Space

Dec 10th, 2025 - Stars are bright. Extremely, intensely bright. This intense glare can sometimes make it harder to view other celestial objects creeping around it. That's why scientists designed an instrument called coronagraph in the early 1930s. Coronagraph, as NASA describes, is inspired by solar eclipse, where the disk of the Moon overshadows the light of the Sun. Nicknamed "starglasses," coronagraphs use a cool system of disks, mirrors, and masks to suppress the overwhelming glare of the stars and ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - A sampling of aging Sun-like stars demonstrates that they likely eat their closest planets. Our Sun is about halfway through its life, which means Earth is as well. After a star exhausts its hydrogen nuclear fuel, its diameter expands more than a hundredfold, engulfing any unlucky planets in close orbits. That day is at least 5 billion years off for our solar system, but scientists have spotted a possible preview of our world's fate. Using data from the  TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - NASA has lost contact with a spacecraft that has orbited Mars for more than a decade. Maven, an acronym for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, abruptly stopped communicating with ground stations on Dec. 6. NASA said this week that it was working fine before it went behind the red planet. When it reappeared, there was only silence. Launched in 2013 and having entered Mars' orbit in September 2014, Maven began studying the upper Martian atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - Approximately 424 million light-years away, a vast chunk of the cosmic web (the network-like distribution of matter the universe displays on the largest scale) appears as if it's been caught in a vortex. It's the biggest single spinning structure astronomers have ever seen, measuring around 117,000 light-years across and 5.5 million light-years long. The discovery also contains clues about how early galaxies formed. Scientists found it in survey data from South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope. ... [Read More]

Dec 10th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the heavyweight champions of cosmic fireworks – brief, blistering flashes of high-energy light that typically flare and vanish within seconds or minutes. They are so short-lived that catching one in action often feels like cosmic luck. But on July 2, 2025, that script unraveled. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a GRB that simply refused to stop, firing in repeating pulses for more than seven hours. The event – now ... [Read More]

Dec 9th, 2025 - NEW YORK (AP) — It's time for one of the strongest meteor showers of the year. The Geminids peak this weekend and are visible through mid-December, according to the American Meteor Society . The meteors tend to be yellow in color and can be seen across the globe, but the best viewing happens in the Northern Hemisphere. Skygazers could see up to 120 meteors per hour under dark skies during the peak Saturday night into Sunday's predawn hours, according to NASA. Meteor showers appear when ... [Read More]

Dec 9th, 2025 - More than 100 million light-years away from Earth, a monstrous black hole turned ravenous this summer. It ended up gulping down a star. This feeding event was so intense that it lasted for at least seven hours, the longest ever recorded. NASA scientists didn't even have a high-energy monitor that could record the whole event, which they named GRB 250702B. The footage of the event shows this supermassive black hole feasting on a star until its sparkle is shredded and reduced to a mere wisp of ... [Read More]

Dec 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. An incredibly luminous star system that has long baffled astronomers could soon light up the sky with the nuclear brilliance of thousands of suns, new research suggests. When that happens, the results may be visible from Earth with the naked eye — in day or night. The star system, called ... [Read More]

Dec 9th, 2025 - Reading time 2 minutes In the early 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope picked up something odd in the local clouds that surround our solar system. An unusually large number of electrons had been ripped apart from the atoms found in the clouds of gas and dust, a process known as ionization. Now, researchers have traced the ionization of the local interstellar cloud to a close encounter between the Sun and two hot, fast, and massive stars. In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, a ... [Read More]

Dec 9th, 2025 - Earth, though seemingly huge for us, is just a Lilliputian blue-green ball swimming around in the infinite lagoon of dark space. The fathomless darkness of this space often makes scientists stay up at night and question, "Are we alone in the universe?" Science fiction has jostled our imaginations with pictures of humans venturing on interstellar adventures and encountering aliens , of magical worlds hiding far away, and of robots that save humanity. In reality, however, no astronaut has ... [Read More]

Dec 9th, 2025 - The comet is the third object ever confirmed to have entered our cosmic neighborhood from elsewhere in the galaxy. Space telescopes and orbiters have been documenting the rare visit. A mysterious interstellar comet has been taking a tour of our solar system in recent months, garnering intense interest from astronomers and space enthusiasts alike. Comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third object ever confirmed to have entered our cosmic neighborhood from elsewhere in the galaxy, and the rare visit has ... [Read More]

Dec 9th, 2025 - NASA crew will be the first astronauts to work with a robot on a celestial body other than Earth. B-9 had Will Robinson. Twiki had Buck Rogers. And, of course, C-3PO and R2-D2 had Luke Skywalker. Now, in a scenario straight out of science fiction, MAPP will have whoever NASA names to the crew of the second Artemis mission to land on the moon. The space agency has selected Lunar Outpost's Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, to become the . Although its tasks will be far simpler than ... [Read More]

Dec 9th, 2025 - The James Webb Space Telescope has observed the oldest known supernova —the explosive death of a star that lived when the universe was only 730 million years old. The ancient blast occurred when the cosmos was just 5 percent of its current age, and the supernova's light has been traveling through space ever since. Astronomers were surprised to find that this primeval explosion strongly resembles today's supernovae, which occur when massive stars run out of fuel for the nuclear fusion ... [Read More]

Dec 8th, 2025 - Wonder Bound, the product of a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the Vatican Observatory, brings images from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to a historic venue For millennia, the act of gazing at the night sky has connected us not only to the stars but also to one another. This simple, shared experience ignites our curiosity, inspiring philosophical and scientific quests to peer deep into the cosmos so we can better understand ... [Read More]

Dec 8th, 2025 - Some of the elements used by living systems are far more abundant in Cassiopeia A than we thought, hinting that some parts of our galaxy might be more suitable for life than others Hidden within Cassiopeia A, the youngest known exploded star in our galaxy, astronomers have found surprisingly high levels of chlorine and potassium. These elements carry an odd number of protons in their atomic nuclei, and though they are thought to be less abundant in the universe, they are essential for planet ... [Read More]

Dec 7th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google An international team has revealed parts of the Milky Way that ordinary star counts have missed. The researchers read elemental clues in stars to outline two inner spiral arms and a faint bridge between them. The experts worked with a carefully selected set of roughly 5,000 stars, focusing on patterns in their chemistry rather than just positions. The result reframes how we chart the galaxy's most crowded regions. Spiral arms concealed in the Milky Way The work was led by ... [Read More]