Billions of years ago, the newborn Earth morphed from a messy ball of mixed-up rock to a perfectly layered planet with an iron core. A new model explaining this mysterious process suggests the core ...

Cubic core: what is the crystal structure of iron at the centre of the Earth? (Courtesy: shutterstock/Johan Swanepoel) A long-standing debate about the structure of solid iron at the centre of the ...

It’s one of nature’s topsy-turvy tricks that the deep interior of Earth is as hot as the Sun’s surface. The sphere of iron that resides there is also under extreme pressure: about 360 million times ...

A tiny fraction of carbon helps account for the oddly light density of Earth's iron core, a new computer simulation finds. Though the core is only 0.1 percent to 0.8 percent carbon, the iron ball is ...