Space

Oct 8th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its moons for more than a decade, has yielded a new discovery. A recent peer-reviewed study found complex organic fragments in fresh ice grains from Saturn's moon Enceladus, renewing hope that this water world harbors life in its oceans. These grains were blasted from fractures near the south pole and struck the spacecraft at about 11.2 miles per second during an October 2008 pass. That fast hit provided a more defined ... [Read More]

Oct 8th, 2025 - Astronomers have observed a gigantic cosmic "contrail" in a distant galaxy. The trail of gas and dust may have been churned out by a passing massive black hole , although there are other possible causes, scientists report in a new study. The contrail was spotted in the spiral galaxy NGC 3627, located roughly 31 light-years from our solar system in the constellation Leo. Although contrails have been previously identified in the Milky Way , NGC 3627's is the most clearly defined contrail ever ... [Read More]

Oct 8th, 2025 - Thirty years ago this week, two Swiss astronomers announced that they had spotted the first known planet orbiting a Sun-like star . The Nobel-winning discovery , later published in the pages of Nature , was the culmination of centuries of dreaming, and decades of searching, for worlds beyond the Solar System. It was also the start of a whirlwind of discovery . Astronomers have since found more than 6,000 exoplanets, plus hints of thousands more. Many were detected by NASA's Kepler and ... [Read More]

Oct 7th, 2025 - reading time 2 minutes Stars are the original nuclear fusion reactors. As it evolves, a star continuously fuses hydrogen, helium, and—if it becomes big enough—heavier elements, releasing the energy created into space as light and heat. The earliest stars, however, were a little different. Astronomers believed that the universe's first stars were more " pristine ," meaning that they consisted of only the lightest of elements. For years, scientists thought it unlikely that such ... [Read More]

Oct 7th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google The results of a new study point to a universe that was already radiating heat before the great switch on, known as reionization. The study suggests that the first stars did not flicker on in an icy cosmos. The team behind the Murchison Widefield Array ( MWA ) used a fresh way to read ultra-faint hydrogen signals and came up empty for the coldest scenarios, which is a significant finding.  Detecting heat the early universe Lead author Cathryn M. Trott at the ... [Read More]

Oct 7th, 2025 - A rare interstellar comet — only the third ever confirmed to enter our solar system — was photographed last week, closely approaching Mars, the European Space Agency said Tuesday.  The images taken on Friday by two Mars orbiters show a bright, fuzzy white dot of the comet, also known as 3I/ATLAS , appearing to move against a backdrop of distant stars as it was about 18,641,135 miles away from Mars. The comet poses no threat to Earth, NASA has previously said.  "This was a ... [Read More]

Oct 6th, 2025 - A small asteroid zoomed past Earth closer than most satellites last week — and astronomers didn't notice it until hours later. The surprise asteroid encounter occurred at 8:47 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 30 (Wednesday, Oct. 1 at 0047 GMT) when the roughly giraffe-size space rock flew over Antarctica at just 265 miles (428 kilometers) above Earth's surface, according to newly released data from the European Space Agency ( ESA ). Astronomers first spotted the sneaky space rock — now ... [Read More]

Oct 6th, 2025 - An analysis of the afterglow of the big bang sheds light on how black holes distribute mass in the universe, and why some matter previously seemed to have been missing Unexpectedly violent black holes may have caused the mystery of the missing cosmic matter. Most of the universe is filled with mysterious dark matter, but even ordinary matter has stumped cosmologists. Some of this normal matter – made up of particles called baryons – seemed to have been missing for a long time. ... [Read More]

Oct 6th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google In 2022, NASA sent the DART spacecraft to smash into a small asteroid moon called Dimorphos, aiming to prove that a collision could shift the orbit of an asteroid system. The result stunned everyone. The orbit changed by more than thirty minutes almost instantly. That was a huge success for planetary defense. But a smaller, stranger change appeared later. Observations showed that Dimorphos's orbit kept shrinking by another half a minute in the following weeks. That subtle ... [Read More]

Oct 6th, 2025 - The discovery reveals a mysterious double-ring system billions of light-years away. When astronomers first started finding "odd radio circles," or ORCs, they were baffled. These faint, ghostly rings of radio light seemed to float in deep space, surrounding galaxies like cosmic smoke rings. Now, scientists have discovered the most powerful and distant one yet, and this one isn't even circular. The new object, named RAD J131346.9+500320, lies seven billion light-years away, from a time when the ... [Read More]

Oct 5th, 2025 - The James Webb Space Telescope's latest image shows eight spectacular examples of gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that Albert Einstein first predicted some 100 years ago. Quick facts What it is: Eight "Einstein rings," officially known as gravitational lenses Where it is: The deep sky When it was shared: Sept. 30, 2025 As telescopes peer into the universe, they sometimes see quirks of nature that magnify faraway objects. These eight galaxies recently imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope ... [Read More]

Oct 5th, 2025 - Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has traveled farther than any spacecraft in human history. After more than four decades of silent endurance through space, it now sails beyond the orbit of the outer planets of the solar system. Its mission has transcended planetary flybys; it's now humanity's first direct way to explore interstellar space.   as it stumbled upon something astonishing hiding at the farthest reaches of our solar system: a mysterious "wall of fire." This may sound like ... [Read More]

Oct 5th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A century after astronomers first spotted the colossal jet blasting from the black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87, a new look has brought it into startling focus. Using infrared observations, researchers have traced bright knots and dark, helical lanes in unprecedented detail and, crucially, picked out the jet's elusive counterpart on the far side of the black hole. The research team, led by Maciek Wielgus at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia , reanalyzed ... [Read More]

Oct 5th, 2025 - QUICK FACTS Date: Night of Oct. 5, 1923 Where: Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California Who: Edwin Hubble On the night of Oct. 5 to 6, 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered a new star — and revealed the utter vastness of the universe. Hubble was looking at the cosmos with the 100-inch Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California, when he homed in on a faint smudge of light. He took a series of photographic plates of the object. The rather fuzzy, ... [Read More]

Oct 4th, 2025 - Black holes are eaters of all things, even radiation. But what if their rapacious appetites had an unexpected side effect? A new study published in Physical Review Letters suggests that black holes might spew dark energy —and that they could help explain an intriguing conflict between different measurements of the universe . Dark energy is the force driving the accelerated expansion of the universe. No one knows what it is, but it's thought to permeate everything. In the theory proposed ... [Read More]

Oct 4th, 2025 - Discovery of wide array of carbon-based substances on Enceladus shows solar system is fertile hunting ground From tentative evidence of habitable planets to the eyebrow-raising suggestion an interstellar comet might not be what it seems, the possibility of life beyond our solar system has long tantalised scientists and the public alike. But experts say ET is more likely to be found if we search in our own back yard. The prospect was revitalised on Wednesday when scientists announced the ... [Read More]