Space

Jan 30th, 2026 - New simulations suggest the first small black holes could binge on gas and balloon quickly. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted supermassive black holes—objects up to millions of times the sun's mass—at times when the cosmos was still in its infancy. How did they grow so large, so fast? A new study in Nature Astronomy argues that the early universe may have made it easier than many researchers assumed, by turning young galaxies into chaotic feeding grounds ... [Read More]

Jan 30th, 2026 - On April 24, 1990, humanity launched a scientific revolution. I mean " launched" literally: on that date the space shuttle Discovery roared into the sky with the Hubble Space Telescope nestled in its cargo bay. The telescope was on a mission destined to forever change our view of the universe. Hubble wasn't the largest telescope ever—its 2.4-meter mirror is actually considered small these days—but being above the atmosphere gave it superpowers. Our air boils and roils, blurring the ... [Read More]

Jan 30th, 2026 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, January 30 The Moon passes 4° north of Jupiter this evening at 9 P.M. EST. The pair is visible most of the night in the central region of Gemini. Early in the evening, the nearly Full Moon hangs to the upper left of bright Jupiter. The gas giant outshines either of the Twins' brightest stars, Castor and Pollux.  Over in the north, the constellation Camelopardalis arcs above the North Star late tonight. A few degrees from the ... [Read More]

Jan 30th, 2026 - Astronomers think they've found a celestial unicorn: a potentially habitable near twin of Earth with the same size and perhaps even year-length as our own familiar planet, circling a star much like our own. The only problem is that they're not sure it's really there. The first—and so far only—hint of the potential planet arrived in observations from NASA's now retired Kepler space telescope. In 2017 the telescope recorded a sudden 10-hour-long dimming of HD 137010, a star only ... [Read More]

Jan 30th, 2026 - Weak magnetic hiccups can cascade into a flare and a lingering rain of plasma. Imagine standing on a snowy mountain ridge. A single fracture forms in the ice crust, or a small patch of heavy snow shifts just an inch. That tiny movement destabilizes the snowpack below, which pushes against the next layer. Within moments, the entire mountainside is a cascading white sheet of destruction. We call this phenomenon an avalanche. Now, thanks to the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft, we ... [Read More]

Jan 30th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Stars don't go quietly. When massive ones die, they tear themselves apart in explosions so bright they can outshine entire galaxies. For years, astronomers have mostly watched these deaths through visible light. That view captures the blast, but it leaves out much of what happens just before the end. Now there's something new. Scientists have detected radio waves from a very rare kind of exploding star for the first time. Those faint signals preserve a record of the ... [Read More]

Jan 29th, 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 Editor's note: This article was updated on Jan. 29, 2026. It was originally published in May, 2025, when the related study was released as a ... [Read More]

Jan 29th, 2026 - From degeneracy to galactic archaeology, white dwarfs are helping scientists make sense of some of the universe's burning mysteries. White dwarfs are the final stop for stars that aren't massive enough to go out in a supernova . Think of them as the retirement phase for the vast majority of stars in our universe. When a star consumes its fuel, it doesn't just vanish; it leaves behind a dense, white-hot core. Essentially, a white dwarf is the dense, hot core left behind after a star has ... [Read More]

Jan 29th, 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 An artificial intelligence (AI) tool has uncovered more than 1,000 strange cosmic objects in the Hubble Space Telescope 's image archive, including ... [Read More]

Jan 29th, 2026 - New models suggest many planets once dismissed as barren may still hold liquid water. Life as we know it needs liquid water. For liquid water to exist on a given planet, it has to lie in a specific region called the "habitable zone" or "Goldilocks zone". This zone is estimated using the star's size and the distance between the planet and the star. But maybe we were wrong. In research published this month in The Astrophysical Journal , the astrophysicist Amri Wandel of the Hebrew University of ... [Read More]

Jan 29th, 2026 - Voyager 1 keeps moving farther from Earth than any human-made object. Launched in 1977, it flew by Jupiter and Saturn, sending back images and information that changed our understanding of the outer planets. It left the asteroid belt early and overtook its twin, Voyager 2, on its way out. The probe crossed into interstellar space in 2012, entering a region with material like long-dead suns. Voyager 2 followed in 2018. Both spacecraft are still sending data through the Deep Space Network, though ... [Read More]

Jan 28th, 2026 - Reading time 3 minutes Jupiter's moon Io is covered in hundreds of volcanoes, which spew fountains of lava that constantly refill impact craters on its surface with scorching molten lakes. A recent discovery of extreme volcanic activity on the Jovian moon tops any eruption previously detected on Io, proving that this chaotic world knows no bounds. NASA's Juno mission detected a volcanic hot spot in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter's moon, marking the most energetic eruption ever detected on ... [Read More]

Jan 28th, 2026 - Massive stars have an outsized influence on their environment and the galaxies they call home. These behemoths have the highest surface temperatures of any normal stars, so they emit copious amounts of ultraviolet radiation that ionizes their surroundings. They also possess fierce stellar winds that help shape their gaseous environs. But these monster suns also burn through their nuclear fuels rapidly, so they don't live long and thus are exceedingly rare. It's no wonder astronomers were eager ... [Read More]

Jan 28th, 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 complex precursors to biological molecules can form spontaneously in interstellar space, according to a lab experiment that opens up new ... [Read More]

Jan 28th, 2026 - Reading time 2 minutes , one of Jupiter's 95 moons, is encased in a shell of water ice, and researchers have just re-estimated its thickness. In 2022, NASA's Juno spacecraft zoomed close to the moon's surface. Information from this flyby has led researchers to conclude that, in the area where the flyby collected data, the moon's layer of ice is on average around 18 miles thick (29 kilometers). The new measurement, along with other new information about certain ice features, could inform our ... [Read More]

Jan 28th, 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 A giant cloud of vaporized metal may be hiding a secret planet or second alien sun in a nearby star system, a new study reveals. The mysterious ... [Read More]