In space, nobody can hear you scream — or meow, for that matter. This was as true for Félicette — the stray Parisian tuxedo cat who safely completed the world's first (and only) suborbital feline flight, in 1963 — as it is for the gargantuan Cat's Head Nebula, which is featured in stunning new images from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.

Rising from the cloudy Carina Nebula some 7,500 light-years from Earth, the Cat's Head Nebula is a column of star-sculpted gas and dust that vaguely resembles a feline sitting with its back to us, coyly turning its head to show off a single red eye. That eye is a young star that's embedded deep within the dust and possibly transforming it before our eyes.

Nebulas like these occur when the radiation from active young stars lights up and erodes the material around them. They are beautiful and easy to find; if this cosmic cat gets bored staring at us, it can just waltz over to the other side of the Carina Nebula and crawl into a similar globule of gas that looks exactly like a box with an open lid. (Cats will be cats, after all.)

In honor of Halloween, the European Space Agency (ESA) shared three competing views of the Cat's Head Nebula — one from the Hubble Space Telescope, which captures optical light, and two from the infrared instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The three views, shown below, reveal different features of the nebula in different wavelengths of light, getting progressively spookier as more color drains out of the scene.Take a look at all three images — and cast your vote for the spookiest in the poll at the end.

Hubble's view

Observing the nebula in the same visible wavelength range that you could see through a strong backyard telescope, Hubble highlights the dark pillar of dust that has survived the ultraviolet assault of nearby stars. The wispy edges at the right of the column show where starlight is evaporating the gas around it, slowly whittling it away to nothing.

The glow of blue, yellow, orange and red light around the dust pillar mark where starlight is interacting with different gas molecules, including oxygen, hydrogen and sulfur, according to ESA. The process is similar to how different molecules in Earth's atmosphere produce different-colored auroras when excited by solar radiation — just on a much grander scale.

JWST's near-infrared view

Switching to light human eyes cannot see, JWST's Near-Infrared Camera cuts through the wispier outer layers of dust to show the densest material at the column's center. Countless additional stars and galaxies appear in the field of view as their infrared glow penetrates the surrounding material.

Here we see a more complex, turbulent column, showing how stellar radiation is carving up the inside of the cat's head as well as its edges. JWST's view also illuminates a disembodied, hand-like structure to the left of the cat, reaching out as if to pet its cosmic companion.

JWST's mid-infrared view

The final view, taken with JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument, cuts to the ghostly core of the nebula, showing little more than smoky, bluish light. According to ESA, these are the emissions of molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — typically colorless molecules of carbon and hydrogen related to combustion.

While most starlight disappears in this view, a strange new bright spot emerges to the right of the cat's head. This orange speck is a true mystery, according to ESA, and its relationship to the rest of the nebula is unknown.

The mysterious force that cleared the cosmic fog at the dawn of the universe may not be what we thought, a new study suggests. The results hint that astronomers may need to rethink a major aspect of cosmological evolution, which led to the universe we clearly see today.

Around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the fledgling universe finally cooled enough to form atoms — mostly hydrogen. But these neutral, non-electrically charged hydrogen atoms shrouded the cosmos in a fog that made it opaque to ultraviolet (UV) light.

Then, after the first stars flickered to life and gathered into galaxies, bursts of radiation ionized the neutral hydrogen. This turned the impenetrable fog of atoms into electrically charged protons and electrons, allowing light to pass through interstellar space unimpeded and, eventually, reach our observatories. This cosmic curtain parting is known as the Epoch of Reionization, or what a team of researchers studying it call the "last major phase transition in the universe."

"We don't know exactly what objects caused reionization or how it evolved," Cody Carr, an astronomer who focuses on galaxy evolution at the University of Michigan and first author of a new study of the epoch, said in a statement. "We know that it took place, but we don't have complete answers to those questions."

Astrophysicists previously thought that this fog-clearing effect depended on supernovas, the violently explosive deaths of stars around eight to 50 times the mass of the sun.

But in the new study, published Oct. 15 in the journal Nature Astronomy, Carr and colleagues presented evidence that supernovas exerted the opposite effect, trapping the so-called Lyman continuum (LyC) photons of ionizing UV radiation that dispelled the celestial fog instead of scattering them.

