An abandoned part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is projected to crash into the moon at 2:35 a.m. EDT on Aug. 5 — and two new studies suggest the event may be visible in telescopes from parts of North and South America, providing both amateur and professional astronomers with a rare, real-time viewing opportunity. Both studies are available as preprints on the arXiv server.

The impending Aug. 5 impactor is the truck-sized spent upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. In 2005, the rocket boosted two privately owned landers into orbit around the moon, before leaving its upper stage in an elliptical orbit around Earth, according to OrbitalRadar.com.

A report earlier this year estimated that the collision would occur near the moon's Einstein crater, with the rocket grinding into the lunar surface at a speed of 5,436 mph (8,748 km/h). Although that sounds fast, it's about six times slower than a natural impactor, like an asteroid, would hit.

What can you see with a telescope?

The initial impact flash of the collision — which will last less than a second and be hidden on the sunlit side of the moon — will likely be invisible to casual skywatchers, according to one of the new studies. The brightest estimates for the impact put it at 20 times dimmer than Saturn. The resulting crater likely won't be visible from Earth, as the study estimates that the hole is relatively small and shallow ‪—‬ about 90 feet (27 meters) wide and up to 16 feet (5 m) deep.

More promising for Earthbound skywatchers is the plume of regolith (and potentially water vapor) the impact will loft. The plume will likely reach several miles in height, with computer-based simulations from the second study showing it may tower up to 31 miles (50 km) high. This will make it visible over the moon's limb as a cloud, with the debris spreading up to 112 miles (180 km) from the impact site.

The plume will hang above the lunar surface much longer than the flash ‪—‬ for up to 400 seconds, or close to seven minutes; during this time, it will scatter sunlight toward Earth. Even then, the plume will be too faint to be observed with the naked eye, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the second study, told Live Science in an email. Viewers will need a good backyard telescope to see it.

"Where the science is"

Although the event will be dim and occur on the sunlit portion of the moon, skywatchers are gearing up to watch it. Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of the first study, told Live Science in an email that there "will be an observing campaign involving professional and amateur astronomers from around the world."

In particular, he said, folks in South America and continental North America — where it will be night, with the moon high above the horizon — will have the best chance of seeing it, although you will need at least a 4-inch (10 centimeters) telescope.

However, Jo was less optimistic. "I don't think it would be an easy task for an amateur astronomer," he said, but if they know exactly where to point their telescope and tackle atmospheric refraction, they might see the plume. Nonetheless, he urged well-equipped observers to try observing the plume, as that is "where the science is."

This science, Jo said, would help researchers understand how everything delivered to or disposed of on the moon will ultimately affect the lunar surface. "This would be useful for studying disposal methods for upper stages, maybe how far ejecta will travel, and whether or not the ejecta will hit sensitive instruments, or in the far future lunar bases," he added.

Previous collisions of human-made objects on the moon have likewise led to some major scientific insights. For example, the 2009 crash of a Centaur rocket's upper stage was analyzed by NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission, which revealed subsurface ice near the lunar south pole. As a result, the lunar south pole is now considered the most coveted location for moon missions that aim to establish a permanent human presence on Earth's satellite.

How much do you know about the moon? Test your lunar smarts with our moon quiz!

Andromeda is the only major galaxy in the universe that is speeding closer to the Milky Way as all the others rush away. Now, a new analysis of Hubble Space Telescope data hints that our galactic next-door neighbor may be winding down from a big burst of activity as it draws toward a possible collision with our galaxy.

The new study found that the Andromeda galaxy (M31) has been steadily slowing its production of new stars over the past 500 million years. The findings suggest that the galaxy is naturally winding down after a more active period, offering astronomers valuable clues about how large spiral galaxies evolve.

Andromeda is a giant spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way, but with around twice its mass. As the nearest large spiral galaxy to Earth, it provides an ideal laboratory for studying galaxy formation and evolution. An understanding of when and where stars form is essential for explaining how galaxies develop and change over time.

The new research, published July 27 in The Astrophysical Journal, combines two major Hubble surveys that mapped roughly two-thirds of Andromeda's disk, including around 200 million stars. It's already known that Andromeda experienced a dramatic burst of star formation about 2 billion years ago, which is thought to have formed about a fifth of all the stars in the galaxy. That starburst is thought to be the result of a merger with another galaxy, probably the compact elliptical galaxy M32, which now orbits Andromeda.

The new study found that Andromeda formed stars at a rate of around one solar mass per year 500 million years ago. By 40 million years ago, that rate had halved, while today the rate has fallen to just one-fifth of a solar mass each year. Researchers found that most recent star formation in Andromeda has been concentrated within a ring about 32,000 light-years from the galaxy's center and that the decreasing activity within this region is largely responsible for the overall decline. That suggests the galaxy is gradually winding down from its previous burst of star formation rather than suddenly running out of material.

Scientists also investigated whether M32 may have contributed to the slowdown. Regions closest to M32 show a more recent decline in star formation, making the companion galaxy a possible influence, although the evidence remains inconclusive.

"We need to measure the individual stars because they are the fossil record of the galaxy's formation," study co-author Ben Williams, an astronomer at the University of Washington, said in a NASA statement. "Hubble is the only telescope that can give you high enough spatial resolution over a large enough area to be able to do that in Andromeda."Although the team will continue studying Hubble's archive, they will also target observations from NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket as soon as Aug. 30. With a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, Roman will survey the entire Andromeda galaxy and its surrounding halo in unprecedented detail.

Andromeda is best observed in November and is visible to the naked eye, even from locations with moderate light pollution. The galaxy may collide with the Milky Way about 5 billion years from now, though its ultimate trajectory is still uncertain.

Skywatchers across North America and Europe should mark Wednesday, Aug. 12 on their calendars. From a daytime solar eclipse to the peak of the Perseid meteor shower beneath a moonless sky, the date offers an exceptionally rare combination of celestial events within a 24-hour period. Add brilliant Venus and the glowing band of the Milky Way after sunset, and the result is a full day of astronomy that could become one of the standout skywatching opportunities of the year.

The first spectacle arrives during daylight as the moon partially covers the sun across Alaska, eastern Canada and parts of the northeastern U.S. A dramatic total solar eclipse will be visible along a narrow path stretching across eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain — and that's where eclipse chasers will be. However, about 779 million people in North America, Europe and North Africa will see at least a 10% partial eclipse, according to Time and Date.

Northern Canada will experience North America's deepest partial eclipse, with parts of Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic seeing up to 93% of the sun covered, according to Time And Date; large eastern cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Quebec will see between 8% and 24% coverage. The best views in the U.S. will be from Alaska and the Northeast, with Fairbanks, Alaska, seeing 37% of the sun covered, and Boston seeing 16%.

In Europe, London will see a 91% eclipse and Paris will get 92%. No matter your viewing location, it's important to use ISO 12312-2 certified solar eclipse glasses throughout the entire partial eclipse. Also remember to fit binoculars, telescopes and cameras with solar filters before pointing them at the sun. (Here’s a great selection of gear that will help you safely watch the eclipse from anywhere).

After sunset, the day's second major event begins. Brilliant Venus will be easy to spot as it reaches dichotomy, the point at which the planet appears half illuminated. Through a small telescope or large stargazing binoculars, skywatchers should see Venus resembling a tiny half-moon as it moves closer to Earth.

Once darkness falls, the day's third and fourth major events will begin. The annual Perseid meteor shower will peak during the overnight hours of Aug. 12-13, and this year's display benefits from one crucial advantage: a new moon. With no moonlight washing out faint meteors, observers under truly dark skies could see between 50 and 75 meteors per hour, while even suburban locations should enjoy frequent "shooting stars," according to The Planetary Society.

The best time to look is from midnight to 2 a.m. local time, when the sky is darkest and the constellation Perseus is highest in the sky. As a final bonus, those under dark, rural skies will see the Milky Way arch overhead, providing one of the finest views of our home galaxy all year.

A daytime solar eclipse, a moon-free Perseid meteor shower, a dazzling Venus and spectacular views of the Milky Way make Aug. 12 a great opportunity for anyone with an interest in the night sky. If skies are clear, it could be the single greatest day and night for skywatching in years.

See how much you know about the sun with our sun quiz!

July’s full Buck Moon, the second full moon of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, will turn full on Wednesday (July 29). It will be the final full moon before a flurry of solar and lunar activity — notably, a total solar eclipse caused by the new moon on August 12, and a partial lunar eclipse during the following full moon on August 28.

Named for the new antlers that emerge from male deer during summer, July’s full moon is also known as the Thunder Moon and Hay Moon, according to Time and Date. The Anishinaabeg people call it Miin Giizis, or Berry Moon, according to the Center for Native American Studies.

The Buck Moon will be at its fullest at 10:37 a.m. EDT on Wednesday — however, it will also look bright and full on Tuesday and Thursday night. From North America, the best time to see it will be at moonrise in the southeast during dusk on Wednesday evening. The exact time of moonrise will depend on your location. A full moon looks most dramatic as it first appears above the eastern horizon shortly after sunset, with Rayleigh scattering making it loom orange — the same light-scattering phenomenon that makes the sky blue and sunsets red.

July's full moon is one of the lowest full moons of the year as seen from the Northern Hemisphere because it occurs relatively soon after the June solstice. A full moon always sits opposite the sun, so the path of July's full moon mirrors the sun's path in February.

You can easily enjoy the full moon with the naked eye, but a good backyard telescope or pair of stargazing binoculars can help you zoom in on famous structures, such as craters and Apollo landing sites. And if you want to take stunning photos of the moon, here’s everything you need to know.

Two weeks after theBuck Moon, the new moon will slide directly between Earth and the sun, causing a total solar eclipse. Observers along a narrow path of totality in eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain will see the moon block the sun for a few minutes, revealing the solar corona.

A deep partial solar eclipse will be visible across Europe, with a small partial solar eclipse observed over Canada and the northeastern U.S.. The largest eclipse in Canada will be 93% in northeastern Nunavut, while northeastern Maine in the U.S. will see 29% of the sun covered by the moon. Solar eclipse glasses must be worn at all times to safely view the partial phases.

The next full moon, the Sturgeon Moon, will rise on August 27 and be partially eclipsed by Earth overnight. More than 96% of the moon will pass into Earth's shadow as seen from Europe, Africa, North America and South America.

How much do you know about the moon? Test your lunar smarts with our moon quiz!

In a string of a dozen small galaxies hung in the sky like a row of cosmic fairy lights, astronomers have discovered a small, ghostly galaxy without any dark matter. The rare discovery offers additional evidence that violent galactic collisions can knock this invisible substance loose from visible matter.

Dark matter acts like cosmic glue, accumulating in "halos" in which galaxies form. It makes up about 85% of all the matter in the cosmos, meaning all the stars and other celestial objects we see account for a small fraction of the universe's mass. And as astronomer Vera Rubin observed, despite its invisible nature, dark matter seems essential to explain the apparent movement of stars around their galactic centers.

Yet in a study published June 16 in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers report that a dwarf galaxy called DF9 may be devoid of dark matter, joining a couple of other apparently dark-matter-devoid dwarfs (DF2 and DF4) previously discovered in the same string of tiny, faint galaxies.

"The most surprising aspect is that this finding indicates that an entire trail of galaxies including DF2, DF4, and DF9 formed together in an extreme event producing galaxies not alike any we've ever seen before — the first of its kind," Michael Keim, an astrophysicist at Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the study's first author, told Live Science via email. "As a result, they have a ghostly appearance, bright clusters of stars, and a lack of dark matter."

Following a trail of galactic crumbs

To study DF9, the researchers used the Keck Cosmic Web Imager at the W. M. Keck Observatory atop the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. The dwarf galaxy is situated within a long trail of a dozen similarly small, diffuse galaxies in the NGC 1052 field, nearly 70 light-years from Earth.

To calculate the mass of DF9, the researchers measured the motion of its stars by analyzing changes in their wavelengths. The analysis revealed that DF9 has a measly mass of approximately 100 million suns, which is consistent with its visible mass in stars. If it contained the expected amount of dark matter, it would be exponentially heavier, harboring a mass of more than 10 billion suns, the researchers said in a statement.

As revealed over the past decade, at least two of DF9’s nearby galactic siblings also appear to lack dark matter.

"If DF2, DF4, and DF9 were the only galaxies known, one would not conclude there is any need for dark matter," the researchers wrote in the paper. These three galaxies do not display a mass-based discrepancy based on their visible and invisible matter; their mass, determined by the gravitational motion of their stars, matches their mass as measured by the light emitted from these same stars.

But this is hardly typical among most observed galaxies, especially the tiniest ones. Counterintuitively, low-mass dwarf galaxies such as these often have the highest fraction of dark matter. Because they are not as massive, they have lower escape velocities, allowing supernovas and other "feedback mechanisms," like intense black hole winds, to eject their gas more easily. This mass expulsion typically results in dark matter halos around galaxies that are 100 times more massive than all of a dwarf galaxy's stars, the researchers said.

Dark matter deficiency is linked to a violent past

The team likened this lineup of dwarf galaxies to a miniature version of the Bullet Cluster, located nearly 4 billion light-years from Earth. The collision of two galaxy clusters that created the Bullet Cluster is considered the most energetic event known since the Big Bang, astronomers say, and the massive mashup is responsible for separating the system's gas from its dark matter.

Violent galaxy mergers are widespread in space, suggesting such galaxies without dark matter also may be more common throughout the cosmos than once thought.

"The Bullet Dwarf event in which DF9 is thought to have formed is named after the famous Bullet Cluster wherein the gas of two entire clusters of galaxies was separated out in a similar manner as this 'Bullet Dwarf' collision, so indeed this can occur at much larger scales," Keim explained via email. "But collisions between giant clusters are far less frequent than collisions of individual galaxies."

Yet being able to glimpse DF9 and its linearly laid-out counterparts still required an element of fortune. "High-speed collisions are, nevertheless, somewhat rare," Keim added. "DF9 is 67 million light years away from Earth; based on cosmological simulations, we would expect just 7 or so similar collisions to have occurred within that distance."

Additionally, celestial bodies are always in flux, so finding galaxies devoid of dark matter is difficult for other reasons. For example, they may exist in dense regions, where they are harder to view through the obscuring dust, gas and starlight surrounding them. Or, they may merge with other galaxies that do have dark matter.

The strange separation between dark matter and visible matter in the galaxies of the NGC 1052 field warrants further study, the researchers said. Finding any leftover gas from the collision would provide the "smoking gun" evidence for the collisional origin of this faint string of galaxies.

The astronomers are conducting follow-ups with other observatories, including the new MOTHRA facility, the "world's largest all-lens telescope," which is under construction in Chile. With an array of 1,140 telephoto lenses, "its line mapping sensitivity on large scales — like that of the trail — will be at least an order of magnitude deeper than any other facility," Keim added.

Two meteor showers will peak together overnight on Thursday, July 30, into Friday, July 31 — but skywatchers should expect a moonlit challenge rather than a dazzling display.

Both the Southern Delta Aquariids and the Alpha Capricornids reach maximum activity just one night after July's full Buck Moon, which turns full on Wednesday, July 29. According to the American Meteor Society, the moon will still be 98% full during the peaks of those meteor showers, meaning bright moonlight will wash out many of the fainter "shooting stars."

This year, the Southern Delta Aquariids are active from July 12 to Aug. 23 and peak on the night of July 30-31. The meteor shower can result in about 25 shooting stars under ideal dark skies, but the full moon makes this year's timing far from perfect. The Alpha Capricornids, which are active from July 3 to Aug. 15 this year, offer around five meteors per hour on the same peak night. That's not many, but the Alpha Capricornid meteor shower is known for bright fireballs — space rocks that shine brightly, and sometimes colorfully, as they catch fire during the plunge through Earth’s atmosphere.

From North America, the moon will appear bright for much of the night around the meteor showers' peak. A nearly full moon does not stop meteors from occurring, but it brightens the sky enough to hide the faintest streaks. That's particularly important for the Southern Delta Aquariids, which can be faint and typically lack fireballs, according to the American Meteor Society. Even still, the overlapping showers make a great night for practicing your meteor shower photography or for taking pictures of the moon.

The best time to try watching will be between midnight and dawn, when the radiant — the point from which the meteors seem to emanate — of the Southern Delta Aquariids, the constellation Aquarius, is highest in the southern sky. Observers in the southern U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean will be better placed than those farther north because Aquarius climbs higher at lower latitudes.

For the best chance of seeing some shooting stars, keep the moon behind you or blocked by a building, tree or hill, and look toward the darkest part of the sky. Meteor showers are always best viewed with the naked eye.

If you're clouded out — or mooned out — during the July meteor peaks, don't worry, as you'll get a better opportunity in August. The Perseid meteor shower will peak overnight on Aug. 12-13, just after the Aug. 12 new moon, when skies will be moonless for the meteor shower's peak rate of 100 meteors per hour.

That same new moon will also cause a total solar eclipse to be visible along a narrow path through eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. A partial solar eclipse will be seen from parts of Canada and the northeastern U.S. (Remember to protect your eyes with proper solar eclipse glasses at all times during the partial phases.)

The combination of a solar eclipse and the peak of a major meteor shower will make Aug. 12-13 potentially one of the most exciting days of the year for skywatchers.

Scientists have found previously missing galactic matter lurking in the huge voids of space between galaxies.

For decades, scientists have been unable to solve the long-standing puzzle of why we see far less normal matter in galaxies than we should. Now, a team of scientists in the CHIME/FRB Collaboration, led by researchers at MIT, has developed a novel method to spot this missing galactic matter by combining detections of fast radio bursts (FRBs) with measurements of galaxies' locations.

This method, published July 21 in the journal Physical Review Letters, has exposed vast amounts of previously unseen matter in the space between galaxies, which originated from within the galaxies themselves. It has also unveiled the causes of the galactic matter's expulsion: violent astrophysical phenomena within galaxies, such as black hole jets and exploding stars. This finding, in turn, hints that these phenomena are much more energetic than previously thought.

Just after the Big Bang, physicists estimate that roughly 17% of the universe was made from "ordinary" matter — the observable matter that we, the planets, the stars, and galaxies are made of — with the other 83% being dark matter, a mysterious component of the universe that exerts a gravitational influence on objects around it but does not interact with light, leaving it poorly understood.

Scientists therefore expect to see a similar proportion of ordinary matter in the observable universe today. However, the total amount of ordinary matter within galaxies adds up to roughly one-tenth of what's expected in the universe.

It has long been theorized that if the missing matter is really present in the universe, it is likely hiding in the vast space between galaxies. However, if this were true, the missing matter would be spread so thinly across empty space that it would be extremely difficult to detect.

Now, the CHIME/FRB team has pioneered searching for the missing matter by studying FRBs. Discovered in 2007, FRBs are incredibly bright, millisecond-long flashes of radio waves thought to be produced by some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe. They arrive at Earth from distant galaxies billions of light-years away and contain imprints of the matter they pass through to get here — acting like cosmic X-ray scans.

"What makes FRBs good to probe missing matter is that they have a special property," co-author Haochen Wang, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement. "They start out as a very quick flash, and as they pass through matter, they smear out in time. And we can measure that smearing very precisely, which is directly proportional to how much missing matter the FRB passed through."

