Space

Dec 19th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have finally captured a single image that shows both a black hole's feeding ring and its blazing jet. The target is the supermassive black hole in galaxy Messier 87 (M 87), about 55 million light-years from Earth. In 2019 , the shadow, a dark patch where gravity traps nearby light, of this black hole stunned the world. That Event Horizon Telescope image revealed an asymmetric ring roughly 42 microarcseconds wide, circling a darkness carved by intense gravity. ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - An infrared atlas reveals how the universe grew up, and where life's ingredients hide. In the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the universe ballooned outward at a speed that still defies explanation, stretching space itself before stars or even atoms had a chance to form. Cosmologists call this moment inflation, and for decades it has remained frustratingly abstract, etched into equations but with no reference in physical observations. Now, a new space telescope has begun to ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 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. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter We've watched it speed through the solar system using the most powerful telescopes in human history . We've studied its light with probes whipping around the ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Dec. 19 (UPI) -- Comet 3I/ATLAS passed its nearest point to Earth early Friday and approaching within 168 million miles. After its brief visit Friday the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS will head back toward the outer solar system before continuing its journey through the Milky Way, according to scientists. 3I/ATLAS was only the third known interstellar object to enter our solar system, following 'Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019. Its arrival gave scientists a rare chance to study the building ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Reading time 2 minutes A supermassive black hole that's 10 million times the mass of the Sun is hurtling through space, leaving a trail of gas that's spawning newborn stars in its wake. Astronomers have long theorized about runaway black holes, but none have been observed until now. The Webb space telescope confirmed the first runaway black hole, which broke away from its home galaxy for a speedy life on the run. The black hole is one of the fastest-moving objects observed in the cosmos, ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Astronomers have witnessed a violent collision between two massive objects and a huge debris cloud, unlike anything in our own solar system. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare collision in a nearby planetary system. The image was obtained after astronomers directly imaged two separate collisions between rocky objects in the Fomalhaut star system. The reason this has attracted interest in the astronomical field is because these rare, observable collisions provide unprecedented ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, December 19 We're getting ready to say goodbye to the summertime constellations, including Cygnus the Swan, now about 40° high in the west two hours after sunset. Before this famous star pattern disappears, however, let's take a last look at some of its lovely deep-sky treasures, such as the North America Nebula (NGC 7000).  With no Moon in the sky tonight, darkness is on our side. NGC 7000 lies just 3° east of Deneb ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to spot one of the most distant supernovae ever confirmed. It was linked to a powerful gamma-ray burst that flashed across the universe when it was only 730 million years old. An international team raced to follow the burst alert, using JWST's infrared vision to peel the dying star's light away from its faint host galaxy. The explosion looked strikingly familiar – closely resembling supernovae seen billions ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Saturnian moon may be the solar system's biggest slushie According to a NASA study, Saturn's moon Titan may be the most fantastically large slushie of all time. Based on a reexamination of data from the Cassini probe collected in 2012, the moon's long-suspected global ocean may actually be a slurry of ice and rock. Many icy moons in the outer solar system are believed to harbor vast subsurface oceans sandwiched between thick ice shells and rocky cores. Since 2008, the methane-shrouded moon ... [Read More]

Dec 19th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Supernova explosions are part of how the universe builds matter, but they're not the only cosmic blasts that shape what we're made of. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it ends its life as a supernova. The star's core collapses, its outer layers blast outward, and the explosion scatters heavy elements like carbon and iron into space. There is also a second, much rarer kind of explosion. In a kilonova, two neutron stars collide and produce even heavier elements, ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 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. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter For the first time, scientists have created detailed, 2D maps of the sun's outermost atmosphere. This feat was accomplished using data from NASA 's Parker ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2025 - NEW YORK (AP) — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope got a rare look at the aftermath of two cosmic collisions — and helped scientists solve a decades-old mystery. Many years ago, scientists saw a dense, bright spot near a young star called Fomalhaut. They thought it could be a planet and continued to track it. But in 2023, Hubble's pictures revealed something strange. The bright spot had vanished — and a new one had appeared — a sign that it wasn't a planet after all. ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2025 - 2025 was a big year for astronomy, marked by major technological milestones and rare celestial events. We got our first look at images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will forever change how we monitor the night sky. The unexpected arrival of 3I/ATLAS — only the third interstellar object ever detected — turned an armada of telescopes and instruments in its direction. And as the Sun reached the peak of its 11-year cycle of activity, dedicated solar missions seized the ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2025 - Astronomers are scratching their heads at the odd chemistry, which hints at soot clouds and possibly diamond formation deep inside. Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have found an exoplanet that is a bit out of the ordinary. The team found a Jupiter-mass world stretched into a lemony shape by a nearby pulsar, wrapped in an atmosphere dominated not by water vapor or methane, but by molecular carbon. The object, coined PSR J2322-2650b, circles its dead-star host in a blistering ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2025 - For two decades, astronomers have wondered how supermassive black holes could exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang. They knew that the processes inside normal stars simply couldn't create such objects within that time frame. But if so-called "monster stars," those with masses between 1,000 and 10,000 times that of our Sun existed, that would solve the mystery. Recently, an international team of scientists using the James Webb Space ... [Read More]

Dec 18th, 2025 - When we talk about "Earth-like" worlds, it is tempting to picture blue oceans and white clouds and stop there. But the bigger mystery is what happens much earlier, when a newborn solar system is still just a swirling disk of gas, dust, and tiny rocks. In that chaotic stage, small differences can steer a planet toward becoming a mostly rocky world like Earth or something very different. A new study suggests one of those differences may be surprisingly common, and it may begin with a dramatic ... [Read More]