Space

Mar 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Some planets orbit so close to their stars that they may spill enough gas to build a long-lived ring around the star itself. That gas would not just drift away, it would alter the star's light in a pattern that astronomers can now hunt. Gas rings alter star light In the starlight itself, the clearest fingerprint appears near a helium line at 10,830 angstroms. By tracing that blockage, Ethan Schreyer found that the helium feature should deepen enough to pull these stars ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - In June 2013, seven telescopes across South America were trained on the star UCAC4 248-108672, in anticipation of it being occulted by the centaur Chariklo . ( Centaurs are a unique class of large asteroids that have properties of both asteroids and comets.) To researchers' surprise, they witnessed not only the occultation, but additional brief dips in the star's light, before and after the centaur passed in front of it. From these observations, scientists concluded that Chariklo has two rings. ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Space is messy when a planet is being born. Dust swirls, gas stretches into rings, and gravity pulls matter into clumps that may one day become planets. In one distant system, that process is happening right now, and astronomers have just spotted something rare inside it. A second giant planet is forming around a young star known as WISPIT 2 . The system sits in the constellation Aquila , visible in the northern sky between July and November. This fresh find places WISPIT ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Astronomers typically describe the cosmos with numbers that are, well, astronomical. They measure distances within our galaxy in light-years, where 1 light-year equals 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers), while other galaxies lie millions or even billions of light-years away. And stars typically live billions of years within a universe some 13.7 billion years old. But these enormous numbers obscure the remarkable pace at which some events transpire. For example, it takes no more than a ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google The Crab Nebula has been expanding ever since a star exploded nearly 1,000 years ago – but until now, that motion has mostly lived in static images. Instead of a frozen cloud of debris, the nebula reveals itself as a system that is still actively reshaping. Its filaments drift outward in a surprisingly organized way, challenging what scientists thought they knew about supernova remnants. Motion seen across decades In paired Hubble images taken decades apart, the ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is in a race against time. For more than 21 years the Earth-orbiting telescope has surveyed the sky for gamma-ray bursts —the most powerful and luminous explosions in the universe—and whipped around to take a closer look. But on every orbit, it collides with countless particles from the planet's atmosphere. Each impact steals a tiny bit of the spacecraft's speed, pushing it a smidgen closer to Earth. If left alone, the spacecraft will lose the ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers expect most stars like our sun to act in a calm, predictable way. Their brightness rises and falls a little over time, but the changes are small and steady. That is why one quiet-looking star in our galaxy caught scientists off guard. Its light suddenly started behaving in ways no one expected. The star sits about 11,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Pupis . For years, it looked like a typical "main sequence" star, the same stage ... [Read More]

Mar 25th, 2026 - On March 25, 1655, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens pointed his 50-power refracting telescope toward Saturn. He and his brother had been perfecting telescope-building techniques, including making improvements to reduce chromatic aberration through lens grinding, and experimenting with optical stops to improve clarity. Huygens hoped his self-designed scope would help him study Saturn's rings; instead, he spotted a large moon in the gas giant's orbit. Titan – named by John Herschel in ... [Read More]

Mar 25th, 2026 - Only one US-built nuclear reactor has ever flown in space, and that was more than 60 years ago. NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration's space policy. But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the ... [Read More]

Mar 25th, 2026 - Reading time 3 minutes Earth has a particularly strong magnetosphere —a bubble-shaped capsule of magnetism—shielding the planet and its inhabitants from solar weather and other space badness. These protective perks extend to the Moon, whose orbit enters and exits Earth's magnetosphere. But new research suggests we've underestimated how good the magnetosphere is at its job. In a Science Advances paper published today, researchers say they've found strong evidence that an energetic ... [Read More]

Mar 24th, 2026 - Our solar system's rocky planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – may have formed from two rings around the young sun, rather than a single disc The inner solar system may have formed differently from how we have long thought it must have. For decades, researchers have thought that the rocky planets formed from a single disc of dust and debris in the early solar system, but new simulations indicate there might have been two separate discs of material. Models featuring a single ... [Read More]

Mar 24th, 2026 - As soon as April 1, four people will embark on a journey that will take them farther from the Earth than anyone has ever traveled before. When NASA's new moon rocket lifts off as soon as April 1, its immense core stage will mix 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen with 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and ignite the propellant in four, eight-foot-wide engines, producing some 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Shortly after these main engines fire, two solid rocket boosters, one on each side, will ... [Read More]

Mar 23rd, 2026 - As black holes feed, they pull material into a disk around them. The material orbiting in this disk gets heated to extreme temperatures, and so it becomes a plasma — a state of matter in which some of the electrons are separated from their atoms. This creates ions, or atoms that become charged because the number of electrons and protons are no longer the same. So, there are both positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons in this plasma. As these charged particles move, they ... [Read More]

Mar 23rd, 2026 - Larger, more powerful storms on Jupiter produce stronger lightning than on Earth. New measurements could shed light on electrical phenomena associated with thunderstorms on our planet. Jupiter, the most massive planet in our solar system, has correspondingly humongous storms, some of which last for centuries. Some of these storms also generate terrific bolts of lightning, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley scientists. Some flashes are 100 times more powerful than ... [Read More]

Mar 23rd, 2026 - "We can't quite afford to support everything that we have done in the past." Jupiter's colossal storms generate lightning flashes at least 100 times more powerful than those on Earth, according to scientists analyzing data from NASA's Juno spacecraft. The findings were published March 20 in the journal AGU Advances.  Researchers used data recorded by Juno in 2021 and 2022, after NASA granted an extension to the spacecraft's operations upon completing a five-year science campaign at ... [Read More]

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