Space

Mar 31st, 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 Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google A new analysis has found that seven competing descriptions of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, all leave the standard black hole picture intact when matched against the motion of S2, a single, nearby star. That result keeps one of modern astronomy's most important objects on familiar ground, even as it narrows where more exotic possibilities can still hide. Tracking S2 around Sagittarius A* Around the Milky Way's central dark ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2026 - An accounting of all the water that should have been and gone on Mars's surface has come up with a discrepancy that shows just how little we understand the Red Planet's hydrological history Planetary scientists agree that Mars used to have liquid water on its surface and a water-rich atmosphere, far different from its current arid state. But an accounting of all the sources of water to the Martian surface and all the ways it could have been taken away has found a major discrepancy – we ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Saturn has always stood out in the night sky. Its rings catch the eye, but the real action happens in the thick layers of gas wrapped around the planet. Now, two powerful space telescopes have taken fresh images that show Saturn in ways we have never quite seen before. These views do not just look different – they reveal how the planet actually works. One image shows color and detail we can see with our eyes. The other goes deeper, pulling out hidden layers and ... [Read More]

Mar 29th, 2026 - When Heinrich Olbers spotted asteroid Pallas on March 28, 1802, it called into question the recent discovery of Ceres as the "missing" planet between Mars and Jupiter. The Titius-Bode law , a mathematical formula that predicted the expected distances of planets from the Sun and had accurately posited the location of Uranus, suggested there should be a planet between Mars and Jupiter. Giuseppe Piazzi 's discovery of Ceres seemed to solve the mystery, but when Olbers discovered Pallas, he ... [Read More]

Mar 29th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Scientists have discovered the most compact quadruple star system ever observed, with three stars packed inside Mercury's orbit around the Sun. That finding turns a faint, flickering point of light into a rare test case for how tightly crowded star systems form, survive, and eventually collapse. Signals in starlight Nine long fades in NASA's TESS data marked the moment this system stopped looking like an ordinary eclipsing pair. From those repeated dips, Tamás ... [Read More]

Mar 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 Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & ... [Read More]

Mar 29th, 2026 - NASA's Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter for 10 years. During that time, it has studied the huge storms on the planet, such as the Great Red Spot, which is larger than Earth. New data shows that lightning strikes inside Jupiter's atmosphere may be more than 500 times as powerful than on Earth. Lead author Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, published the study in the journal AGU Advances . "Convection operates a little bit differently on Earth ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google For decades, a bright star in the night sky quietly held onto a secret. Gamma Cassiopeiae, easy to spot in the familiar W-shaped Cassiopeia constellation, looked ordinary at first glance. But behind that steady glow, something strange was happening. Astronomers kept seeing bursts of powerful X-rays that did not fit what they knew about stars like it. The question lingered for more than half a century: what was causing them? Now, that long-running mystery finally has an ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Did the very young universe make swarms of tiny black holes? Black holes are weird. You heard it here first. But really, they're even more bizarre than most of us realize. They warp space. They warp time . They can spin so rapidly they wrap the fabric of spacetime around them like a warm blanket on a winter's day . Despite greedily pulling in everything around them, they are the engines that power some of the most luminous objects in the entire cosmos . And yet, if you stand back and squint a ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, March 27 The Moon passes through the outskirts of the famous Beehive Cluster (M44) in Cancer this evening, standing due north of the open cluster's center around midnight Eastern time.  Earlier in the evening, Venus lingers long after sunset, slowly sinking toward the western horizon. Standing nearly 20° high as the Sun disappears, Venus sets around 9 P.M. local daylight time. It's blazingly bright at magnitude –3.9, ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Astronomers caught a comet in the act of reversing its spin. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, scientists noticed the never-before-seen behavior of Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák (41P to its friends) after it passed around the sun in 2017. In May of that year, data from NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory suggested the object was spinning some three times slower than it had just two months before, in March 2017. A follow-up Hubble analysis revealed something even more unusual: ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - On Jan. 15, 2025, the Gaia spacecraft took its last image. Then the craft ran a final round of engineering tests, fired its thrusters to leave Earth behind, and slipped into an orbit around the Sun, finally turning off on March 27. After more than a decade in operation, 3 trillion observations, and 2 billion stars observed, Gaia earned its retirement. Launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, Gaia's goal was "to map a billion stars," and it succeeded. Compiling the map of where these ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 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 Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Earth is facing an unexplained surge of massive, booming daytime fireballs in early 2026. On a Saturday afternoon this past March, a piece of the solar system plummeted toward a home in north Houston. The one-ton space rock broke apart nearly 30 miles above the city, unleashing a violent sonic boom equivalent to 26 tons of TNT. A dark, jagged fragment smashed through a residential roof and even ricocheted around a bedroom like a cosmic pinball. This would have been stunning in itself, except ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Cosmologists have an embarrassing problem: we don't know what shape the universe is. The cosmos has three possible geometries—positively curved like a sphere, flat like an infinite plane or negatively curved like a saddle—but geometry alone doesn't determine shape. A flat universe could still wrap around in any number of ways. It could be finite, infinite, or even folded back on itself like a Klein bottle someone left in the dryer. Einstein's general theory of relativity describes ... [Read More]