Smeared signals

By combining data from both the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the team cross-correlated the degree of smearing from thousands of measured FRB signals with the locations of millions of galaxies across the universe. This enabled the scientists to determine whether the FRBs were smeared by matter inside galaxies on their journey to Earth, or whether their path was through space between galaxies, meaning any smearing was due to matter residing there.

The results showed that previously undetected matter was indeed located outside of galaxies and that it formed widely spread clouds that extend farther out than previously predicted. These findings support hypotheses that highly energetic processes, such as black hole jets and exploding stars within galaxies, push matter beyond galactic boundaries, but also suggest that the energies of these violent events must be higher than originally thought to throw them out so far.

"A galaxy is maybe a few 100,000 light-years across, and we found missing matter out to about 4 million light years," study co-author Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT, said in the statement. "That’s further than the simulations predict, by quite a bit."

"These measurements indicate that star activity, and activity from black holes, is stronger and much more violent than predicted," he added.

Now that these results have verified that FRBs can indeed be used to search for missing matter, the team expects its method and results to improve in the future, particularly given that CHIME is continuing to detect more FRBs.

"We got it to work for the first time," Masui said, "and will get it to work even more precisely as data gets better."

Astronomers have found the strongest evidence yet that a rocky planet beyond our solar system has managed to hold onto an atmosphere — a crucial ingredient for life as we know it.

The discovery marks the first time scientists have detected an atmosphere surrounding a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of another star, the region around a star where temperatures could enable liquid water to exist on a planet's surface. The findings, published July 16 in the journal Science, could help astronomers narrow the search for potentially habitable worlds beyond our cosmic backyard.

"It's absolutely exciting," Edward Schwieterman, associate professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "We are getting closer to studying the atmospheres of worlds that could plausibly harbor life, with evidence of that life embedded in their observable spectra."

The planet, known as LHS 1140 b, lies about 48 light-years away from Earth and orbits a small, cool red dwarf star. At roughly 5.6 times Earth's mass, the exoplanet is classified as a super-Earth: a rocky planet larger than our own but much smaller than gas giants like Neptune.

It receives less than half the sunlight Earth gets, giving it an estimated surface temperature of around minus 53 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 47 degrees Celsius), according to previous estimates not accounting for an atmosphere. That makes the planet cold, but in the range astronomers consider potentially habitable.

Cosmic gas leak

Scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets over the past few decades, including many rocky worlds. But determining whether those planets have atmospheres has proven far more difficult, because atmospheres around rocky planets are incredibly thin compared with those of giant planets, making them much harder to detect across vast cosmic distances.

Instead of looking for the atmosphere directly, the researchers behind the new study searched for a subtle clue that one existed: helium gas leaking into space. Using the WINERED spectrograph on the Magellan Clay Telescope in Chile, the team watched LHS 1140 b cross in front of its star and let a sliver of starlight filter through the planet's atmosphere on its way to Earth. As it did, the team looked for a tiny dip in the star’s light at the exact wavelength of infrared light that helium blocks — a telltale sign that gas was streaming off the planet and into space.

The prediction rested entirely on a mathematical model that had never been confirmed for a rocky planet. However, in September 2024, the team caught LHS 1140 b and a smaller, hotter neighboring planet, LHS 1140 c, transiting their star on the same night, less than 40 minutes apart. The researchers detected a clear helium signal from LHS 1140 b, while LHS 1140 c showed nothing.

The contrast matters: LHS 1140 c orbits much closer to its star than LHS 1140 b does and receives roughly five times the radiation, yet it's also smaller and less gravitationally bound — conditions that should make any escaping gas easier, not harder, to spot. Finding nothing there suggests LHS 1140 c's atmosphere was stripped away long ago, while LHS 1140 b, sitting farther out in cooler, calmer conditions, has managed to hold onto its own.

The discovery addresses a question astronomers have been working to answer for decades.

"Twenty years ago we wondered whether other terrestrial-type planets even existed," study co-author Robin Wordsworth, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, said in a statement. "Then we learned they're common, and found some in the habitable zone. The next question was whether any of them had managed to keep an atmosphere. Now we know at least one has."

A step forward in the hunt for life

The find is especially notable because red dwarf stars like LHS 1140 can bombard nearby planets with high-energy radiation capable of stripping atmospheres away over time. Based on the star's estimated age of at least 3.1 billion years, the researchers say LHS 1140 b's atmosphere has likely persisted despite that bombardment, suggesting some rocky planets around these common stars can hang onto their atmospheres for far longer than once assumed.

But the researchers caution that detecting helium does not mean the planet is inhabited — or even that it is habitable. The observations reveal only the planet's thin upper atmosphere, not its full composition. Scientists still don't know whether LHS 1140 b has oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor or other gases that could make its surface more Earth-like and hospitable to life.

Instead, the discovery opens a new way to study distant rocky worlds.

"The study demonstrates that, at least in some cases, we will be able to begin characterizing the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets," Schwieterman said. "If only rocky planets orbiting Sun-like stars retained atmospheres, we might have to wait one to two decades for the launch of the Habitable Worlds Observatory to search for biosignatures on rocky planets. I'm certainly excited about what comes next!"

Future observations will aim to determine what the rest of LHS 1140 b's atmosphere is made of and investigate whether it may harbor oceans or other features associated with habitability.

Around 100 years ago, Albert Einstein made an audacious prediction about space. The frequently right (but occasionally wrong) physicist theorized that, just as the curved lens of a magnifying glass bends light to increase an object's apparent size, massive celestial objects can curve the very fabric of the universe with their gravity — causing distant sources of light to bend, warp, and appear magnified as their rays pass through the region on their way to Earth.

Today, this phenomenon — called gravitational lensing — has been confirmed through dozens of telescope observations, and is a crucial tool that observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) use to probe the light of the oldest, faintest galaxies in the universe. And in this newly released JWST image of a tumultuous young galaxy cluster, Einstein’s gravitational funhouse effect is on full display.

In the foreground, two bright white points of light ringed with white halos signify the gravitational center of MACS J0553.4-3342, a gargantuan collection of bound galaxies located in the constellation Columba (the dove). These two white beacons are massive elliptical galaxies, each wreathed in their own sub-cluster of smaller galaxies, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA). And the two clusters are not getting along.

Studying the galaxies’ light as it appeared roughly 4.4 billion years ago, astronomers can tell the clusters are in the messy process of merging together. The two principal elliptical galaxies have already slammed through each other once, and now sit at a distance of around 1 million light-years apart (that’s about 10 Milky Ways lined up in a row). Eventually, that gap will close as the massive galaxies swoop back toward each other, finally combining into one.

But the real jewels in this galactic trove are hidden in the contorted, orange arcs of light that bookend the cluster on either side. Here, the magnifying effect of gravitational lensing is acting in full force — allowing JWST to detect the light of several faint galaxies from less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

Three bright dots in the arc on the left are actually three repeated images of a single galaxy, according to ESA. The trippy effect appears several times throughout the image, with each elongated orange streak cracking open a warped window onto an ancient corner of the universe that would otherwise be impossible to see.

Through observations like these, scientists using JWST have discovered that the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe have grown larger and faster than our leading theories of cosmology predict should be possible. Using one cosmic oddity to uncover another, this gravitational lens could keep astronomers busy for decades to come.

See more space photos of the week:

Scientists have discovered the building blocks of life inside a meteorite that smashed through a New Jersey home two years ago. The space rock contains amino acids, carbon compounds and other "prebiotic" molecules similar to what may have helped kick-start life on our planet, a new study shows.

Scientists on the study team — led by Peter Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer with affiliations at the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center — praised the homeowner in Hillsborough, N.J., for quickly preserving the meteorite after it fell through the roof on July 16, 2024, despite the adverse circumstances. His actions included using disposable gloves and aluminum foil to place pieces of the meteorite fragments into glass jars.

"I was at home at the time, heard a loud crash and found a hole in the ceiling of the master bedroom," the homeowner, who was not named, said in a statement from the SETI Institute. "I smelled a strong, sulfur-like odor and saw many black fragments, along with debris and black dust that covered my bed, carpet and surrounding areas."

Those meteorite pieces were precious, the scientists said, and likely came from an ancient solar system planet that wasn't fully formed. "A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a small primitive asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids — a process not previously known from this type of protoplanet world," Jenniskens said in the statement.

The study, published July 15 in the journal Science Advances, also traced how the meteorite got to the house. Earlier on July 16, 2024, at least 60 observers in New York, New Jersey and other Northeastern states spotted a meteor later confirmed to be traveling at 32,000 mph (51,500 km/h). At least 16 people in New York and New Jersey reported feeling the meteor's shock wave.

The rock broke apart in midair, with observer reports stopping when the meteor reached 22 miles (35 kilometers) in altitude, although Newark Liberty International Airport briefly tracked pebbles falling from the sky with Doppler weather radar after that. Fragments from only one meteorite ‪—‬ called Hillsborough, after the town where it crashed through the New Jersey home ‪—‬ were recovered.

The American Meteor Society used its cameras in Northford, Connecticut, and Douglassville, Pennsylvania — along with a doorbell camera in Wayne, New Jersey — to figure out the meteor's origin, Mike Hankey, an operations manager at the American Meteor Society and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "The path traced back to low in the asteroid belt."

Hillsborough is the second stony meteorite of its type ever spotted in a fall. Later analysis showed that the meteorite is full of ancient brines or salt. Scientists classified the meteorite as a type of stony space rock called a carbonaceous chondrite.

Scientists will compare the salt minerals to samples of asteroids Ryugu and Bennu, both of which contain ingredients of life and are samples of another carbonaceous chondrite type that formed earlier than Hillsborough. This analysis could help scientists further trace the origins of life-friendly chemistry in the early solar system.

Up to 90% of Earth's population may be able to see the enormous "God of Chaos" asteroid Apophis zoom past our planet in less than three years, scientists say. The skyscraper-size space rock will come closer to us than some satellites, making it clearly visible to the naked eye during the "once-in-a-millennium" skywatching event.

This will be the first time humans have ever been able to predict a flyby of an asteroid visible to the naked eye, and it could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the up to 7.6 billion people who manage to see it, scientists said at the Apophis T-3 Years workshop, held June 18-19 at the University of Padua in Italy.

"Sighting Apophis as it passes by is a way of feeling a shared cosmic experience, realizing the smallness of Earth in the vastness of space," Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist and asteroid expert at MIT who helped organize the recent workshop and create new maps of the flyby, told Live Science in an email.

The asteroid, dubbed 99942 Apophis (or simply Apophis), is a peanut-shaped object that spans about 1,500 feet (450 meters) across at its widest point, or around as wide as the Empire State Building is tall, making it large enough to wipe out a city if it ever impacted our planet. Apophis likely originated from the solar system's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but it now resides between the orbits of Venus and Earth, circling our home star roughly every 10.5 months. The name Apophis comes from Apep, the Egyptian serpent god of darkness and disorder, which has earned the space rock the nickname "God of Chaos."

On April 13, 2029, Apophis will make a superclose flyby of Earth, reaching a minimum distance of around 19,000 miles (30,600 kilometers) from our planet, according to The Planetary Society. That's much farther away than the International Space Station and the thousands of other spacecraft in low Earth orbit, but it's closer than several hundred satellites stationed in an elevated geosynchronous orbit. (Apophis poses no threat to these high-altitude satellites because they can easily be maneuvered away from its projected path.)

There is currently zero chance that Apophis will impact our planet during the flyby or within the next 100 years. However, some experts have suggested that there is still a slim chance that the asteroid's trajectory could change before it reaches us. Other experts worry that the upcoming flyby could permanently alter the space rock or nudge it off course, potentially increasing the chances it could hit us in the future.

Therefore, scientists are keen to monitor the flyby in great detail and will coordinate observations from telescopes around the world to understand the potentially hazardous asteroid better. Several spacecraft, including NASA's OSIRIS-APEX, will also attempt to fly past Apophis to study its structure and trajectory. The event is so significant that the United Nations has declared 2029 the International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defence.

Researchers also hope the flyby will provide a unique opportunity to inspire the next generation of space scientists. "I hope people will find the Apophis flyby intriguing, as it is not anything fearful or frightening at all," Binzel said. "Who knows how many young people might find a spark of curiosity that leads them on a path to a career in space studies."

Who will see Apophis?

The new maps help break down who might be able to see Apophis throughout the roughly seven-hour period it passes by our planet. The asteroid will be visible only to people who are positioned within its path at twilight or night amid clear skies and limited light pollution.

At the start of the flyby, when Apophis is farthest from Earth, the asteroid could be visible to around 4.5 billion people across Australia and most of Asia. By the end of the flyby, when the space rock reaches its closest point to us, it might be visible to around 1.9 billion people in eastern South America, northern Africa and parts of Europe, according to the new maps.

Peak visibility will occur around halfway through the flyby, when Apophis might be seen by as many as 5.7 billion people across eastern Africa, Southern Europe, Australia, and all of Asia and the Middle East. At this point, astronomical observatories situated on Spain's Canary Islands will likely snap the best photos of the asteroid's flyby, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

North America is the only continent that will not get a clear view of Apophis.

For those who are lucky enough to see the passing space rock, the asteroid will appear as a "modest star passing slowly across the sky, much like a slow-moving satellite," Binzel said, and it will shine as brightly as the stars in the Big Dipper.

Interstellar space just got a little sweeter: A type of sugar called erythrulose has been found near the center of the Milky Way, according to a new study.

The detection, made in a gas cloud called G+0.693-0.027, is the first time this sugar has been found outside the solar system and adds to research identifying similar life-friendly ingredients around our galaxy, such as water.

Erythrulose, which is made up of four carbon atoms, is also found in raspberries. Its interstellar presence was confirmed by the Yebes 40-meter and IRAM 30-meter radio telescopes in Spain, the research team reported Monday (July 13) in the journal Nature Astronomy. The signal of erythrulose was confirmed with patterns measured in the laboratory.

While space researchers often focus on water and carbon when searching for the ingredients of life, sugars are also essential. "Sugars are important molecules in living systems, helping to provide energy, build important biological structures, and form parts of genetic material," the researchers said in a statement.

"We were able to achieve this detection thanks to the combination of exceptionally sensitive observations, extensive frequency coverage, and highly accurate laboratory spectroscopic data," study co-author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, a staff researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, told Live Science in an email. "In addition, our astronomical target is one of the richest chemical inventories in the galaxy, which enhances the probabilities of detection,"

Finding erythrulose, he added, "is particularly relevant for the field of origins of life" because that sugar changes the configuration of threose — yet another sugar which is believed to be the precursor of the first nucleic acids that evolved into RNA and DNA.

Sugar, space, and everything nice

Sugar has been spotted in meteorites and asteroid samples before, particularly ribose (an RNA building block) and glucose (a product of photosynthesis on Earth). Recently, for example, samples from the asteroid Bennu returned by the OSIRIS-REx mission were found to contain both ribose and glucose, suggesting that these vital ingredients for biology are available elsewhere in the solar system.

Previously, scientists could not figure out how erythrulose could be made in conditions simulating the early Earth. That's because lab experiments "yield insufficient concentrations" of erythrulose on the surface of prebiotic (pre-life) Earth, the researchers explained.

The new finding of erythrulose in an interstellar gas and dust cloud, by contrast, suggests that erythrulose could be found in the interstellar medium for incorporation into rocky planets like Earth earlier, when they are first forming and evolving.

As such, ribose, glucose and erythrulose could have been part of the "sugar inventory" on Earth before it fully formed, the researchers said. "The findings suggest that erythrulose can be made from simpler molecules on dust grains in space, and may then become part of more complex chemical systems," the team said in the statement.

The sweet detection adds further evidence to the theory that many, if not all, of the essential ingredients of life are plentiful in space.

"One of the most exciting next steps is to search for even more complex sugars and for molecules that are direct precursors of RNA, and other biologically important compounds," Jiménez-Serra told Live Science. "We want to understand how far prebiotic chemistry can progress before planets are even formed, and what chemical inventory young planetary systems inherit from interstellar space."

This image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) offers a rare look at the hidden workings of Centaurus A, one of the most unusual and active galaxies relatively near Earth. JWST detected wavelengths of light humans cannot see, revealing a galaxy shaped by violence and chaos.

Centaurus A is relatively close to the Milky Way, which enabled JWST to study the strange galaxy in remarkable detail. It's no quiet, ordinary galaxy; it's the aftermath of a major cosmic collision. At its heart is an actively feeding supermassive black hole, surrounded by vast clouds of dust that trace the galaxy's turbulent history.

In visible light — such as images from the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory and Very Large Telescope in Chile — thick dust lanes obscure Centaurus A's center, blocking part of the story. The Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, both of which can see in near-infrared wavelengths, previously imaged Centaurus A, but they also saw mainly dust. But infrared light can pass through that dust, which enabled JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument to see the galaxy's center glowing in white and pale pink, revealing filaments, loops and clouds of warm dust stretching across the scene.

Scientists believe Centaurus A collided with another galaxy roughly 2 billion years ago. That ancient merger left visible scars, which JWST captured in striking detail. Evidence of a galaxy pulled, stirred and reshaped over immense timescales appears throughout the image, from the warped gray-and-white parallelogram-shaped structure cutting across the galaxy, to the pink and lavender ribbons curving above and below it in an S shape. The image reveals how galaxy mergers rearrange dust and gas, trigger star formation and influence galaxy growth over time.

The image also shows how a nearby supermassive black hole can both fuel and limit the birth of stars. As material falls toward the black hole at the center of Centaurus A, it releases enormous energy and launches powerful jets that shape the surrounding gas and dust.

The image comes near the end of JWST's fourth year of science operations, which began with the release of spectacular images in July 2022. The telescope launched on Dec. 25, 2021, and is predicted to operate for about 20 years.

See how much you know about the world's most powerful telescope with our James Webb Space Telescope quiz!

Two of the Milky Way's gigantic spiral arms appear to be much farther away than we realized, scientists have discovered after listening to the echoes of distant cosmic explosions. The findings could potentially force us to reconsider our galaxy's mass and maybe even its shape, researchers say.

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy made up of a dense central region containing a supermassive black hole (dubbed Sagittarius A*), orbited by four major arms — the Sagitarrius arm, the Scutum-Centaurus arm, the Perseus arm and the Outer arm — that curve and stretch outward like a giant pinwheel. Most of our galaxy's stars and gas are tightly packed together in these cosmic limbs, although some stars, including the sun, exist in the gaps between them or within other smaller structures.

Until now, researchers have estimated the size of these arms based on the Milky Way's rotation rate, because it is impossible to see our galaxy's entirety from Earth's position inside the galaxy. This, in turn, has helped us estimate the galaxy's total size (around 100,000 light-years across) and its mass, which is equivalent to around 1.5 trillion suns, according to NASA.

However, this way of measuring the massive structures is not foolproof and has led to several uncertainties about our galaxy since we first discovered its spiral shape around 175 years ago, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

"We usually model the Milky Way's outer arms indirectly based on what we know of how our galaxy rotates, but doing it this way leaves room for error," study first author Beatrice Vaia, a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics who led the new study as part of her doctorate, said in a statement. The farther away from the galactic center, the more uncertain the measurements become, she added.

In the new study, published June 19 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers came up with a new method of measuring the arms using the most powerful and luminous explosions in the universe, known as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). As X-ray light from these cosmic outbursts passes through dense clouds of gas, like those within our galaxy's arms, it creates luminous rings, or echoes, whose size corresponds to their distance from Earth.

The team used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory (both of which orbit Earth) to analyze echoes from three different GRBs that shone through gas clouds in the Perseus, Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms, respectively. This revealed that both the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms are likely around 10% farther from Earth than we thought. This may not sound like much, but it equates to several thousand light-years.

The biggest potential implication of this discovery is that our galaxy is wider and, therefore, probably more massive than we realized, which could have major knock-on effects for our understanding of our cosmic neighborhood.

"The differences are small, but any revision of these distances is important because they are so fundamental for understanding our galaxy," study co-author Ilaria Fornasiero, an astronomer at the University of Bologna in Italy, said in a separate statement. "For example, this could mean that astronomers have to revise estimates of the mass of the galaxy, because that affects how wide the arms stretch."

Animations released alongside the new paper show how the Milky Way might look based on the new data, revealing the Outer and Scutum-Centaurus arms extending farther into intergalactic space, making our galaxy look more like a lopsided snail's shell than a perfect spiral.

These visualizations do not necessarily show the true shape of the galaxy, as the Sagitarrius arm and other minor galactic limbs have not been measured using the same methodology. However, the fact that the Perseus arm was not as distant as the other two GRB-illuminated limbs hints at a surprising asymmetry throughout our galaxy that cannot be easily explained.

The researchers are now on the hunt for more GRBs that can be used to map out the rest of our galaxy's shape and help us better understand what our cosmic neighborhood actually looks like. However, finding these cosmic explosions is easier said than done.

"We're relying on the universe to provide us with these events, and so far, over 25 years, we've only found a handful that we can use," study co-author Andrea Tiengo, an astronomer at Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pavia in Italy, said in the statement. "That said, we will continue to be on the lookout for more."

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope has spotted 31 previously unknown quasars dating to the universe's earliest chapter, including the two oldest ever found.

The discoveries, described July 6 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, more than double the number of known quasars from that primordial era and could help astronomers unravel one of cosmology's biggest mysteries: how supermassive black holes grew so enormous so quickly after the Big Bang.

"It's a big step towards understanding these fascinating objects on a more fundamental level," Antonio La Marca, an ESA research fellow on the Euclid team, said in a statement.

Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe. They form when gas and dust spiral into a galaxy's central supermassive black hole, heating up and releasing enormous amounts of energy that can outshine the galaxy itself. Each of the two most ancient quasars detected in the new study shone with the light of a trillion suns, according to the researchers.

Euclid spotted the quasars while surveying the distant universe. Twelve of them have redshifts of 7 or higher, meaning their light has traveled for more than 13 billion years and dates to the universe's first 770 million years. Two of the objects, with redshifts of 7.77 and 7.69, are the most ancient quasars ever identified, shining just 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only about 5% of its current age.

"These early quasars date back to the Universe's infancy," Daming Yang, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands and first author of the new study, said in the statement. "By finding and studying them, we can better understand how these enormous systems formed and grew so quickly — one of the greatest mysteries in astrophysics."

Finding quasars from the early universe has long been difficult because they are rare and incredibly distant. Until now, astronomers had identified only the brightest examples, making it difficult to understand the broader population during this early era. Euclid's wide-field survey is changing that by detecting fainter quasars across huge swaths of the sky.

The latest discoveries represent only a fraction of what the telescope is expected to find during its six-year mission, which will cover more than one-third of the total sky once complete. Mounted with a pair of instruments that see in visible and near-infrared light, Euclid is currently assembling the largest-ever 3D map of the universe. Scientists expect the survey to uncover hundreds of similarly ancient quasars, providing an unprecedented look at how the universe's earliest galaxies and supermassive black holes evolved.

Euclid has also taken some time to study the nearby universe, revealing more than 60 million individual stars packed into the Milky Way's center in a sparkling image released in late June.

Black hole quiz: How supermassive is your knowledge of the universe?

Scientists have found evidence that gravitational waves from a spectacular black hole collision carry signals from the very edge of the newly formed black hole. If confirmed by future observations, the discovery could provide an entirely new way to investigate what happens in the immediate vicinity of a black hole without ever observing it directly.

In a new study, the researchers analyzed an exceptionally strong gravitational wave event known as GW250114. They identified a "direct wave," a subtle feature of the total gravitational wave signal predicted by theory but never previously detected in real data. The signal appears to contain information from extremely close to the black hole's event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

The findings, published June 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that gravitational wave observatories may eventually allow astronomers to probe regions that have remained inaccessible since black holes were first predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Listening to the edge of a black hole

Although astronomers have photographed the glowing material surrounding some supermassive black holes and have detected dozens of black hole mergers through gravitational waves, the event horizon itself has remained frustratingly difficult to study.

Unlike ordinary light, gravitational waves are tiny ripples in space-time produced when massive objects accelerate. They pass almost undisturbed through the universe, carrying information about violent cosmic events that would otherwise remain hidden.

According to study co-author Sizheng Ma, a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, the newly identified signal offers a rare glimpse of what happens immediately after two black holes collide.

"When two black holes merge, they violently shake space-time itself," Ma told Live Science. "For a brief moment, the region very close to the newly formed black hole's horizon is swept into a fast, fading swirl."

Ma explained that the direct wave is the portion of the gravitational wave signal produced near the horizon and carries the imprint of that motion outward through space.

"That is why it is so interesting," he said. "It may let us 'listen' to what happens near the horizon, a region we cannot see directly with light."

A remarkable black hole collision

The team focused on GW250114, a black hole merger detected on Jan. 14, 2025, by the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.

"Our earlier theoretical work predicted that black hole mergers should produce a direct-wave signal from the near-horizon region," Ma said. "The big question was whether this effect could actually be seen in real data."

GW250114 turned out to provide exactly the conditions needed to test that prediction.

"It was strong enough, clean enough, and close enough to the theoretical situation where this signal should be visible," he said.

To search for the elusive feature, the researchers first removed the best-understood part of the gravitational wave signal, which comes from the newly formed black hole settling down after the merger. Then, they examined the remaining data to determine whether it consisted only of detector noise or contained another physical signal.

"What we found was striking," Ma said. "The remaining signal followed the expected rhythm and fading pattern of a wave shaped by the region very close to the final black hole's horizon."

The team concluded that the leftover signal matches the behavior expected for a direct wave predicted by previous theoretical studies.

A new way to explore extreme gravity

The researchers stressed that their findings do not reveal what lies inside a black hole. Instead, they're providing a new observational tool for investigating the region immediately outside the event horizon.

"The gravitational wave data appear to carry an imprint from very close to the newly formed black hole's horizon — the famous point of no return," Ma said.

He explained that the measurements are consistent with space-time near the horizon being rapidly dragged around by the spinning black hole while the signal fades because of the intense gravitational field.

"For us, the exciting message is that gravitational waves may be giving us a new way to study the edge of a black hole using real observational data," Ma said.

Ma believes the method could eventually become useful for exploring ideas such as quantum gravity — which seeks to unite Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum mechanics — or the black hole information paradox, the longstanding puzzle of whether information that falls into a black hole is truly lost. However, it cannot test those questions directly yet.

"If quantum effects, or any deviations from the standard black-hole picture, leave a measurable imprint there, then direct waves could, in principle, help us search for them in the future," he said.

More observations will be needed

The researchers cautioned that the discovery is based on a single gravitational wave event. While GW250114 provided exceptionally favorable conditions, much stronger evidence will come only if similar signals are found in many additional black hole mergers.

"There are two main directions," Ma said. "The first is theory."

Current models capture the essential physics but remain simplified, and more realistic descriptions of black hole mergers will be needed.

"The second is observation," he added. "This result comes from one exceptionally loud and clean event, so the strongest confirmation would come from seeing the same kind of pattern in other black hole mergers."

As gravitational wave observatories continue to improve and detect increasing numbers of mergers, researchers hope to determine whether direct waves are a universal feature of black hole collisions.

"If the pattern appears repeatedly in the way general relativity predicts," Ma said, "direct waves could become a new way to study black hole horizons or the regions very close to them, and to test Einstein's theory in one of the most extreme environments in the universe."

If future observations confirm the team's results, scientists may have gained something they have sought for decades: a direct observational window into the very edge of a black hole.

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

Astronomers have reconstructed the "skeleton" of the cosmos in unprecedented detail, thanks to the largest-ever survey conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The resulting map reveals how galaxies have evolved since the universe's infancy around 13 billion years ago and how they fall together in a vast structure called the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is the largest known structure in existence, home to countless galaxy clusters and clusters of clusters. It is the framework of the universe, a scaffolding of gas filaments, stars, voids and sheets of dark matter that trace the entire large-scale organization of the cosmos.

In a paper published May 6 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), utilized a treasure trove of JWST data to reveal how the universe has evolved.

How to sculpt a universe from scratch

The new research shows how intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence the formation and death of stars — and, therefore, galaxies and galactic clusters — throughout vast swathes of cosmic time.

Yet in what may seem like a wistful twist, the peak era of star formation is many billions of years behind us. The new research offers additional evidence of how the universe's structural framework facilitated this transition.

"We show how the cosmic web helped shape galaxy growth before, during, and after that peak era," study co-author and UCR astronomer Hossein Hatamnia told Live Science via email. "At earlier times, dense regions appear to be sites of rapid galaxy growth, while at later times dense environments are associated with the shutdown of star formation."

Such revelations come courtesy of COSMOS-Web, the grandest JWST survey yet: a 255-hour program spanning a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full moons.

Compared with the previous COSMOS2020 survey, shared in 2021 and conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope and other facilities, the JWST-derived COSMOS-Web boasts better redshift precision and includes more galaxies — including fainter, lower-mass and more-distant objects. (Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance and time based on how light shifts to redder wavelengths as it crosses the universe.)

Compared with the JWST-derived image below, which shows a slice of the cosmos as it appeared 11.5 billion years ago, previous cosmic maps were sparser, more diffuse, and lacking in cosmic structures.

Additionally, the older COSMOS2020 survey tended to overestimate the depth in especially dense cosmic regions, where galaxies grow earlier and larger, and underestimate the depth of the least-dense spatial regions, the researchers said.

Revealing celestial birth and death

Yet JWST's cosmic map preserves the relative contrast across cosmic regions. It also shows that "massive galaxies in dense environments are more likely to be quiescent" — dying and quenched of their star-forming potential.

This may be because those galaxies are too massive, the team theorized. Once the dark matter halos that anchor galaxies grow to 1 trillion solar masses, they energize gas and prevent it from forming new stars. Additionally, active supermassive black holes quench star formation by energizing gas with their lethal, near-light-speed jets.

Such "mass-related" star-killing mechanisms dominated up to around 7 billion years ago — around half the age of the universe, the team found.

In the more recent universe, star formation is dominantly quenched by the environment around galaxies, which may strip them of material or prevent cold gas from accumulating and coalescing into stars.

Thanks to JWST's capabilities, the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe have been made clearer than ever, resolving blurry blobs into dim, ancient galaxies.

"The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," co-author Bahram Mobasher, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, concluded in a statement.

The catalog of 164,000 galaxies used to build the map of the cosmic web is publicly available.

This article was first published May 18, 2026.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is continuing to have a disruptive impact on ever more parts of humanity. But what does it mean in the long run? A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Austrian researcher Sergey Ivliev, extrapolates what the wide scale adoption of AI means for the future of humanity in space — and in particular what it means for the ultimate question of whether we're truly alone in the galaxy or not.

A framework for much of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence came from famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who simply asked "Where is everybody?" at a lunchtime discussion at Los Alamos in the 1950s. Though never officially published, Fermi's lunch partners from that day have passed down an oral history of that conversation that has cemented it into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), at least until Michael Hart formally laid out the argument and mathematics for the underlying question in a paper in 1975.

There are plenty of potential answers to the Fermi Paradox, many of which can be found floating around the internet — and some are likely more valid than others. But Ivliev, a Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics and founder of environmental project consultancies such as Peatland Ecosystems and Vlinder, suggests a new resolution: the Quiet Expansion filter.

The central argument of the paper is that there aren't thousands of alien mega-structures lighting up the night sky because once a civilization reaches the threshold of Autonomous AI-Cosmoindustry (AICI), "loud", resource-hungry empires motivated by prestige or romance become irrational. However, this does not mean expansion stops; instead, it shifts to a "quiet" mode driven by rational goals like survival diversification, knowledge preservation, and scientific observation.

The AICI threshold is reached when a civilization possesses a self-sustaining off-planet industrial and computational system capable of designing, manufacturing, repairing and launching space hardware through AI-mediated autonomy. We're already taking tentative steps in this direction with the advent of space-based data centers, but true AICI —where a civilization can extend its infrastructure beyond its home planet without continuous biological intervention — is leaps and bounds beyond our current capabilities.

In this vein, Ivliev is drawing on work done by astrophysicists Sergey Popov, who noted that a truly rational AI system would reject human-like motivations for space travel — such as romance, conquest, or prestige. Instead, AI would view space expansion as simple risk management.

To an AI, putting all your eggs in one basket — whether that basket is a single planet, solar system, or even galaxy, can lead to a single point of failure. Therefore, expansion is highly logical as a way of mitigating the risk posed by that single point of failure. At the point where we have reached AICI, the cost for sending a 10kg interstellar probe to another star at 1% of the speed of light is roughly 4.5x10^13 Joules — a tiny fraction of the overall energy budget of such a civilization.

One key aspect is that the 10 kg probe doesn't contain any actual people — it simply holds the "seeds" to restart life elsewhere in case a catastrophe happens back in the home system. It would contain a civilization's knowledge, and possibly some of its biological material, enabling a sufficiently advanced AI to rebuild the entire civilization from scratch. This is the "Quiet Expansion" where an AI sends low-mass and hard to detect "seed systems" instead of moving millions of biological entities around in massive interstellar space ships.

There are some additional constraints on this method of expansion, including selecting promising exoplanets discovered by remote sensing and deploying minimal local resources to maintain themselves until needed. Additionally, the AI would restrict self-replication of the probes in order to avoid any "grey goo" scenario with a probe attempting to take over entire swathes of the galaxy.

This has obvious implications for why we've never found "loud" technosignatures. In this scenario, a "null" result of being unable to find the thermal signature of a Kardashev-III scale civilization doesn't mean a galaxy is empty. It just means that the successful civilizations are residing in a "quiet" state in case its back-up plans are needed.

But there's another, more ominous implication from this framework. If interstellar backups are cheap to make, and we haven't found any in our own backyard, that means either we're one of the first civilizations to make it to that point or the transition from a planetary industrial society to a space-based one is a narrow path to tread. Admittedly the probes such civilizations would send out are probably hard to find even in our own solar systems, but if we're unable to, it means we're ending uncharted territory — and might just run into a filter that had silenced the rest of the galaxy. That's a sobering thought, but one to keep in mind as we start to advance our own AI capabilities.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

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NASA has marked the 250th birthday of the U.S. with a striking new collection of cosmic images from its Chandra X-ray Observatory, presenting four deep-space objects in red, white and blue.

The image set combines X-ray data from Chandra — which has been orbiting Earth since 1999 — with observations from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (JWST), as well as multiple ground-based observatories. Together, the images showcase some of the universe’s most dramatic environments, from the remains of an exploded star to a massive galaxy cluster shaped by dark matter — each rendered in patriotic colors.

Arguably the image most reminiscent of Fourth of July fireworks is that of Cassiopeia A, a famous supernova remnant about 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia (top left). Chandra’s X-ray data, shown in blue and purple, reveal the blast wave from a massive stellar explosion and trace elements such as iron, calcium and oxygen. Meanwhile, infrared data from JWST has been overlaid in red and white, highlighting the expanding shell of debris and cosmic dust. It’s all the result of a massive star that exploded about 340 years ago, according to NASA.

On the top-right is NGC 3603, a giant nebula 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way. Here it appears as a glowing field of highly active, newly formed stars. Chandra’s X-ray observations reveal the light coming from the nebula, while Hubble data in optical, infrared and ultraviolet light show its glittering array of stars, as well as dust and gas. NGC 3603 is the largest nebula seen in visible light in our galaxy.

NGC 4736, also known as M94, is something else entirely. Pictured bottom-right, it’s a spiral galaxy about 19 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. Its famed for the faint arms outside of its oval-shaped core region — known as a "starburst ring," where new stars are forming. It’s shown here with Chandra’s X-ray data layered with visible-light imagery captured by ground-based astrophotographers.

The final image features ZwCl 0024+1652 (bottom-left), a distant galaxy cluster where Hubble data has helped astronomers infer the presence of dark matter. About five billion light-years away in the constellation Pisces, Chandra’s X-rays reveal a vast reservoir of superheated gas in ZwCl 0024+1652 — shown in red — that contains more mass than the cluster’s galaxies combined.

The release of the new photos also includes novel sonifications for NGC 3603, NGC 4736 and ZwCl 0024+1652, transforming astronomical data into sound. The project allows audiences to experience space through both sight and hearing.

See more space photos of the week:

A hefty "super Earth" lurking in one of the closest star systems to our planet may be much better suited to supporting extraterrestrial life than scientists initially thought, a new study suggests. The alien world's relative proximity to Earth, and the nature of its home star, make it a prime candidate for follow-up observations, researchers say.

The exoplanet, dubbed GJ 3378b, was discovered in 2024 and orbits a red dwarf star around 25 light-years from our planet. The alien world circles its star every 21.5 days at a distance around 10 times closer than Earth orbits the sun, which would make it completely inhospitable in our solar system. But because the red dwarf emits around 90% less radiation than the sun does, GJ 3378b is slap bang in the middle of this star system’s "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the exoplanet's surface.

Researchers initially thought that GJ 3378b was around five times more massive than Earth. If the planet is rocky like ours, it would qualify as a "super Earth" — often considered the best candidates for sustaining extraterrestrial life. However, it was hard to tell if this world had a solid surface or was actually a mini gas giant. And even if it was rocky, its immense size would probably mean that its atmospheric pressure would be crushing, making it less likely to harbor life.

But in a new study, published June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers recalculated the exoplanet's size, using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument attached to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. This device measures subtle wobbles in the host star, caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets, and can be used to calculate the planet’s mass and trajectory.

This revealed that GJ 3378b is actually only 2.3 times more massive than Earth, which almost guarantees it is a rocky world and means it could have an atmosphere with a similar pressure to our own, raising the chances that extraterrestrial lifeforms could thrive there.

While researchers have found several other exoplanets that could harbor life, the fact that GJ 3378b is so close to us makes it particularly intriguing, as it will be easier to confirm whether it is truly habitable.

"This one’s exciting," study first author Paul Robertson, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. "25 light-years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, so in that respect it’s our next-door neighbor."

Before we get too carried away, there is still no evidence that GJ 3378b has an atmosphere or liquid water. Its proximity to its home star may mean that any atmosphere it once had was stripped away by stellar winds, similar to how solar radiation likely stripped Mars of its atmosphere and ancient oceans.

Therefore, more observations are needed. But if an atmosphere is detected, GJ 3378b would likely jump to near the front of the queue of exoplanets that researchers want to study further.

