It's got solid and liquid parts, it's almost as hot as the sun, and it may be teeming with life.
1. In 1692 Edmond Halley (of comet fame) proposed that the Earth is hollow. Below the outer crust where we live, he pictured two concentric shells and a core about the size of Mercury, all floating in a luminous gas.
2. Helloooo down there: Halley even imagined that these shells might be inhabited. Jules Verne riffed on this idea in his classic Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Did you feel the heat and the effects of a tremendous solar flare Friday? As we now know the human race does experience all kinds of symptoms ranging from feelings of euphoria to aggressiveness during solar events, and this one today was a real douzy!
Hitting planet Earth at approximately 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) and registered as a class X1.1 solar flare — one of the strongest types of solar flares possible, according to the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) run by NOAA and the National Weather Service, it was one of several more to come this week, after an intense week of activity.
Today's fiery solar storm erupted from the giant sunspot AR1515, and space weather scientists were closely watching the sunspot for possible X-class flares. According to the Smithsonian website:
