind.

A signal caused by the very first stars to form in the universe has been picked up by a tiny but highly specialised radio telescope in the remote Western Australian desert. Details of the detection are revealed in a paper published in Nature, and tell us these stars formed only 180 million years after the Big Bang. It’s potentially one of the most exciting astronomical discoveries of the decade. A second Nature paper, also published February 28, links the finding to possibly the first detected evidence that dark matter, thought to make up much of the universe, might interact with ordinary atoms. This discovery was made by a small radio antenna operating in the band of 50-100 Mhz, which overlaps some well known FM radio stations (which is why the telescope is located in the remote WA desert). What has been detected is the absorption of light by neutral atomic hydrogen gas, which filled the early universe after it cooled down from the hot plasma of the Big Bang. At this time (180 million years after the Big Bang) the early universe was expanding, but the densest regions of the universe were collapsing under gravity to make the first stars.
A note of caution is warranted. This hydrogen signal is very difficult to detect: it is thousands of times fainter than the background radio noise even for the remote location in Western Australia. The authors of the first Nature paper have spent more than a year doing a multitude of tests and checks to make sure they have not made a mistake. The sensitivity of their aerial needs to be exquisitely calibrated all across the bandpass. The detection is an impressive technical achievement but astronomers worldwide will be holding their breath until the result is confirmed by an independent experiment. If it is confirmed then this will open the door to a new window on the early universe and potentially a new understanding of the nature of dark matter by providing a new observational window in to it.

have designed a nuclear weapon-wielding spacecraft powerful enough to deflect a 1600-ft asteroid currently circling the sun. Set for multiple close encounters with Earth over the next hundred years, there is a chance – however vanishingly small – that the asteroid Bennu could one day collide with our planet. Called the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response, or HAMMER, the "impactor" spacecraft would be deployed to deflect a small asteroid with its own bulk. In certain cases, however, it would set off a nuclear weapon.
NASA lists 78 dates on which Bennu has a tiny chance of colliding with Earth. Taken together, they give an impact risk of one in 2700— small, but not impossible. Asteroid impacts can be devastating. Some 66 million years ago, the impact of a 9-mile asteroid is widely believed to have wiped out most of Earth’s dinosaurs. In 2013, a 65-ft asteroid entered the skies above Russia, exploding over Chelyabinsk Oblast. The blast caused extensive damage and injured nearly 1,500 people.

Unfortunately for us vulnerable earthlings, HAMMER is a plan which may never be built. The proposal is one of a growing number of potential planetary protection efforts developed following a 2010 National Research Council report that called for the development of NEO hazard mitigation plans. Researchers modelled their work on Bennu because the asteroid is the best-studied near Earth object (NEO). It zipped past Earth in 1999 and again in 2005, but it won’t have another close encounter until 2054, NASA predicts.

In September 2135 it may come as close as one-third the distance to the moon.

first space station Tiangong-1 (Heavenly/Sky Palace), launched in 2011, is expected to come crashing down to Earth within weeks around Easter, but scientists have not been able to predict where the 8.5-tonne module will hit. The US-funded Aerospace Corporation estimates Tiangong-1 will re-enter the atmosphere during the first week of April, give or take a week. The European Space Agency says the module will come down between 24 March and 19 April. The fuel on board is believed to be very carcinogenic.
In 2016 China admitted it had lost control of Tiangong-1 and would be unable to perform a controlled re-entry. "If this should happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometres in size," said Aerospace, a research organisation that advises government and private enterprise on space flight.

Zhu Congpeng, from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, said:
"We have been continuously monitoring Tiangong-1 and expect to 'allow it' to fall within the first half of this year. It will burn up on entering the atmosphere and the remaining wreckage will fall into a designated area of the sea, without endangering the surface."

Although the bus-sized spacecraft is most likely to burn up upon re-entry, some scientists fear that debris could survive the atmosphere and land
anywhere within c.43 degrees either side of the equator.
Reseachers have warned that a number of the spacecraft's parts – including its dense rocket engines –
would be unlikely to burn up, leaving chunks of the craft to crash towards the planet's surface.

was launched by China's National Space Administration (CNSA) in 2011 as a prototype ahead of the Chinese large modular space station,

the core module of which is expected to launch next year (2019).

Asteroid 2017 VR12 passes safely at 3.76 times the moon’s distance. Asteroid 2017 VR12 was closest to Earth at around 07:53 UTC (2:53 a.m. EST).

humans have measured time by the movement of the cosmos. A spin of the Earth is a day, an orbit of the moon is about a month and the Earth’s journey around the sun is a year. We might have to add a new cosmological measure to our calendars, because astronomers have discovered that all galaxies, no matter their size, rotate once every billion years.

At about 5:30 a.m. local time, Yellowstone's Steamboat Geyser erupts for the first time since 2014.

Members of the International Space Station (ISS) expedition 55/56, NASA astronauts Andrew Feustel (C) and Richard Arnold (L) and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev board the Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft at the Baikonur cosmodrome. The Soyuz-FG rocket booster with Soyuz MS-08 space ship carrying a new crew to the International Space Station, ISS, blasts off at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.

