Top 10 Meteorites

It's a little bit terrifying to think that there are giant rocks, flying straight at our planet, on a regular basis, but it's true. Good thing we've got our atmosphere to help fry the occasional wayward piece of asteroid or comet as it heads our way … but once in a while, and handful (or more) make it through and we get everything from pretty shooting stars to terrifying meteor fireballs, not to mention the occasional nice-looking extraterrestrial...

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Top 10 Strangest Things in the Universe

The more we look among the stars and galaxies, the weirder things seem to get. Even space itself is puzzling, for example. Recent studies suggest that the fabric of the universe stretches more than 150 billion light-years across -- in spite of the fact that the cosmos is 13.7 billion years old. From super-fast stars to the nature of matter, here we cover other strange and mysterious elements of the universe. 10. Hypervelocity...

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Life of the Sun

The Sun is a perfectly normal example of a star, formed from the solar nebula 4.6 billion years ago. The Birth of the Sun The Sun (and all the planets) started their lives in a giant cloud of cold molecular gas and dust. And then about 4.6 billion years ago, something bumped into the cloud, like the gravity from a passing star, or shockwaves from a supernova, causing the cloud to collapse. With the collapse, the mutual gravity...

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