Space

Dec 17th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Somewhere in the Milky Way, a tiny star named GPM J1839-10 has been sending out a radio pulse every 22 minutes. Astronomers now realize that this pattern has been repeating, almost without fail, for several decades. GPM J1839-10 is about 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Scutum. Its slow but steady flashing breaks the usual rules for how dead stars should behave, leaving scientists puzzled about the engine powering it. Odd signal from GPM J1839-10 This ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2025 - NASA scientists say Titan's hidden water may be trapped in pockets not an ocean. For years, Saturn's largest moon Titan has worn the label "ocean world." Beneath its orange smog and methane rain, many planetary models placed a vast, planet-encircling sea of liquid water under an icy crust — a hidden reservoir that could, at least in theory, mingle minerals, water, and chemistry over geologic time in a way that might be conducive to life. Yet, a reanalysis of Cassini data in a new Nature ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Seven tiny grains of dust from China's Chang'e-6 Moon mission have revealed traces of an unusually fragile, CI chondrite meteorite in lunar soil. It is the first confirmed time that this specific meteorite type has been found on the Moon. The CI chondrites found on the Moon are rare, water-rich stony meteorites that carry many easily-evaporated elements. Their survival inside Moon soil suggests that ancient water-bearing asteroids once bombarded the Earth Moon system more ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 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. The discovery of a hidden supermassive black hole inside an ancient galaxy suggests that some of our universe's most extreme objects could be invisible unless observed in infrared wavelengths, James Webb telescope observations reveal. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Join the conversation ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Einstein said a spinning mass should twist spacetime around it. For more than a century, that idea remained frustratingly hard to catch in the wild. Now, astronomers watching a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole have spotted a repeating wobble in both X-rays and radio light. The synchronized motion points to spacetime itself being dragged into a slow, predictable swirl. By following the debris disk and a powerful jet over time, researchers from the ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 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 A mysterious, spider-like structure lurking on Jupiter's fourth-largest moon, Europa, may finally have a proper explanation nearly 30 years after it was ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes The cosmos is so full of mysteries that sometimes, astronomers will find answers to things you've probably never even heard of. Take, for instance, the luminous fast blue optical transients—LFBOTs for short—those weird, fading flashes of blue and ultraviolet light whose source has long eluded astronomers. Well, astronomers may finally have an answer. LFBOTs are relatively rare events. They're so bright that they're visible over hundreds of millions to billions ... [Read More]

Dec 17th, 2025 - NASA has lost contact with MAVEN, a spacecraft that launched in 2013 and began orbiting Mars about 10 months later, remaining there for over a decade. According to , it was working normally before orbiting around the red planet, and around December 6 when it emerged, there was no signal between the craft and NASA's Deep Space Network. The appropriate teams are investigating, and continue to do so, but there has been no successful reconnection as of yet.  According to recent analysis, after ... [Read More]

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 - The rings of Saturn are normally thought to be flat, but measurements by the Cassini spacecraft show that some of their particles fly hundreds of thousands of kilometres above and below the thin main discs Specks of dust from Saturn's rings appear to float much farther above and below the planet than scientists thought possible, suggesting the rings are more like a giant dusty doughnut. The main structure of Saturn's rings is extremely thin, extending outwards for tens of thousands of ... [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 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 - 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 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 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 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]