Space

Jan 21st, 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 Pinterest Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a stunning time-lapse of a trio of solar eruptions exploding into space from the sun during an ... [Read More]

Jan 21st, 2026 - Inside a famous nebula, astronomers find an iron structure they cannot yet explain. The Ring Nebula is a bright shell of gas in the constellation Lyra. It has long served as a textbook example of how stars similar to the Sun shed their outer layers at the end of their lives. It's also perhaps one of the most adored nebulae by space enthusiasts, as well as amateur and professional astronomers alike. Now it has surprised scientists with something wholly unexpected: a massive bar of iron atoms ... [Read More]

Jan 21st, 2026 - Even for astronomers who have gazed upon the same cosmic object over their whole career, new portraits of these celestial bodies from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have the power to delight and amaze. See, for example, JWST's latest images of the iconic Helix Nebula , also known as the "Eye of God," a stellar grave site some 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. "I thought this was a close-up of lavender until I saw the galaxies," wrote Australian astrophysicist ... [Read More]

Jan 21st, 2026 - A new all-sky census reveals thousands of stable, long-lived stars that might be life's best bet. Some astronomers have made it their life's work to find "Earth 2.0," a rocky planet orbiting a star just like our own Sun. It makes sense; we know life works here, so why not look for a mirror image of our own solar system? But a massive new survey suggests we might have been looking at the wrong stars. The sweet spot for life isn't necessarily a yellow sun like ours, nor the volatile red dwarfs ... [Read More]

Jan 20th, 2026 - Spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet have helped researchers map out an ancient coastline that surrounded a large ocean billions of years ago Geological features on Mars suggest the planet once boasted rivers and broad coastlines around a vast ocean. The discovery provides the most direct evidence yet for the Red Planet's former blue vistas. "The presence of liquid water [on Mars] is a broad topic that includes rains, rivers, lakes, as well as oceans," says Ezat Heydari , a geochemist at Jackson ... [Read More]

Jan 20th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Earth's first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization is likely to arrive as something hard to miss, not a quiet or subtle trace. That expectation matters now, because decades of discovery show that what we notice first often says more about visibility than about what is typical. A new research article titled " The Eschatian Hypothesis " by David Kipping from Columbia University will appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . First ... [Read More]

Jan 20th, 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 Pinterest Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Scientists have observed a supermassive black hole waking up from a nearly 100 million-year nap. The black hole lies at the center of a gigantic ... [Read More]

Jan 20th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google A surprisingly orderly galaxy from the universe's infancy, nicknamed "Cosmic Grapes," shows signs of being built in pieces rather than as a smooth whole. Its structure challenges long-standing ideas about how early galaxies grew and how stable their disks could be so soon after cosmic beginnings. Studying the "Cosmic Grapes" The Cosmic Grapes galaxy is a rotating system that formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang, with its disk split into multiple dense, ... [Read More]

Jan 20th, 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 have spotted a distant supernova unleashed by a collapsing star just 1 billion years after the birth of the universe. The James Webb Space ... [Read More]

Jan 20th, 2026 - High-resolution images of exploding stars challenge our understanding of cosmic death and shock physics Astronomers pictured novae—the violent explosions that occur on the surface of white dwarf stars—as simple, spherical fireballs. You could think of them as the universe's flashbulbs: one big pop, a blinding light, and then a slow fade. But when researchers recently pointed the high-powered CHARA Array telescope at two erupting stars, they saw something very different. New ... [Read More]

Jan 19th, 2026 - From surveys of the pre-Sputnik skies to analysis of interstellar visitors, scientists are rethinking how and where to look for physical traces of alien technology. There's no denying the allure of alien artifacts. Science fiction is awash in the material remnants of extraterrestrial civilizations , which surface in everything from the classic books of Arthur C. Clarke to game franchises like Mass Effect and Outer Wilds . The discovery of the first interstellar objects in the solar system ... [Read More]

Jan 19th, 2026 - Scientists finally have an explanation for the mysterious red dots in space. In 2022, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured a rare, similar sight of the cosmos where red lights glimmered like stars, but scientists could not figure out what it was. That's how the adventure to uncover the mystery behind the "little red dots" or LDRs began. The unique bright red color intrigued researchers who wanted to know the secrets it might hold about the early universe. A recent study published in the ... [Read More]

Jan 19th, 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 Astronomers have revealed the James Webb Space Telescope's ( JWST ) sharpest-ever image of the area around a black hole. The spectacular view could help ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2026 - We all know the sensation the Sun's rays warming our faces. Its bountiful light and heat make life on our planet possible. But our nearest star also provides us with what is literally the biggest mystery in the Solar System, spanning millions of miles. It is a puzzle so profound that, on the face of it, it challenges one of our most basic laws of physics. Solving it may be the key to protecting our electronics and technology, not to mention our astronauts, from the worst effects of space ... [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 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]