The Russian rocket carries Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, and U.S. astronauts Richard Arnold and Andrew Feustel.

An earthquake of 7 magnitude strikes off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The quake, the latest in a series in the region over recent days, struck 180 km west of the town of Rabaul, on New Britain island, at a shallow depth of 10 km.

in the oil-and -gas-rich Permian Basin ground level has shifted 40 inches (about a metre) over the past two-and-a-half years, from oil drilling. More than 7,000 oil fields now dot the Permian Basin. The Texas counties of Winkler, Ward, Reeves, and Pecos (about 4,000 square miles, or 10,000 square km) are both sinking and uplifting, which includes the towns of Pecos, Monahans, Fort Stockton, Imperial, Wink and Kermit.

China’s Tiangong-1 space station crashes in the Pacific Ocean, north west of Tahiti, according to the country’s space agency. The spacecraft re-entered the earth’s atmosphere at 0015 GMT on Monday ( ~5:16 p.m., PST, April 1) over the South Pacific and mostly burnt up, state news agency Xinhua says. It was originally planned to be decommissioned in 2013 but its mission was repeatedly extended. Eventually, in 2016, it had become apparent to space-watchers that the craft had stopped functioning and was no longer responding to ground control.

In December 2017, China made a statement to the UN predicting that Tiangong-1 would come down by late March 2018.

mission demonstrating how to salvage potentially dangerous junk orbiting the Earth is successfully launched. The blast off came less than a day after a Chinese space station (Tiangong-1) broke up over the Pacific, hitting the sea north of Tahiti. The RemoveDEBRIS satellite, to be deployed from the International Space Station (ISS), will carry a net for capturing space litter and a harpoon that can spear and haul in larger objects.
A Space X Falcon 9 rocket carrying the box-like craft takes off from the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida at 9.30pm UK time on Monday.

RemoveDEBRIS is now on board a capsule heading for the ISS, where it is due to arrive on Wednesday morning, April 4.

On Wednesday, physicists at Europe's massive underground particle lab said they have taken a step closer to solving the mystery through unprecedented observation of an antimatter particle they forged in the lab – an atom of "antihydrogen". "What we're looking for is (to see) if hydrogen in matter and antihydrogen in antimatter behave in the same way," said Jeffrey Hangst of the ALPHA experiment at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). Finding even the slightest difference may help explain the apparent matter-antimatter disparity and would rock the Standard Model of physics – the mainstream theory of the fundamental particles that make up the Universe and the forces that govern them. But, somewhat disappointingly, the latest, "most precise test to date", has found no difference between the behaviour of a hydrogen atom and that of an antihydrogen one.

Not yet.

have detected a dozen black holes at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, and said Wednesday there could be as many as 10,000. The find provides the first evidence for a long-held theory that the massive black hole at the core of every large galaxy should be surrounded by thousands of smaller ones, they wrote in the science journal Nature. "We observed a dozen black holes" around Sagittarius A, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, said study co-author Chuck Hailey, an astrophysicist at New York's Columbia University. "But this is the tip of the iceberg," he told AFP.

will soon be able to boldly go where no holidaymakers have gone before thanks to the launch of the first-ever luxury hotel in space. Announced during the Space 2.0 summit in San Jose, California, on Thursday, the ambitious Aurora Station project plans to allow six people – including two crew members – the opportunity to enjoy first-class accommodation above Earth as part of a 12-day odyssey among the stars. The once-in-a-lifetime experience will allow guests to experience the exhilaration of zero gravity and gaze upon stunning views of the planet below without the fear of getting lost in space, with the added perk of being able to witness an average of 16 sunrises and sunsets a day. Also on the agenda is the chance to take part in research experiments such as growing food in orbit and try out state-of-the-art virtual reality technology on the holodeck, while high-speed internet will let people put together some truly incredible Snapchat stories.

Frank Bunger, chief executive officer and founder of developer Orion Span, said the hotel would open in 2021 and host its first guests the following year. "We developed Aurora Station to provide a turnkey destination in space," he said. "Upon launch, Aurora Station goes into service immediately, bringing travellers into space quicker and at a lower price point than ever seen before, while still providing an unforgettable experience."

is just so weird and so exotic compared to the moon and other terrestrial planets," Kathleen Vander Kaaden, a planetary scientist at the engineering company Jacobs Engineering Group working on a contract at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas, told Newsweek. "It’s just a very exciting planet." To untrained eyes, its weirdness may not be clear.
Mercury is a tiny hunk of mostly metal, barely larger than the moon, dressed in a drab grey-brown and covered in scars left by billions of years of impacts. It speeds around the sun, which makes its surface incredibly hot during the day, but without an atmosphere blanketing it, the planet rapidly cools off every night. All that heat from the sun also creates a comet-like tail of sodium gas streaming away from the star. The last spacecraft to visit Mercury was NASA’s MESSENGER mission, which circled the planet from 2011 to 2015 before purposefully crashing itself into it. MESSENGER revealed that the planet had once been volcanically extremely active, that its dense core was even larger than scientists had expected, and even that the planet is shrinking.

recognizable storm in the solar system used to be so big that it could fit three whole Earths. Now, it has room for only one. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shrinking, and has been for decades.

