Space

Oct 29th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Space keeps a record of chemistry that started long before Earth formed. Carbon bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur to build "organic molecules," and those compounds show up all over the place. Telescopes and spacecraft find them in comet gases, in interstellar dust , and in primitive rocks. This matters because planets can inherit those ingredients instead of making everything from scratch. That hand‑off changes how we think about the first steps ... [Read More]

Oct 29th, 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 hot mystery on the sun may be close to being solved. For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why the sun 's outer atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface, despite being farther from the core. Whereas the surface, or photosphere, is millions of degrees Fahrenheit, the ... [Read More]

Oct 29th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers have identified a star system, named HD 110067, where six planets keep steady orbital ratios with one another. This pattern is a resonance, which means each world completes a set number of laps while its neighbor finishes a different, simple count. A clear example is "three orbits of the inner planet for every two orbits of its neighbor." When a chain like this persists for billions of years, it signals the star system has had a quiet history without major ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 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. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) , astronomers have spotted a very bright and mysterious object that could be a galaxy that emerged just 100 million years after the Big Bang, which would make it the universe's earliest known galaxy, a new study suggests. Alternatively, Capotauro may ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 2025 - The Milky Way is a rich and complex environment. We see it as a luminous line stretching across the night sky, composed of innumerable stars. But that's just the visible light. Observing the sky in other ways, such as through radio waves, provides a much more nuanced scene – full of charged particles and magnetic fields. For decades, astronomers have used radio telescopes to explore our galaxy. By studying the properties of the objects residing in the Milky Way, we can better understand ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 2025 - Many space-lovers know the phrase "We are all made of star stuff." And it's true — our planet formed from the dust cloud left over from the formation of our Sun, and from the planet, all life. That cloud, in turn, was born from the remnants of past generations of stars. But the elements that stars produce over the course of their lives are just one part of the story. The rest of the story — involving stars' apocalyptic deaths — is even more exciting. Our story begins as all ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 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 astronomer recently aimed his telescope above Manciano, Italy, and caught something incredible: a bright comet seemingly wrapped up in the corkscrewing trail of a meteor, glittering in the same patch of sky like a cosmic barber shop pole. With millions of miles separating the foreground ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Massive stars don't die quietly. Their cores collapse, shockwaves race outward, and the dying stars light up the sky across many forms of light. Sometimes these endings start with a sudden blast of X-rays, a type of high-energy radiation released by extreme cosmic events, that lasts seconds to hours. Astronomers call this a fast X-ray transient (FXT), a short-lived flash of X-rays that suddenly appears and then fades away, and the latest case has helped reveal what ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 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. For the first time, scientists have spotted multiple complex building blocks of life in the ice around a star outside the Milky Way . Using the James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ), researchers detected five large, carbon-based compounds around a protostar in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 2025 - For generations, UFO enthusiasts have longed for claims of aliens visiting Earth to be seriously investigated by scientists. Now they are getting their wish. This month prominent peer-reviewed journals have published two papers that link apparent flashes of light seen by a telescope 70 years ago to potential artificial objects in space. But there are many simpler explanations, providing an opportunity for UFO enthusiasts to see how extraordinary claims are tested —and often undone ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 2025 - Six planets in the solar system have at least one moon. Both Earth and Mars are toward the lower end of the lunar count, as our home planet only has one moon, and Mars has two. But not all moons share the same origin story, and some experts believe that We can elaborate further by comparing the formation of Earth's single satellite to Mars' lunar duo: One of the leading theories is that roughly 4.5 billion years ago, a massive protoplanet (think of this as a full planet in the making), ... [Read More]

Oct 28th, 2025 - Despite its size, Ariel could join the ranks of the solar system's ocean worlds Uranus's tiny moon Ariel may have had a subsurface ocean that made up around 55% of its total volume. By mapping craters, crags, and ridges on the moon's surface, planetary scientists modeled how thick Ariel's crust was before it cracked under tidal stress and created the geologic features seen today. By subtracting the size of the crust and core, the researchers found that the Arielian ocean could have been about ... [Read More]

Oct 27th, 2025 - The Sun generates energy through nuclear fusion, converting some 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second. This process began nearly 5 billion years ago, and it will continue for at least another 5 billion years. But the Sun did not pop into existence fully formed. It started its long journey to stardom in a cold molecular cloud. Instabilities within this dusty gas cloud triggered small pockets to contract. Gravity worked its magic, compressing each clump into a smaller and denser ... [Read More]

Oct 27th, 2025 - The story began about 4.6 billion years ago, when a monstrously giant cloud of dust and gas collapsed under its own gravity. Sun took the center stage and soon enough Earth and its neighborhood planets started spinning in their orbits, performing the celestial ballet, bathed in the sunny spotlight. Our solar system, a household nestling in the starry lap of the Milky Way, often receives celestial guests from neighboring stars, galaxies, and solar systems. Think Oumuamua or Borisov, the ... [Read More]

Oct 27th, 2025 - In the lab, researchers recreated the conditions on Mars. If there is life on Mars (or if there was long ago) it may not lie buried in the planet's rocky crust. Instead, it might be locked in ice. That's the conclusion of a new study by researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Penn State University, who recreated the frigid, irradiated conditions of Mars inside a laboratory. Their results, published in Astrobiology in September 2025, suggest that amino acids, or even microbes ... [Read More]

Oct 26th, 2025 - On October 18, 2025, the 4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST) facility, installed on the VISTA telescope at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile, obtained its first light. This milestone is a crucial step in the life of any telescope, marking the moment it is ready to begin its scientific journey. Moreover, 4MOST does not simply take images of the sky; it records spectra, capturing the light of each object in every individual color. With this ... [Read More]