During the early hours of Wednesday morning, James Rice waited anxiously at Kennedy Space Center’s Banana Creek viewing platform in Florida as NASA’s Moon rocket geared up for its inaugural liftoff. “Today I saw a piece of history,” Rice, associate director at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, told Gizmodo in an email.

Humans discovered the curvature and rotation of the Earth thousands of years ago, dating back to ancient Greece. Since then, scientists have only discovered more evidence to prove this is true – including seeing Earth itself from space.

NASA's Artemis launch is attempting to return America to 'Space Race' form, paving the way for humans on the moon for the first time since the 1970s.

Some social media users are saying that Alexander Gleason’s 19th Century “New Standard Map of the World” is proof that the earth is flat and that Antarctica is not a continent but an ice ring that circles the earth’s edges. They are wrong. The earth is not flat. The map has been misinterpreted.

The Big Bang theory is currently the most popular model we have for the birth of our universe. Observations on the expanding universe, as well as observations of Cosmic background radiation, lingering electromagnetic radiation from the Big Bang, have helped back this theory. However, rumors have spread on the internet that the newly released images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) somehow suggest the big bang is wrong. We find this claim to be mostly false. Although the spectacular images from JWST may have surprised scientists in how they might change theories on galaxy formation, they by no means negate the Big Bang theory.

When someone asks UNLV astrophysicist Jason Steffen why regular people — or at least people who don’t study the sky in intricate detail — should be interested in the images coming back from the James Webb Space Telescope, he asks them what they value before he responds.

UNLV professor of physics and astronomy Jason Steffen is available to talk about the significance of the James Webb Space Telescope imagery, and how it broadens our understanding of the universe.

Despite all the incessant coverage about air travel, pre-pandemic polling showed that a majority of Americans don't fly every year. Now, even fewer people fly.