An asteroid, estimated to be at least 150 feet in diameter, made an alarmingly close pass to Earth on Sunday morning just hours after it was first observed by astronomers. The asteroid, named Asteroid 2018 GE3, was closest to Earth at around 2.41 a.m. ET on April 15 when it was spotted about 119,500 miles away, EarthSky.org reports. That’s closer than the moon, which orbits Earth at an average distance of 238,900 miles. GE3 also passed close to the moon later that morning on its journey around the sun. According to EarthSky.org, Asteroid 2018 GE3 could be as much as six times bigger than the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which exploded over central Russia in 2013. When the rock hit the atmosphere it caused a bright flash, and thousands of fragments fell throughout the region of Chelyabinsk, breaking windows and injuring about 1,500 people.

If GE3 had entered Earth’s atmosphere it could have caused similar, if not more severe, damage.

exploring the effects of microgravity on human body suggests traveling to Mars and setting up a habitat there could pose a significant risk to the muscles of the travelers.
NASA and SpaceX aim for deep space and are already building massive rockets to launch crewed missions to the moon and beyond. But before any of that happens, all parties involved should look forward to addressing the concerns posited in a new research conducted by an international group of physiologists. According to the team, during long-term spaceflights or in future Martian habitats, astronauts would be exposed to microgravity or the condition where the gravitational field is much smaller than that of Earth. In these environments, the amount of oxygen would be lower than Earth, which means the cells won’t be able to use it to produce the energy required by skeletal muscles to enable movement.

6:51 pm (2251 GMT), Nasa launches its planet-hunting satellite, TESS (a $337 million satellite that aims to scan 85 percent of the skies for cosmic bodies where life may exist), on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The agency says the launch was originally scheduled for Monday 16 April, but rescheduled to conduct additional Guidance Navigation and Control analysis. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket was able to land on the droneship minutes later.

TESS is expected to reveal 20,000 planets beyond our solar system,
including more than 50 Earth-sized planets and up to 500 planets less than twice the size of the Earth, NASA says.

The Lyrid meteor shower – April’s shooting stars – lasts from about April 16 to 25. About 10 to 15 meteors per hour can be expected around the shower’s peak on a dark, moonless night. Fortunately, in 2018, the waxing moon will set before the peak morning hours of the Lyrid meteor shower. The Lyrids are known for uncommon surges that can sometimes bring the rate up to 100 per hour. Those rare outbursts are not easy to predict, but they’re one of the reasons the tantalizing Lyrids are worth checking out. The radiant for this shower is near the bright star Vega in the constellation Lyra (chart here), which rises in the northeast at about 10 p.m. on April evenings. In 2018

A study published Thursday confirms that the cracks identified on Mars' surface last year by the Curiosity rover are indeed evidence of ancient lakes that likely dried up about 3.5 billion years ago. The new study provides further evidence of what the climate on the Red Planet may have been like in its ancient past. The study, published online in Geology, proved that cracks on Mars' surface previously photographed by Curiosity are indeed desiccation mudcracks which could have only been formed when wet sediment was exposed to the air. This conclusion was based on an analysis of a single area of rock known as "Old Soaker." Researchers used the Curiosity rover and data from its many tools, particularly the Mars Hand Lens Imager, ChemCam Laser Induced Breakdown Spectrometer (LIBS) and the Alpha-Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) to study both the physical appearance and the chemistry of the rock, which is described as no bigger than a coffee table. 

Water still exists on Mars in the form of ice.
In 2015, NASA scientists found a slab of ice just beneath Mars' surface
that was estimated to be as big as California and Texas combined.

On Thursday evening, Hawaii County ordered roughly 1,500 people near Pahoa, Hawaii, to leave their homes. A new lava fissure had opened on Kilauea, a massive volcano in the southeast of the state’s Big Island. Lava from the fissure has come within several hundred yards of homes, threatening two subdivisions in the area. The fissure is also releasing toxic amounts of sulfur dioxide. A ponderous lava flow, moving through trees: It’s not exactly the sudden explosion that many Americans imagine when they hear the words volcanic eruption. But for exactly that reason, "it’s the kind of eruption that makes volcanologists nervous," says Erik Klemetti, a volcanologist at Denison University. The U.S. Geological Survey is still trying to understand the new fissure. If the lava flow stabilizes, residents could return to unharmed homes in a week or two. But if the new fissure follows a pattern set by other fissures on Kilauea, then the evacuation could "last for a prolonged period of time".

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, California – An Atlas 5 rocket soared into space early on Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying NASA's first robotic lander designed for exploring the deep interior of another planet on its voyage to Mars. The Mars InSight probe lifted off from the central California coast at 4:05 a.m.PDT, treating early-rising residents across a wide swath of the state to the luminous pre-dawn spectacle of the first U.S. interplanetary spacecraft to be launched over the Pacific. The lander will be carried aloft for NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) atop a two-stage, 19-story Atlas 5 rocket from the fleet of United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.

