Space

Mar 28th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google For decades, a bright star in the night sky quietly held onto a secret. Gamma Cassiopeiae, easy to spot in the familiar W-shaped Cassiopeia constellation, looked ordinary at first glance. But behind that steady glow, something strange was happening. Astronomers kept seeing bursts of powerful X-rays that did not fit what they knew about stars like it. The question lingered for more than half a century: what was causing them? Now, that long-running mystery finally has an ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Cosmologists have an embarrassing problem: we don't know what shape the universe is. The cosmos has three possible geometries—positively curved like a sphere, flat like an infinite plane or negatively curved like a saddle—but geometry alone doesn't determine shape. A flat universe could still wrap around in any number of ways. It could be finite, infinite, or even folded back on itself like a Klein bottle someone left in the dryer. Einstein's general theory of relativity describes ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - On Jan. 15, 2025, the Gaia spacecraft took its last image. Then the craft ran a final round of engineering tests, fired its thrusters to leave Earth behind, and slipped into an orbit around the Sun, finally turning off on March 27. After more than a decade in operation, 3 trillion observations, and 2 billion stars observed, Gaia earned its retirement. Launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, Gaia's goal was "to map a billion stars," and it succeeded. Compiling the map of where these ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Astronomers caught a comet in the act of reversing its spin. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, scientists noticed the never-before-seen behavior of Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák (41P to its friends) after it passed around the sun in 2017. In May of that year, data from NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory suggested the object was spinning some three times slower than it had just two months before, in March 2017. A follow-up Hubble analysis revealed something even more unusual: ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, March 27 The Moon passes through the outskirts of the famous Beehive Cluster (M44) in Cancer this evening, standing due north of the open cluster's center around midnight Eastern time.  Earlier in the evening, Venus lingers long after sunset, slowly sinking toward the western horizon. Standing nearly 20° high as the Sun disappears, Venus sets around 9 P.M. local daylight time. It's blazingly bright at magnitude –3.9, ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Did the very young universe make swarms of tiny black holes? Black holes are weird. You heard it here first. But really, they're even more bizarre than most of us realize. They warp space. They warp time . They can spin so rapidly they wrap the fabric of spacetime around them like a warm blanket on a winter's day . Despite greedily pulling in everything around them, they are the engines that power some of the most luminous objects in the entire cosmos . And yet, if you stand back and squint a ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 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 Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & ... [Read More]

Mar 27th, 2026 - Earth is facing an unexplained surge of massive, booming daytime fireballs in early 2026. On a Saturday afternoon this past March, a piece of the solar system plummeted toward a home in north Houston. The one-ton space rock broke apart nearly 30 miles above the city, unleashing a violent sonic boom equivalent to 26 tons of TNT. A dark, jagged fragment smashed through a residential roof and even ricocheted around a bedroom like a cosmic pinball. This would have been stunning in itself, except ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers expect most stars like our sun to act in a calm, predictable way. Their brightness rises and falls a little over time, but the changes are small and steady. That is why one quiet-looking star in our galaxy caught scientists off guard. Its light suddenly started behaving in ways no one expected. The star sits about 11,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Pupis . For years, it looked like a typical "main sequence" star, the same stage ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Astronomers have discovered a record-breaking binary system, ZTF J1239+8347, which is a record-breaking case of two 'failed stars' (brown dwarfs) in a 57-minute orbital death spiral that may result in the formation of a new star. The results were published in a study on arXiv that was led by Samuel Whitebook of Caltech. The brown dwarfs are so close together that the more massive one (the primary) is 'feeding' off the other (the secondary) by transferring mass from the secondary to the primary. ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google The Crab Nebula has been expanding ever since a star exploded nearly 1,000 years ago – but until now, that motion has mostly lived in static images. Instead of a frozen cloud of debris, the nebula reveals itself as a system that is still actively reshaping. Its filaments drift outward in a surprisingly organized way, challenging what scientists thought they knew about supernova remnants. Motion seen across decades In paired Hubble images taken decades apart, the ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Astronomers typically describe the cosmos with numbers that are, well, astronomical. They measure distances within our galaxy in light-years, where 1 light-year equals 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers), while other galaxies lie millions or even billions of light-years away. And stars typically live billions of years within a universe some 13.7 billion years old. But these enormous numbers obscure the remarkable pace at which some events transpire. For example, it takes no more than a ... [Read More]

Mar 26th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Space is messy when a planet is being born. Dust swirls, gas stretches into rings, and gravity pulls matter into clumps that may one day become planets. In one distant system, that process is happening right now, and astronomers have just spotted something rare inside it. A second giant planet is forming around a young star known as WISPIT 2 . The system sits in the constellation Aquila , visible in the northern sky between July and November. This fresh find places WISPIT ... [Read More]

Mar 25th, 2026 - Only one US-built nuclear reactor has ever flown in space, and that was more than 60 years ago. NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration's space policy. But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the ... [Read More]

Mar 24th, 2026 - Our solar system's rocky planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – may have formed from two rings around the young sun, rather than a single disc The inner solar system may have formed differently from how we have long thought it must have. For decades, researchers have thought that the rocky planets formed from a single disc of dust and debris in the early solar system, but new simulations indicate there might have been two separate discs of material. Models featuring a single ... [Read More]

Mar 24th, 2026 - As soon as April 1, four people will embark on a journey that will take them farther from the Earth than anyone has ever traveled before. When NASA's new moon rocket lifts off as soon as April 1, its immense core stage will mix 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen with 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and ignite the propellant in four, eight-foot-wide engines, producing some 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Shortly after these main engines fire, two solid rocket boosters, one on each side, will ... [Read More]