"The most interesting thing about our paper is the observation that the strongest LyC emitters do not have fast galactic winds," Carr told Live Science via email. "This challenges the notion that galaxies require fast supernova-driven winds to enable LyC escape."

Which way the winds blow

The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe an analogue of the ancient universe in the local cosmos: six star-forming, wind-launching galaxies around 3.5 billion light-years away.

These compact starburst galaxies are generally smaller than 6,500 light-years in diameter and form around 10 solar masses' worth of stars per year. That star-birthing rate is several times higher than that of the Milky Way, which is up to 20 times larger.

The galaxies' spectra, or light-based fingerprints, revealed the origin, chemical composition, speed and direction of their stellar winds, which were whipped up by the radiation from their newly formed stars.

The researchers also described how these processes changed as the massive young stars evolved and died in energetic supernovas several billion years later, with the resultant galactic winds overpowering the stellar winds.

These nearby galaxies highlighted a counterintuitive two-phase process.

In the initial phase, which occurred during the first 3 million years of star formation, the newly formed massive stars' stellar winds carved through their galaxies' neutral gas and dust at nearly 2,000 miles per second (3,000 kilometers per second). This allowed LyC light to escape the galaxy and ionize the neutral gas and dust in intergalactic space.

The second phase, which emerged around 3 million years after star formation, seemed to reverse this process. As O-type stars — the hottest, bluest and most massive stars in the cosmos — lived fast and died young, their expelled stellar guts added to the opaque galactic gas and dust, churning it and loading it with mass, which created a trap for LyC light.

The oldest galaxies in this study ‪—‬ and, therefore, the ones with the fastest supernova-generated galactic winds ‪—‬ allowed the least amount of ionizing radiation to escape their environs.

"In general, our results are in disagreement with most cosmological simulations, which typically show the LyC escape fraction peaking after the launch of supernova-driven winds," Carr explained via email. In other words, supernovas didn't drive the Epoch of Reionization, but they may have dampened it. The intense light of newborn stars now seems like the most viable source of reionization.

Future research could aim to obtain additional galactic samples and higher-resolution observations across other wavelengths.

When the sun inevitably dies, not even the outer solar system will be safe from the resulting chaos, new research hints.Scientists have long thought the outer solar system ‪—‬ which comprises the four giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — would mostly retain its present-day appearance for hundreds of billions of years to come. But a new study suggests that the outer giants may develop weirdly shaped orbits as the sun runs out of fuel, causing the planets to cross paths and destroy themselves through collisions within three billion years of the sun's transformation into a red giant.

The findings, published Sept. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could change our understanding of what kinds of exoplanets orbit certain stars.

In about 5 billion years, the sun will balloon outward as a red giant after exhausting all of the hydrogen in its core. During this red giant phase, our star will swell to 100 times its present-day size, gobbling up Mercury, Venus and possibly even Earth in the process, Nathan Kaib, a planetary scientist at the University of Oklahoma who wasn't involved in the new research, told Live Science in an email. Following this violent swelling, the sun will crumple into a collapsed core called a white dwarf.

Until now, scientists thought the four outer planets would escape this phase relatively unscathed. A 1998 simulation-based study suggested that the gas the sun spews from its outer layers will push this planetary quartet outward, doubling the radius of each planet's orbit. Only the gravitational impact of a runaway star could destabilize this new order, and such events are thought to occur only once every billion billion years.

Solar recoil

These predictions hinged on the assumption that the sun will eject its outer layers smoothly. However, recent observations of stars suggest a jerkier loss of mass, with gas clouds lofted by plumes of plasma in the sun — as though our star were spitting out mass blobs. "They're kind of like coronal mass ejections, except much larger," Jim Fuller, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at Caltech and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.

Each "blob" pushes the star backward, similar to how a fired bullet causes a gun to recoil. Although every push is small, moving the sun just a few feet per second, many pushes can, over time, impart the equivalent of an enormous kick that alters the sun's speed by several hundred feet per second. In fact, astronomers have already seen white dwarfs suffer such kicks in other star systems.