"If a planet in the habitable zone has a proper atmosphere, we can justify further research looking for biosignatures, liquid water or other signs of life," study co-author Gogod James, an undergraduate student at UC Irvine, said in the statement.

The fact that GJ 3378b orbits a red dwarf also makes it more appealing for future study because this is the most common star type in the Milky Way, so experts are keen to learn more about these stars' planetary systems and potential to nurture life.

"About 70% of stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, so they represent the standard," study co-author Michael Endl, an astronomer at the McDonald Observatory and the University of Texas at Austin, said in another statement. "It’s really important that we understand the planet population around these stars."

Fourth of July celebrations across the United States this weekend could be accompanied by light shows in the night skies, as a string of powerful solar eruptions appear set to strike Earth.

The sun has been especially hyperactive over the past few days — firing off 10 M-class solar flares over 24 hours that have been accompanied by multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are set to slam into Earth on July 3 and July 5.

CMEs are large, fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma and solar radiation that occasionally get flung into space with solar flares when kinks in the sun's magnetic field snap. If CMEs smash into Earth, they cause disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, called geomagnetic storms, that can trigger partial radio blackouts and produce vibrant aurora displays farther away from Earth's magnetic poles than usual.

"Machine-Gun Sun! More than 5 storms on their way to Earth and 3 of them offer good chances for aurora views," Tamitha Skov, a space weather physicist at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a July 2 post on the social platform X. "NOAA and NASA model predictions do not show all the storms yet (it's hard to keep up with the rapid-fire storm launches!) but the first should hit before noon July 3 UTC."

The CMEs are expected to give a glancing blow to our planet, creating conditions for a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. It's also possible that these storms will strengthen to become strong (G3), depending on how they interact with Earth's magnetic field.

Auroras resulting from G3-class geomagnetic storms are often visible in northern parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Maine, according to NOAA. Skywatchers farther south in Oregon, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire will also have a chance of catching the light show. In any case, skywatchers interested in seeing or photographing the auroras will need to get as far from artificial light sources as possible.

The weekend storms might not be the last activity we see from the sun in the coming days, as two gigantic sunspots currently pimpling its face are displaying "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic fields — the most tangled and unstable type. This means these sunspots harbor the potential to launch powerful X-class flares, according to spaceweather.com.

The last few years have seen a record number of powerful X-class flares explode from the sun's surface, hitting Earth with several major solar storms, including 2024's Mother's Day storm. This record comes partly from improvements to scientists' solar monitoring technologies, but also due to the sun reaching its 11-year peak in sunspot production, or solar maximum, in 2024.

Following this peak, the sun has now entered a period known as the "battle zone," a relatively understudied solar phase where instabilities across our star's newly flipped magnetic field ramp up the production of solar holes, gigantic, highly-tangled sunspots and subsequent geomagnetic storms.

The worst-case scenario for a solar storm is a superstorm like the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles set telegraph systems around the world on fire and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

The Carrington Event unleashed a roughly X45 magnitude solar flare that remains a record, yet it's likely far from the worst the sun can muster — with ancient tree rings harboring evidence of even more powerful blasts that occurred long before humans existed.

On a dark mountaintop in Chile, the world's largest digital camera has begun filming its masterpiece.

This Tuesday (June 30), scientists with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory announced that the facility's ambitious Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) officially began. Every night for the next 10 years, the observatory's car-size LSST Camera will capture a 3,200-megapixel image of the southern sky — then another, then another, slowly filling in a mosaic of the universe 30 seconds at a time.

"In a sense, we're taking a digital color motion picture of the universe," Tony Tyson, a professor of cosmology at the University of California Davis and LSST's chief scientist and former founding director of the Rubin Observatory, told Live Science.

Strafing across the sky in stop-motion, the survey is expected to spot between 7 million and 8 million changes among the stars each night — from flashing supernovas and streaking comets to colliding galaxies and dim, tumbling asteroids. Within minutes of each exposure, alerts to any peculiar changes will become publicly available for astronomers and space enthusiasts around the world to study.

"Rubin is an automated facility, so scientists don't come here to use it," Tyson said. "But tens of trillions of observations is enough data for everybody in the world."

Tyson is hoping the firehose of data will unmask theinvisible 95% of the universe that is composed of dark matter and dark energy.

While there are still some technical bugs to work out — and the looming threat of ultra-bright corporate satellites to contend with — Tyson and his colleagues are ready to roll out the survey, "gradually increasing our sky area and image quality" over the next few months, he added.

Live Science spoke with Tyson about the LSST and what it may find in the coming years.

Brandon Specktor: You're about to spend 10 years observing the southern sky with the largest digital camera ever. What will a typical night of the survey look like?

Tony Tyson: In a sense, we're making a digital color motion picture of the universe. We'll take thousands of 30-second exposures every night. Within two minutes of the shutter closing on an exposure, we will process all the data, [compare] it from the archival sky of that piece of the sky, and — if something explodes, or pops off, or moves in the sky in a way we don't understand — issue an alert. The alerts go to the world.

I made the decision early on to make the data available to everyone. The alerts will also go to eight data brokers, which specialize in things like cosmology, supernovae, etc., and the public can sign up to the feed from their favorite brokers.

BS: Which feed will you be watching most closely?

TT: My most interesting data broker is one which will come up with a classification of "unknown." I'm more interested in the unknown, unclassifiable things that go on in the universe. But there's a sort of a live stream of catalog information that's going to be available to people — and we're excited for writing up a lot of new discoveries.

My hope at this time is that we will discover something unexpected that will revolutionize astronomy. I think it's more than a hope, I think it's a guarantee.

BS: What kind of revolution would that be? Is there one big question you hope Rubin will answer?

TT: I'm a cosmologist, so my hope is that we'll get closer to understanding the physics of dark energy and dark matter.

But to be frank, I think we'll be remembered 100 years from now for something else in addition. And discovering something totally new in the time domain, something that blows our minds, that we did not expect — some kind of new object that's out there. There's examples of this in radio astronomy with the FRBs [fast radio bursts], for example. And I think that that's going to be how we will be remembered.

BS: The Rubin Observatory observes in optical light. Are there any strange optical phenomena you have your eye on?

TT: There's already a pretty strong hint, actually, that there is a population of very faint bursting objects that just pop off. The ones we know about are typically pretty bright — supernovae, which last for a long time, and gamma-ray bursts, which are bright but they don't last very long. But there's a big question mark in this unique area that we're going to explore, of faint things that are very short-lived. And there's evidence now from a team in Japan that there is a population of very faint things that explode just once. They don't repeat. And so I'm keeping my eye on that.

BS: What are the Rubin Observatory's main science goals?

TT: There's a lot of areas of science that we can address — and that was really the main selling point for us with the agencies. For one, we'll be looking at cosmology and the history of the expansion of the universe. Just by itself, we will have enough data to measure key parameters in cosmology to eliminate models of dark matter and dark energy, which is exciting.

Another area is looking at new kinds of stars in our galaxy, so we can look at the history of our galaxy and the history of star formation in our galaxy. At even lower redshift, an interesting area is looking at both comets and potentially Earth-threatening asteroids. Every night we detect about a thousand new asteroids.

And we will be able to uniquely look for those, if we can get rid of the interfering low-Earth-orbiting satellites, which really make that impossible. And so I've been unfortunately sidetracked into worrying a lot about that in the recent year.

BS: Are you talking about companies like Reflect Orbital, which essentially want to put giant mirrors in low Earth orbit? We've written about how satellites like that could totally compromise the LSST.

Yes. There's a proposed class of extremely ultra-bright satellites that are going to be launched that are incompatible with the LSST science, totally incompatible. The skies will no longer be dark for anybody, anywhere.

Reflect Orbital is one example. The other example is these orbiting AI [artificial intelligence] computational centers, which will be exceedingly bright. We've met with all these companies. They say that they feel our pain, but their board of directors or their investors say that they're going to go forward.

I've been working with SpaceX, though. They're really trying very hard to eliminate some of these effects, but nothing is perfect. It's going to be tough.

BS: So if these companies are moving forward, what are you going to do?

What I'm trying to do is work very closely with Congress and the American Astronomical Society and other bodies — the United Nations, the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] — to see what we can do.

I'm inherently an optimist. I think the Reflect Orbital is a failed business model, but they're going to try doing it anyway. So they'll put a lot of junk up there for a while.

BS: I truly wish you the best with that. But since you're an optimist, let's end on something positive. You've championed this observatory for more than 20 years — first as its founding director and now its chief scientist. How does it feel now that the LSST is finally operational?

It's quite gratifying, after all this time, to have something that actually works. It's a hugely complicated system, and nothing so complicated as that works perfectly all the time.

I was the original founding director, I am now the chief scientist, and it is my day job to worry about what's going wrong with this or that. And there's a laundry list of things that we're worried about. But it's working, and it's working quite well. And so that's quite gratifying.

Editor's Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. The article was updated with a new headline on July 6 at 1 p.m. ET.

Astronomers have spotted an ancient galaxy shining through the cosmic fog of the early universe, revealing a detailed view that was thought to be impossible.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, along with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers detected "ionizing" ultraviolet photons — energetic light capable of stripping electrons from hydrogen atoms — coming from the galaxy, called MXDFz4.4. It's the earliest such detection on record, arriving only around 250 million years after the end of a major cosmic transition called the Epoch of Reionization, the researchers explained in a study published June 23 in The Astrophysical Journal.

For hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the space between galaxies was filled with a fog of neutral hydrogen gas that blocked this kind of light. Over time, radiation from the first stars and galaxies ionized that gas, clearing the fog and letting light travel freely across the universe — a process astronomers are still working to fully understand.

"This was thought to be impossible," Ilias Goovaerts, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and first author of the new study, said to Live Science. "What’s really special about this galaxy is that it’s getting through so much of the intergalactic medium [the ionized plasma between galaxies]. It’s the furthest away so it has the most intergalactic medium to get through."

What makes MXDFz4.4 unusual is its combination of size and star-formation rate. The galaxy is roughly 100 times smaller by area than the Milky Way, yet it forms stars around 10 times faster, packing a large number of massive young stars into a compact space. According to Goovaerts, that crowding effect helps the galaxy punch clear channels through its surrounding gas, letting ionizing light escape both the galaxy and, eventually, the murky space between galaxies. The team estimates that somewhere between half and all of the galaxy's ionizing light is escaping.

The discovery, made in October, came about somewhat by chance. While preparing an unrelated funding proposal just days before a major deadline, Goovaerts examined an existing, deep Hubble image to check whether anyone had looked for this kind of signal there before. Within a couple of hours, he had a promising signal. "It was very, very quick from us having the idea to me going, okay, there’s something here and this is exciting," Goovaerts said. "We were excited from day one, but then it took months for it to mature and to extract all the properties about the galaxy."

The finding relied on an unusually rich set of observations: an extremely deep Hubble image taken from 40 hours of observations; JWST imaging across many wavelengths, used to characterize the galaxy's stars and star-formation history; and one of the deepest spectra ever taken of a single patch of sky, gathered over roughly six days of observing time with the VLT's Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument. That spectrum confirmed the galaxy's distance through its Lyman-alpha emission line — which serves as a "hydrogen fingerprint," or a glow given off by excited hydrogen gas, that astronomers can use to measure cosmic distance and time.

No other galaxy from this early period had previously shown detectable ionizing light, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind so far, study co-author Marc Rafelski, deputy mission head for the Hubble Space Telescope at STScI, noted in the statement. .

Researchers say bursts of vigorous star formation like the one seen in MXDFz4.4 may have played an important role in clearing the early universe's hydrogen fog and that more galaxies like it are likely still waiting to be found.

James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

A mysterious wavelength of light is missing from the dwarf planet Pluto and Saturn's supersized moon Titan, new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations show. The surprising discovery hints that these worlds harbor an unknown molecule that has not been seen in any other solar system world or exoplanet so far.

Every element or molecule in the universe absorbs unique wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Therefore, one of the main ways astronomers study distant worlds — both inside and outside the solar system — is by closely examining the light that reflects off them and searching for dark "absorption lines" that correspond to the wavelengths of known chemical compounds.

For example, molecular oxygen absorbs light at 230 nanometers, so if the electromagnetic spectrum of a faraway exoplanet has an absorption line at this frequency, researchers can be confident that its atmosphere contains oxygen, according to a 2021 study.

JWST has proved to be exceptionally good at capturing electromagnetic spectra and identifying specific chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres, around distant stars and within primitive galaxies. It has even identified a molecule on one alien world that could point to extraterrestrial life.

In a new study, uploaded June 11 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers analyzed JWST data from Pluto and Titan, focusing on very small wavelengths that have been relatively unexplored until now. This revealed a specific absorption line at around 5.11 micrometers in both worlds' spectra. (These findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet.)

The team pored through similar studies on other planetary spectra but "did not find any band referenced in these publications that corresponds to the location of the observed absorption in Titan and Pluto," the researchers wrote in the paper.

A molecular mystery

The discovery is even stranger because there are very few similarities between Pluto and Titan that could explain why they share a molecule not found anywhere else.

Titan is the largest of Saturn's many moons and is even larger than Mercury. It is also the only solar system world, other than Earth, that is known to have liquid rivers and oceans on its surface. Pluto, on the other hand, is a completely frozen world that's around half the size of Titan and roughly four times farther from the sun than Saturn's satellite is.

Both worlds do have similar atmospheres that are rich in methane and nitrogen. However, the researchers are confident that the molecule responsible for the 5.11-micrometer absorption line is located on both worlds' surfaces, not in their atmospheres.

Pluto's absorption line is around three times thicker than Titan's, meaning the mystery molecule is likely much more abundant on the dwarf planet. But on Titan, the molecule seems to be unevenly distributed, with a stronger absorption line on its trailing side — the hemisphere opposite to its forward momentum around Saturn — than on its leading side.

The researchers proposed that it could be benzene — a ring-shaped hydrocarbon — mixed with an unknown molecule, or some form of acetylene or ketene ice. However, much more work is needed to prove that any of these potential candidates are responsible for absorbing this specific wavelength, they wrote.

NASA's Dragonfly spacecraft, which is set to launch no earlier than 2028 and fly through Titan's atmosphere in 2034, could eventually shed more light on the situation. The helicopter-like craft's onboard spectrograph could identify the mystery molecule on Saturn's moon, which would also help reveal if it is viable on Pluto, the researchers suggested. But in the meantime, we'll have to wait to unravel this curious cosmic conundrum.

See how well you know our planetary neighborhood with our solar system quiz!

Editor's note: This article was updated at 06:53 EDT on July 3 with news that the mission has launched and reached orbit.

A rescue spacecraft set to speed toward a NASA telescope to prevent it from falling into Earth's atmosphere has launched into orbit.

The first-of-its-kind mission reached orbit after launching at 4:36 a.m. EDT (0836 GMT) Friday (July 3) from the Marshall Islands, carrying a robot-arm spacecraft named Link into the sky aboard a modified Lockheed Martin L-1011 airliner. In midair, a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket fired Link into orbit, where it will now rendezvous with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope that has been slowly falling toward Earth and headed for an untimely demise.

The launch follows two consecutive scrubs that caused delays to the mission on July 2 and 3, the first due to weather conditions and the second a software fault. Now that Link has reached orbit, mission engineers are working to acquire a signal from the craft to confirm that its solar panels have deployed and its power systems are working, NASA wrote in an update.

Link was developed by private company Katalyst Space for $30 million. Katalyst's goal is to meet up with the falling Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004, and pull it to a higher orbit, using Link's robotic arms and thrusters. Swift is still scientifically useful but is rapidly losing altitude due to the natural drag of Earth's atmosphere. Without help, Swift will likely meet its demise later this year, scientists say.

"This is a high-risk, high-reward mission," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said in a statement. "We have much to gain by attempting this boost, which is more affordable than trying to replace Swift's capabilities, and allows NASA to advance the nation's satellite servicing industry, for the benefit of all."

Swift cost $250 million in 2004, which is roughly $450 million today when accounting for inflation — a relatively cheap observatory compared with the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope. The Swift mission was originally designed to study gamma-ray bursts ‪—‬ cosmic explosions that occur when a massive, dying star collapses into a black hole. Swift has made many observations of these bursts in the past 20-plus years while also watching for other signs of stellar activity, like X-ray flares or supernova explosions, as well as transient objects, like comets and asteroids.

In sum, Swift helps us see how the universe is changing over short periods.

"Swift is NASA's multitool when it comes to studying the cosmos," S. Bradley Cenko, Swift's principal investigator and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. "It observes the sky using a wide range of light, and rapidly points at short-lived outbursts, alerting other facilities in space and on the ground to help coordinate follow-up observations."

High-risk rescue mission

The rescue mission comes with several challenges. Swift was not designed to be serviced when it launched, making the logistics of the mission something of a puzzle. Moreover, NASA only gave the contract to Katalyst in September, after high solar activity in recent years ballooned Earth's atmosphere and unexpectedly accelerated the spacecraft's fall due to increased drag. This meant the mission had to be ready for space in less than a year after the usual punishing requirements of design, build and testing.

Katalyst accepted the challenge because the company hopes to do this kind of work more often. "If we're going to build an enduring presence beyond Earth, we need the capability to manipulate our environment in space," Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said in the statement. "That means deploying robotic spacecraft that can reposition, repair, refuel, and refit satellites after launch."

Unless Swift altered its operations plan, however, the spacecraft would have been irrecoverable in July. So, to give Link as much time as possible to rescue Swift, the operations team at Penn State's Eberly College of Science made some changes.

For example, Swift's science was minimized so that the spacecraft looks at targets only if the telescope is put in a "streamlined position" to minimize drag, NASA explained. Power consumption has also been slashed to let Swift's solar panels fly "in a more aerodynamic orientation," which also reduces the drag that is making the spacecraft fall into the atmosphere.

These changes will allow Swift to stay above the minimum rescue altitude of 185 miles (298 kilometers) until autumn, agency models suggest. Katalyst will use that time to do the usual spacecraft "commissioning" on Link to make sure all systems are well. It will take Link about a month to rendezvous with Swift, according to NASA.

Following those steps, Link will approach Swift for evaluation, and Katalyst will use Link's robotic arms to latch onto the NASA observatory. Link will then use its propulsion system to gradually bring Swift's orbit to about 370 miles (595 km) ‪—‬ well above the pathway of the International Space Station, which orbits roughly 250 miles (400 km) over Earth.

NASA did not say how much longer Swift would be able to keep observing, should it reach its new altitude safely. However, figures from the European Space Agency suggest that spacecraft at an altitude of 310 miles (500 km) reenter the atmosphere within about 25 years. This would suggest that as long as Swift's instruments hold out, scientists would have many years of observations to look forward to.

June's full moon, the Strawberry Moon, will rise Monday (June 29) as seen from North America and Europe. As it does, it will be the lowest-hanging and one of the smallest full moons of the year.

The moon will officially become full at 7:56 p.m. EDT on June 29. It will appear nearly full and brightly illuminated Sunday (June 28) and Tuesday (June 30) as well, but the best time to catch it is when it appears on the southeastern horizon at dusk on Monday. At that time, it will be visible on the horizon and remain unusually low in the sky for viewers in the Northern Hemisphere.

