The Mechanics of Earth's Spin Earth rotates once in about 24 hours with respect to the Sun, but once every 23 hours, 56 ...

Earth’s path around the Sun is not a fixed racetrack but a slowly shifting orbit, and those subtle changes have a long ...

Earth’s orbit around the Sun isn’t a perfect circle—it’s slightly elliptical. Each year, around July 2 or 3, Earth reaches its farthest point from the Sun, known as aphelion. Around January 2 or 3, ...

For the past 60 years, Earth has had a secret companion in space—a quasi-moon that has been sharing our planet’s orbit around ...

If you've felt like summer days are flying by, you're not wrong—at least not scientifically. Experts have observed that Earth's rotation is speeding up, making some days slightly shorter than the ...

Tossing a bad guy into the Sun sounds simple enough, but orbital mechanics make it a far trickier task than you'd expect.

Astronomers recently detected a stray quasi-moon in our planet’s orbit, but it's hardly the first stowaway to hang out around ...

If the atmosphere were not dragged with our planet, you could utilize the insane relative wind speeds to decrease flight time, but you'd probably not be concerned with such problems as "long flights" ...