Space

Jan 11th, 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: IRAS 23077+6707, the largest planet-forming disk ever observed Where it is: 978 light-years away, in the constellation Cepheus When ... [Read More]

Jan 10th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google NASA has announced a new mission to study the Sun. The Chromospheric Magnetism Explorer (CMEx) was chosen over four other mission concepts that competed in earlier studies. A team in Boulder, Colorado wants CMEx to monitor the Sun's chromosphere , a restless layer above the visible surface. The work is led by Dr. Holly Gilbert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research ( NCAR ) where she studies solar magnetism and eruptions. NASA wants CMEx to capture the first ... [Read More]

Jan 10th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Dust is everywhere in space. Even the emptiest parts of the universe are full of tiny grains that shape how stars form and how planets eventually come together. For decades, scientists believed this dust needed a decent supply of heavy elements like silicon, oxygen, and iron. Without them, dust should be scarce or missing altogether. But now, a small galaxy near the Milky Way is showing that dust can form even when almost all the usual ingredients are missing. The ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - This article (originally published Aug. 13, 2025) has been updated to include new text and illustrations featured in the Jan. 2026 issue of . Using an artificial intelligence algorithm, astronomers have discovered a new type of supernova that likely results from the merging of a dying star and its black hole companion. In July 2023, the Zwicky Transient Facility detected supernova SN 2023zkd, located 730 million light-years from Earth. Six months later, in January 2024, an AI algorithm known as ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Supermassive black holes are notorious for gobbling up young stars and burping out powerful jets of gas as they finish the snack. Scientists call this mechanism "jet precession." Typically, only two types of jet streams are observed by the astronomers during this process. One is the radiative mode where a white-hot incandescent accretion disk heats up the gassy material, and the superheated gas pushes out the cooler gas outwards. Another mode, as Scientific American describes, sees ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Cloud-9 sits in a universe that rarely stops shining. Telescopes are built to chase that light and record every spark they can find. Yet some of the most important clues about how the universe works come from places that barely register at all. This object does not glow or glitter. It has no stars and almost no visible light. From a distance, it looks like nothing more than a quiet patch of gas. That absence is exactly what makes it useful. Cloud-9 offers a rare chance to ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - A spiral galaxy's nucleus, carved by an elongated plume of gas and stars, creates a bar-like structure at the center. These galaxies are called barred spiral galaxies, as per NASA . Recent research led by Daniel Ivanov, a physics and astronomy graduate student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at Pitt, may have found its earliest member. In a potentially groundbreaking discovery, the researchers seem to have uncovered one of the earliest spiral galaxies of the universe with ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Reading time 3 minutes Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has transformed our understanding of the cosmos. The space telescope revealed a universe teeming with galaxies, stars, and planets instead of what we once saw as empty patches of the skies. Today, the telescope's aging hardware is being dragged down toward Earth, and Hubble may be nearing its end sooner than anticipated. A team of scientists has estimated that the Hubble Space Telescope could reenter Earth's atmosphere and meet its fiery ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, January 9 Mars is in conjunction with the Sun at 7 A.M. EST, invisible in our sky until mid-March.   The bright moon Titan lies near its parent world, Saturn, in the evening sky tonight. The largest of the ringed planet's moons, Titan is the only other solar system world known to host liquid on its surface, though its lakes and seas consist of hydrocarbons (like ethane and methane), not water.  The second-largest moon in ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - The expansion of Kepler's Supernova Remnant over the past 25 years is summed up in 40 seconds in a new video released by NASA. The stunning time-lapse was created using data from  NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory . It goes back to 1604, when the German astronomer Johannes Kepler discovered the supernova in the sky. Thus began the research, and scientists learned that Kepler's Supernova (SN 1604) is a Type Ia supernova, where a little white dwarf star exploded after exceeding a critical ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - Science Inside Donald Trump's Attack on NASA's Science Missions During his first year back in office, the president tried to bring America's age of discovery to an end. A test model of the Perseverance rover, designed to explore the surface of Mars, sits in a garage at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, near Pasadena, California, in October. Save O n Mars , in the belly of a rover named Perseverance, a titanium tube holds a stone more precious than any diamond or ruby on Earth. The robot spotted ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - New research gives us the answer many have been long wondering. Astronomers have cataloged thousands of exoplanets, and a pattern keeps showing up: Around most stars, the most common planets are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. They're often called super-Earths and sub-Neptunes , and dominate the statistics. But are these really the most common types of planets? Now, a new Nature study points to an answer by catching four planets at a stage most systems never show us: The awkward, ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - "This is now the fastest-spinning asteroid that we know of, larger than 500 meters [1,640 feet]," astronomer Sarah Greenstreet revealed at the recent American Astronomical Society's winter meeting held in Phoenix. Named 2025 MN45, the asteroid was discovered by the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and it makes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes. It has been declared as the asteroid that rotates faster than any other asteroid of that size (nearly half a mile in diameter). Its discovery ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 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 A shock wave, far away in space, might be the telltale sign of the first confirmed "runaway" supermassive black hole , escaping its host galaxy at 2.2 ... [Read More]

Jan 7th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google NASA's Perseverance rover has spotted a desk-sized rock, nicknamed Phippsaksla, on Mars that looks suspiciously like an iron-rich meteorite. Roughly 31 inches wide (80 centimeters) wide, the lonely boulder sits in the Vernodden area just beyond Jezero Crater. Metal-rich Phippsaksla rock The work was led by Candice Bedford, a research scientist at Purdue University , whose studies focus on Martian rocks. The unusual Phippsaksla rock has a sculpted shape and raised position ... [Read More]

Jan 7th, 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 Half a year after first opening its eyes to the cosmos, NASA 's SPHEREx spacecraft has unveiled its first complete, all-sky mosaic of the universe. The first ... [Read More]