Full moons that occur close to the summer solstice, which happened on June 21 this year, follow a lower path across the southern horizon. That's because the solstice places the sun at its northernmost point on the ecliptic (the path of the sun through the daytime sky), so the full moon near that time appears low in the southern sky. Because a full moon, by definition, sits opposite the sun in Earth's sky, it mirrors the sun's path from approximately six months earlier.

Observers in the Southern Hemisphere will experience the opposite effect, with the Strawberry Moon climbing high overhead and becoming the year's highest-rising full moon.

Anyone can see the full moon without specialist equipment. But a decent backyard telescope or pair of binocualrs can help you zoom in on lunar landmarks, like craters and mountains. If you've got a good camera, here's how to take the best photos of the moon.

A low-hanging 'micromoon'

June's full moon will be the second-smallest full moon of 2026, occurring when the moon is 252,442 miles (406,267 kilometers) from Earth — just 63 miles (102 km) closer than the year's most distant full moon, the Blue Moon of May 31, at 252,505 miles (406,369 km). According to Time and date.com, that makes it a micromoon, minimoon or apogee moon.

The Strawberry Moon's name comes from Native American traditions associated with the seasonal harvesting of strawberries and other ripening fruits. According to Almanac, several tribes used other names linked to summer harvests, including the Berries Ripen Moon, Blooming Moon, Green Corn Moon, Hoer Moon, Birth Moon, Egg Laying Moon and Hatching Moon. European names include the Honey Moon and Mead Moon.

As the Strawberry Moon rises into summer skies, look out for a yellowish, bright star to its upper right. That's Antares, a red supergiant star and the brightest in the constellation Scorpius.

Following the Strawberry Moon, the next full moon — known as the Buck Moon — will rise on July 29, setting the stage for both a total solar eclipse and a partial lunar eclipse in August.

How much do you know about the moon? Test your lunar smarts with our moon quiz!

Earth may survive the fiery death of the sun, even as our star engulfs the innermost planets, a new study using state-of-the-art models suggests.

The findings offer a potential alternative fate for our planet, which was thought to face certain death as the sun engulfs it in a thermonuclear inferno billions of years from now. As a yellow dwarf star, the sun is expected to have a relatively calm, 10 billion-year life. But in about 5 billion years, it will run out of hydrogen to fuse in its core and begin fusing hydrogen in its shell, causing it to expand enormously into a red giant star and then an even larger "AGB star," before it ultimately dies as a white dwarf.

Now, in a Letter to the Editor published June 19 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers used stellar evolution models and observed a nearby dying star to reassess Earth's ultimate, potentially fiery fate.

Solar tug of war

When the sun enters its later life stages, Earth will be at the mercy of two competing forces — a fate shared by countless worlds throughout the unimaginably immense span of cosmic time.

As the sun expands to potentially hundreds of times its current size, the increased tidal forces will pull Earth toward our rapidly ballooning, sputtering star. Yet the surging sun will also lose its puffed-up outer layers into space through stellar wind. As it sheds much of its mass and becomes lighter, its gravitational grip will weaken, allowing our planet to escape outward into the depths of the solar system, the models show.

"The fate of Earth depends on a delicate balance between these two effects," Mats Esseldeurs, a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven's Institute of Astronomy in Belgium and first author of the study, said in a statement. "If tidal interactions dominate, Earth is engulfed. If mass loss dominates, Earth escapes to a wider orbit."

Previous research only muddies the issue. Studies have made different assumptions about solar mass loss, tidal forces and planetary interactions that may occur as the inner solar system evolves. As a result, it's uncertain if Earth will survive both of the sun's giant phases before our star shrivels into a tiny-but-dense stellar corpse called a white dwarf.

In a glimmer of hope, astronomers have discovered intact worlds around white dwarfs. On the other hand, some white dwarf systems are littered with the rocky remnants of their destroyed planetary children. So the researchers observed the formerly sunlike, dying giant star L2 Puppis, located 200 light-years away in the "poop deck" constellation Puppis, to glimpse our solar future. L2 Puppis may be losing up to one-millionth of a solar mass per year, according to previous estimates, expelling a dusty disk that's thought to harbor a planet 12 to 16 times the mass of Jupiter.

Additionally, the researchers performed state-of-the-art gravitational calculations "based on the internal structure and dynamics of evolved stars," modeling the orbital evolution of the inner solar system and the sun's lifespan from its infancy to its final phase as a "burned out" white dwarf.

So long, Mercury and Venus

Based on observations of L2 Puppis' mass loss, combined with the updated stellar evolution models, the researchers projected that Earth will survive as it shifts to just outside the expanding sun's radius.

"The largest uncertainty no longer comes from the tidal calculations, but from how much mass the future sun will lose," Esseldeurs said in the statement. "Observations of sun-like giant stars currently point towards Earth's survival, but we need better observations before we can be certain."

But even if Earth survives, our solar system siblings will not be spared; the simulations suggest Mercury and Venus will be engulfed by the hellish blaze of our dying star.

Additional stellar observations and improved models will help elucidate our planet's fate. For example, the European Space Agency's PLATO mission, a space telescope that aims to search for Earth-like planets around sunlike stars, will launch next year. It will likely detect planets around aging stars, thus providing a more accurate account of this potentially doomed population.

See how much you know about the sun with our sun quiz!

The universe is full of structures that remind us of Earthly objects, such as the Cat's Eye Nebula, a "cosmic hamburger," and the famous Crab Nebula. Now, one more has been added to the list: a radio galaxy shaped like a bow and arrow.

The newly discovered galaxy, dubbed the RAD-Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy (RAD-BAARG), sits roughly 2 billion light-years from Earth.

Radio galaxies are powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes that launch powerful jets of charged particles in opposite directions. As these high-speed jets crash into the surrounding medium, they form huge lobes of magnetized plasma that can stretch for thousands to millions of light-years. Inside both the jets and the lobes, electrons spiral around magnetic-field lines and emit radiation that is detected at radio wavelengths.

As a result, most radio galaxies look roughly symmetrical, like two matching balloon-like radio lobes inflated on each side of the central galaxy. RAD-BAARG, with its lopsided structure, appears to be an oddball.

RAD-BAARG was first spotted by citizen scientist Pranim Limbo while inspecting ultrasensitive radio images from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey. Limbo made the discovery through India's RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory, a citizen-science research initiative in India, in collaboration with an international team of researchers.

The new image shows RAD-BAARG in stunning detail, with red tracing the radio emission captured by the LOFAR telescope, combined with an optical image from the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey.

Researchers think the strange shape may have been influenced by the galaxy's environment. RAD-BAARG appears to be falling toward a nearby cluster of galaxies, plunging through the intracluster medium, ‪the hot, thin gas that fills the space between galaxies, the researchers explained in a paper published June 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"The structure of this source is unlike that of any radio galaxy I have seen in the last 25 years," Ananda Hota, principal investigator of the RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory and first author of the paper, said in a statement.

When a galaxy moves through this gas faster than the speed of sound within it, it creates a shock front, similar to how a fighter jet generates a sonic boom. This compressed wall of gas piles up ahead of the galaxy as the gas falls inward.

One of RAD-BAARG's jets appears to be running straight into this shock front, causing it to bend and compress into the shape of a drawn bow. The enormous bow-like structure extends nearly 1.8 million light-years across. On the opposite side, the other jet doesn't face the same resistance. Instead, it twists into a distorted S shape before fading into a faint tail forming the "arrow."

According to the study, RAD-BAARG has a length of about 2.3 million light-years. That places it in the category of "Giant Radio Galaxies," which are some of the largest standalone single structures in the universe.

Astronomers have long predicted that infalling galaxies should generate bow shocks as they plunge through the hot gas of a galaxy cluster. But actually catching one has been extremely difficult, since the surrounding gas is too diffuse and faint to detect easily. Sitting in a complex, chaotic environment, RAD-BAARG is rare not only for its unique shape but also for providing a direct, detailed view of this elusive phenomenon. In other words: That’s a bullseye.

See more space photos of the week:

Researchers have found a new puzzle piece in Mars' geological history that hints that the Red Planet may have once harbored life. New data from NASA's Perseverance rover indicates that mudstones in Jezero crater contain a complex form of carbon, the chemical foundation of all known life. It's the highest concentration of organic molecules found on Mars to date.

Although the mere presence of carbon isn't proof that life once evolved on Mars, the location of the discovery adds to the excitement. This "macromolecular carbon" was discovered near other potential signs of life, or biosignatures, touted by NASA with great fanfare in 2025. This geological context adds credence to the case that microbes may have once colonized the Martian surface. The results were published Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Science Advances.

Perseverance landed in Jezero crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Since then, the site has emerged as one of the most geologically interesting places on Mars. "Jezero crater was once fed water and sediment from rivers, and, billions of years ago, it hosted a lake," Ashley Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.

It may have hosted more than that. A study published last year in the journal Nature found that some of the stones in an area of Jezero known as the Bright Angel outcropping contain clays and other minerals that are known to preserve fossils on Earth. One sample, in particular, raised eyebrows: a piece of a rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls, whose patterns resemble those left by terrestrial microbes. Although these patterns could have been created by nonliving sources, NASA officials proclaimed it one of the clearest signs yet of past microbial life on the Red Planet.

The backbone of life

The new research builds on this work by confirming the widespread presence of complex carbon molecules in and around the Bright Angel outcrop. In the study, the researchers used the rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument to map the carbon distribution in these rocks and sediments. They compared them with carbon data from NASA's Curiosity rover taken at Gale crater some 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, a distribution that suggests water may have been widespread on Mars in the deep past.

Murphy's team also determined that the carbon was not too weathered, indicating that it may have been exposed recently. However, it’s impossible to say whether the newly discovered carbon is related to life or not.

The work is an important step in unraveling Mars' geological history, including the planet's potential habitability and how water shaped its surface. But Murphy cautioned that it is far from a definitive answer.

"Macromolecular carbon on Mars does not prove the existence of life there," Murphy said. The molecules could indicate the presence of fossilized microbes, but they also could have formed through nonbiological means, like meteor strikes or running water.

Until scientists get their hands on a sample directly, it will be hard to tell exactly how this complex carbon arose and whether it represents a true biosignature. But that research may now be decades away — if it happens at all.

The Cheyava Falls sample was originally supposed to be brought to Earth in the 2030s as part of NASA and the European Space Agency's joint Mars Sample Return program. However, in its 2026 budget proposal, the Trump administration deemed the mission "financially unsustainable" and proposed slashing the project. Currently, the project is considered dead.

It may be China that gets the first shot at bringing Martian samples back to Earth for analysis. The country's Tianwen-3 sample-return mission will aim to collect several samples — albeit in a more accessible but less-promising site than where Perseverance has looked for biosignatures — in a mission due to launch no sooner than 2028.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

China's Einstein Probe has spotted a cosmic explosion from a mysterious source that's unlike anything seen before.

The burst was made up of two X-ray flares, about 200 seconds apart, that likely came from the same object. Their behavior is most consistent with powerful cosmic explosions known as gamma ray bursts — except no gamma rays were detected, scientists reported June 13 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Launched into low Earth orbit in 2024 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the European Space Agency, the Einstein Probe is designed to scan the sky for high-energy X-ray emission events. Those events are usually short-lived, but scientists can use the data to perform detailed follow-up studies with other instruments. The Einstein Probe orbits Earth every 96 minutes and can scan almost the entire night sky about every five hours.

On March 5, 2024, the probe captured one such event, called an X-ray transient, from a celestial object scientists named EP240305a. The first flare lasted about two minutes. Roughly 200 seconds later, the probe detected a second flare lasting just over 4 minutes.

In the new study, researchers directed several ground- and space-based telescopes toward the area to collect data at X-ray, infrared, optical and radio wavelengths over the weeks that followed. They found that, following the initial burst, the X-rays faded after a few days, while radio emissions slowly petered out over several weeks.

To predict what kind of object could emit these bursts, the team compared their data to the expected emissions from several types of X-ray transients. None matched the emission patterns from EP240305a.

For example, tidal disruption events, which occur when a supermassive black hole rips apart a passing star, emit light for months or years, while radio emissions from stellar flares fade after a few hours. And other types of X-ray bursts that occur on similar timescales to EP240305a emit no radio signals at all.

The most similar type of event that matches EP240305a’s behavior is a gamma ray burst (GRB), the team found. Gamma ray bursts can occur when massive stars die or collide. But without detecting any gamma rays directly, the team can’t yet say that this was the signal's origin.

"In the case of EP240305a, the current data do not allow us to firmly establish a GRB origin, and we therefore conservatively classify it as a gamma-ray-dark GRB-like transient or more broadly an extragalactic fast X-ray transient," the researchers wrote in the study.

If the signal was due to a gamma ray burst, the jet of gamma rays may have been pointed away from Earth, or it may have been surrounded by material that hid or reduced the gamma radiation emitted.

Collecting data on this and other unusual X-ray transients could help scientists figure out what causes them, the team wrote in the study.

A deep-space telescope on a grand mission to make the largest-ever 3D map of the universe just peered into the star-filled heart of the Milky Way. In the new observations, shared Wednesday (June 24), the Euclid space telescope imaged the center of the Milky Way in extraordinary detail, showing off more than 60 million stars crowded in the galaxy's center.

The shiny new image from the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft will help astronomers confirm newfound exoplanets and use changes in starlight to measure those planets' masses as they orbit their parent stars, according to ESA scientists.

The image was taken in 26 cumulative hours in March 2025, across nine pointings of the telescope's visible-light camera toward the galaxy's center, also called the galactic bulge. Each viewpoint captured a slice of sky larger than the full moon. In a statement, ESA praised the performance of Euclid under challenging conditions.

"Designed to observe billions of faraway galaxies, the space telescope's visible-light camera is sensitive enough to tell apart individual stars in our super-crowded galactic bulge, without being blinded," agency officials wrote.

The mosaic image will help NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope with its upcoming planet-hunting mission, after that observatory launches aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than Aug. 30.

One way the Roman telescope will search for new worlds is through microlensing, the same technique that can be used to examine exoplanets in the new Euclid image. Microlensing happens when one star passes in front of another from the perspective of an observer. The gravity of the closer-up star briefly bends and magnifies the light of the star behind it, allowing possibly unseen planets to pop up near that star.

"During the last 20 years, almost 300 exoplanets have been discovered using this technique, all with ground-based telescopes and all towards the centre of our galaxy," Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, who initiated the Euclid galactic bulge survey and co-led the Euclid Consortium's exoplanet working group, said in the ESA statement.

"This image from Euclid includes 51 known planetary systems ‪—‬ and it will assist in studying many more that will be found," added Beaulieu, who holds positions at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics and the University of Tasmania in Australia.

A cosmic time capsule

Euclid's observing window was too short to find a microlensing event, which requires more than 20 days of examining one star to watch for a planet's orbit and associated changes in the star's light. But Euclid's work did allow astronomers to measure already-known planets. And once newer planets are confirmed by other telescopes, the image will let astronomers look back to confirm those newfound worlds' masses.

"In 24 hours, Euclid has already captured the stars involved in all the future microlensing events that the Roman space telescope will detect, but before the stars and planets involved have aligned," Natalia Rektsini, a postdoctoral fellow at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics who led the release of Euclid's galactic bulge survey data, explained in the statement.

"Anyone who detects a microlensing event in the same region, for example with Roman, will be able from now on to use Euclid data as a time reference in the past and see how the stars looked before they overlapped," she added. "Since Euclid can clearly separate individual stars, one can then measure how fast they move over time, and use that information to confirm the existence of a planet and determine its mass. This would not be possible with data from one point in time."

How well do you know our home galaxy? Find out with our Milky Way quiz!

Humans have been searching the stars for alien radio signals for decades — and so far, E.T. has not phoned home. But that doesn’t mean intelligent life isn’t out there, a new study hints. Rather, something else could be interfering: according to the research, space weather surrounding alien planets could be preventing us from detecting technological signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

The findings, published March 5 in The Astrophysical Journal, offer a potential answer to the Fermi paradox: Given the size of the universe, there are many potentially habitable planets that could support life, and yet we have not detected technosignatures from any of them ‪— so, "Where is everyone?" physicist Enrico Fermi famously posited in 1950.

In the new study, researchers found that space weather caused by a planet's star could broaden hypothetical technosignals, dissipating their power over a larger range of frequencies and making them more difficult to detect.

"If a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it's there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in technosignature searches," Vishal Gajjar, an astronomer at the SETI Institute and first author of the paper, said in a statement.

One way astronomers search for alien life is by looking for very narrowband signals, which are sharp spikes in the power of a radio emission. This spike usually only covers a few hertz.

"These don't occur naturally," Evan Keane, an astronomer at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the research, told Live Science. "So, if you see something very narrowband, you know that it is from something of interest." Astronomers would, for example, be able to easily detect some narrowband technosignatures on Mars, coming from the Mars rovers. But they have not observed any such signals from a clearly non-human origin.

Distorting signals

The new research argues that astronomers may have been looking for the wrong signal shape. In the new study, the researchers found that alien signals could be distorted by stellar space weather surrounding their home stars, which could explain why they have not been detected.

Space weather refers to changes in the space environment caused by charged particles, radiation and giant lumps of plasma called coronal mass ejections emitted by the sun. Other stars also generate space weather in their vicinity.

Gajjar and SETI colleague Grayce Brown investigated how space weather has historically impacted communications between Earth and spacecraft such as Mariner IV, which flew by Mars in the 1960s, and the Viking probes, which launched in 1977 for a voyage through the solar system and beyond. They created one of the largest collections of signal broadening examples and used that information to determine how other sunlike stars would affect the environment around their exoplanets. From this, the team calculated what would happen to a hypothetical alien narrowband signal that originated on one of them.

Then, they turned their attention to M dwarf stars, the most common type in the Milky Way. These stars account for three out of four stars in our galaxy, and some have been around since the early universe. That gives them a lot of time to have developed technologically advanced life, according to the paper.

There are no actual measurements of space weather around these stars, so Gajjar and Brown modeled what might happen to a narrowband technosignal that emerged from exoplanets and had to travel through interplanetary plasma. They found that hypothetical narrowband signals from these exoplanets were more likely to be smeared by space weather, making them even harder to detect.

In the paper, the authors propose a framework to estimate how much broadening would happen to a signal, given its frequency and the type of star its exoplanet was orbiting.

This new framework doesn’t totally answer Fermi’s infamous question, but it does give us a potential reason for the silence. The Fermi paradox "is not solely evidence for the absence of transmitters, but also a reflection of our detection limitations arising from a mismatch between the assumed signal morphology" and shape, the researchers wrote.

A step forward for SETI

Michael Garrett, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, welcomed the research.

"It is a solid contribution that SETI researchers and signal-processing teams should pay attention to," he told Live Science. "One of the strengths of the paper is that it's grounded in real measurements too, drawing on decades of spacecraft observations."

However, he emphasized that the paper focused on narrowband radio signals, which was only one way of potentially detecting an alien civilization. By contrast, Garrett's work explores the possible combined radio leakage from a technological civilization across a large range of frequencies.

Andrew Siemion, director of Breakthrough Listen Oxford Hub in the U.K. who was not involved in the research but collaborates with the SETI Institute, said this is the first paper to explore the space around exoplanets and its impact on detectability.

"The work offers a very concrete mechanism through which a candidate signal might ultimately be validated as having a likely origin with a distant planetary system," he told Live Science.

