Space

Mar 11th, 2026 - Researchers found a magnetic star core acting as a high speed engine to power a record breaking luminous supernova. In December 2024, the ATLAS astronomical survey detected a distant flash of light. It was a supernova, the explosive death of a massive star, located far, far away, roughly a billion light-years away. But when Joseph Farah, a graduate student at Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) and UC Santa Barbara, looked at the continuous data streaming in, he noticed something highly unusual. The ... [Read More]

Mar 11th, 2026 - Asteroid 2026 CC3 will be flying by Earth very closely today. The newly spotted celestial object is approximately 33 feet wide, around the size of a city bus. The asteroid will fly safely past Earth on March 11, 2026, at a distance of about 976,000 miles, according to NASA's tracking data . Officially named 2026 CC3, it is currently in the direction of the constellation Hydra. The asteroid is being closely monitored by experts at the facility as part of ongoing efforts to track near-Earth ... [Read More]

Mar 11th, 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 Get the Live Science Newsletter Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and ... [Read More]

Mar 11th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Recent observations of our corner of the universe suggest we have been living inside a hot, less dense region, and that there may even be a strange "cosmic interstellar channel," or tunnel, connecting us to distant stars. After years of careful mapping, detailed analysis reveals what appears to be a channel of hot, low-density plasma stretching out from our solar system toward distant constellations. Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute recently confirmed it using ... [Read More]

Mar 11th, 2026 - NASA's DART mission delivered humanity's first measurable push to a celestial orbit. In September 2022, a spacecraft the size of a refrigerator slammed into a small asteroid at nearly 24,000 kilometers per hour (15,000 miles per hour). The collision was deliberate and the asteroid posed no threat of collision with Earth or the moon. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (aptly abbreviated as DART) was humanity's first full-scale attempt at planetary defense. And it worked! NASA's DART mission ... [Read More]

Mar 10th, 2026 - Is this where China's astronauts will land on the moon? In the two-way race between the U.S. and China to put humans back on the moon, the lunar south pole is widely considered the most prized place to land. The area is relatively resource-rich, pocked with dark craters that harbor water ice and have near constant exposure to sunlight around their respective rims—both desirable features for lunar bases. The South Pole–Aitken Basin—the moon's largest and oldest impact ... [Read More]

Mar 10th, 2026 - Sixty-six light-years away, an Earth-sized exoplanet completes an orbit in under six hours, skimming around its star at nearly one-hundredth the distance that Mercury orbits the Sun. This planet is on the edge of destruction.  Astronomer Fei Dai of the University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy and his team combined data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Keck Planet Finder (KPF) to officially verify the world, called TOI-6255 b, as an exoplanet. The find enables ... [Read More]

Mar 10th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Our Sun may seem like the center of the universe to us, but it's actually on the move, orbiting the Milky Way galaxy at a speed of nearly half a million miles per hour. That's fast, but it's nothing compared to a recently discovered star runaway that's blazing a trail across the cosmos. This stellar speedster, known as CWISE J124909+362116.0 (J1249+36 for short), is a low-mass star, or L subdwarf, that's not only hypervelocity but potentially on a trajectory to escape the ... [Read More]

Mar 10th, 2026 - Wandelt studies the connection between data and theory to unlock the secrets of the universe Benjamin Wandelt, a pioneer at the intersection of cosmology, statistics, and artificial intelligence, is transforming how we extract fundamental physics from astronomical data. Driven by a deep curiosity about the origins and structure of the universe and a passion for developing the computational tools needed to unlock its secrets, Wandelt studies the fundamental physics of the universe using a ... [Read More]

Mar 10th, 2026 - Billions of light years away in a remote part of the universe, two neutron stars – the ultradense remnants of dead stars – collided. The catastropic cosmic event sent light and particles, including a sudden flash of gamma rays , streaming through the universe. These gamma rays traveled for 8.5 billion years before reaching Earth. In a new study , our team of astrophysicists examined this gamma-ray signal. We learned that the stellar collision it came from was likely caused by an ... [Read More]

Mar 10th, 2026 - The latest search for life on the headline – making exoplanet K2-18 b has come up empty. But the team says that they have developed a framework that could shape how scientists hunt for extraterrestrial life for years to come. In a study posted to the arXiv preprint server and accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal , researchers conducted one of the broadest and most sensitive technosignature searches ever in the K2-18 planetary system. Technosignatures are observable signs ... [Read More]

Mar 10th, 2026 - A rapidly brightening burst of light called AT 2024wpp, or "the Whippet", is baffling astronomers. One explanation is that it is the result of an exotic star falling into a black hole A sudden, mysterious burst of bright light in the sky could be from a black hole devouring a vast, unusually bare star. In 2018, astronomers spotted a new kind of cosmic explosion that became brighter more quickly than any other. The flash, called AT2018cow or "the Cow" for short, took only a few days to reach its ... [Read More]

Mar 10th, 2026 - The lasers alone would cost around one trillion dollars and the technology to create a nanocraft does not yet exist. A new paper sketches a daring plan: launch a wafer-sized spacecraft toward the nearest black hole and let it report back on the most extreme physics in the cosmos. The author, astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University, places the idea "somewhere between hard engineering and science fiction," yet he also anchors it to a timeline. The hardware might be ready in twenty to ... [Read More]

Mar 9th, 2026 - Reading time 3 minutes Scientists hunting for radio signals from any form of advanced extraterrestrial life that might be out there trying to contact us are now starting to wonder if something has been messing with their work. A new study published by researchers at the SETI Institute, short for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has tested the possibility that "space weather" could render strong premeditated alien broadcasts into the kind of fainter radio signals that SETI typically ... [Read More]

Mar 9th, 2026 - A dying star's final breath creates a haunting, brain-shaped cosmic silhouette. The universe has a dark sense of humor. Five thousand light-years away, in the constellation Vela, a star is dying in the most cinematic way. It's almost like it's stripping its flesh, flinging its outer layers into the void to create a glowing curiosity. To the human eye (which tends to see patterns in random things), it almost looks like a brain seen through a transparent skull. Astronomers officially call it ... [Read More]

Mar 8th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Jupiter's aurora is larger, stronger, and far more constant than Earth's northern lights. Scientists have now discovered something unexpected within that glowing chaos: a sharp cold patch and dramatic swings in density high above the giant planet. The surprise came from close study of two bright marks tied to Jupiter's moons Io and Europa . These marks, called auroral footprints, form when the moons interact with Jupiter's huge magnetic field and send charged particles ... [Read More]