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Earth orbits the Sun, making Earth the third-closest planet to the Sun and part of the inner Solar System. Earth's average orbital distance is about 150 million km (93 million mi), which is the basis for the astronomical unit (AU) and is equal to roughly 8.3 light minutes or 380 times Earth's distance to the Moon.
Widely discussed in the scientific community, terraforming refers to the alteration of other planets to create a habitable environment for terrestrial life. Seeding refers to the introduction of life from Earth to habitable planets. Geoengineering refers to the engineering of a planet's climate, and has already been applied on Earth. Each of ...
An artist's conception shows a terraformed Mars in four stages of development.. Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable for humans to live on.
The accretion model that Earth and the other terrestrial planets formed from meteoric material was proposed in 1944 by Otto Schmidt, followed by the protoplanet theory of William McCrea (1960) and finally the capture theory of Michael Woolfson. [3]
The geological history of the Earth follows the major geological events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock layers (stratigraphy). Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left ...
The distance separating the planet and its star is just 7% of the distance between Earth and the Sun, and the planet receives 1.6 times more energy from its star than Earth does from the Sun.
The first eon in Earth's history, the Hadean, begins with the Earth's formation and is followed by the Archean eon at 3.8 Ga. [2]: 145 The oldest rocks found on Earth date to about 4.0 Ga, and the oldest detrital zircon crystals in rocks to about 4.4 Ga, [34] [35] [36] soon after the formation of the Earth's crust and the Earth
Last year was the planet’s hottest in recorded history, ... Earth was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) hotter than the average from the mid-19th century — a period from ...