Space

Dec 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. As the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS prepares for its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19, it's being monitored not just by space agencies but also the United Nations. The comet, which will come within roughly 167 million miles (270 million kilometers) of our planet, will be tracked by ... [Read More]

Dec 15th, 2025 - CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A stray comet from another star swings past Earth this week in one last hurrah before racing back toward interstellar space. Discovered over the summer, the comet known as 3I/Atlas will pass within 167 million miles (269 million kilometers) of our planet on Friday, the closest it gets on its grand tour of the solar system. NASA continues to aim its space telescopes at the visiting ice ball, estimated to be between 1,444 feet (440 meters) and 3.5 miles (5.6 ... [Read More]

Dec 15th, 2025 - How life begins remains an unsolved question . One key component might be RNA, a molecular cousin of DNA found in every form of life on Earth, and now scientists say they have shown how it could have formed on our planet eons ago. But not everyone is convinced, and RNA is possibly just one of many molecules that could give rise to life on different worlds. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA , astrobiologist Yuta Hirakawa and his colleagues ... [Read More]

Dec 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. After a multi-decade-year mission to understand the nature of the universe, a telescope perched in the mountain plateaus of northern Chile said goodbye in 2022. Now, its final data release is revealing the telescope's legacy: a field in tension. In October 2007, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope ... [Read More]

Dec 15th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have spotted something few expected to see: a thick atmosphere clinging to a blisteringly hot rocky planet beyond our Solar System. The world, called TOI-561 b, is an ultra-short-period super-Earth that races around its star every 10.5 hours, with one side locked in eternal daylight and the other in permanent night. Conventional wisdom says a planet this small, hot, and close should be stripped bare. Webb's data ... [Read More]

Dec 14th, 2025 - Reading time 2 minutes A case of astronomical fratricide is doomed to end in a fiery supernova bright enough to be spotted from Earth during the day. A study published this August in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society investigated a binary star system about 10,000 light-years from Earth called V Sagittae. Researchers finally solved the century-long mystery behind what makes it so freaking bright. They found that the system is strangely luminous because one of the ... [Read More]

Dec 14th, 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: Gamma-ray burst GRB 250702B Where it is: 8 billion light-years away, in the constellation Scutum When it was shared: Dec. 8, 2025 A gamma-ray burst (GRB) — the most energetic type of explosion in the universe since the Big Bang — is detected once every day, ... [Read More]

Dec 14th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google New computer models of Uranus and Neptune suggest these distant worlds might be rock giants rather than pure ice giants. The simulations allow everything from water-rich planets to ones where rock outweighs water by nearly four to one inside Uranus. Both planets sit far beyond Saturn, yet what they are actually made of remains surprisingly uncertain, even after Voyager 2 flew past. Classifying Uranus and Neptune The work was led by Luca Morf, a doctoral student at the ... [Read More]

Dec 14th, 2025 - Even the best telescopes can't see exoplanets. It's all about watching for jiggly stars, blue shifts, and transits. It was almost 100 years ago that Clyde W. Tombaugh discovered Pluto. That was the last planet found until 1992, when humans found another one. But this new planet wasn't in our solar system—it was orbiting another star. We call this an extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet" for short. Since then, astronomers have cataloged more than 6,000 exoplanets. If you thought it was hard to ... [Read More]

Dec 13th, 2025 - Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers has found the earliest known supernova, one which exploded when the universe was just 730 million years old. This observation shattered JWST's previous record, a supernova that occurred when the universe was 1.8 billion years old. The team was following up on a gamma ray burst, designated GRB 250314A, detected by the Space-based multi-band astronomical Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) mission, a Franco-Chinese telescope that ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes The supernova SN 2025wny is hopelessly far, lying approximately 10 billion light-years from Earth. Normally, this would make it impossible for astronomers to detect. But one team got lucky. While scanning the sky for cosmic transients, an international team of astronomers noticed two galaxies in the foreground of a giant blob of light. Further analysis with other telescopes revealed that the blur was a supernova—a superluminous one at that. Remarkably, the two ... [Read More]

Dec 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 have spotted a supermassive black hole whipping up cosmic winds at record speeds. The black hole, located 135 million light-years from Earth in the center of the NGC 3783 spiral galaxy, caught researchers' attention after emitting a huge X-ray flare. As the burst died down, it left ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, December 12 Ganymede reappears from occultation behind Jupiter overnight tonight, late on the 12th in the western U.S. and early on the 13th for those in the eastern half of the country.  Jupiter rises around 7 P.M. local time, located in eastern Gemini. Shining at magnitude –2.7, it's the brightest object in the eastern sky, just to the lower right of Castor and Pollux, the heads of the Twins. Let the giant planet rise ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have captured some of the sharpest early views ever taken of stellar eruptions, and the results overturn the long-held idea that novae erupt in a single, simple blast. Using Georgia State University's CHARA Array in California, a team resolved structures that no single telescope could see – revealing outflows that twist, collide, and sometimes wait weeks before finally breaking free. One eruption held onto its outer layers for more than 50 days before ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - When NASA scientists opened the sample return canister from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample mission in late 2023, they found something astonishing. Dust and rock collected from the asteroid Bennu contained many of life's building blocks , including all five nucleobases used in DNA and RNA, 14 of the 20 amino acids found in proteins, and a rich collection of other organic molecules . These are built primarily from carbon and hydrogen, and they often form the backbone of life's chemistry. For ... [Read More]

Dec 12th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Hints of methane around exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e briefly ignited excitement about air – and maybe even habitability – on one of the most scrutinized Earth-sized worlds beyond our solar system. But the closer scientists look, the clearer one message becomes: proceed with caution. A new analysis led by Sukrit Ranjan of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory pairs James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data with detailed atmospheric modeling. The ... [Read More]