Space

Dec 1st, 2025 - The long nights of December are an astronomical delight. The early evening sky hosts Saturn as the main feature, along with Uranus and Neptune. Jupiter rises later and is visible all night, its four main satellites undergoing many notable events. The morning sky shows the best Northern Hemisphere appearance of Mercury for the year.  Let's begin with Saturn and Neptune , 4.3° apart on Dec. 1. Saturn's easterly motion carries it to within 3.5° of Neptune by the 31st. Saturn is easy ... [Read More]

Dec 1st, 2025 - For multiple decades, we have been trying to determine exactly what the explosions of red supergiant stars look like. A new astronomical finding could help solve the mystery of the missing massive red 'supergiants' . According to theory, massive red supergiant stars should cause most supernovae, yet they are rarely observed. To help garner new information, Northwestern University scientists have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make observations. The analysis of these shows an ... [Read More]

Dec 1st, 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 catastrophic collision that forged the moon, and marked one of the most consequential events in Earth's early history, may have been triggered not by a distant interloper, but by a sibling world that grew up right next door, according to a new study. About 4.5 billion years ago, a ... [Read More]

Dec 1st, 2025 - The final supermoon of the year, known as the Cold Moon, will appear in the sky on Thursday. This full moon will definitely be the brightest object in the night sky this time of the year. If you're thinking that there's been a lot of these supermoons lately, you are correct. Thursday's will be the third one in a row this year. One more supermoon is coming in January, and it's known as the Wolf Moon. A supermoon can appear up to 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than a normal full moon, ... [Read More]

Dec 1st, 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 interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS could be covered in erupting "ice volcanoes," new observations suggest. Researchers found evidence that as the comet approached the sun, a series of cryovolcanoes (nicknamed "ice volcanoes") erupted on its surface. The activation of these icy jets can be ... [Read More]

Dec 1st, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes In September, NASA officially confirmed the existence of a whopping 6,000 exoplanets—a feat so impressive that it's bizarre to think that, by contrast, the number of confirmed exomoons tallies up to, well, zero. But that imbalance may shift soon if a new proposal by astronomers ends up being as effective as they claim. An upcoming Astronomy & Astrophysics paper describes how astronomers devised and utilized a novel, alternative approach for identifying exomoons, ... [Read More]

Dec 1st, 2025 - Monday, Dec. 1, 2025: Your daily feed of the biggest discoveries and breakthroughs making headlines. Here's the biggest science news you need to know. Refresh I'll show myself out The U.S. West Coast is heading out for the evening, but we'll have tons of fresh science news when the British crew signs on. In the meantime, we'll leave you with a classic chemistry joke. Two atoms were sitting at a bar. The first atom says to the second atom: "I just lost an electron." The second asks: "Are you ... [Read More]

Dec 1st, 2025 - A tiny sample from asteroid Bennu just revealed a fragile amino acid never before seen beyond Earth. The question of how life started on Earth is rife with speculation, some ending with a delivery truck from space. Panspermia suggests that life or prebiotic molecules — the chemical building blocks required for life — appeared on other planets and were simply imported by passing asteroids or comets. Scientists have found some of these prebiotic ingredients in fallen meteorites ... [Read More]

Nov 30th, 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. QUICK FACTS What it is: An artist's impression of the supernova explosion SN 2024ggi Where it is: 22 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra. When it was shared: Nov. 12, 2025 On April 10, 2024, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) detected first light from an ... [Read More]

Nov 29th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Over the past thirty years, astronomers have identified more than 7,000 planets outside of our solar system – a remarkable leap since the first exoplanet discovery in 1995. Now, a group of astronomers has confirmed finding a super-Earth that orbits a star very similar to our Sun. The planet circles a star called HD 20794 and sits in a region where liquid water could exist on a rocky surface. The study appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics and is based on one of the ... [Read More]

Nov 29th, 2025 - Space, or as many like to call it, the "final frontier," has captured our hearts and imaginations ever since we got out of the caves and started looking up. For most of human history, though, space was just too far away due to technological challenges and the sheer cost of developing a rocket capable of carrying humans into space and back.  All this changed during the Cold War when the U.S. and the USSR were locked in a space race. The battle wasn't just about achieving something first, ... [Read More]

Nov 29th, 2025 - Nasa has released a new image of the Red Spider Nebula, revealing never-before-seen details of NGC 6537. Captured with the James Webb Space Telescope's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), the image shows the nebula with remarkable clarity, its full structure stretched across a dense backdrop of thousands of stars. The European Space Agency (ESA) described the picture of the month as a "cosmic creepy crawly." Planetary nebulae like the Red Spider form when Sun-like stars reach the ends of their ... [Read More]

Nov 28th, 2025 - Scientists have caught Mars's atmosphere crackling with static, uncovering evidence of miniature lightning in its dust storms. When a dust devil passed over NASA's Perseverance rover in 2021, scientists expected to hear the hiss of sand and the rush of Martian wind. Instead, they caught a faint pop. They now believe this is the sound of electricity discharging in Mars's thin air. "This is like mini-lightning on Mars," said Baptiste Chide of the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetary ... [Read More]

Nov 28th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Some of the smallest moons in the outer solar system may hide water that behaves in a very strange way, far from the Sun. New research suggests that on worlds like Saturn's moon Mimas, parts of the buried ocean can actually start to boil under miles of ice. This boiling does not come from a hot surface at all. It comes from how the ice shell slowly grows thinner over time and changes the pressure on the water below. Boiling water inside icy moons Many outer moons have a ... [Read More]

Nov 28th, 2025 - The only major difference between the sun and the stars we see at night is that the sun happens to be close to us—which is advantageous, assuming you enjoy being alive. Astronomers enjoy this as well but have another reason for rejoicing in the sun's proximity: this allows us to see it as a disk. The sun is, of course, three-dimensional. But from a distance, we see it as a filled circle in the sky, and that means we can study its surface in some detail, revealing its sunspots, faculae, ... [Read More]

Nov 27th, 2025 - On Nov. 27, 2001, NASA announced the first detection of an exoplanet atmosphere. Using the Hubble Space Telescope's spectrometer, astronomers observed HD 209458b , orbiting a 7th-magnitude, Sun-like star 150 light-years away in Pegasus. The researchers were able to detect sodium in the exoplanet's atmosphere – though it was less sodium than models had predicted for a planet of that class, a hot Jupiter. (Some theories suggest that high-altitude clouds in the atmosphere affected the ... [Read More]