Space

Nov 12th, 2025 - Reading time 2 minutes Astronomers have captured a first-of-its-kind image of a massive dying star. Just 26 hours after the supernova SN 2024ggi was first detected in April 2024, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) pointed its Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile at the dramatic astronomical event. Supernovas are the explosive deaths of stars, and ESO's VLT managed to capture this one in its earliest moments—just as the blast was rupturing through the star's surface. This achievement ... [Read More]

Nov 12th, 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. A powerful blast spotted from a dwarf star was strong enough to strip away the atmosphere of any Earth-like planets that might have been lurking close by, new research suggests. The study, published Wednesday (Nov. 12) in the journal Nature , was the first to confirm a coronal mass ejection ... [Read More]

Nov 12th, 2025 - The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission launched March 2, 2004, on a 4-billion-mile (6.4 billion kilometers) path to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission consisted of the Rosetta orbiter and the Philae lander, both designed for in-depth study of the comet. The spacecraft arrived at 67P/C-G on Aug. 6, 2014, and began orbiting the body a month later; on Nov. 12, 2014, the Philae lander descended to the comet surface. Both the spacecraft orbiting a comet and the landing on the comet's ... [Read More]

Nov 12th, 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. Astronomers using the James Webb telescope may have discovered some of the universe's first stars, and they may offer clues to how galaxies form. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and a phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein, the scientists spotted the early stars, known as ... [Read More]

Nov 12th, 2025 - Reading time 4 minutes When LIGO broke news of an unintelligibly large black hole merger earlier this year, physicists were stunned but trusted they'd find an explanation someday. They probably didn't expect the answer this soon, however. But just as the supposedly impossible merger took place, a possible explanation for it has arrived surprisingly quickly. Astronomers ran different simulations of how a massive star could collapse into black holes that are of a smaller size than ... [Read More]

Nov 11th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A century ago, one dim, flickering star in the Andromeda galaxy forced astronomy to face a larger universe. That star , cataloged as V1, sits roughly 2.2 million light years away, about 13 quintillion miles, far beyond the Milky Way. Its steady rhythm overturned the old idea that our galaxy defined the cosmic edge. The find also set off a chain of measurements that now reveals how the universe grows and ages. How star V1 changed everything Edwin Hubble of Carnegie ... [Read More]

Nov 11th, 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. Astronomers have detected the first-ever "radio signal" coming from the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS , right as it passed the halfway mark on its oneway trip through the solar system . And while this may seem like ostensible proof of the comet's supposed alien origins — it's actually the ... [Read More]

Nov 11th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers using the Gemini North telescope in Hawai'i have directly imaged a faint companion hugging the swollen surface of Betelgeuse , the bright red star in Orion's shoulder. The find ends decades of speculation sparked by Betelgeuse's puzzling brightness swings and settles a long standing debate over whether those changes betray the pull of an unseen neighbor. " Gemini North 's ability to obtain high angular resolutions and sharp contrasts allowed the companion of ... [Read More]

Nov 11th, 2025 - Never mind rogue planets—their rogue moons could support life At a young age, we're told how the sun warms Earth and makes life possible. That idea sticks with most of us for life. But when we want to understand things more thoroughly and we dig more deeply, we learn that Earth has its own heat sources that help it maintain habitability: remnant heat and . Other rocky worlds can have these sources, too. A small percentage of us keep going down this rabbit hole in pursuit of more detailed ... [Read More]

Nov 11th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Researchers present strong evidence for a planet circling two brown dwarfs on a near polar path. The orbit is tilted almost 90 degrees to the pair's motion. The system lies about 120 light-years from Earth, roughly 700 trillion miles (1,100 trillion kilometers) away. Lead researcher Thomas A. Baycroft of the University of Birmingham led the analysis. The hosts are brown dwarfs , celestial objects that are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion. "We report strong evidence ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - Last week, four lasers were projected into the sky above the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Paranal site in Chile. The lasers successfully created an "artificial star" that astronomers can use to measure and then correct the blur caused by Earth's atmosphere, ESO announced today. The striking launch of these lasers from each of the eight-meter telescopes at Paranal is a significant milestone of the GRAVITY+ project—a complex upgrade to ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A new study suggests that giant planets orbiting close to Sun-like stars rarely survive their host's aging process. As stars evolve and begin to swell, these nearby worlds often vanish, drawn inward and destroyed by intense tidal forces. The research, which included nearly half a million stars, revealed that only about 0.28 percent – roughly one in every 350 – still host a close-in giant planet. Within that group, the team identified 130 planets and ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - The interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS just flew past Mars, and China's mission managed to snap some pics with its high-resolution camera. According to the (CNSA), the orbiter's high-resolution camera captured images of the comet from a distance of about 30 million km (18.6 million mi). This makes the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which has been orbiting Mars for four years and eight months, one of the closest missions to observe the ISO since it was first detected (on May 7th, 2025). The image shows ... [Read More]

Nov 10th, 2025 - A rogue planet wrapped in iron clouds and rock storms 20 light-years from Earth. Drifting alone through space, about 20 light-years away, is a world that refuses to fit in. SIMP 0136 isn't a star because it's too small to ignite nuclear fusion. But it's also too massive to be a regular planet. Astronomers call it a brown dwarf, though don't let the name fool you — it has a mass 13 times that of Jupiter, hovering on the knife-edge between planet and star. Now, thanks to the James Webb ... [Read More]

Nov 9th, 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: The Southern Hemisphere view of the Milky Way galaxy Where it is: All around us When it was shared: Oct. 29, 2025 We cannot see or image the entire Milky Way galaxy, because we are located inside it. From Earth, we can observe only a portion of the galaxy, and when we ... [Read More]

Nov 8th, 2025 - Launched by NASA in 2009, the Kepler space telescope was outfitted with equipment to discover and study Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way galaxy. It was named after the 17th century scientist and astronomer Johannes Kepler, renowned for his laws of planetary motion. It was a fitting name that served the telescope, its equipment, and its mission well. But while we heard a lot concerning the telescope's discoveries around that time, things have since gone quiet. Whatever happened to NASA's ... [Read More]