The authors recommended that future searches, especially with sensitive next-generation telescopes such as SKA-Low, take note of signal broadening when searching for civilizations beyond Earth.

Are you a UFO fanatic? Find out with our extraterrestrials quiz!

When galaxies collide, it's less like a train wreck and more like a marriage: Two separate entities merge into a single massive celestial structure. But relationships are hard, whether you're a human or a galaxy — and this process may also "kill" the merging galaxies by unleashing star-quenching winds.

This mechanism may help to explain an enigma in the early universe. A glut of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations have shown that galaxies grew surprisingly massive within 1 billion years of the Big Bang. Just as unexpectedly, many of these galaxies appear to have already stopped producing stars and grown quiescent (or dead) only about a billion years later.

Galactic winds have previously been considered as galaxy-killing culprits, but astronomers lacked the direct evidence to confirm that this process can meaningfully suppress star formation at such an early stage of cosmic history. Now, in a paper published June 10 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an international team of astronomers has described how star-driven winds can quench galaxies, creating the kaleidoscope of quiescent structures observed by JWST.

Gas leak near the dawn of time

The researchers used JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert to observe a system of galaxies called CRISTAL-02 as it appeared only 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

With a stellar mass around 10 billion times greater than the sun's, CRISTAL-02 is a galactic merger that represents the latter stages of a multigalaxy collision. It also exhibits an immense plume of gas, almost as long as the galaxy system itself, that is escaping into space at hundreds of miles per second.

This immense outflow, comprising 1.5 billion solar masses, appears to be driven by the intense winds generated through a rapid burst of star formation, as well as star death, the study authors said. Both processes occur as galaxies collide, shocking large gas clouds into birthing new stars, including extremely massive ones that die within a few million years in violent supernova explosions.

The intense radioactive winds released from these young stars and their dying elder siblings can then suppress stellar formation, by energizing and dispersing pockets of cool molecular gas before it can gravitationally collapse to birth baby stars.

"The galaxy has a powerful wind that is ejecting material twice as fast as the galaxy forms stars," first author Rebecca Davies, an astrophysicist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, said in a statement.

The CRISTAL-02 galaxy system may be forming around 260 new solar-mass stars per year — a rate three times higher than galaxies with similar masses and ages. Yet it's also losing more than 500 solar masses per year, — 20 times faster than typical massive galaxies, the researchers found.

"We don’t know much about how the first galaxies stopped forming stars. This work directly shows that process in action," co-author Andreas Faisst, an observational astronomer at Caltech, told Live Science via email.

"If the outflow keeps going, the galaxy will run out of gas to form stars in less than 100 million years from now — a blink of an eye in astrophysical terms."

A widespread cosmic phenomenon

This research offers a blueprint for galactic senescence, or gradual deterioration. "Almost half of early massive galaxies are interacting with other nearby galaxies, suggesting this isn't a quirk but a widespread cosmic phenomenon," Davies added.

But previous simulations have suggested that outflows from active black holes, rather than stars, may be primarily responsible for creating quiescent galaxies. Star-burst-driven outflows cease once star formation stops, whereas black-hole-driven outflows can persist for hundreds of millions of years afterward.

Therefore, the researchers cannot rule out that the CRISTAL-02 outflow was generated by a powerful black hole that was inactive at the time of the observation.

Additionally, the researchers compared the outflow from CRISTAL-02 with a sample of 99 other similar outflows spanning 12 billion years to determine whether this feedback process evolves over time.

They discovered that outflow efficiency has remained roughly constant across cosmic history, even as the internal properties of galaxies have changed while the universe has aged and expanded. Additionally, constraining the early-universe feedback mechanisms that dictate galactic evolution can help astronomers improve cosmological simulations that aim to explain why the cosmos looks and behaves the way it does today.

"If many early galaxies collide and experience rapid growth, then it may not be surprising that we see so many dead galaxies in the early universe," Davies explained. "CRISTAL-02 offers a natural solution to the mystery of why these massive galaxies live fast and die young."

These processes are still at work today, governing local star-dense sectors in our galaxy. They may also dictate its far off future, as the Milky Way could collide with our biggest neighbor, Andromeda, in around 4.5 billion years. When this merger occurs, it "will likely trigger a starburst associated with strong stellar winds — maybe similar to what we see in CRISTAL-02," Faisst said via email.

"The Milky Way and Andromeda system will subsequently likely become a large quiescent elliptical galaxy."

Explosive beams of energy crisscross through rainbow-colored space in a scene that evokes a cinematic sci-fi battle. In reality, it’s a scene of birth; in this single image, astronomers have captured every stage of star formation playing out at once.

This new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image reveals OMC-2, a beautiful and dense star-forming region within the Orion Molecular Cloud. It places viewers inside a turbulent cosmic nursery, where gas, dust and newborn stars are all in motion.

Just south of the famous Orion Nebula, one of the best-known stellar nurseries in the night sky (located within the three-star asterism known as the Sword of Orion), OMC-2 is a cloud of cold gas and dust where protostars — very young stars still gathering mass — are forming.

The scene is filled with layered clouds of gas and dust glowing in blue, green and yellow. Thick clumps of cold dust appear dark brown to black, blocking light completely and creating dark pockets across the field. Inside some of these clumps, stars may still be forming, hidden from view inside thick cosmic cocoons.

Scattered throughout the clouds are fully-formed stars of different colors and sizes, from small orange points to larger white and blue stars shining through the haze.

But perhaps the most striking feature of the image is the network of pale, glowing streams and wave-like structures cutting through the cloud. These are created by protostar jets as they collide with the surrounding material, carving out bright ridges and shock fronts. The result is an image that looks sculpted, with curved streams of whitish gas marking how young stars shape their environment.

Each jet, ridge and shadow provides clues about the movement of material through the region and helps astronomers trace how stars form and how their energy changes the surrounding cloud. Its colors and textures reveal a complex environment where gravity pulls material together, young stars ignite and energetic outflows reshape the cloud that gave rise to them.

It’s a vivid portrait of cosmic creation made possible by JWST’s infrared vision, which allows it to peer through thick layers of gas and dust that block visible light. By detecting that infrared light, astronomers can see structures and embryonic stars that would otherwise remain secret.

OMC-2 is one of four parts of the Orion Molecular Cloud, a massive filament behind the Orion Nebula. OMC-1 sits immediately behind the nebula, OMC-2 and OMC-3 are to its north and OMC-4 lies to its south.

See more Space Photos of the Week

Today (June 17), for the first time in 11 years, people across North America will be able to look up in the daytime sky and see Venus temporarily vanish behind the faint crescent moon.

The rare skywatching spectacle can be viewed with the naked eye and recorded without any special equipment, as long as the weather cooperates — however, using a good pair of binoculars or a backyard telescope will make it much easier to see the faint light of Venus in the daytime sky. No matter how you go about skywatching, you must take great care not to stare directly at the sun while doing so.

During the event, known as a lunar occultation, the moon will briefly pass between Earth and Venus, which has been shining especially bright over the past few weeks while hanging out alongside Jupiter in the evening sky. As a result of the occultation, the hellish planet will appear to blink out of existence, before reappearing around an hour later, allowing for two separate skywatching experiences. The last time this happened was on Dec. 7, 2015, and you will not be able to see it again until 2029.

How to see Venus disappear

The occultation will be visible from the 48 contiguous U.S. states, as well as from large parts of Canada and some countries in the northern half of South America — assuming there are clear skies at the time of the event. (The latest forecast suggests that weather conditions will be most favorable along the West Coast.)

As with most skywatching events, such as solar eclipses, not everyone will see it at the same time. For example, people in San Francisco will observe Venus vanish at around 11:34 a.m. PDT, while those in Miami will watch the planet disappear at about 4:06 p.m. EDT (around 92 minutes later when disregarding time zones).

The duration of the occultation will also vary with location. For example, Venus will reappear after around 58 minutes for viewers in San Antonio, but people in Philadelphia will have to wait roughly 80 minutes to see the planet again.

You can see the exact timings for more than 700 locations across the U.S. in a list compiled by the International Occultation Timing Association.

The best place to watch both the disappearance and reappearance of Venus will be from within the shadow of a large tree or building. Blocking out the sun will not only make it easier to see both the moon and Venus but also reduce the risk of sustaining eye damage by looking directly at the sun.

If you are struggling to see the occultation, try using your phone camera to zoom in on the waxing crescent to better locate and record Venus, Spaceweather.com recommends.

What the June 17 lunar occultation will look like

During the event, around 11% of the moon will be faintly visible in the daytime sky, according to Sky & Telescope. Around three-quarters of Venus will be visible — although it will look like a single spot to the naked eye — so the planet will shine much brighter than the moon. The pair will be collectively located around 38 degrees from the sun in the sky.

Venus will vanish behind the side of the moon opposite the illuminated crescent and will take around 30 seconds to disappear completely. It will then reappear above the crescent, similar to the iconic "Earthrise" photos taken by lunar astronauts, such as the Artemis II crew. (The exact spot where Venus disappears and reappears will depend on where you are in the world.)

If you miss this occultation or fancy another skywatching spectacle, be sure to head back outside later the same day, around an hour after sunset, when Venus, Jupiter and Mercury will shine alongside the crescent moon as it passes in front of the Beehive Cluster (also called M44).

A rare lunar meteorite that fell to Earth holds evidence of a previously unknown "impact event" that rocked the moon roughly 3.5 billion years ago, researchers say. Studying this ancient impact provides fresh insight into how the solar system was behaving in those early days — about the same time life on Earth began to appear.

In the new study, scientists looked at a lunar meteorite found in northwest Africa. The meteorite, called NWA 12593, contains information about three separate lunar impacts, but the researchers focused on the earliest of these crashes, the team reported in the journal Geology.

"On Earth, the first fossil evidence of life shows up around 3.5 billion years ago, meaning that life is emerging and evolving before then, " Carolyn Crow, first author of the study and a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. "The question that we often have, even going back further, is what was the impact record when life was emerging? It is important for understanding how life is taking hold… The cadence of these catastrophic events is an important part of the equation."

In the study, the scientists used radiometric dating on the meteorite. This method charts the decay rate of radioactive materials in the sample, allowing the team to estimate the first impact at 3.5 billion years ago — roughly 1 billion years after the solar system formed.

The meteorite contained cubic zirconia, best known on Earth for its resemblance to diamond. But in the ancient meteorite, this material tells a different story: that the moon's surface became molten through the impact, because cubic zirconia forms only at extremely high temperatures. While the material dissipates at the ultracold temperatures found on the moon, the scientists found its presence through traces of its recrystallized products.

The impact occurred at roughly the same time as other huge impacts, both on Earth and on a very large asteroid called Vesta, that have been identified in independent research. To find three impacts on three different worlds so long ago is rare, because erosion and other processes tend to erase the evidence.

"It's not very common, which is why we're very excited about it," Crow said. "It's pretty rare to have all three records line up like this." The team expects that making deeper comparisons between the impacts will show more about how the solar system was changing 3.5 billion years ago, as the number of asteroids in the neighborhood diminished along with impacts.

Scientists often say the early solar system was a collection of gas and dust that gradually grew into smaller, comet-like and asteroid-like bodies. Over time, a subset of those bodies got even larger (through collisions and accretions) to become today's planets and moons.

The other two impacts on the meteorite were a breccia (rock melt) formed after the big collision 3.5 billion years ago and a third collision that sent the meteorite blasting off the moon and into an Earthbound trajectory.

How much do you know about the moon? Test your lunar smarts with our moon quiz!

A pair of sibling dwarf galaxies is having a gravitationally charged squabble in our cosmic backyard, and it will likely end with one ripping the other in half, a new study suggests. The surprising revelation reminds us that you never know your neighbors quite as well as you think, even in space.

The mini galaxies, known as the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), are satellites of the Milky Way that closely circle our galaxy like a moon orbits a planet. The LMC is the closest of the two, at around 160,000 light-years from Earth, while the SMC sits slightly farther away, behind the LMC, around 200,000 light-years from us. Both are clearly visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

The SMC and LMC are fairly hefty compared with other dwarf galaxies. The former has around 3 billion stars, while the latter boasts up to 10 times as many. (For context, the Milky Way has around 200 billion stars.) The pair of dwarves are also connected by a giant tail of gas and dust, known as the Magellanic Stream, left over from a three-way tug-of-war with the Milky Way.

In the new study, published May 21 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers looked more closely at some of the stars within these cosmic clouds and uncovered a "galaxy-wide tidal disruption" in the SMC that could only be explained by the gravitational pull of its larger sibling.

Using more than a decade's worth of observations from the VISTA Survey of the Magellanic Clouds (VMC), the team found that almost all of the stars within the SMC — even those nearest to its center — were moving outward at an average speed of around 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h). Their movements are oriented along the galaxy's southeast-northwest axis, meaning it must be the LMC, and not the Milky Way, causing this disruption.

At this speed, the stars will have moved by "several thousand light-years" over the next few hundred million years, which will be "enough to significantly distort the galaxy's structure," the researchers said in a statement. There is, therefore, a decent chance that the SMC will be completely cleaved in half by the time both the SMC and the LMC eventually collide with the Milky Way in around 2.4 billion years.

This is not the first research to suggest that the LMC is tearing the SMC apart. Last year, a similar study revealed that some of the smaller cloud's stars were moving in opposite directions from each other. However, the new paper is the first to prove this is happening across the entire dwarf galaxy.

A surprising shape

Due to the SMC's obscured position behind the LMC, scientists have struggled to map the small satellite galaxy in great detail. It is also thought to have an irregular shape, which adds to the confusion. But until now, researchers have been fairly confident that the smaller dwarf galaxy spins in place, much like a spiral galaxy such as the Milky Way.

However, the new findings "challenge [the] long-standing assumptions that the SMC behaves like a rotating disk," study first author Sreepriya Vijayasree, a doctoral candidate at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, said in the statement. "The internal motions of stars in the SMC are dominated not by orderly rotation, but by gravitational disturbances caused by repeated encounters with the LMC over billions of years."

The extent to which scientists may have been wrong about the SMC's structure raises questions about other satellites of our galaxy, which have been studied in much less detail. There are at least 60 dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, ranging from the LMC all the way down to "ultrafaint" galaxies with just a few hundred thousand stars each — and more are being discovered all the time.

"Outstanding" observations

The new study was possible thanks to the VMC survey, which uses the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert. The latest VMC dataset covers stellar movements over the past 11 years, showing researchers how the galaxy is evolving in real time.

"When I saw the results for the first time, I was really amazed by the quality of the measured stellar motions," study co-author Maria-Rosa Cioni, an astronomer at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam and principal investigator for the VMC survey, said in the statement. "We were able to map the internal kinematics [motions] of the SMC with a level of detail that is outstanding for observations from the ground."

The researchers hope to bring the SMC's true nature into focus with the upcoming One Thousand and One Magellanic Fields survey, which will utilize a newly attached instrument on VISTA to map the movements of stars toward and away from Earth when it comes online later this year.

With the arrival of the summer solstice on June 21, stargazing becomes a late-night hobby. But June is one of the best months of the year to photograph the Milky Way from the Northern Hemisphere. As summer arrives, the brightest region of our galaxy — the galactic core — begins to climb into view in the southeastern sky. However, success will depend on timing, darkness and preparation.

The Milky Way is visible throughout the year, but its brightest and most photogenic section is best seen between May and September. In June, at midlatitudes, it becomes visible in the southeastern sky around 11:30 p.m. local time as true astronomical darkness begins, opening a roughly three-hour viewing window before the sky begins to lighten. Even so, you'll need a dark sky, which can be found using a light-pollution map or searching for a nearby Dark Sky Place, Dark-Sky Preserve (Canada) or Dark Sky Discovery site (U.K.).

A good way to find the Milky Way is to identify the three bright stars — Vega, Deneb and Altair — that make up the Summer Triangle, a famous and very large asterism that's prominent in the southeastern sky in June. The Milky Way will stream from Deneb to Altair and down to the southern horizon.

The best nights occur between the last-quarter moon on June 8 and a few nights after the new moon on June 14, when the moon will be out of the sky. That's particularly important in June because the moon hangs low in the south — exactly where the Milky Way's brightest section is.

How to take the best photos of the Milky Way

Once you're in position, you'll need a good astrophotography camera ‪—‬ a mirrorless or DSLR camera (preferably full-frame) with manual controls and RAW shooting capability. A sturdy tripod is also vital because exposures typically last between 10 and 25 seconds. Wide-angle lenses between 14 and 24 millimeters work particularly well because they capture more of the sky while allowing longer exposures before stars begin trailing.

With the camera in manual mode, try an aperture of f/2.8 (or the widest your lens can handle), an ISO of 3200-6400, and a shutter speed between 10 and 25 seconds, Capture the Atlas recommends. However, there are other considerations, such as manually focusing to ensure the stars are sharp (using live view or zooming in on an image to check) and employing a shutter delay to avoid camera shake. Then, you can use Photoshop or other post-processing software to adjust the contrast, highlights, color temperature and clarity to reveal spectacular details hidden within RAW files.

What many beginners ignore is the importance of composition. A close-up of the Milky Way will produce a disappointing image. Instead, think about striking foregrounds, such as coastal cliffs, abandoned buildings, lakes, rock formations, lone trees and people to create depth, scale and interest.

While June is an excellent month to begin Milky Way photography in the Northern Hemisphere, it will get even easier in July, August and September as the galaxy moves into the south and, ultimately, the southwest, before getting lost in the horizon once again around October. During that window, astrophotographers from the Northern Hemisphere often travel to dark-sky destinations farther south — such as the Canary Islands, Namibia, Chile, Australia and New Zealand — where darker skies and lower latitudes reveal more of the galaxy's bright core.

• Read more: Astrophotography settings 101

The winners of the 2026 Milky Way Photographer of the Year contest are here — and they are stunning. Each image captures a different angle of our galaxy's center, showing the complex mixture of gases and stars that forms our cosmic home.

The contest was established in 2018 by photographer Dan Zafra to highlight the different facets of the Milky Way galaxy. While this year's winners include a variety of images from across the globe — from New Zealand to Yellowstone National Park — they all had one thing in common: an appreciation for the universe around us.

Here, we present a handful of our favorite honorees that capture the magic of the Milky Way. (And if you want to try your own hand at it, here are some beginning tips for taking breathtaking photos of our galaxy this summer).

"Geminid Symphony Over La Palma's Guardian of the Sky"

Photographer: Uroš Fink

Location: Roque de los Muchachos Observatory; La Palma​, Spain

This panorama captures the Geminid meteor shower in the skies over La Palma​, one of Spain's Canary Islands. La Palma is home to the Gran Telescopio Canarias, the largest optical telescope in the world. Also captured in this image is the Gum Nebula, found between the southern constellations Vela and Puppis.

"Galactic Gandalf"

Photographer: Evan McKay

Location: Wairarapa Coast, New Zealand​

Leaning on New Zealand's reputation for being where much of the "Lord of the Rings" series was filmed, photographer Evan McKay reveals a stunning night sky enjoyed by the wizard Gandalf, added in later.

