Space

Nov 19th, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has spent the last several months on a tour of our solar system. NASA spacecraft and telescopes have snapped photos of this celestial visitor over the course of its journey, and after weeks of anticipation, the agency has finally unveiled these never-before-seen images. During a press conference held at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Wednesday, agency scientists showcased some of the best images of 3I/ATLAS yet, ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 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. Scientists have traced the origins of the most massive black hole merger ever observed, revealing how two "impossible" giants may have formed despite long-standing assumptions that such objects should not exist. These black holes were considered "forbidden" because stars of that size were ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 2025 - A newly discovered cluster of objects called the "inner kernel" of the Kuiper belt could teach us about the early history of the solar system – including the movement of Neptune The Kuiper belt, a disc of icy rocks on the outermost edges of the solar system, seems to have more structure than we thought. In 2011, researchers found a cluster of objects there on similar orbits that they dubbed the "kernel" of the Kuiper belt – now, another team has spotted an even more compact cluster ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 2025 - When astronomers search for planets that could host liquid water on their surface, they start by looking at a star's habitable zone . Water is a key ingredient for life , and on a planet too close to its star, water on its surface may "boil"; too far, and it could freeze. This zone marks the region in between. But being in this sweet spot doesn't automatically mean a planet is hospitable to life. Other factors, like whether a planet is geologically active or has processes that regulate gases in ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have taken a fresh look at NGC 6789, an isolated dwarf galaxy located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Draco. What they found is a fascinating mystery. Over the past 600 million years, this dwarf has been steadily forging new stars despite living inside the Local Void – one of the emptiest neighborhoods in our cosmic vicinity. Star formation needs gas, yet the void is famously short on it. Even stranger, deep imaging now suggests ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 2025 - In a first for the Perseverance rover, it appears to have found an iron-nickel meteorite near the Jezero Crater. Reading time 2 minutes NASA's Perseverance rover has seen its fair share of rocks, and most are unremarkable. Once in a while, however, Perseverance stumbles upon something exotic. That's precisely what happened during the rover's recent investigation of the bedrock at "Vernodden." While exploring this site along the rim of the Jezero Crater , Perseverance encountered an oddly shaped ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes The Webb telescope has unlocked a mystery in an exotic star system located approximately 8,000 light-years from Earth. Using its mid-infrared observation capabilities, the space telescope captured the first image of four swirling spirals of dust encircling two aging stars locked together in an orbital dance. NASA released the image on Wednesday, confirming the existence of the layered shells of dust surrounding two Wolf-Rayet stars in the Apep system. Previous ... [Read More]

Nov 17th, 2025 - New data challenge a foundational idea in cosmology: the accelerating universe. In the late 1990s, two rival teams of astronomers discovered that the universe was expanding faster and faster. It was a stunning conclusion based on the dimming light of distant supernovae . This led to the idea of a mysterious force that counteracts gravity, dubbed dark energy . It was a major breakthrough that reshaped our understanding of cosmology and earned a Nobel Prize in 2011 . But now, a new study from ... [Read More]

Nov 17th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have been chasing this mystery for decades: Can stars, other than our Sun, shoot off massive eruptions of plasma that could wipe out nearby planets' atmospheres? The answer is now a clear yes. For the first time ever, scientists have caught a coronal mass ejection (CME) exploding off a distant star. A CME is a huge burst of charged material that can speed through space at millions of miles per hour. We know our Sun throws these out all the time. They're what ... [Read More]

Nov 17th, 2025 - A new analysis of old Cassini data has also verified past detections of complex organics in Saturn's E ring, strengthening the chemical ties between the ring and its progenitor. In 2008, NASA's now-departed Cassini spacecraft made its fastest flyby of Enceladus, the moon of Saturn that's spewing its subsurface ocean into space. A new analysis of data from that flyby has revealed a bevy of complex organic compounds that hadn't been detected before and confirmed the origin of several previously ... [Read More]

Nov 17th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Earth has picked up a new traveling companion – an asteroid named 2025 PN7 that now moves through space in step with us. This tiny quasi moon, only about 62 feet (19 meters) wide, follows an orbit so similar to Earth's that it will linger nearby for nearly six decades, staying with us until around 2083. The discovery comes from sky surveys that scan the same patches of sky each night, searching for faint, slow-moving objects that reveal themselves only through ... [Read More]

Nov 17th, 2025 - An international team led by researchers from the University of Cologne has solved the mystery of an extraordinary phenomenon known as the "Diamond Ring" in the star-forming region Cygnus X, a huge, ring-shaped structure made of gas and dust that resembles a glowing diamond ring. In similar structures, the formations are not flat but spherical in shape. How this special shape came about was previously unknown. The results have been under the title "The Diamond Ring in Cygnus X: an advanced ... [Read More]

Nov 17th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have spotted nickel gas streaming from comet 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object, a body from outside our solar system, while it was still far from the Sun. In a new study, researchers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to catch the signal earlier than ever for an interstellar visitor. The same campaign confirmed something else unusual. NASA's Webb telescope found that the comet's gas cloud is unusually rich in carbon dioxide compared with water, a chemical ... [Read More]

Nov 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. QUICK FACTS What it is: Barred spiral galaxy Messier 61, AKA NGC 4303 Where it is: 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo When it was shared: Oct. 28, 2025 Even before its full science operations have begun, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has already helped astronomers ... [Read More]

Nov 16th, 2025 - Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) has become a major point of interest for astronomers following a series of rapid changes observed in recent weeks. First detected in May 2025, the comet moved steadily towards its perihelion in early October, then began displaying fluctuations in brightness and visible shape that hinted at underlying instability. Researchers have continued to track these developments closely, as they offer insights into how newly arriving long-period comets behave when exposed to strong ... [Read More]

Nov 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. Look into the night sky, and it might seem like space is a vast expanse of darkness . But are any regions darker than others? What's the darkest place in the solar system and, on a grander scale, the universe ? In short, the answer isn't straightforward, and it depends on whom you ask, experts ... [Read More]