Space

Nov 6th, 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 strange, lopsided dust cloud shrouds Earth's moon , ever skewed toward whichever side is facing the sun. Now, a new study may finally explain how the asymmetrical cloud got its shape. Most of the moon's surface is covered by a layer of gray dust and loose rocks. This layer, called regolith, ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Based on a new astrophysics model, scientists are making a bold claim. A handful of extremely massive stars, each more than 1,000 times the mass of the Sun, may have shaped the chemistry of the universe's oldest star clusters. These colossal stars could explain the unusual elemental patterns astronomers see in ancient stellar systems. The team's framework connects how these clusters formed to the unusual mix of elements we measure in their surviving stars, a link ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 2025 - Reading time 4 minutes After the Big Bang, our universe began to expand at an exponential rate, an acceleration scientists have long attributed to a mysterious force known as dark energy. This idea—which earned its discoverers the Nobel Prize in 2011—has largely defined our understanding of cosmic growth for decades.  But new research is starting to challenge this long-held assumption. A team of researchers has uncovered new evidence suggesting that the universe may already be ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers piece together the story of our expanding universe, and whether or not that expansion is accelerating, by studying how bright certain stellar explosions look from Earth – Type Ia supernovae. These massive cosmic eruptions are a great measurement tool because all reach nearly the same peak brightness and follow predictable patterns as they flare up and fade away. By analyzing each supernova's color and light curve, scientists can adjust for those details ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 2025 - Black holes can get energy boosts by 'snacking', although their dish of choice is rather different from our own. Analysis suggests that the most luminous burst of light ever detected from a black hole — a fireworks show that was, at its peak, more than 10 trillion times brighter than the Sun — flared up as the black hole gobbled up a star that was at least 30 times as massive as the Sun. The findings were published on 4 November in Nature Astronomy . When astronomers first laid eyes ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 2025 - For decades, scientists believed that gold and other heavy elements were born from the cataclysmic collision of neutron stars. These rare events, observed across the cosmos, seemed to provide the intense conditions required to forge such elements. However, and the European Space Agency suggest that another, far more frequent process might have played an even greater role. Evidence drawn from two decades of space observations points to highly magnetised neutron stars, known as magnetars, as a ... [Read More]

Nov 6th, 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 "rogue" planet gobbling gas and dust at a record rate, and they can't explain its baffling behavior. Although many rogue planets, which float freely through space without orbiting a star, have been discovered before, this one — known as Cha 1107-7626 — ... [Read More]

Nov 5th, 2025 - Reading time 2 minutes The Sun is currently in the active phase of its 11-year cycle and is slowly waking up from a prolonged slumber. And it's showing no signs of wanting to slow down. Over the past 12 hours, our host star has unleashed three violent solar flares—intense, concentrated bursts of electromagnetic radiation—two of which were classified as X-class flares. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center flagged both instances as R3 events—relatively powerful solar events ... [Read More]

Nov 5th, 2025 - You might think astronomers have seen it all, but the universe still throws us occasional new mysteries to keep us on our toes. On July 2, 2025, observers around the world were alerted to a new gamma-ray burst (GRB), GRB 250702B , detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. GRBs are extremely energetic explosions that rank among the most powerful astrophysical events in the universe , so luminous they can be seen from billions of light-years away. They're most commonly caused by either ... [Read More]

Nov 5th, 2025 - Researchers have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets in our Milky Way. Of these, the sub-Neptune class, which are smaller than Neptune and more massive than Earth, are the most common. These planets also have atmospheres rich in hydrogen and rocky interiors. Now, new research published in  Nature by Carnegie Institution for Science's Francesca Miozzi and Anat Shahar shows that these worlds could also have large quantities of liquid water. "Our rapidly increasing knowledge about the ... [Read More]

Nov 5th, 2025 - The moon is still an extremely interesting place to study. The structure of the moon has perplexed astronomers for centuries before the advent of spacecraft. In the early 20th century, scientists were debating whether the moon was just a rocky object similar to Martian moons, or whether it had a more complex inner geology. Now, the debate has finally been settled. According to the latest mathematical models, the moon has a fluid outer core and a solid inner core, similar to Earth's. The inner ... [Read More]

Nov 5th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers report the first detection of water with two deuterium atoms replacing hydrogen, also known as doubly-deuterated water (D₂O, or "heavy water"), in a planet-forming disk around V883 Ori, a young star. The signal points to water that formed before the star and survived into the disk in a young system that is about 1,300 light years away. Heavy water on V883 Ori Water sits in a planet-forming disk, which is a gas and dust ring around a young star. There it ... [Read More]

Nov 5th, 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. They're big, they appear early in the history of the universe and where they come from has long been a mystery. Ever since astronomers first detected the existence of supermassive black holes at the center of most galaxies, it has been difficult to fully explain their origin. But a recent ... [Read More]

Nov 4th, 2025 - SETI's 'Noah's Ark' – a space historian explores how the advent of radio astronomy led to the USSR's search for extraterrestrial life As humans began to explore outer space in the latter half of the 20th century, radio waves proved a powerful tool . Scientists could send out radio waves to communicate with satellites, rockets and other spacecraft, and use radio telescopes to take in radio waves emitted by objects throughout the universe. However, sometimes radio telescopes would pick up ... [Read More]

Nov 4th, 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. Recent observations of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS show that it has developed a faint blueish hue, hinting at a potential color change. This is the third time experts have seen the comet's coloring shift since it was discovered. Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS may be developing a blueish hue ... [Read More]

Nov 4th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have, for the first time, mapped magnetic fields inside a planet-forming disk and seen how those invisible forces shape the gas and dust into distinct patterns. The new study reveals a magnetic field about 10 milligauss in strength, gently guiding material around the young star TW Hydrae. The observations came from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array ( ALMA ) in Chile, a network of high-precision radio antennas that captures faint signals from ... [Read More]