The payload will be released about 90 minutes after launch on a 301 million mile (484 million km) flight to Mars.
It is due to reach its destination in six months, landing on a broad, smooth plain close to the planet's equator
called the Elysium Planitia.

That will put InSight roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 landing site of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity. The new 800-pound (360-kg) spacecraft marks the 21st U.S.–launched Martian exploration, dating to the Mariner fly-by missions of the 1960s. Nearly two dozen other Mars missions have been launched by other nations. Once settled, the solar-powered InSight will spend two years – about one Martian year – plumbing the depths of the planet's interior for clues to how Mars took form and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets.

Shooting stars spawned by history's most famous comet will be visible from the UK over the weekend. The Eta Aquariids is an annual event that occurs when Earth passes through a stream of ice and dust left in the trail of Halley's Comet. The comet produces two meteor showers –

the Eta Aquariids, which are always visible in May, and the Orionids, which are visible in October.

Hawaii – From May 3 the Kilauea volcano begins erupting leaking lava through a series of 10 fissures above the surface, including several in a residential subdivision called Leilani Estates. Hawaii's civil defense service says 26 homes have been destroyed by the eruption as of Sunday evening May 6. In addition to lava flows and earthquakes, Kilauea is also producing large amounts of sulfur dioxide gas. That gas mixes with other chemicals like carbon dioxide and water to cause what scientists call volcanic smog, or vog, which is dangerous to breathe in high quantities.

Vog has been a problem at Kilauea since the eruption at the volcano's summit began in 2008

Every 405,000 years, gravitational tugs from the planets Jupiter and Venus gradually affect Earth's climate and life forms, according to a new study published Monday, May 7. In fact, this pattern has apparently been going on for at least 215 million years and allows scientists to more precisely date geological events like the spread of dinosaurs. "Scientists can now link changes in the climate, environment, dinosaurs, mammals and fossils around the world to this 405,000-year cycle in a very precise way," said study lead author Dennis Kent, an expert in paleomagnetism at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University. The cycle has been happening for hundreds of millions of years, from before the rise of dinosaurs, and is still active today, scientists say. 

is a swirling, spitting mass of incredibly hot charged particles called plasma. But that motion isn't all random—and scientists have just confirmed new details about one of the phenomena that control the movement of the sun's contents. That phenomenon is called a Rossby wave, and scientists have been looking for it in the sun for decades. Now, a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy found these waves can last several months and reach more than 1,000 miles below the sun's surface. The first evidence for solar Rossby waves came last year, when scientists tracking bright spots in the outermost layer of the sun watched them gradually drift. The team behind the new paper used six years worth of observations to track the sun's activity to identify and measure the impact of Rossby waves. These waves are caused by the rotation of a star or planet and create patches that rotate in the opposite direction. Unusually,

the new paper only found evidence for Rossbly waves directly over the sun's equator, not further to the north or south.

Scientists wanted to better understand what's happening on the sun because some of those phenomena have effects reaching far beyond the sun. For example, giant ejections of plasma out into space can impact communication and navigation satellites orbiting Earth. Rossby waves also occur here on Earth in the upper atmosphere and in the ocean. In the atmosphere, they shape weather patterns like the jet stream and distribute heat more evenly between the equator and the poles. The marine versions can take months to cross the Pacific near the equator but travel much more slowly farther to the north and south. While they move the surface of the ocean just a few inches, they can be as tall as 300 feet deep below, where warm and cool water meet. And chances are, there are plenty more places in our solar system where scientists can find these waves lurking in the atmosphere. In particular, they think the distinctive hexagon of clouds that covers Saturn's north pole may also be caused by the phenomenon.

a helicopter to Mars! Traveling onboard our #Mars2020 rover, this #Marscopter will test our capabilities for controlled flight in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet and could pave the way for future uses across the solar system: https://go.nasa.gov/2IhELF3  

An asteroid somewhere between the size of New York’s Statue of Liberty and Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa is set to fly safely past Earth on Tuesday. Estimated to stretch about 170-400 feet across, asteroid 2010 WC9 should pass at about half the distance to the Moon at its closest approach at 6:05 p.m. ET.

It’s not a particularly big asteroid, but this will be a pretty close encounter for a space rock of this size.

Although it will travel remarkably close to Earth, 2010 WC9 does not present any risk to our planet. It is much larger than the Chelyabinsk meteor that entered the skies above Russia in 2013, but its trajectory will not bring it close enough to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere.

