Space

Jan 24th, 2026 - Inside an incredibly bright cluster of galaxies, a long-dormant supermassive black hole has come back to life. Radio images captured a one-million-light-year-long stream of star-forming particles and gas emanating from the black hole at the center of the galaxy J1007+3540—which apparently is erupting for the first time in about 100 million years. "Although some 'restarted' radio galaxies are known in the literature, J1007+3540 stands out," says lead study author Shobha Kumari of Midnapore ... [Read More]

Jan 24th, 2026 - Reading time 3 minutes It's difficult to overstate the significance of NASA's upcoming Artemis 2 mission . For the first time in over 50 years, astronauts will fly by the Moon on the first crewed test of the rocket and spacecraft that will eventually enable humanity's long-awaited return to the lunar surface. But Artemis 2 won't just test spaceflight systems and hardware. This mission will also put NASA's in-space science operations to the test. During their 10-day trip around the Moon, the ... [Read More]

Jan 23rd, 2026 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, January 23 Pluto reaches conjunction with the Sun at 5 A.M. EST. Also this morning, the Moon passes 4° north of Saturn at 8 A.M. EST and passes 4° north of Neptune at 11 A.M. EST. You can catch the trio in the southwestern sky after sunset. Earlier is better — around 6:30 P.M. local time, they are still 40° high, affording clear views of Neptune through binoculars or a telescope before it gets too close to the more ... [Read More]

Jan 23rd, 2026 - 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 Pinterest Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Colossal monsters lurk in the centers of all galaxies. Known as supermassive black holes, these gravitational beasts can have millions to billions ... [Read More]

Jan 23rd, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Earth's atmosphere may feel permanent, but it is slowly leaking into space. New research suggests some of that lost air does not disappear. Instead, it drifts outward and settles onto the Moon, quietly accumulating in lunar soil over billions of years. That process matters for both science and exploration. The Moon may preserve a chemical record of Earth's ancient atmosphere, and those same materials could one day support future lunar missions. Using computer simulations, ... [Read More]

Jan 23rd, 2026 - The northern sky's greatest galaxy gets its familiar name from the northern constellation where it resides, Andromeda the Princess. This star system is our nearest large spiral galaxy, and it sits at the far end of the Local Group of galaxies. Observations Observers have described M31 as something other than starlike as far back as 964. In that year, Persian astronomer Abdal-Rahman Al-Sufi called it a ''little cloud'' in his  Book of Fixed Stars . German astronomer Simon ... [Read More]

Jan 23rd, 2026 - The biggest explosions in the universe, ranked The universe is exploding. Or parts of it are. The night sky may seem calm, even serene, but that masks events of a catastrophic and nearly unimaginable scale. Across the galaxy and even the cosmos itself, immense outbursts of energy occur that could easily vaporize our planet. Happily, space is vast, and the terrible distance between these events and us diminishes what we see to a faint glow—usually. It's very rare for our Earth to be ... [Read More]

Jan 22nd, 2026 - 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 Pinterest Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Two of the universe's most mysterious particles may be colliding invisibly throughout the cosmos — a discovery that could solve one of the ... [Read More]

Jan 22nd, 2026 - Reading time 3 minutes On September 30, 2024, the Sun unleashed a powerful explosion, causing magnetic field lines to break and reconnect in a criss-cross pattern. A Sun-observing probe was there to watch it unfold, gathering unprecedented data that's helping scientists better understand the mechanism behind solar flares. Using the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a team of scientists discovered that solar flares are triggered by initially weak disturbances that grow more ... [Read More]

Jan 21st, 2026 - Earth exists in a bubble. Our atmosphere forms a protective barrier between everything on the planet's surface and the near-empty vastness of space. But it's not the only bubble Earth sits inside. Beyond our familiar atmospheric cocoon lies a much larger bubble, an invisible boundary carved by the Sun itself. This bubble, known as the heliosphere , is enormous. It encompasses the entire Solar System , spanning such a vast distance that only two spacecraft have ever managed to leave it. Launched ... [Read More]

Jan 21st, 2026 - Inside a famous nebula, astronomers find an iron structure they cannot yet explain. The Ring Nebula is a bright shell of gas in the constellation Lyra. It has long served as a textbook example of how stars similar to the Sun shed their outer layers at the end of their lives. It's also perhaps one of the most adored nebulae by space enthusiasts, as well as amateur and professional astronomers alike. Now it has surprised scientists with something wholly unexpected: a massive bar of iron atoms ... [Read More]

Jan 21st, 2026 - 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 Pinterest Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a stunning time-lapse of a trio of solar eruptions exploding into space from the sun during an ... [Read More]

Jan 21st, 2026 - Even for astronomers who have gazed upon the same cosmic object over their whole career, new portraits of these celestial bodies from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have the power to delight and amaze. See, for example, JWST's latest images of the iconic Helix Nebula , also known as the "Eye of God," a stellar grave site some 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. "I thought this was a close-up of lavender until I saw the galaxies," wrote Australian astrophysicist ... [Read More]

Jan 21st, 2026 - A new all-sky census reveals thousands of stable, long-lived stars that might be life's best bet. Some astronomers have made it their life's work to find "Earth 2.0," a rocky planet orbiting a star just like our own Sun. It makes sense; we know life works here, so why not look for a mirror image of our own solar system? But a massive new survey suggests we might have been looking at the wrong stars. The sweet spot for life isn't necessarily a yellow sun like ours, nor the volatile red dwarfs ... [Read More]

Jan 20th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Earth's first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization is likely to arrive as something hard to miss, not a quiet or subtle trace. That expectation matters now, because decades of discovery show that what we notice first often says more about visibility than about what is typical. A new research article titled " The Eschatian Hypothesis " by David Kipping from Columbia University will appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . First ... [Read More]

Jan 20th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google A surprisingly orderly galaxy from the universe's infancy, nicknamed "Cosmic Grapes," shows signs of being built in pieces rather than as a smooth whole. Its structure challenges long-standing ideas about how early galaxies grew and how stable their disks could be so soon after cosmic beginnings. Studying the "Cosmic Grapes" The Cosmic Grapes galaxy is a rotating system that formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang, with its disk split into multiple dense, ... [Read More]