"When I first discovered this location, I immediately envisioned creating something special beneath the night sky," McKay said in a statement. "Given the complexity of the scene, I knew the final image would require a significant amount of work. Over the following weeks, starting in November, I returned whenever possible to collect the necessary data for this panorama, carefully building the image piece by piece under the night sky."

"Sodium Milky Way"

Photographer: Julien Looten

Location: Very Large Telescope; Paranal, Chile​

Chile's Atacama Desert hosts many different telescopes, including the Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Mount Paranal. There, the high altitude and dry desert air make observing the night sky much easier than in areas with lots of city lights.

In this image, both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — dwarf galaxies that orbit close to the Milky Way — can be seen toward the left.

"Subtle airglow adds another layer to the scene, a natural emission produced by chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere at altitudes of 80 to 100 kilometers [50 to 62 miles]," Looten said in the statement. "In this image, it reveals a range of colors, with green tones on the left and warmer reddish hues toward the right."

In the foreground, one of the VLT's telescopes shoots four sodium laser beams into the sky, creating four guide stars that astronomers can use to calibrate the observation systems.

"Firewater"

Photographer: Baillie Farley

Location: Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Like the VLT image, this photo of our home galaxy above Yellowstone National Park has a subtle airglow to it. It also captures the colorful Grand Prismatic Spring, a 121-foot-deep (36.8 meters) hot spring whose bacteria give the spring its colorful appearance.

• Read our full review of the Sony A7 III, which Baillie used to capture this image

"Perseid Meteors Over Durdle Door"

Photographer: Josh Dury

Location: Durdle Door; Dorset, England

Astrophotographer Josh Dury is known for his stunning night-sky images, and this one does not disappoint. The long-exposure photo captures the streaks of meteors from the Perseid meteor shower, which happens annually from mid-July to late August as debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle moves across Earth's atmosphere.

"'Ancient fireworks' from Comet Swift-Tuttle hurtled through the atmosphere to document this ultra-wide angle composite image above the natural limestone arch of Durdle Door," Dury said in the statement. "In the foreground, a singular glow worm was documented amongst reeds along the sea cliff edge."

• Read our full review of the Sony A7S III, which Josh used to capture this image

"Galaxy on the Rise"

Photographer: Anastasia Gulova

Location: Tenerife, Spain

It took over four hours for photographer Anastasia Gulova to find the perfect place to document the Milky Way's beauty from inside a cave on Tenerife in Spain's Canary Islands.

"Capturing the image proved just as challenging," Gulova said. "Composing and shooting the panoramic foreground required careful positioning, while properly illuminating the upper section of the cave was particularly difficult. To manage this, I used focus stacking across different planes, including the upper edge, the horizon, and the lower foreground, all in near-total darkness, where the brief blue hour offered little assistance."

Gulova's persistence was worth it, as she snapped the brilliant colors of the Milky Way mixed with the night sky and beginning sunrise.

• Read our full review of the Canon EOS R5, which Anastasia used to take this image

"Salto del Agrio"

Photographer: Alejandra Heis

Location: Salto del Agrio; Caviahue, Argentina​

The glowing Milky Way isn't the only stunning part of this image; it frames a 148-foot (45 m) waterfall that feeds into a large canyon, created by the lava flows from the Copahue volcano.

"Despite the harsh conditions, I waited for the precise moment when the Milky Way aligned above the waterfall, forming an arch suspended over this ancient terrain," Heis said in the statement. "Working with the tripod close to the ground and repeating exposures, I was finally able to capture the scene I had envisioned for so long."

• Best astrophotography cameras
• Best lenses for astrophotography
• Best beginner astro cameras

Can you name all the animals, objects and mythological figures hiding in the night sky? Find out with our constellations quiz!

Something doesn’t quite add up about the orbits of our solar system’s eight planets and their hundreds of moons, a new study hints.

According to the research — which compared more than 100 simulations of our cosmic neighborhood’s early history — there may have once been two extra giant planets careening around the outer solar system, helping to reshape the orbits of the other planets before ultimately being kicked out into interstellar space.

The infant solar system was constantly being reshuffled. One drastic rearrangement, called the giant planet instability, may have caused the giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to migrate from their initial positions, ending up farther from the sun.

This migration, first proposed in 2005 by astronomers in Nice, France, as a part of the "Nice Model," likely started due to extra-close encounters between the planets and leftover planetary building blocks called planetesimals. Additionally, modifications proposed in 2011 suggested there may have been a fifth giant planet whose gravitational encounters with its neighbors ultimately tossed it out of our cosmic neighborhood.

However, astronomers don't know much about this missing planet. To find out more, the new study "systematically tested the effects of giant-planet close encounters on the orbital stability of their satellites," Matthew Clement, a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the study's first author, told Live Science in an email.

Replaying cosmic history

For their analysis, the researchers turned to computer models of the early outer solar system. Each model tracked the trajectories of the giant planets and a thousand planetesimals over 20 million years.

From a previously constructed database of 100,000 of these models, the team identified a smaller subset of 122 simulations with final configurations broadly similar to those of the present-day giant planets. Roughly two-fifths of this subset's simulations started with five giant planets, while the remaining began with six. Then, the team "'re-played' these encounter sequences with the giant planets satellites in place," Clement said.

The simulations showed that the extra giant planet (or planets) ping-ponged among their neighbors, before finally being kicked out of the system. But the simulations also revealed an unexpected result: Jupiter's moons remained stable mostly in the simulations with two extra ice giants, while Uranus' moons remained stable in those with just one extra giant planet. In other words, Jupiter's and Uranus' moons appear to have been preserved in separate events ‪—‬ an outcome the researchers found surprising.

The scientists noted that three of Jupiter's big moons — Io, Europa and Ganymede — exist today in an intricate resonance of 1:2:4. In other words, Io completes four orbits of Jupiter for every two of Europa and one of Ganymede. Such a delicately balanced dance suggests that Jupiter's moons have remained largely untouched since they formed and thus favors the existence of two extra ice giant planets, the researchers said.

Planet ping-pong

While ping-ponging between the gas giants and Uranus, these supplemental planets likely destabilized Uranus' moons, causing them to collide. Such collisions would have at least partially fragmented the moons and vaporized volatile materials like ice, which later accumulated on the remnants, possibly explaining why Uranus' moon Miranda has 50% more ice than the planet's other moons, the researchers suggested.

But this isn't the only possibility. Two simulations yielded a scenario resembling the present-day solar system, in which both Jupiter's and Uranus' satellites survived the same instability. In those cases, only one extra ice giant planet was involved. Therefore, further simulations will be needed to discern whether there was one extra ice giant or two, the researchers said in the study.

Little can be inferred about the now-missing planets, except for their masses. In the five-giant-planet scenarios, the one extra planet had a mass similar to that of Neptune, while in the six-planet cases, the two extra planets had masses between those of Earth and Neptune, making them "super-Earths."

"Given that the masses are not too different from Uranus and Neptune, [the long-lost planets'] physical properties probably resembled those planets," study co-author Nathan Kaib, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, told Live Science by email.

Although the researchers aren't planning to actively research the fugitive planets, they will continue studying Uranus' moons to identify signatures that show they were disrupted and to determine "the actual consequences of what happens if the satellites do go unstable," Clement said.

The team’s research was published online March 25 in the journal Icarus.

See how well you know our planetary neighborhood with our solar system quiz!

A new theoretical study adds fresh support to the idea that a mathematical pattern of ripples in space-time geometry could give rise to naked singularities and microscopic black holes. The new finding advances research into a subject that has vexed physicists for decades.

In 1997, Stephen Hawking famously conceded defeat on a 1991 bet with fellow theoretical physicists Kip Thorne and John Preskill about the possible existence of naked singularities: objects like black holes but without an event horizon (a point beyond which light, and all other matter, cannot escape), making them observable. Hawking eventually admitted that such objects could exist. Thorne and Preskill’s prize? T-shirts to cover their "nakedness."

The evidence that swayed Hawking came from physicist Matthew Choptuik. In 1993, Choptuik studied a specific set of solutions to Albert Einstein's general relativity equations. When solved numerically, on what was then considered a supercomputer, he showed how naked singularities could hypothetically occur under very specific conditions.

Choptuik found that by modeling the gravitational collapse of a simple form of matter, such as a field, and fine-tuning the initial conditions, an unstable state can be constructed. This theoretical state later became known as a space-time crystal — a self-organized repetitive mathematical pattern of ripples in space-time geometry — containing a singularity with infinite curvature (a naked singularity). Because such a singularity wouldn’t form inside a black hole, it could theoretically be observable.

But much like the phase transition from liquid water to ice, this state is delicate, with the field teetering on the edge between dissipating to become empty space or forming a microscopic black hole.

However, significant doubt remained about such a state's existence, even theoretically.

"Whenever you formulate a system in numerical code, you always have a problem because you can only represent a finite number of digits on a computer," study co-author Christian Ecker, an astrophysicist at Goethe University in Germany, told Live Science. "The historic computer simulations could only go so far before inaccuracies became unavoidable."

Though more recent numerical methods offer much higher accuracy, they are not exact and can never provide deep understanding of the phenomenon that traditional analytical methods (such as manipulating equations using algebra and calculus) offer.

In the new study published May 12 in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers mathematically described the formation of space-time crystals, naked singularities and microscopic black holes precisely.

A pen and paper solution

They succeeded using just pen and paper, and some mathematical sleight of hand. "Whenever physicists find a small parameter, they are happy because they can first solve the equations when this parameter is zero, then add small corrections to it with standard perturbation theory," co-author Daniel Grumiller, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Vienna University of Technology, told Live Science. "General relativity by itself doesn’t have a small parameter, but if you inject a small parameter [one over the number of dimensions and let this number be huge]… then you can use these perturbative tools and get a handle on otherwise very tough equations."

When taking the number of dimensions to be infinite, the team's exact solution could fit on just a few lines. This solution is unrealistic given we are most certainly not living in an infinite dimensional universe. However, as they brought the number of dimensions down to more realistic numbers, the solution required additional terms that made the expressions ever more complicated.

"The lowest dimension that we can consistently connect with so far is 52, but the numerical data extends only up to dimension 14 — so there's a gap," Grumiller said, referring to the fact that neither pen-and-paper nor numerical techniques are accurate enough to cross paths yet.

"In the future, we plan to extend the numerics to higher dimensions, so that we can actually connect the two," Grumiller added.

Doing so would provide a compelling case that space-time crystals, naked singularities and microscopic black holes are mathematically possible in a universe like ours — however, this would still not prove they actually exist in reality. In the end, Hawking may have awarded those T-shirts too soon.

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

Throughout its history, Earth has been bombarded with countless meteorites. About 80,000 have been found so far, but one specific group is exceedingly rare — and scientists now think they could be evidence for a long-dead proto-world that used to orbit the sun.

That rare group is the "angrites," which account for just 0.09% of all meteorites. They’re among the oldest known rocks in the solar system, forming within just a few million years after the solar system began 4.56 billion years ago. They also contain exceptionally low levels of silica (silicon dioxide), which is a key ingredient of most asteroids and rocky planets.

One angrite meteorite, dubbed NWA 12774, (pictured here in cross-polarized light) was discovered in the Sahara Desert in 2019. And a new study into this space rock suggests that it could be the first definitive evidence of a long-lost protoplanet that once existed in the early solar system. (NWA stands for Northwest Africa, a designation given to every meteorite found in this region.)

The findings, published July 1 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, hint that this “planetary embryo” — if it existed — was made of angrite and may have been as big as the moon or even Mars. It’s thought to have orbited the sun before crashing into another celestial body and shattering into rubble billions of years ago; cue angrite meteorites falling to Earth.

In addition to its low silica content, NWA 12774 contains clinopyroxene, a mineral commonly found in Earth’s crust and mantle. This clinopyroxene is also unusually rich in aluminum, indicating that it formed under extremely high pressure — possibly a high-energy collision.

Such pressures could not have existed inside a small asteroid, hinting that the parent body of the angrites must have had a radius of at least 621 miles (1,000 kilometers), the researchers wrote. The sharp edges on NWA 12774 further suggest it formed near the surface, implying the parent body was even larger — with a radius of up to 1,118 miles (1,800 km). For comparison, Earth’s moon has a radius of 1,080 miles (1,737 km), and Mars has 2,106 miles (3,390 km).

“It’s incredible to think there was once [another] world this large,” study first author Aaron Bell, a petrologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. “We only know it existed because a few fragments of it happened to land on Earth. These meteorites preserved evidence of a completely different pathway through which early planets developed.”

Due to the lack of silica in the angrites, scientists had previously theorized that these meteorites originated from small asteroids. But the new findings challenge that view.

If they did originate from a protoplanet, then the world that could have formed from this "embryo" would have likely looked much different than the rocky planets we see today.

“The materials that formed the angrite parent body are fundamentally different from the ingredients of Earth and Mars,” said Bell. “It points to a distinct and separate evolutionary path in planetary formation in the early history of our solar system.”

It is unclear exactly what happened to the lost protoplanet. However, the researchers speculate that some of its fragments may have become the building blocks of other terrestrial planets, including Earth.

See more Space Photos of the Week

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the most distant, dormant black hole in the known universe , hiding in a galaxy more than 10 billion light-years from Earth.

The newly analyzed black hole, located in a galaxy called MRG-M0138, smashes the previous distance record for such an object by 15 times, according to a study published Thursday (June 4) in the journal Science.

Studying black holes like this, which formed early in the universe's 13.8-billion-year-old history, will give researchers an unprecedented look at how black holes evolved when the universe was young. Within MRG-M0138, for example, scientists suspect there used to be a quasar (an extremely bright and supermassive black hole) that grew very quickly, eventually throwing out a significant amount of gas in the galaxy needed to form new stars. This process rapidly shut down star formation in the galaxy, robbing the black hole of its fuel source and likely explaining why the area looks so quiet today.

When stars go stagnant

Scientists are curious about how quickly star formation ceases in ancient galaxies such as this one. Luckily, MRG-M0138 is just part of a larger dataset of early-universe galaxies gathered from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations; the research team also examined four other distant, gravitationally lensed galaxies with the telescope this last year, and analysis is ongoing.

"While the stars in MRG-M0138 are ancient, star formation shut down much later in the other galaxies that we've just observed with JWST," lead author Andrew Newman, a staff scientist at Carnegie Science in California, told Live Science in an email.

"They're like cinders that we can study to learn what put out the fire," Newman continued, then alluded to a direction of future research. "In particular, we're looking for signs of gas that's been blown out of the galaxy, by a black hole more active than the one in MRG-M0138."

Aside from the star-formation sequence at MRG-M0138, the researchers also determined the mass of its black hole — which is roughly six billion times that of the sun.

Making this measurement wasn't easy; because MRG-M0138's black hole is dormant and not interacting with any gas around it, it's invisible in all wavelengths of light. Weighing the cosmic monster required repurposing a technique using star motions, usually used in galaxies much closer to Earth. To track the motion of stars orbiting the black hole, the team relied on a natural magnifying glass, called gravitational lensing.

Researchers took advantage of another galaxy, between MRG-M0138 and Earth, whose gravity is so powerful that it bent the light of objects behind it, magnifying groups of stars. This lens made the image of MRG-M0138 about 30 times larger than what would usually be visible, allowing the researchers to track the stars whirling about the black hole. The team then analyzed the stars' motions to determine how quickly they moved, as well as any differences in motion between stars that were closer or further from the black hole, to figure out the black hole's mass.

"By demonstrating the feasibility of such a technique for galaxies in the early universe, we can now undertake a more complete census of how black holes develop over time, and infer their role in shaping galaxy evolution," senior author Richard Ellis, an astrophysics professor at University College London, said in a statement.

That said, other techniques will be needed to gather that census of black holes because JWST is designed to take a very detailed look at a small patch of sky. To push the research forward, the team is hoping for lensed-galaxy observations from the wide-angle Euclid space telescope — as well as the forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is also optimized to look at large swaths of the sky.

"We want to find more galaxies like these: places where star formation shut down in the early universe, and that are magnified by a gravitational lens," Newman told Live Science. "We need sensitive infrared images of large areas of sky to find these rare objects, and fortunately that is exactly what the Euclid telescope is providing and the Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for launch later this year, will soon deliver."

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

A pair of spiralling stars could be a blueprint for decoding mysterious bursts of radio energy coming from space, according to new research.

Long-period transients have puzzled radio astronomers since they were first detected in 2022. These objects emit strong pulses of radiation every few minutes or hours, each burst lasting only a few seconds. They are much slower than the likes of fast radio bursts, which are intense bursts of energy that flicker for mere milliseconds.

There are many theories about what these transients are and what powers them. It's possible they are slowly rotating remnants of dead stars (pulsars) or the revolving cores of collapsed stars (white dwarfs). Previous work on other long-period transients has suggested that they could be white dwarfs in a slow dance with another object.

Now, a recent study published Jun. 1 in the journal Nature Astronomy argues that a newly discovered long-period transient named ASKAP J1745−5051 is a type of star system called a magnetic cataclysmic variable. This type of variable is a binary system, in which a white dwarf is stripping material off its companion star. It is the first time a long-period transient has been confirmed in an accreting system, where one object is stealing material from another.

The discovery is "a Rosetta Stone to help us decipher the missing bits of information in other long-period transients, both in the dozen or so that we've discovered, and the new ones that we're going to keep discovering," Kovi Rose, lead author on the study and a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney, told Live Science. (The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian slab of stone that helped scholars to decipher hieroglyphics.)

Something unexplained

Rose analyzed more than 3 million sources of radio waves using the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope (ASKAP), and whittled that number down to 100 sources whose light was circularly polarised, meaning it corkscrews as it travels toward Earth.

Out of those candidates, there were two objects Rose couldn't immediately identify. The first turned out to be an ultra-cool brown dwarf, which is only as hot as a pizza oven. The second was ASKAP J1745−5051. It was "something we couldn't explain, and when we eventually managed to explain it, it was more interesting than we could have hoped for," Rose said.

Using data from several radio telescopes, as well as optical and X-ray observations, Rose and collaborators showed that the object produces powerful bursts of radiation in both radio waves and X-rays every 1.3 hours. The object is more than a thousand light-years away.

"You’d see these beautiful pairs of pulses – pulse-pulse, pulse-pulse, pulse-pulse, and then it switched off," Rose explained.

However, there were a few strange features in the system that have helped researchers uncover what is behind the periodic signals.

For one thing, the radio waves and X-rays peaked at different times, showing that they originate in different parts of the system, Rose said. The team argued that the radio emissions are produced when the stars' magnetic fields meet and interact with the material that is being stripped off the smaller star. This material emits X-rays as it is heated up by the white dwarf.

Further analysis showed that the emissions pointed to the presence of helium and hydrogen, and they drifted in frequency. "The wavelengths would shift to higher frequencies and then back to lower frequencies, which is a tell-tale sign of a binary system," Rose said. That was a "smoking gun," indicating that it was two stars circling each other.

"This paper gives us a strong connection for at least some long period transients with white dwarf binary systems," Marcin Glowacki, an astronomer with the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. "We also see new behavior in this [transient], which has only been seen in one other [transient] to date, with emission drifting up and down in frequency. This behavior can give us important clues on the immediate plasma or accretion environment" of this long-period transient.

However, he was surprised that ASKAP J1745−5051 was identified as a cataclysmic variable. "As the paper states, 50 other cataclysmic variables have been seen to produce radio emissions, but none with periodic behavior as seen here and they are typically much fainter."