Pahoa, Hawaii – An explosive eruption sends ash spewing 30,000 feet into the air above Hawaii's Kilauea volcano on Thursday and residents of the Big Island are warned to shelter in place as the plume engulfs a wide area. The powerful, steam-driven blast is expected to spew large amounts of volcanic ash and smoke from Kilauea's crater. The volcano has destroyed 37 homes and other structures in a small southeast area of the island and forced around 2,000 people to evacuate their homes. Geologists had warned explosive eruptions could begin once Kilauea's falling lava lake descended below the water table, allowing water to run on to the top of the lava column and create steam-driven blasts.
About every 10 minutes, the fissure shoots jets of steam and smoke 20 to 30 feet (7 to 9 m) high, whining like a fighter jet. Small fires burn in the distance as the lava flow's leading edge heads toward coastal Highway 137, one of the last exit routes for 2,000 residents to the south.

asteroid that is moving the wrong way around Jupiter is turning heads this week as scientists reveal it's the first "interstellar immigrant" from beyond our solar system to stick around, according to a new study released Monday. The 2-mile-wide asteroid, known as 2015 BZ509, is in retrograde – appearing to turn the opposite direction in relation to other planets within its solar system – around the gas giant's sun. It was just recently discovered around Jupiter’s co-orbital region, and stumped scientists who studied it. "How the asteroid came to move in this way while sharing Jupiter’s orbit has until now been a mystery,” Dr. Fathi Namouni, lead author of the study, said in a statement online. "If 2015 BZ509 were a native of our system, it should have had the same original direction as all of the other planets and asteroids, inherited from the cloud of gas and dust that formed them."

planet containing 10 times the mass of the Earth could explain the unusual orbit of a newly discovered asteroid. If found, the giant world would represent the first discovery of a planet in our solar system since Pluto in 1930, and before that Neptune in 1846. (Pluto was subsequently downgraded from planet to “dwarf planet” in 2006.) The asteroid in question is called 2015 BP519. It was discovered three years ago at fifty-five times the Earth’s distance to the sun.

Since that time, a group of astronomers led by Juliette Becker of the University of Michigan have been tracking it.

They now conclude the space rock is following a highly unusual orbit that is most easily explained if the gravity of a large – as yet unseen – planet has pulled it into place. 2015 BP519’s orbit takes it from 35 to 863 times the radius of Earth’s orbit, but the weird part is that it is inclined to the orbits of Earth, the other planets and most of the asteroids by 54 degrees. If we presume BP519 formed in the same plane as the other members of the solar system, its tilt requires a large gravitational pull to have hoisted it into position.

In Hawaii – A rising tide of lava turns a Hawaii street into a smoking volcanic wasteland on Friday, destroying at least eight homes as residents stood on the road and watched their houses burn. The destructive fury of the erupting Kilauea volcano has been unleashed on the Big Island's Leilani Estates housing development, with the number of homes and other structures destroyed jumping to 82 from a previous count of 50 only a few days ago, according to David Mace, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.Some 15,000 acres (6,070 hectares) of land – about half the size of Florida's Disney World resort – have been torched by lava since May 3,

in what is likely to be the most destructive eruption of Kilauea in over a century, according to the County of Hawaii.

Around 37 structures are "lava locked," meaning homes are inaccessible, and people who do not evacuate them may be hemmed in by 30-foot-high (9-meter-high) walls of lava. Magma is draining underground from a sinking lava lake at Kilauea's 4,091-foot (1,247-meter) summit before flowing around 25 miles (40 km) east and bursting from giant cracks, with two flows reaching the ocean just over three miles (4.83 km) distant.

The International Astronomical Union has now confirmed that a small asteroid – discovered Saturday morning, June 2, 2018 – entered Earth’s atmosphere later that day. The asteroid was originally designated ZLAF9B2 and is now officially called 2018 LA. It surprised astronomers shortly after its discovery, when its trajectory suggested it would pass very, very close to Earth just hours later. It disintegrated at a height of 30 miles (50 km) over South Africa.

A new study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that 1.4 billion years ago, a day on Earth lasted just over 18 hours. This is at least in part because the moon was closer and changed the way Earth spun around its axis. The moon is currently moving away from Earth at a rate of 3.82cm a year, which could mean in around 200 million years’ time, each day will be 25 hours long.
Stephen Meyers, a professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study, explained:

"As the Moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out."

In Indonesia, off the coast of Sumatra – A 5.8 magnitude earthquake strikes.

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover dropped out of contact with Earth after a huge dust storm blocked the sun, preventing the solar-powered rover from recharging its batteries, mission managers have said. The rover, 14 years past its original 90-day design life, powered down everything but its master clock. Engineers are optimistic Opportunity will survive its trial by dust, but given its age and their emotional attachment to the hardy robot, they will not rest easy until the Mars skies clear enough for power levels to rise, allowing the rover to finally phone home

In Surrey, UK – An earthquake measuring 2.6 magnitude shook Surrey, causing a "few seconds of rumbling" through a town centre. The shaking was centred on Newdigate, in the Mole Valley, about 4km (2.5m) from Gatwick Airport. It was detected at 1.28pm (BST) and happened at a depth of 5km (3.1m), the British Geological Survey has said. It is the second quake of similar magnitude in the area this year. The previous quake shook Newdigate on Easter Sunday and was measured at 2.7.

