It turns out weather on other planets is a lot like on Earth
What do the clouds on Jupiter, dust storms on Mars and rainstorms on Titan all have in common? They look like they belong on Earth.
As we venture through the universe, scientists are finding uncanny — and sometimes unexpected — hints of Earth on other planets and moons. Clouds on Jupiter swirl like ocean eddies on Earth, and dust storms that act like hurricanes can inundate Mars. Even though these celestial bodies can be hundreds of million miles away from us, the same laws of physics apply, and what happens there can help us learn more about worlds that humans have yet to visit.
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an hour ago
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How could an explosive Big Bang be the birth of our universe?
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@ How can a Big Bang have been the start of the universe, since intense explosions destroy everything? – Tristan S., age 8, Newark, Delaware Pretend you're a perfectly flat chess piece in a game of chess on a perfectly flat and humongous chessboard. One day you look around and ask: How did I get here? How did the chessboard get here? How did it all start? You pull out your telescope and begin to explore your universe, the chessboard…. What do you find? Your universe, the chessboard, is getting bigger. And over more time, even bigger! The board is expanding in all directions that you can see. There's nothing that seems to be causing this expansion as far as you can tell – it just seems to be the nature of the chessboard. But wait a minute. If it's getting bigger, and has been getting bigger and bigger, then that means in the past, it must have been smaller and smaller and smaller. At some time, long, long ago, at the very beginning, it must have been so small that it was infinitely small. Let's work forward from what happened then. At the beginning of your universe, the chessboard was infinitely tiny and then expanded, growing bigger and bigger until the day that you decided to make some observations about the nature of your chess universe. All the stuff in the universe – the little particles that make up you and everything else – started very close together and then spread farther apart as time went on. Our universe works exactly the same way. When astronomers like me make observations of distant galaxies, we see that they are all moving apart. It seems our universe started very small and has been expanding ever since. In fact, scientists now know that not only is the universe expanding, but the speed at which it's expanding is increasing. This mysterious effect is caused by something physicists call dark energy, though we know very little else about it. Astronomers also observe something called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. It's a very low level of energy that exists all throughout space. We know from those measurements that our universe is 13.8 billion years old – way, way older than people, and about three times older than the Earth. If astronomers look back all the way to the event that started our universe, we call that the Big Bang. Many people hear the name 'Big Bang' and think about a giant explosion of stuff, like a bomb going off. But the Big Bang wasn't an explosion that destroyed things. It was the beginning of our universe, the start of both space and time. Rather than an explosion, it was a very rapid expansion, the event that started the universe growing bigger and bigger. This expansion is different than an explosion, which can be caused by things like chemical reactions or large impacts. Explosions result in energy going from one place to another, and usually a lot of it. Instead, during the Big Bang, energy moved along with space as it expanded, moving around wildly but becoming more spread out over time since space was growing over time. Back in the chessboard universe, the 'Big Bang' would be like the beginning of everything. It's the start of the board getting bigger. It's important to realize that 'before' the Big Bang, there was no space and there was no time. Coming back to the chessboard analogy, you can count the amount of time on the game clock after the start but there is no game time before the start – the clock wasn't running. And, before the game had started, the chessboard universe hadn't existed and there was no chessboard space either. You have to be careful when you say 'before' in this context because time didn't even exist until the Big Bang. You also have wrap your mind around the idea that the universe isn't expanding 'into' anything, since as far as we know the Big Bang was the start of both space and time. Confusing, I know! Astronomers aren't sure what caused the Big Bang. We just look at observations and see that's how the universe did start. We know it was extremely small and got bigger, and we know that kicked off 13.8 billion years ago. What started our own game of chess? That's one of the deepest questions anyone can ask. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you'd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@ Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live. And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you're wondering, too. We won't be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Michael Lam, Rochester Institute of Technology Read more: After our universe's cosmic dawn, what happened to all its original hydrogen? Hubble in pictures: astronomers' top picks Curious Kids: Can people colonize Mars? Michael Lam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Only two years left of world's carbon budget to meet 1.5C target, scientists warn
The planet's remaining carbon budget to meet the international target of 1.5C has just two years left at the current rate of emissions, scientists have warned, showing how deep into the climate crisis the world has fallen. Breaching the target would ramp up the extreme weather already devastating communities around the world. It would also require carbon dioxide to be sucked from the atmosphere in future to restore the stable climate in which the whole of civilisation developed over the past 10,000 years. The carbon budget is how much planet-heating CO2 can still be emitted by humanity while leaving a reasonable chance that the temperature target is not blown. The latest assessment by leading climate scientists found that in order to achieve a 66% chance of keeping below the 1.5C target, emissions from 2025 onwards must be limited to 80bn tonnes of CO2. That is 80% lower than it was in 2020. Emissions reached a new record high in 2024: at that rate the 80bn tonne budget would be exhausted within two years. Lags in the climate system mean the 1.5C limit, which is measured as a multi-year average, would inevitably be passed a few years later, the scientists said. Scientists have been warning for some time that breaching the 1.5C limit is increasingly unavoidable as emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue to rise. The latest analysis shows global emissions would have to plummet towards zero within just a few years to have any decent chance of keeping to the target. That appears extremely unlikely, given that emissions in 2024 rose yet again. However, the scientists emphasised every fraction of a degree of global heating increases human suffering, so efforts to cut emissions must ramp up as fast as possible. Currently, the world is on track for 2.7C of global heating, which would be a truly catastrophic rise. The analysis shows, for example, that limiting the rise to 1.7C is more achievable: the carbon budget for a 66% chance of keeping below 1.7C is 390bn tonnes, which is about nine years at the current rate of emissions. 'The remaining carbon budgets are declining rapidly and the main reason is the world's failure to curb global CO2 emissions,' said Prof Joeri Rogelj, at Imperial College London, UK. 