Space

Jan 18th, 2026 - 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. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Quick facts What it is: The star cluster Westerlund 2 Where it is: 20,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Carina When it was shared: Dec. 19, ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2026 - Newly appointed Cambridge professor says feat would accelerate scientific knowledge by an order of magnitude Dark, hungry and inescapable: black holes are often portrayed as the ultimate cosmic villains. But now astronomers are preparing to capture a movie of a supermassive black hole in action for the first time, in observations that could help reveal another side to these elusive – and perhaps misunderstood – space objects. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will track the colossal ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2026 - The secret to Earths freezing history might actually lie in the gravitational pull of Mars. Mars is about half Earth's size and roughly a tenth its mass — not really the sort of planet you'd expect to leave fingerprints on Earth's climate history. Yet a new set of simulations by an international group of researchers suggests the Red Planet helps shape some of the slow, repeating orbital patterns like Earth's ice ages and other long-term climate swings. The work, published in the ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2026 - 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. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Scientists continue to push the boundaries of astronomy and cosmology, thanks to next-generation instruments that can see farther and clearer than ever ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2026 - Cloud-9 was first discovered about three years ago by a telescope located in Guizhou, China. However, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) wasn't able to exactly identify it for what it really was. The Chinese astronomers classified it as yet another hydrogen gas cloud near the spiral galaxy Messier 94, roughly 14 million light-years from Earth.  It was the follow-up observation with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope that provided a clearer picture. Cloud-9 isn't a ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2026 - 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. A decade of observations of four planets around the young planetary system V1298 Tau revealed a rare, long-sought missing link in planet formation. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2026 - On Jan. 18, 2004, the European Space Agency's Mars Express successfully mapped Mars' south pole, and, in a first, revealed the presence of both water ice and carbon dioxide ice. Launched June 2, 2003, the Mars Express orbiter arrived at the Red Planet on Dec. 25 of the same year to begin its mission of studying the planet's atmosphere, surface, and subsurface. The probe is equipped with the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS), OMEGA (a visible and infrared ... [Read More]

Jan 17th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Recent observations of our corner of the universe suggest we have been living inside a hot, less dense region, and that there may even be a strange "cosmic interstellar channel," or tunnel, connecting us to distant stars. After years of careful mapping, a new analysis reveals what appears to be a channel of hot, low-density plasma stretching out from our solar system toward distant constellations. Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute recently confirmed it using data ... [Read More]

Jan 17th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google A strange, distant galaxy shows signs that suggest astronomers have witnessed the birth of a new supermassive black hole. If confirmed, it would reveal a long-theorized way that the universe can create supermassive black holes far faster than once thought. The evidence comes from combined observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ) and ground-based follow-up at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi, which together capture the unusual ... [Read More]

Jan 16th, 2026 - A sleeping black hole erupts, fighting a million-year war against its own galaxy cluster. Deep in the cosmos, about a billion light-years away, a monster with a gargantuan appetite has woken up. For roughly 100 million years, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy J1007+3540 was silent. It sat quietly in the dark, surrounded by the cooling remnants of its past tantrums. But recently (in cosmic terms), it turned back on. Astronomers have captured a vivid portrait of this ... [Read More]

Jan 16th, 2026 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, January 9 Cygnus may be sinking toward the horizon a few hours after sunset, but there's still a bit of time to glimpse some of this constellation's many treasures. Today let's try for M39, a loose open cluster in the northeastern reaches of the Swan.  Cygnus' alpha star, Deneb, is still nearly 20° above the northwestern horizon at 8 P.M. local time. M39 is about 9.2° above this star, almost due east of it on the sky. ... [Read More]

Jan 16th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google A distant early-universe galaxy is turning out more than 180 solar masses of new stars each year, based on a temperature reading from a Chilean telescope analysis. Known as galaxy Y1, this ultraluminous infrared "star factory" is wrapped in superheated dust  The heat suggests some young galaxies grew fast, while warm dust made them look brighter than their stars alone would allow. Taking galaxy Y1s temperature Dust temperature provides a direct measure of how much ... [Read More]

Jan 15th, 2026 - What they saw raises an immediate question: if something this striking was hiding there, why has it been so easy to miss until now? A thin line that does not match the rest of the nebula A European team led by astronomers at Cardiff University and University College London (UCL) says it has detected a previously unknown, bar-shaped strip of glowing iron inside the Ring Nebula. The feature sits within the nebula's bright inner region, running across the middle rather than following the familiar ... [Read More]

Jan 15th, 2026 - For the past few years, astronomers have grappled with a cosmic enigma first revealed by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Practically everywhere JWST looked in the sky's distant depths, probing a time when our universe was only several hundred million years old, it saw something hard to explain : bright, curiously compact specks that were ruby red. The spots were ubiquitous in scenes from this early epoch. But then, circa two billion years into the universe's history, they vanished ... [Read More]

Jan 15th, 2026 - 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. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter NASA recently revealed the first pictures of its newly constructed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope , which could soon help researchers hunt for exoplanets ... [Read More]

Jan 14th, 2026 - Nine hundred light-years away from Earth, a giant burger of glowing gas is about to offer a masterclass in planet formation . Nicknamed Gomez's Hamburger or GoHam, the gassy burger showed signs of pregnancy when scientists observed it using the powerful radio antennas of  Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile. GoHam, one of the biggest protoplanetary disks ever recorded, is soon going to birth a planet, scientists informed in a press conference at the ... [Read More]