After a 42-month journey, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft arrives at asteroid 162173 Ryugu – about 200 million miles (~300 million km) from Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, confirmed the arrival on June 27, 2018. Prior to arriving, the spacecraft had been sending back images for several days as it inched closer to Ryugu. It closed to just 12 miles (20 km) from the asteroid’s surface on June 27 at 00:35 UTC; translate UTC to your time. Hayabusa 2 has already been providing the first-ever close-up views of this asteroid, which is classified as a near-Earth object. The images show a roughly diamond-shaped body – also being compared to a spinning top – with boulders and craters. Hayabusa 2 aims to study Ryugu in detail, deposit a European and a series of Japanese landers on the surface and return a sample of ancient asteroid rock back to Earth in 2020. The tweet below simulates your eavesdropping on the craft as its tells its MASCOT lander – designed to hop from place to place on Ryugu’s surface – to wake up!

The fourth annual International Asteroid Day is Saturday, June 30, 2018. Now recognized by the United Nations, Asteroid Day marks a global opportunity to raise awareness of the threat and opportunity posed by the numerous rocky bodies zooming through space. Asteroid Day is held on the anniversary of the most devastating asteroid impact in Earth’s recent history – an event that took place on June 30, 1908, known as the Tunguska explosion, when a small asteroid struck the Earth over Tunguska, Siberia. It was originally estimated to have released the equivalent of up to 30 megatons of TNT, although, in recent years, the number has been revised downward to perhaps 3 to 5 megatons of TNT. Whatever the actual power of the explosion,

it devastated an area of forest about 800 square miles (about 2,000 square km), the size of Greater London.

June saw the hottest temperature ever recorded in Scotland and was the driest June on record in parts of England. Some areas received only 6% of expected rainfall, with Middlesex getting just 0.7mm, Essex 1.7mm and Dorset 2mm. A temperature of 33.2C was recorded in Motherwell, Scotland, on June 28 – comfortably breaking the 32.9C set in August 2003 at Greycook, on the borders.

An iceberg, 4-mile wide, breaks off the Helheim Glacier in Greenland, tumbling into the fjord below.

There is a nearly perfect alignment of the sun, Earth and Pluto as this outer world reaches its yearly opposition on July 12, 2018. On this date, someone with a telescope on Pluto could watch the Earth transit (cross in front of) the face of the sun.Transits of Earth seen from Pluto are exceedingly rare. There hasn’t been one since 1931, the year after Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. In this post, we talk about why they’re so rare, and how the transit might look from Pluto, if there were any beings on Pluto to witness it. After 2018, because of the eccentricity of Pluto’s orbit, it will be another 161 years until the next perfect alignment opportunity and another transit of Earth from Pluto.

Afghanistan – As the ground shakes and a sound like a "jet engine" rumbles through the valley, villagers in remote northeastern Afghanistan run for their lives, minutes before a landslide buries their homes under tonnes of mud and water. At least 10 people are killed as the landslide strikes several villages in Panjshir, a mountainous province north of Kabul, in the early hours of Thursday, destroying hundreds of houses, shops, mosques and cars. Most people appear to have had enough time to escape to higher ground after they were roused from their sleep by warning gunshots fired into the air after the landslide triggered quake-like tremors as it roared down the mountain. Melting snow in the surrounding mountains had flooded a lake, sending water and mud cascading over villages below, the disaster management ministry and local officials said.

West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier (PIG) is the fastest-melting glacier in Antarctica, making it the single biggest contributor to global sea-level rise. The main driver of this rapid loss of ice is the thinning of the PIG from below by warming ocean waters due to climate change. However, a study, published June 22, 2018, in Nature Communications, has discovered a volcanic heat source beneath the PIG that is another possible driver of the PIG’s melting. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which includes the PIG, sits on top of the West Antarctic Rift System that includes 138 known volcanoes. It is difficult, however, for scientists to pinpoint the exact location of these volcanoes or the extent of the rift system,

because most of the volcanic activity occurs below kilometers of ice.

A huge 12-mile wide lake of liquid water lies beneath the southern ice cap of Mars, scientists have learned. Dissolved salts are thought to keep the water fluid, despite having a temperature below freezing point. The discovery, which has major implications for the chances of life surviving on the Red Planet, was made by an orbiting European probe using ground-penetrating radar.

It is the first time a large stable body of liquid water has been confirmed to exist on Mars

A total lunar eclipse rises over the night sky this summer, and it will be the longest eclipse of this century, according to NASA. On July 27, a lunar eclipse will be fully visible for 1 hour and 43 minutes. But you may have to travel to see it since the eclipse will only be visible in parts of South America, much of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. A lunar eclipse occurs when the sun, Earth and moon line up perfectly, casting Earth's shadow on the moon. The eclipse will be partially visible for 3 hours and 55 minutes. This also makes it the longest time an eclipse will be partially visible between the years 2011 and 2020. A lunar eclipse always happens within two weeks of a solar eclipse. This summer, two partial solar eclipses will take place on July 12 and August 11. These can be seen from Australia, and parts of Europe and Asia, respectively.