When Fuller, who studied these kicks, described them to Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary science at Caltech and the study's first author, Batygin "realized this would have important consequences for the evolution of our own solar system," Fuller said. That's because the kicks change the sun's gravitational pulls on everything around it.

Chaos at the edge of town

To determine how the sun's mass loss would influence the giant planets, Batygin created computer-based simulations of the sun and the outer planets. The researchers considered three scenarios: if the sun lost its mass smoothly, if it spit out distinct mass blobs during its entire time evolving as a red giant, and if the sun spewed the blobs only during its last stages. The researchers also varied each ejected blob's mass.

The first scenario produced results similar to those of previous studies, with the outer solar system retaining almost all of its features for billions of years. In contrast, the other two cases had drastically different results. Using 672 simulations, the researchers found that if the sun lost mass in blobs, the giant planets would be thrown into chaos, switching places, developing weirdly oval-shaped orbits, and even getting ejected out of the solar system entirely. Most dramatically, in 96% of the simulations with the heaviest ejected mass packets, the planets get destroyed as they crashed into each other.

These developments also happened much more rapidly — less than a few hundred million years after the sun transformed into a white dwarf, or even during the red giant phase, in the most extreme scenarios.

The study's findings hint that analogues of the present-day outer solar system around white dwarf stars are less likely to exist than previously thought. Kaib noted that the study's results suggest that planets with oval-shaped orbits should dominate instead. It's thought that habitable planets could exist around white dwarfs, but this study's findings show that our understanding of those distant star systems may be incomplete, and that such worlds may, in reality, be unstable.

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

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has found what might be a tiny new world in the far reaches of our solar system, hidden beyond the orbit of Neptune — and it is among the largest and brightest objects ever discovered beyond Neptune.

If confirmed, the miniature world would increase the number of officially recognized solar system dwarf planets to six. Upper estimates of the object's size place it at more than half the diameter of Pluto, the largest known dwarf planet.

"My first reaction was one of excited disbelief," Matthew Holman, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and member of the Rubin team who wrote the code that helped discover the prospective dwarf planet, said in a statement. "Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong."

Hidden among stars

The potential dwarf planet, designated 2026 ED138, orbits the sun at roughly 46 times the distance between Earth and the sun. The potential new planetoid has been hiding behind galactic camouflage; with its orbit tilted at a 25-degree angle from the solar system plane, it's at just the right angle to get lost in the light from the inner Milky Way, the researchers said.

Many telescopes struggle to see past the millions of stars making up our galaxy's bulge. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, however, images the entire southern sky every few nights with the largest digital camera ever built, sending out millions of nightly alerts for every object that has changed brightness or position. This makes it exceptional at identifying anything that moves, from solar system objects to transient events like supernova explosions.

The observatory had only just begun its 10-year mission of scanning the sky in July, and ED138 stood out in the data.

Holman works on the software algorithms that process the extreme amounts of data the observatory collects. The code he developed with his colleague, Kevin Napier, compares billions of observations to determine which ones are detections of the same moving object. Running data from Rubin through the code revealed the unusually large object.

By looking at past data from Rubin and archival images from the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (both in Chile), the team was able to map out ED138's orbit over the past 10 years.

Going beyond Neptune

The Kuiper Belt is a region of the solar system beyond Neptune that is a wild frontier of small, mostly icy bodies made from frozen methane, ammonia, water and rock. It ranges from roughly 30 to 50 times the distance between Earth and the sun, and is home to most of the known dwarf planets, including Pluto. Thousands of Kuiper Belt objects have already been discovered. These space rocks can be frozen time capsules that hold clues about the early solar system's formation.

Dwarf planets are the largest Kuiper Belt objects that we know of. Bigger than asteroids but not quite planets, dwarf planets are big enough to be rounded under the force of their own gravity but too small to clear their orbits like planets do. While the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has officially confirmed five dwarf planets — Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake — astronomers studying dwarf planets often recognize at least nine, with several more candidates whose properties are still unknown.

