Space

Nov 23rd, 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. NASA 's Perseverance rover has discovered a highly unusual rock lying on the surface of Mars. The lumpy boulder, which has a metal-rich composition, is most likely a meteorite that crash-landed on the Red Planet — and it's the first one that Perseverance has found during its four-year ... [Read More]

Nov 23rd, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A telescope can show a lot, but astronomers always want to see more detail in the sky. They look not only at stars, but also at the faint structures around them, including thin disks of gas. A new trick with light has now helped capture the sharpest-ever measurement of a disk around a nearby star, beta Canis Minoris. The study revealed a strange, lopsided shape that had never been seen before. The method was used with a ground-based telescope , which is impressive because ... [Read More]

Nov 23rd, 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. NASA's SOFIA observatory captured a rare image of a glowing gas ring in Cygnus X — a vast star-forming region 4,500 light-years away. QUICK FACTS What it is: A 'cosmic ring' — an expanding gas bubble of ionized carbon. Where it is: 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus ... [Read More]

Nov 23rd, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A new artificial intelligence system takes on one of science's toughest questions: did this chemistry originate from life or not? Built by researchers at Georgia Tech and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the technology studies meteorites and Earth soils for patterns that might signal biology. The system, called LifeTracer, is a machine learning tool that compares complex mixtures of organic molecules. In tests, LifeTracer correctly distinguished lifeless space rocks ... [Read More]

Nov 22nd, 2025 - Queen guitarist Sir Brian May's latest book explores the history, mystery and evolution of galaxies in a way never tried before – through 3D photography that takes years of painstaking work to create. Many of us have looked at images of the galaxies around us and been overawed by the vastness of the Universe they hint at. Seeing in 3D The images in this article are from Islands in Infinity: Galaxies 3D, and can be viewed in stereo with a special viewer. If you happen to have a viewer at ... [Read More]

Nov 21st, 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. Researchers are puzzled as to how the dwarf galaxy NGC 6789 continues to make new stars, despite being stuck in the gas-famished Local Void. Scientists are puzzled by an"impossible" galaxy that doesn't appear to have the fuel it needs to be growing. The dwarf galaxy, NGC 6789, is located ... [Read More]

Nov 21st, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, November 21 The solar system's seventh planet, the ice giant Uranus, reaches opposition this morning at 7 A.M. EST among the stars of Taurus the Bull. Now is the best time to view the planet, which rises as the Sun sets and remains visible all night long. Plus, Uranus is located not far from the easy-to-find Pleiades cluster (M45), offering a great steppingstone to the faint magnitude 5.6 planet, which is best seen with binoculars or ... [Read More]

Nov 21st, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A NASA fleet has spotted the first magnetic switchback near Earth, a zigzag in the magnetic field at the edge of our planet's shield. The result shows that twists once seen near the Sun also appear in our space neighborhood. The work was led by E. O. McDougall, a physicist, at the University of New Hampshire ( UNH ). McDougall's research focuses on magnetic switchbacks and reconnection in space plasmas. Near Earth, the magnetosphere, the protective magnetic bubble that ... [Read More]

Nov 21st, 2025 - I do so love an ostentatious comet. As I wrote in a recent "The Universe" column , when these dusty ice balls are billions of kilometers from the sun, they're frozen solid. But as they near our star on their orbit, they warm up. The ice thaws and turns directly to gas, which expands around a comet's solid nucleus as a fuzzy head and, sometimes, as a long, spectacular tail. Some of these comets can get bright enough for us to see without optical aid, but the vast majority of them never become ... [Read More]

Nov 20th, 2025 - Reading time 3 minutes Around 100 million years after the formation of the solar system, a Mars-sized object dubbed Theia slammed into the Earth and created the Moon. We now have a better idea as to where this wayward object came from. In a study published today in the journal Science, researchers investigated the isotopic fingerprints —the ratio of isotopes, or versions, of elements in a material—of iron in rocks from the Moon, Earth, and meteorites (meteoroids that reach the ... [Read More]

Nov 20th, 2025 - Some deep-sky objects stand on their own. Others pair up with notable companions. Occasionally, the surrounding star field helps elevate a rather ordinary object's status. Such is the case with the Cocoon Nebula a 12′-wide (1/5°) emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. The Cocoon Nebula overlaps the eastern edge of Barnard 168 (B168), one of the northern sky's finest dark nebulae. From a dark site, sharp-eyed observers can pick up this murky lane without optical ... [Read More]

Nov 20th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Our solar system appears to be moving through the universe far faster than standard cosmology says it should. A new study of radio galaxies by a team in Germany suggests the solar system's motion leaves a stronger mark on the sky than theory predicts. Instead of quietly confirming the standard picture, the result deepens a long running mystery about how evenly matter is spread across the cosmos. If it holds up, the mismatch hints that either our cosmic models or our vast ... [Read More]

Nov 20th, 2025 - Nov. 20 (UPI) -- NASA released images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS flying past Mars and, based on the agency's observations, scientists expressed doubt that it is an alien spaceship. Space agencies globally have shifted satellites, telescopes and myriad other sensors and tools to monitor the comet, which has beguiled space scientists and the public alike with every move it has made on its trip through the solar system. Over the last 4 1/2 months, in addition to watching the comet rocket ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 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. Scientists have traced the origins of the most massive black hole merger ever observed, revealing how two "impossible" giants may have formed despite long-standing assumptions that such objects should not exist. These black holes were considered "forbidden" because stars of that size were ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 2025 - A newly discovered cluster of objects called the "inner kernel" of the Kuiper belt could teach us about the early history of the solar system – including the movement of Neptune The Kuiper belt, a disc of icy rocks on the outermost edges of the solar system, seems to have more structure than we thought. In 2011, researchers found a cluster of objects there on similar orbits that they dubbed the "kernel" of the Kuiper belt – now, another team has spotted an even more compact cluster ... [Read More]

Nov 19th, 2025 - When astronomers search for planets that could host liquid water on their surface, they start by looking at a star's habitable zone . Water is a key ingredient for life , and on a planet too close to its star, water on its surface may "boil"; too far, and it could freeze. This zone marks the region in between. But being in this sweet spot doesn't automatically mean a planet is hospitable to life. Other factors, like whether a planet is geologically active or has processes that regulate gases in ... [Read More]