I North-east Lombok, Indonesia – A 6.9 magnitde earthquake strikes killing at least 10 people.

Two Japanese rovers (released from the Hayabusa2 space probe) land on asteroid Ryugu.

Researchers in Japan launch a pair of satellites bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The weekend launch, conducted at the Shizuoka University in Japan, is the first trial conducted in space as part of the Space Tethered Autonomous Robotic Satellite (STARS) project.

The satellites, called STARS-ME, will be "carried to the ISS by HTV launched by the H-IIB rocket".

If successful, space elevators are expected to cut the costs of transporting people and objects to and from space tremendously. Still, there are a number of developments needed to progress, such as special cables resistant to high energy cosmic rays.

Off Indonesia – The Indonesian island of Sulawesi is rocked by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake which also causes a 10-foot hgh tsunami. Houses were swept away and families were reported missing. The official death toll stands at over 800, but everyone knows that figure will only continue to rise.

Indonesian authorities scramble to get food, aid and equipment into quake-hit Sulawesi island as the death toll from the disaster soars to 832 and looks certain to rise as rescuers struggle to reach devastated outlying communities.

Four earthquakes measuring up to 6.0 magnitude have hit off the coast of an Indonesian island, says the US Geological Survey. The tremors were recorded near Sumba island – hundreds of miles south of Sulawesi, which is dealing with the aftermath of a devastating quake and tsunami which hit on Friday.

Britain's Royal Air Force delivers 17.5 tonnes of UK aid supplies to Indonesia to help people affected by the devastating earthquake and tsunami. The 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit Sulawesi island last Friday and was followed by a tsunami as high as 6m (20ft) which destroyed homes and has left hundreds of thousands desperate for food and water.

Buckingham Palace announced the Queen has made a private donation to the cause.

Most of the confirmed dead have come from Palu and losses in remote areas remain unknown.

have found a small object far beyond Pluto that orbits the sun in a lonely, oblong loop, a discovery that supports the notion of a larger, more distant planet – often referred to as Planet X – wandering the edge of our solar system.
The object, 2015 TG387, is likely a dwarf planet with a diameter of about 300 km (186 miles), making it about as wide as Massachusetts is long. It was found roughly 80 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. An AU is equal to the distance between the sun and Earth, or roughly 150 million kilometers (93 million miles). Pluto is about 34 AU from the sun, so 2015 TG387 is two-and-a-half times farther from the sun than the former ninth planet.

The Kepler Space Telescope has officially gone to sleep for good. On November 15th, the death anniversary of its namesake German astronomer Johannes Kepler, its ground team sent it a series of "goodnight" commands. They were meant to disable the telescope's safety modes that could switch it back on and to shut down its transmitters to completely cut off communications. Since the observatory is spinning, the team had to time their beams -- a task they successfully accomplished, because according to Kepler's Twitter account, it indeed received the final set of commands.

Twenty years ago, the most ambitious construction project in the history of the human race began with the launch of a Russian Proton rocket on Nov. 20, 1998.
The uncrewed vehicle carried Zarya, a control module that would become the first piece of the International Space Station (ISS) placed in orbit.  The first crew, consisting of American astronaut and former Navy SEAL Bill Shepherd alongside Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, would arrive to live in orbit just under two years later on October 30, 2000. Construction of the ISS, however, would continue for another decade until 2011, when the final planned module was installed.

After a six-month voyage from Earth, NASA's InSight Mars lander, streaking through space at some 12,300 mph, will slam into the thin Martian atmosphere Monday afternoon to begin a nail-biting six-and-a-half-minute descent to the surface, kicking off a billion-dollar mission to probe the red planet's hidden interior.

Russia’s federal space agency intends to establish a lunar colony by the year 2040. NASA, meanwhile, announced today that it’d have a continuous human presence there within a decade.

A team of scientists at the University of Oxford may have solved one of the biggest mysteries in modern physics - the issue of dark matter and dark energy in the universe.
Scientists have long suspected there is more material in the cosmos than we can observe and 95% is made up almost entirely of invisible, unknown material dubbed dark energy and dark matter.
The mysterious dark substances are not covered by the existing mathematical model of the universe - known as LambdaCDM - but they are known to exist because of their gravitational effects
Now scientists have proposed a new model which unifies dark energy and dark matter into a single phenomenon - a fluid which possesses "negative mass". Dr James Farnes, who led the team at Oxford's e-Research Centre, said: "We now think that both dark matter and dark energy can be unified into a fluid which possesses a type of 'negative gravity'.
The idea of negative matter was previously ruled out because it was thought the material would because less dense as the universe expanded something which observations involving dark matter did not support.

China’s trying to make history by becoming the first to land a spacecraft safely on the Moon’s far side early in the new year. If it gets there safely, investigative tools contributed by several countries will help it study the Moon’s hidden side.
China acknowledged those efforts on the rocket that helped send Chang’e-4 spacecraft to space, stamping it with the logos of the organizations that developed equipment on board the Chang’e-4 and Queqiao, the relay satellite that will help the rover communicate with Earth. China is barred from the International Space Station or cooperation with NASA by the US over security concerns, and collaborating with China requires countries to be careful of not falling afoul of US export controls on sensitive technology.
China launched the Chang’e-4 spacecraft, which consists of a lander and rover, with the Long March 3B rocket from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern Sichuan province on Saturday (Dec. 8) at 2:23 am (link in Chinese) Beijing time.

