Space

Feb 18th, 2026 - In the 1980 film  Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back , Han Solo and friends try to escape pursuing imperial forces by flying through an asteroid field. Droid C-3PO remarks, "the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1". The scene depicts a chaotic, dense field of rocks swirling and spinning through space. This scenario has been played out many times in the cinema. But the reality is very different, at least for the asteroid belt in our Solar ... [Read More]

Feb 18th, 2026 - Last month, Earth was treated  to a massive aurora borealis that reached as far south as Texas. The event was attributed to a solar storm that lasted nearly a full day and will likely contend for the strongest of 2026. Such solar storms are usually fun for people on Earth, as we are protected from solar radiation by our planet's atmosphere, so we can just enjoy the gorgeous greens and pretty purples in the night sky. But solar storms are a lot more than just the aurora borealis we see, and ... [Read More]

Feb 18th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . L ast July, during a routine survey of the sky, the wide-field X-ray telescope equipped on China's Einstein Probe detected something strange: an X-ray source that showed "violent" variability. Around the same time, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a series of gamma ray bursts from the same region—the longest ever recorded, followed by two more. Across the planet and in space, several other telescopes were pointed in the ... [Read More]

Feb 18th, 2026 - A study led by SETI Institute scientist Matija Ćuk proposes that Saturn's bright rings and its largest moon, Titan, may have both originated in collisions among its moons. This study was accepted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal  and the preprint is available here . Near the end of its 13-year mission, NASA's Cassini spacecraft measured how Saturn's internal mass was distributed. That has an effect on the planet's precession, which is the change in the ... [Read More]

Feb 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. Following a massive cryovolcanic eruption, the mysterious Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann has been morphed into a giant spiral and is now shining 100 times brighter than normal. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Get the ... [Read More]

Feb 17th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have been searching for water ice outside of our solar system for years. They expected to find it. They knew it existed on moons and dwarf planets around Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. But they couldn't confirm it around other stars. Until now. The James Webb Space Telescope just changed everything. Researchers aimed its Near-Infrared Spectrograph ( NIRSpec ) at HD 181327, a Sun-like star 155 light-years away. What they found was crystalline water ice swirling ... [Read More]

Feb 17th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google For decades, scientists suspected that Venus might hide massive lava-formed tunnels beneath its scorched surface, but clear evidence had remained elusive. Now, a newly analyzed radar signal has confirmed what researchers long suspected: an empty volcanic tunnel lies beneath one of the planet's collapsed surface pits. The discovery offers the first direct indication that Venus hosts intact underground lava tubes, turning a long-standing geological hypothesis into an ... [Read More]

Feb 17th, 2026 - Scientists may be one step closer in their hunt for signs of past life on Mars after . Nearly a year ago, – one of two – came across an intriguing rock sample that contained some interesting features. On the rock, Curiosity's instruments detected organic compounds that on Earth are most often produced by living things. Though geological processes can also make the material present, researchers concluded in a study Feb. 4 in the journal Astrobiology that such non-biological processes ... [Read More]

Feb 17th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Most massive stars end their lives in spectacular supernova explosions that briefly outshine entire galaxies. But astronomers are now seeing evidence that some stars skip the fireworks entirely, collapsing inward so quietly that the only sign of their death is a gradual fading glow. Researchers studying a massive supergiant in the Andromeda Galaxy, named M31-2014-DS1, found that the star disappeared without any visible explosion, leaving behind only faint infrared traces ... [Read More]

Feb 16th, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . P ulsars are highly magnetized, rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit bursts of electromagnetic radiation from their poles at regular intervals as they spin. In a way, they're kind of like cosmic lighthouses, blinking in space. Now, according to a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal , there could be a pulsar at the center of our Milky Way—and it could open a new chapter in physics.     Nautilus Members ... [Read More]

Feb 15th, 2026 - Kaolinite pebbles show evidence of alteration under high rainfall conditions. A recent study showed that Mars was warm and wet billions of years ago. The finding contrasts with another theory that this era was mainly cold and icy. The result has implications for the idea that life could have developed on the planet at this time. Whether Mars was once habitable is a fascinating and intensely researched topic of interest over many decades. Mars , like the Earth, is about 4.5 billion years old and ... [Read More]

Feb 15th, 2026 - Tree-covered hills stand watch over a yawning hole in the ground. The giant pit steps down in stages, its concentric rings growing ever smaller the deeper it goes. Huge trucks rumble up and down these makeshift roadways. This is the scene at Wangu goldfield in China's Hunan province. This area has already been mined for gold, but it seems they've only scratched the surface. In late 2025 came the announcement that they believe there's over one thousand tonnes of gold tucked away below the ... [Read More]

Feb 15th, 2026 - Humans in space: Are astronauts obsolete? The Artemis II mission, which will return US astronauts to lunar space, has run into problems that have critics demanding NASA remove the crew from the flight for safety reasons. The bigger question is, why do we have astronauts at all? NASA's Artemis program to set up a permanent US human presence on the Moon has so far cost the American taxpayer an eye-watering US$93 billion in return for, at the time of publication, only one unmanned flight around ... [Read More]

Feb 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. ! , Earn Your First Badge Keep Earning Badges See what you've unlocked. Members Exclusive The James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have captured the clearest image yet of a galaxy cluster in the making, seen when the universe was only one billion years old. Facebook X ... [Read More]

Feb 14th, 2026 - On Feb. 14, 1980, the Solar Maximum Mission (or SolarMax) launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and slipped into orbit around the Earth. With goals of better understanding solar flares, the solar constant, and solar atmosphere, the spacecraft carried instruments to image and observe the Sun in X-ray, gamma ray, and ultraviolet.  Only months into its mission, SolarMax experienced an electronics malfunction in its coronagraph, and, not long after, a fuse failure that left it unable to point ... [Read More]

Feb 14th, 2026 - Next-generation telescopes are mapping this outer frontier. Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two. The , a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and perhaps farther, though nobody knows—has been shrouded in mystery since it first came into view in the 1990s. Over the past 30 years, astronomers have cataloged about 4,000 Kuiper Belt objects ... [Read More]