'Under any course of action now, there is a very high chance we will reach and even exceed 1.5C and even higher levels of warming.' 'The best moment to have started serious climate action was 1992, when the UN [climate] convention was adopted,' he said. 'But now every year is the best year to start being serious about emissions reduction. That is because every fraction of warming we can avoid will result in less harm and suffering, particularly for poor and vulnerable populations, and in less challenges to living the lives we desire.' Rogelj said it was crucial that countries commit to big emissions cuts at the UN Cop30 climate summit in November. The hottest year on record was 2024, fuelled by increasing coal and gas burning, and setting an annual average of 1.5C for the first time. There is no sign yet of the transition away from fossil fuels promised by the world's nations at Cop28 in Dubai in December 2023. Related: Antarctic seal numbers falling drastically due to melting sea ice, research shows Solar and wind energy production is increasing rapidly and has precluded previous worst-case scenarios of 4-5C of global heating. But energy demand is rising even faster, leading to more fossil fuel burning and turbo-charging extreme weather disasters. The analysis, produced by an international team of 60 leading climate scientists, is an update of the critical indicators of climate change and is published in the journal Earth System Science Data. It aims to provide an authoritative assessment, based on the methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but published annually unlike the intermittent IPCC reports, the most recent of which was 2021. The study found that the Earth's energy imbalance – the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect – has risen by 25% when comparing the past decade with the decade before. 'That's a really large and very worrying number,' said Prof Piers Forster, at the University of Leeds, UK, and lead author of the study. 'I tend to be an optimistic person. But things are not only moving in the wrong direction, we're seeing some unprecedented changes and acceleration of the heating of the Earth and sea level rise.' Sea level rise has doubled in the past 10 years, compared with the period 1971-2018, the analysis found, rising to 4mm per year. The flooding of coasts will become unmanageable at 1.5C of global heating and lead to 'catastrophic inland migration', a study in May found. Sea level is rising because about 90% of global heating is absorbed by the oceans, making the water expand, and because the climate crisis is melting glaciers and ice caps. Dr Karina Von Schuckmann, at Mercator Ocean International, said: 'Warmer waters also lead to intensified weather extremes, and can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on them. In 2024, the ocean reached record values globally.'
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
How could an explosive Big Bang be the birth of our universe?
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@ How can a Big Bang have been the start of the universe, since intense explosions destroy everything? – Tristan S., age 8, Newark, Delaware Pretend you're a perfectly flat chess piece in a game of chess on a perfectly flat and humongous chessboard. One day you look around and ask: How did I get here? How did the chessboard get here? How did it all start? You pull out your telescope and begin to explore your universe, the chessboard…. What do you find? Your universe, the chessboard, is getting bigger. And over more time, even bigger! The board is expanding in all directions that you can see. There's nothing that seems to be causing this expansion as far as you can tell – it just seems to be the nature of the chessboard. But wait a minute. If it's getting bigger, and has been getting bigger and bigger, then that means in the past, it must have been smaller and smaller and smaller. At some time, long, long ago, at the very beginning, it must have been so small that it was infinitely small. Let's work forward from what happened then. At the beginning of your universe, the chessboard was infinitely tiny and then expanded, growing bigger and bigger until the day that you decided to make some observations about the nature of your chess universe. All the stuff in the universe – the little particles that make up you and everything else – started very close together and then spread farther apart as time went on. Our universe works exactly the same way. When astronomers like me make observations of distant galaxies, we see that they are all moving apart. It seems our universe started very small and has been expanding ever since. In fact, scientists now know that not only is the universe expanding, but the speed at which it's expanding is increasing. This mysterious effect is caused by something physicists call dark energy, though we know very little else about it. Astronomers also observe something called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. It's a very low level of energy that exists all throughout space. We know from those measurements that our universe is 13.8 billion years old – way, way older than people, and about three times older than the Earth. If astronomers look back all the way to the event that started our universe, we call that the Big Bang. Many people hear the name 'Big Bang' and think about a giant explosion of stuff, like a bomb going off. But the Big Bang wasn't an explosion that destroyed things. It was the beginning of our universe, the start of both space and time. Rather than an explosion, it was a very rapid expansion, the event that started the universe growing bigger and bigger. This expansion is different than an explosion, which can be caused by things like chemical reactions or large impacts. Explosions result in energy going from one place to another, and usually a lot of it. Instead, during the Big Bang, energy moved along with space as it expanded, moving around wildly but becoming more spread out over time since space was growing over time. Back in the chessboard universe, the 'Big Bang' would be like the beginning of everything. It's the start of the board getting bigger. It's important to realize that 'before' the Big Bang, there was no space and there was no time. Coming back to the chessboard analogy, you can count the amount of time on the game clock after the start but there is no game time before the start – the clock wasn't running. And, before the game had started, the chessboard universe hadn't existed and there was no chessboard space either. You have to be careful when you say 'before' in this context because time didn't even exist until the Big Bang. You also have wrap your mind around the idea that the universe isn't expanding 'into' anything, since as far as we know the Big Bang was the start of both space and time. Confusing, I know! Astronomers aren't sure what caused the Big Bang. We just look at observations and see that's how the universe did start. We know it was extremely small and got bigger, and we know that kicked off 13.8 billion years ago. What started our own game of chess? That's one of the deepest questions anyone can ask. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you'd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@ Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live. And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you're wondering, too. We won't be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Michael Lam, Rochester Institute of Technology Read more: After our universe's cosmic dawn, what happened to all its original hydrogen? Hubble in pictures: astronomers' top picks Curious Kids: Can people colonize Mars? Michael Lam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