Some scholars in India believe that the cooling phase of the sun from 2020 wil 'not happen' because they assume that the present cycles of sun-spots on the sun's surface will continue as in the past and therefore do not take into account the solar effect of Jupiter's magnetic field.

An image shot by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft reveals a snowy oasis hiding out in a massive crater.

Christmas 2018 has been particularly kind to folk watching for the astronomical kind of comet, because hyperactive comet 46P/Wirtanen has swung past Earth for a historically close flyby.

In Indonesia - the Saturday evening tsunami has left at least 370 dead, 745 injured and 30 missing. He expects the death toll to rise since not all the areas that were hit have been reached yet.
Scientists say the tsunami was probably caused by the eruption of Anak Krakatau, a volcanic island formed over years from the nearby Krakatau volcano. They also cited tidal waves caused by the full moon.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finally enters asteroid Bennu’s orbit, after more than two years of hurtling through space toward the rock. On the afternoon of December 31, about 70 million miles away from Earth, Bennu broke the record for becoming the smallest object in space to have a human-made spacecraft in its orbit.

A Chinese spacecraft has become the first to land successfully on the far side of the Moon, according to state media. The lunar explorer Chang'e 4 touched down on Thursday morning Beijing time (just before 2.30am GMT), the official China Central Television said. The landing "lifted the mysterious veil" and "opened a new chapter in human lunar exploration", according to the broadcaster. Previous spacecraft have seen the far side of the Moon but have never landed on it. The probe, containing a lander and a rover, was launched on a Long March 3B rocket from southwestern Xichang on 8 December.

America's NASA is planning to make oxygen from the atmosphere on Mars when its next robot arrives on the mysterious red planet in 2020. Scientists will send microbial life – possibly algae or bacteria – on the 2020 Rover mission in a bid to create air fit for human consumption. They aim to feed the micro-organisms in Martian soil in the hope that they will pump out oxygen as a by-product.

There is a 1 in 8 chance of a catastrophic solar storm by 2020 which would destroy many communication satellites.

The size of the universe is hard to fathom, and it’s expanding even faster than scientists originally thought. While humans will never map out the entirety of space, that doesn’t stop them from exploring it. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been around since 1958. Japan, Russia, and France — just to name a few countries — all have space agencies dedicated to exploring the final frontier.

is redoubling its efforts to reach a hurtling chunk of rock. Instead of a 2023 lift-off, they are now targeting 2022.

It’s made of Iron and Nickel. It’s called Psyche 16.

Molnar and his colleagues and students have made an unprecedented prediction of a star explosion – due in the year 2022, or thereabouts within a year – that’ll become visible from Earth, even to those without telescopes. The star system is an eclipsing binary system (one star passes in front of the other as seen from Earth) known as KIC 9832227. When that happens, the star will increase its brightness 10 thousandfold, temporarily becoming a bright star in Earth’s sky.

The star will be visible as part of the constellation Cygnus, and will add a star to the recognizable Northern Cross star pattern.

New evidence suggests that these two very close stars are getting closer and will merge explosively, soon.

Asteroid 99942 Apophis is expected to come close to earth but NASA has said that it will not endanger our planet.

Named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, who determined the comet's periodicity, the comet is visible from Earth every 76 years. Captured by several interplanetary spacecraft, the comet is believed to be composed of volatile ice and dust.

Leaving a trail of blazing light every time it passes over Earth, Halleys Comet last appeared in 1986 and will be seen next in 2061.

The apparent 3D volumes of the bubbles are linearly proportional to their respective fatalities

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) illustrated below is of great significance to astronomical satellites and other spacecraft which orbit the earth at several hundred kilometres altitude, for these orbits take satellites through the SAA periodically, exposing them to several minutes of strong radiation. The SAA is the point where the Van Allen radiation belts (rings of charged particles that surround Earth) come closest to our planet's surface.

It is one of the most dangerous areas of radiation ever encountered.

August 14: The comet Swift–Tuttle (formally designated 109P/Swift–Tuttle) is due to pass perilously close to earth.
It has a comet nucleus 26 km in diameter and is the parent body of the Perseid meteor shower. A close encounter with Earth is also predicted for the comet's return to our inner Solar System in the year 4479, around September 15.

It is captured into a 1:11 orbital resonance with the planet Jupiter, so it completes one orbit for every 11 of Jupiter.

Data compiled from many sources.

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• See: Insightful Article by Robinson, Robinson and Soon, of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

• Dr. D. Bruce Merrifield – Professor of Management Emeritus at the Wharton School of Business,
served in the Reagan Administration as Under-secretary of Commerce for Technology and Economic Affairs:
believes Global Warming is GOOD.

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