Patrick Woudt, an astronomer at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who specializes in cataclysmic variables and who was not part of the study, told Live Science in an email that ASKAP J1745-5051 provided a bridge between long-period transients and cataclysmic variables.

"ASKAP J1745-5051 is a few orders of magnitude brighter than the compact variables observed at radio frequencies, so what makes ASKAP J1745-5051 so unique amongst the magnetic CVs?" he asked. "That is a very interesting question to address with future observations, not only at radio frequencies, but also at UV, optical, X-ray wavelengths."

Going forward, Rose said that he plans to investigate ASKAP J1745−5051's X-ray behavior and further characterize the system to find out what other secrets it's keeping.

A "cannibal" coronal mass ejection (CME) birthed from a rare type of sunspot will slam into Earth tonight (June 4), likely bringing auroras to skies above 23 U.S. states.

The solar outburst began on June 2 from sunspot 4455, a dark patch on the sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields became knotted and unstable. These field lines then snapped, producing a series of X-class solar flares — the most powerful class of solar eruption — alongside multiple CMEs.

CMEs are large, fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma and solar radiation that occasionally get flung into space alongside solar flares. If CMEs smash into Earth, they cause disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, called geomagnetic storms, that can trigger partial radio blackouts and produce vibrant aurora displays much farther away from Earth's magnetic poles than usual.

One of the CMEs thrown out by yesterday's eruption caught up with and engulfed a slower one, creating a combined, cannibal eruption, according to a model from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The cannibal CME is expected to arrive mid-afternoon EDT and will create a strong (G3) or possibly even severe (G4) geomagnetic storm, according to NOAA.

Auroras resulting from this class of geomagnetic storm are often visible from northern parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Maine, according to NOAA. Skywatchers farther south in Oregon, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire will also have a chance of catching the light show.

And this may not be the last eruption we see from sunspot 4455. It is a rare "anti-Hale" sunspot, meaning its magnetic polarity is reversed compared with the other sunspots in its hemisphere. This type of polarity, seen in fewer than 10% of sunspots, makes the sunspot highly unstable and more likely to spit out powerful solar flares, according to spaceweather.com.

The last few years have seen a record number of powerful X-class flares explode from the sun's surface, hitting Earth with several major solar storms, including 2024's Mother's Day storm. This record comes partly from improvements to scientists' solar monitoring technologies, but also due to the sun reaching its 11-year peak in sunspot production, or solar maximum, in 2024.

Following this peak, the sun entered a period known as the "battle zone," a relatively understudied solar phase where instabilities across our star's newly flipped magnetic field ramp up the production of solar holes, anti-Hale sunspots and subsequent geomagnetic storms.

The worst case scenario for a solar storm is a superstorm like the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles set telegraph systems around the world on fire and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

The Carrington Event unleashed a roughly X45 magnitude solar flare that remains a record, yet it's likely far from the worst the sun can muster — with ancient tree rings harboring evidence of even more powerful blasts that occurred long before humans existed.

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, astronomers claim they have directly measured the magnetic fields of multiple planets beyond our solar system — potentially providing a crucial new tool in the search for habitable planets and alien life.

Magnetic fields exert a vital influence on planetary atmospheres and, therefore, their ultimate fate and prospects for habitability. We know, for example, that Earth's magnetic field has long protected our planet from harmful radiation, allowing our world to become a flourishing blue-green planet while inert Mars has grown barren and ostensibly dead.

The importance of a guardian magnetosphere is clearly evident. Yet magnetic fields on exoplanets, or alien worlds that orbit stars beyond our solar system, have remained poorly constrained, until now.

In a study published Tuesday (June 2) in the journal Nature Astronomy, a massive, multinational team of astronomers observed seven sizzling planets and found that their winds were slower than expected, suggesting that magnetic fields were slowing them down.

"This breakthrough opens a completely new window on exoplanet research," study co-author Julia Seidel, an astronomer at the Lagrange Laboratory in Nice, France, said in a statement. "It's the first time we can compare the magnetic environments of other worlds — a key step toward ultimately understanding which planets can stay alive, keep their water, and perhaps even, one day, host life as we know it."

Unexpected astronomy

The researchers were not specifically seeking exoplanetary magnetic fields. Instead, they sought to determine whether winds throughout the cosmos behave similarly on hot planets.

So they focused on seven "ultra-hot Jupiters," or sizzling gas giants swirling so close to their stellar parents that they're tidally locked, with one side always facing their star and the other side perpetually drenched in darkness.

Under such intense stellar irradiation, these seven planets attain estimated equilibrium temperatures of approximately 2,600 Kelvin (over 4,200 degrees Fahrenheit), whipping up unimaginable winds ranging from nearly 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers) per hour to almost 16,000 mph (25,000 kmh). For comparison, our own not-so-hot Jupiter only manages to power winds to a relatively tame 900 mph (1,500 kmh).

The researchers clocked these otherworldly wind speeds using the ESPRESSO instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and the MAROON-X instrument on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

These are both spectrographs, which are tools that split a celestial object's light into its constituent wavelengths to reveal its atmospheric composition. Accordingly, these observations allowed the astronomers to measure wind speeds by tracing the movement of iron through the atmospheres of these exoplanets.

A counterintuitive discovery

In doing so, they revealed several surprises. First, wind speeds on these hot, gassy planets actually declined with temperature — the hotter the planet, the lower the wind speed.

"This is totally counterintuitive because, all things being equal, hot planets have more energy to accelerate the winds," study co-author Vivien Parmentier, an astronomer and professor at Lagrange Laboratory, explained in a separate statement. "Something must happen that slows down the wind speeds for hotter objects."

The researchers concluded that the magnetic fields may be responsible for putting the "brakes" on these winds, by slowing the movement of charged particles in the atmospheres of these exoplanets.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the research suggests that these magnetic fields are only several gauss in strength — rather than hundreds of gauss, as predicted by some models. Such values are on par with the much colder gas giants in our solar system. This finding may therefore also help to reconcile predictive models for planetary magnetic fields.

Overall, this breakthrough study may set the standard for detecting magnetic fields around planets beyond our own. Applying this technique elsewhere could guide future searches for potentially habitable worlds, an ever-appealing prospect as next-generation facilities begin aiming their electric eyes toward other possible Earths throughout the universe.

NASA has confirmed that a bright fireball meteor exploded in the sky over New England on Saturday (May 30), releasing the equivalent energy of about 230 tons of TNT and generating a sonic boom heard across multiple U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.

The meteor was relatively small — about 5 feet (1.6 meters) in diameter, NASA wrote in a statement on X. However, it faced incredible friction while tumbling through the atmosphere at about 42,000 mph (67,000 kilometers per hour). The meteor broke the sound barrier as it split apart roughly 31 miles (50 km) over Earth, raining debris onto Cape Cod, according to NASA.

No injuries or property damage were reported in connection to the fireball. But onlookers in several northeastern states said they heard a loud boom and felt buildings shake as the meteor exploded around 2:06 p.m. EDT, according to The Guardian.

NASA estimates that the meteor had a mass of about 5.6 metric tons before it fragmented. Meteors that small are incredibly hard to track in space, NASA noted in a separate statement on X. That said, they also are highly unlikely to survive the intense heat and pressure as they fall through the atmosphere, and they thus pose no serious risk of damage to cities.

Far more dangerous are large, near-Earth asteroids measuring more than 460 feet (140 m) in diameter. Sometimes dubbed "city-killers," these large space rocks could survive the plunge through the atmosphere and cause massive damage if they were to fall onto a populated area.

They are also much easier to track than small asteroids; NASA keeps tabs on more than 40,000 large asteroids in our planet’s vicinity at all times. Several thousand still remain to be discovered, NASA estimates suggest, but next-generation asteroid tracking probes are poised to close this gap in the next decade.

Saturday's fireball is one of many that have been spotted in recent months. On May 25, cameras recorded a dazzling green fireball plummeting through the sky behind the erupting Mount Mayon volcano in the Philippines. On March 21, a cannonball-size meteor chunk crashed through the roof of a Texas family's home, causing damage but no injuries. And just days before that, a 6-foot-wide (1.8 m) fireball erupted over Ohio, triggering a powerful sonic boom.

One of the greatest achievements of the James Webb Space Telescope is how it has allowed scientists to push the boundaries of astronomy by observing galaxies that existed during the early universe, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. This period, known as the Epoch of Reionization, coincides with what astronomers have nicknamed the "Cosmic Dark Ages." During this time, 380,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen, and any sources of light visible today are redshifted beyond the limits of conventional telescopes.

Thanks to Webb's advanced infrared instruments and spectrometers, scientists can now peer behind this veil and see how galaxies have evolved since the earliest cosmological epochs. In a recent discovery, an international team of astronomers used Webb and the gravitational lensing technique to capture a rare look at LAP1-B, an ultra-faint galaxy that existed 800 million years after the Big Bang. Using Webb's spectrometers, the team was able to definitively characterize this galaxy, revealing it to be the most metal-poor galaxy in the early Universe observed to date.

The team was led by Associate Professor Kimihiko Nakajima of Kanazawa University. The study describing their research appeared on May 13th in the journal Nature.

In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe contained only light elements such as hydrogen and helium, while the elements necessary for life (carbon, oxygen, etc.) were absent. These elements were forged in the interiors of the first generation of stars (Population III), which were then dispersed when these stars went supernova and blew off their external layers. For decades, astronomers have been hoping to find these stars so they could witness the moment they began seeding the Universe with heavier elements. This has been problematic since the earliest galaxies that hosted Population III stars appear so small and faint.

As a result, determining their chemical makeup through spectroscopy was thought to be nearly impossible until now. The work of Nakajima builds on initial detections of LAP1-B by adding JWST spectra to the picture, revealing a record-low oxygen abundance (1/240th that of the sun). When combined with an elevated carbon-to-oxygen ratio and a dominant dark matter halo, these findings suggest that LAP1-B is a progenitor to the fossil galaxies found near the Milky Way. Astronomers have been searching for these "ancestor" galaxies, making LAP1-B a historic window into the earliest stages of galaxy formation.

The team was assisted by the presence of an intervening galaxy cluster, which acted as a gravitational lens, magnifying the light from LAP1-B by a factor of 100. After 30 hours of observations and deep spectroscopy, the team was finally able to characterize the chemical abundance of this galaxy. In addition to being chemically primitive, the galaxy's carbon-to-oxygen ratio closely matches theoretical predictions for the material dispersed by Population III star explosions.

Said Associate Professor Nakajima in a Kanazawa University press release: "I was instantly thrilled by the extreme lack of oxygen revealed in the data. Finding a galaxy in such a primitive state is astonishing. It's a chemical signature that clearly indicates a primordial galaxy caught in the moments shortly after its formation.."

The team also discovered that LAP1-B is incredibly light (less than 3,300 Solar masses), implying that most of the galaxy consists of dark matter in the form of a halo.

Along with its unique chemical makeup, this makes it a near-perfect match for the "Ultra-Faint Dwarf galaxies (UFDs)" found near the Milky Way today. Said Professor Masami Ouchi (NAOJ/University of Tokyo), a member of the research team: "UFDs are not only the faintest galaxies; they are composed of ancient stars over 12 billion years old and are often described as 'fossils of the universe.' Astronomers suspected they might be the remains of the universe's earliest galaxies because they lack heavy elements, but astronomers never had a direct link — until we found LAP1-B. It is a profound surprise to find that LAP1-B looks exactly like the 'ancestor' we had only imagined in theories. This helps us solve the mystery of why these cosmic fossils have survived in their current form to the present day."

The team's findings present astronomers with a new way to map the birth of heavier elements in the Universe and the formation of its oldest structures. The next step will consist of the team using JWST data to search for even more chemically primitive objects, including the very first ever formed.

As Nakajima indicated: "We hope this discovery marks a historic step in understanding how the elements that make up our own bodies were first born and accumulated across the Universe."​​ ​

See how much you know about the world's most powerful telescope with our James Webb Space Telescope quiz!

A phenomenon that was thought to be impossible on Mars is squeezing the Red Planet's atmosphere like toothpaste from a tube, a new study finds. The surprising discovery, uncovered by a NASA spacecraft during a powerful solar storm, could change how we think of dangerous space weather throughout the solar system, researchers say.

The unlikely phenomenon, dubbed the Zwan-Wolf effect, was first discovered on Earth in 1976 and occurs when "charged particles are squeezed like toothpaste coming out of a tube along magnetic structures called flux tubes," NASA representatives wrote in a statement. These flux tubes are located within Earth's magnetosphere, the invisible field that is generated by the movements of our planet's molten metal core and shields us from radiation.

While similar phenomena likely occur on Jupiter and Saturn, experts have long assumed that the Zwan-Wolf effect could not happen on Mars because our next-door neighbor's core has long since solidified and, therefore, does not generate a proper magnetosphere. (This is also why the Red Planet has such a thin and wispy atmosphere; without magnetic shielding, most of its gases have been stripped away by solar storms.)

But in the new study, published May 18 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed data from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2014 (though NASA lost contact with it last year), and found something strange.

In December 2023, a powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) erupted from the sun and slammed into Mars, temporarily scrambling the remnants of its upper atmosphere and revealing disturbances that could be explained only by the Zwan-Wolf effect.

"When investigating the data, I all of a sudden noticed some very interesting wiggles," study lead author Christopher Fowler, a planetary scientist at West Virginia University, said in the statement. "I would never have guessed it would be this effect," he added.

Unlike on Earth, where the Zwan-Wolf effect occurs tens of thousands of miles above our planet's surface, the Martian equivalent occurs in the ionosphere — the upper part of the atmosphere, which is full of ionized gas, or plasma — at an altitude of around 125 miles (200 kilometers).

"No one expected that this effect could even occur in the atmosphere," Fowler said. "That's what makes this even more exciting."

Mars' Zwan-Wolf effect is likely powered by a localized magnetic field at the boundary where solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles that shoots from the sun — collides with ionospheric plasma, the researchers wrote. This means it is probably happening all the time, but we only realized it now because the radiation from the CME exaggerated the effect.

As a result, experts are keen to study this phenomenon further to better understand how it may impact future missions to Mars, since changes to the ionosphere will likely affect orbiting spacecraft, communications equipment, and the levels of harmful radiation that reach the planet's surface.

"Knowing how space weather interacts with Mars is essential," study co-author Shannon Curry, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and the principal investigator for MAVEN, said in the statement. It is, therefore, vitally important to understand "these links between our host star and the Red Planet," she added.

Now that we know the Zwan-Wolf effect can occur within planetary atmospheres, we may also soon discover it on other solar system worlds, such as Venus and Saturn's largest moon, Titan, the researchers hypothesized.

A mysterious new kind of celestial object discovered by the James Webb telescope just inched closer to reality, a new study reports.

Looking within a large stellar nursery in the southern sky, astronomers found two pairs of "rogue" Jupiter-like objects that are similar to mysteriously paired planets that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) previously discovered. The planet pairs — which tumble through space, seemingly untethered to any star — dwell in a different part of the Milky Way than JWST's initial discoveries, suggesting that the enigmatic objects truly are a new kind of object. However, further observations are still necessary for confirmation.

"We were always fascinated by the possibility of finding different kinds of planets," Dante Minniti, a professor of astrophysics at the Universidad Andrés Bello University in Chile and co-author of the new research, told Live Science in an email.

Free-floating planets (FFPs) are "rogue" exoplanets that aren't gravitationally bound to a star. These peculiar objects abound in the cosmos. Surveys by space-based telescopes, especially JWST, have revealed hundreds of FFPs in many star-forming regions, or nebulas. NASA estimates that solitary rogue planets may outnumber stars in the Milky Way 20 to 1.

In contrast, binary FFPs — which comprise two rogue exoplanets that orbit each other — seem much rarer. One subset, in particular, has piqued interest. Called Jupiter-mass binary objects, or "JuMBOs," these binary pairs of widely separated planet-like objects measure 0.7 to 30 times Jupiter's mass.

A jumbo-size mystery

In 2023, JWST unveiled 40-odd JuMBO candidates in the Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery in the constellation Orion. Their discovery raised interest because such planet pairs challenged conventional theories of planet formation. Subsequent research, though, disputed their existence, including a 2024 reanalysis that suggested many of the purported planet pairs were actually just distant stars.

Still, these developments didn't dissuade Minniti from searching for more definitive pairs of exoplanets and low-mass cosmic objects. Also on his search list were brown dwarfs, "failed stars" that are more massive than planets but not big enough to be stably powered by nuclear fusion.

However, rather than scouring the Orion Nebula again, Minniti and his collaborators turned to a different stellar nursery: the Lower Centaurus-Crux (LCC) association, which "spreads hundreds of square degrees across the Southern sky," he said.

It consists of more than 100 young, massive blue stars that move together through space but are not linked by gravity. Objects in the LCC association are, on average, about 15 million years old, said Claudio Cáceres, an associate professor of physical sciences at Andrés Bello University and first author of the new study. Exoplanets this age are still considered young, and at longer wavelengths, "they are more luminous than their older counterparts," he wrote in an email to Live Science.

A new type of object?

First, Cáceres and his collaborators created an enormous database of images of the LCC association by crossmatching two datasets. One comprised archival near-infrared photographs by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Piranal Observatory in Chile. The second dataset consisted of visible-light snapshots gathered by the European Space Agency's Gaia survey.

The researchers searched the data for faint cosmic objects that might be planets. Of the 9,000-odd low-mass candidates they identified, only about 400 actually belonged to the LCC association, since they showed movement patterns that were mathematically predicted. Minniti said the team then "inspected the candidates one by one carefully in order to find faint companions that could be characterized."

Their analysis, described in a study published April 24 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, revealed 17 object binaries. Only two — named VVVX-FFP-001 and VVVX-FFP-007 — are pairs of planet-size objects, and they share several characteristics with JuMBOs.

Both contain two objects, each of which has a mass less than 13 times Jupiter's — approximately 12 and eight times Jupiter's mass for VVVX-FFP-001 and VVVX-FFP-007, respectively. Additionally, both are widely separated; three and 180 times the distance between the sun and Neptune separate VVVX-FFP-001's and VVVX-FFP-007's members, respectively.

Despite these similarities, Cáceres doesn't call the newly discovered objects JuMBOs, noting that the term hasn't been accepted in the research literature. "I personally prefer free-floating planetary-mass binaries," he said.

While the new objects support the existence of JuMBOs, they also suggest that FFP pairs are rare, accounting for just 2% of rogue planets in the LCC association, Cáceres said. Although much smaller than the Orion Nebula JuMBO fraction of 9%, this value agrees with the fraction of paired "cold" objects like brown dwarfs found elsewhere. This suggests the Orion Nebula sample may indeed have falsely identified members.

Additionally, Minniti said, some FFP pairs may be "tight binaries" that orbit each other at narrow separations. He said such planets may retain liquid water because their companions' gravitational tugs heat them up. This could make them habitable, Cáceres said, "even when there is no star. … This is very interesting because these binary planets may transport life through different regions of the Galaxy."

The researchers plan to continue studying the objects using instruments like the ESO's Very Large Telescope. "These observations will help to better characterize the whole sample of low-mass binary objects," Minniti said.