Space

Nov 11th, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes Ever since astronomers first detected interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in July, speculation about its true nature has run wild. Some experts speculate it isn't a comet at all but rather an extraterrestrial spacecraft sent to sniff around our solar system. New evidence has dumped cold water on this provocative hypothesis. MeerKAT, a radio telescope operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, recently detected a radio signal from 3I/ATLAS. Before you get excited, ... [Read More]

Nov 11th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A century ago, one dim, flickering star in the Andromeda galaxy forced astronomy to face a larger universe. That star , cataloged as V1, sits roughly 2.2 million light years away, about 13 quintillion miles, far beyond the Milky Way. Its steady rhythm overturned the old idea that our galaxy defined the cosmic edge. The find also set off a chain of measurements that now reveals how the universe grows and ages. How star V1 changed everything Edwin Hubble of Carnegie ... [Read More]

Nov 11th, 2025 - Never mind rogue planets—their rogue moons could support life At a young age, we're told how the sun warms Earth and makes life possible. That idea sticks with most of us for life. But when we want to understand things more thoroughly and we dig more deeply, we learn that Earth has its own heat sources that help it maintain habitability: remnant heat and . Other rocky worlds can have these sources, too. A small percentage of us keep going down this rabbit hole in pursuit of more detailed ... [Read More]

Nov 11th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Researchers present strong evidence for a planet circling two brown dwarfs on a near polar path. The orbit is tilted almost 90 degrees to the pair's motion. The system lies about 120 light-years from Earth, roughly 700 trillion miles (1,100 trillion kilometers) away. Lead researcher Thomas A. Baycroft of the University of Birmingham led the analysis. The hosts are brown dwarfs , celestial objects that are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion. "We report strong evidence ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - Early superdense star clusters may have planted seeds for monster black holes. A new simulation could help solve one of astronomy's longstanding mysteries—how supermassive black holes formed so rapidly—along with a new one: What are the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) "little red dots?" Invisible leviathans lurk at the cores of nearly all of the 2 trillion or so galaxies strewn throughout space-time. Monster black holes entered the cosmic scene soon after the Universe's birth ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A new study suggests that giant planets orbiting close to Sun-like stars rarely survive their host's aging process. As stars evolve and begin to swell, these nearby worlds often vanish, drawn inward and destroyed by intense tidal forces. The research, which included nearly half a million stars, revealed that only about 0.28 percent – roughly one in every 350 – still host a close-in giant planet. Within that group, the team identified 130 planets and ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - A rogue planet wrapped in iron clouds and rock storms 20 light-years from Earth. Drifting alone through space, about 20 light-years away, is a world that refuses to fit in. SIMP 0136 isn't a star because it's too small to ignite nuclear fusion. But it's also too massive to be a regular planet. Astronomers call it a brown dwarf, though don't let the name fool you — it has a mass 13 times that of Jupiter, hovering on the knife-edge between planet and star. Now, thanks to the James Webb ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - The interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS just flew past Mars, and China's mission managed to snap some pics with its high-resolution camera. According to the (CNSA), the orbiter's high-resolution camera captured images of the comet from a distance of about 30 million km (18.6 million mi). This makes the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which has been orbiting Mars for four years and eight months, one of the closest missions to observe the ISO since it was first detected (on May 7th, 2025). The image shows ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google On the night before Christmas in 2023, a meteoroid rattled the flanks of Apollinaris Mons and unleashed a flurry of dust avalanches on Mars.  The European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter caught the aftermath in crisp detail. The Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System ( CaSSIS ) revealed a faint cluster of fresh impact craters at the base of the slope and roughly a hundred new, dark streaks raking downhill like claw marks.  Follow-up imaging shows the ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - Last week, four lasers were projected into the sky above the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Paranal site in Chile. The lasers successfully created an "artificial star" that astronomers can use to measure and then correct the blur caused by Earth's atmosphere, ESO announced today. The striking launch of these lasers from each of the eight-meter telescopes at Paranal is a significant milestone of the GRAVITY+ project—a complex upgrade to ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer ... [Read More]

Nov 9th, 2025 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. Quick facts What it is: The Southern Hemisphere view of the Milky Way galaxy Where it is: All around us When it was shared: Oct. 29, 2025 We cannot see or image the entire Milky Way galaxy, because we are located inside it. From Earth, we can observe only a portion of the galaxy, and when we ... [Read More]

Nov 8th, 2025 - Mere months after its long-awaited debut, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is beginning to deliver on its promise to rewrite cosmic history. The observatory's colossal camera — perched atop a mountain in Chile — has yet to begin its official scientific survey. But just by perusing its first test image , astronomers have uncovered a surprise: a trail of light — called a stellar stream — extending from a well-known galaxy, suggesting that the galaxy once tore apart a much ... [Read More]

Nov 8th, 2025 - Launched by NASA in 2009, the Kepler space telescope was outfitted with equipment to discover and study Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way galaxy. It was named after the 17th century scientist and astronomer Johannes Kepler, renowned for his laws of planetary motion. It was a fitting name that served the telescope, its equipment, and its mission well. But while we heard a lot concerning the telescope's discoveries around that time, things have since gone quiet. Whatever happened to NASA's ... [Read More]

Nov 7th, 2025 - Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Saturn's Enceladus moon might be capable of supporting life, according to data collected by NASA's Cassini mission and compiled in a new study in the Science Advances journal. The moon is one of the most promising for supporting extra-terrestrial life among Saturn's 274 moons, and data show it is capable of long-term stability that would enable life to develop, the University of Oxford announced Friday. Researchers from Oxford, the Southwest Research Institute and the Planetary ... [Read More]

Nov 7th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, November 7 With a bright Moon still in the sky, we're a bit limited in what we can observe. But Hercules is home to a bright globular cluster visible during the evening hours: 6th-magnitude M13. Slowly setting in the west after dark, you have a few hours to catch this cluster before it gets too low. By 6 P.M. local time, M13 is still nearly 40° high in the west, located along one edge of the Keystone of Hercules between the stars ... [Read More]

Nov 7th, 2025 - Astrophysicists are scrambling to study an ancient comet from another star system that entered the solar system this year, and which has already swung past Mars. Dubbed 3I/ATLAS, the comet poses no threat to Earth or its neighbouring planets, but has aroused immense interest as space agencies train their sights on what is only one of three interstellar objects detected by scientists. Here is what we know about the object that is intriguing scientists: What is the 3I/ATLAS? The comet is only the ... [Read More]