Space

Dec 16th, 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 Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ) may have discovered the most distant supernova in the universe. This stellar explosion, hosted by a ... [Read More]

Dec 16th, 2025 - Astronomers eagerly wait for their best chance to see interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS approaching Earth on 19 December. Found on 1 July by NASA-funded ATLAS Telescopes in Chile, the icy comet was the third confirmed interstellar object that entered the solar system after 1I/'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. Comet 3I/ATLAS will certainly be no close call to Earth, staying about 1.8 astronomical units or 270 million kilometres away from our planet. Despite this safe distance, the encounter ... [Read More]

Dec 16th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google New oblique images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera ( LROC ) reveal enormous cracks, called grabens, curling around an ancient lunar sea on the Moon's near-side. These grabens are part of a broken ring that records how a huge patch of the Moon's crust was pulled apart rather than squeezed together. How a lunar sea grew too heavy The work was led by Thomas Watters, a planetary scientist at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum ( SNASM ). His ... [Read More]

Dec 16th, 2025 - A shredded star revealed a long-predicted spacetime whirlpool around a spinning black hole. For more than 100 years, physicists have known — at least on paper — that spinning black holes should stir the universe around them. Now, thanks to the violent death of a distant star, astronomers have finally watched that cosmic stirring happen in real time. The event unfolded when a star wandered too close to a supermassive black hole and was torn apart in what astronomers call a tidal ... [Read More]

Dec 15th, 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. As the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS prepares for its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19, it's being monitored not just by space agencies but also the United Nations. The comet, which will come within roughly 167 million miles (270 million kilometers) of our planet, will be tracked by ... [Read More]

Dec 15th, 2025 - How life begins remains an unsolved question . One key component might be RNA, a molecular cousin of DNA found in every form of life on Earth, and now scientists say they have shown how it could have formed on our planet eons ago. But not everyone is convinced, and RNA is possibly just one of many molecules that could give rise to life on different worlds. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA , astrobiologist Yuta Hirakawa and his colleagues ... [Read More]

Dec 15th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have spotted something few expected to see: a thick atmosphere clinging to a blisteringly hot rocky planet beyond our Solar System. The world, called TOI-561 b, is an ultra-short-period super-Earth that races around its star every 10.5 hours, with one side locked in eternal daylight and the other in permanent night. Conventional wisdom says a planet this small, hot, and close should be stripped bare. Webb's data ... [Read More]

Dec 15th, 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. After a multi-decade-year mission to understand the nature of the universe, a telescope perched in the mountain plateaus of northern Chile said goodbye in 2022. Now, its final data release is revealing the telescope's legacy: a field in tension. In October 2007, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope ... [Read More]

Dec 14th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google New computer models of Uranus and Neptune suggest these distant worlds might be rock giants rather than pure ice giants. The simulations allow everything from water-rich planets to ones where rock outweighs water by nearly four to one inside Uranus. Both planets sit far beyond Saturn, yet what they are actually made of remains surprisingly uncertain, even after Voyager 2 flew past. Classifying Uranus and Neptune The work was led by Luca Morf, a doctoral student at the ... [Read More]

Dec 14th, 2025 - Reading time 2 minutes A case of astronomical fratricide is doomed to end in a fiery supernova bright enough to be spotted from Earth during the day. A study published this August in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society investigated a binary star system about 10,000 light-years from Earth called V Sagittae. Researchers finally solved the century-long mystery behind what makes it so freaking bright. They found that the system is strangely luminous because one of the ... [Read More]

Dec 14th, 2025 - Even the best telescopes can't see exoplanets. It's all about watching for jiggly stars, blue shifts, and transits. It was almost 100 years ago that Clyde W. Tombaugh discovered Pluto. That was the last planet found until 1992, when humans found another one. But this new planet wasn't in our solar system—it was orbiting another star. We call this an extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet" for short. Since then, astronomers have cataloged more than 6,000 exoplanets. If you thought it was hard to ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have captured some of the sharpest early views ever taken of stellar eruptions, and the results overturn the long-held idea that novae erupt in a single, simple blast. Using Georgia State University's CHARA Array in California, a team resolved structures that no single telescope could see – revealing outflows that twist, collide, and sometimes wait weeks before finally breaking free. One eruption held onto its outer layers for more than 50 days before ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - When NASA scientists opened the sample return canister from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample mission in late 2023, they found something astonishing. Dust and rock collected from the asteroid Bennu contained many of life's building blocks , including all five nucleobases used in DNA and RNA, 14 of the 20 amino acids found in proteins, and a rich collection of other organic molecules . These are built primarily from carbon and hydrogen, and they often form the backbone of life's chemistry. For ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes The supernova SN 2025wny is hopelessly far, lying approximately 10 billion light-years from Earth. Normally, this would make it impossible for astronomers to detect. But one team got lucky. While scanning the sky for cosmic transients, an international team of astronomers noticed two galaxies in the foreground of a giant blob of light. Further analysis with other telescopes revealed that the blur was a supernova—a superluminous one at that. Remarkably, the two ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 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. Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole whipping up cosmic winds at record speeds. The black hole, located 135 million light-years from Earth in the center of the NGC 3783 spiral galaxy, caught researchers' attention after emitting a huge X-ray flare. As the burst died down, it left ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, December 12 Ganymede reappears from occultation behind Jupiter overnight tonight, late on the 12th in the western U.S. and early on the 13th for those in the eastern half of the country.  Jupiter rises around 7 P.M. local time, located in eastern Gemini. Shining at magnitude –2.7, it's the brightest object in the eastern sky, just to the lower right of Castor and Pollux, the heads of the Twins. Let the giant planet rise ... [Read More]