Depending on which astronomer you ask, there could be anywhere from a handful to hundreds of dwarf planets in this part of the solar system. Identifying which Kuiper Belt objects are dwarf planets is tricky because they are often very dim and move very slowly from Earth's perspective, since their orbits are so large and distant. The likeliest candidates have high albedo (surface reflectivity) and diameters greater than roughly 370 to 500 miles (600 to 800 km).

What makes ED138 special is its size, inferred from its brightness, albedo and distance from the sun. It's estimated to have a diameter between 370 to 930 miles (600 to 1,500 km). For comparison, Pluto — the largest dwarf planet recognized by the IAU — is 1,477 miles (2,377 km) in diameter. Ceres, the smallest IAU-recognized dwarf planet, is 595 miles (958 km) in diameter. Future observations of ED138 will give researchers a more accurate idea of its diameter and density to determine if it's round enough to join the dwarf planet club.

"If confirmed as a dwarf planet, ED138 would join a very small family of worlds," Holman said in the statement. "Rubin will image the whole southern sky again and again for ten years, so any others hiding in the places earlier surveys skipped are now within reach."

Scientists are getting a new glimpse of how the first galaxies came to be. In a stunning new simulation, researchers charted the aftermath of the universe's "dark age," including the appearance of the first galaxies that began to shine about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Lumina, the program behind the simulation, catalogs 2 billion years of cosmic time and represents a decent chunk of the 13.8 billion-year-old history of our universe. The results were published Monday (Oct. 26) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Other simulations cannot zoom in as far as this," study co-author Mark Vogelsberger, a professor of physics at MIT, said in a statement. "The difference between the smallest and largest scales that we simulate is larger than in any other simulation."

A video published alongside the paper shows what the scientists saw. The team zoomed in on an area roughly 1.6 billion light-years wide to learn more about how the ingredients of space create galaxies.

Lighting up the Cosmic Dark Age

In the earliest years of our universe, a fog of neutral hydrogen atoms gradually built up, blocking out the light of the first stars. The hydrogen served as a "shroud" and didn't make light visible until galaxies began to form. This ancient, enshrouded period is known as the Cosmic Dark Age.

The video begins in the middle of this epoch, at roughly 45 million years after the Big Bang. Zooming in on one small part of the simulated universe, it slowly reveals a gassy halo giving way to young galaxies shining brightly within it. Included in the calculations are dark matter, stars, gas and radiation — all contributing to the reemergence of cosmic light.

"We see this is where the first galaxies form," first author Oliver Zier, a former postdoctoral researcher and computational astrophysicist at MIT who is now at Harvard University, said in the statement. "And the first stars form in those first galaxies. Those stars then create radiation. The simulation then tracks that radiation, and we can zoom way out to see how that radiation travels out from stars, through the universe, until at some point it ionizes some neutral hydrogen."

Lumina aims to show off two phenomena key to the young universe's history: hydrogen reionization and helium reionization — a first for a program of its kind. Reionization describes how the intergalactic medium, or the area between galaxies, changed from neutral hydrogen to negatively charged ions.

Hydrogen reionization took place when ultraviolet light from young stars and galaxies hit the hydrogen, removing negatively charged electrons from the hydrogen molecules — a process that also allowed light to shine through the fog. Helium reionization happened when supermassive black holes, which have a lot of energy, broke apart neutral helium molecules.

The team said the simulation could eventually be used to validate telescope observations of the early universe, especially those focused on mapping many galaxies at the same time.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered a galaxy with a glowing ring of newborn stars shining in the early universe. The galaxy, which the researchers observed as it appeared just 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang, is the most distant ring galaxy ever found.

The ring galaxy, known as GS18660, may be the result of a collision between two galaxies, the researchers reported in their study, published Sept. 8 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

It's rare to find the possible snapshot of a merger like this, given the timescales involved in these systems, Christopher Conselice, a professor of extragalactic astronomy at the University of Manchester in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. Although interactions between galaxies may have been common in the early universe, the creation of ringed systems like this is thought to be unusual.

"In this sense, the galaxy system is quite unique and may give us important information about early galaxy formation," Conselice said in an email.

A surprising discovery

Scientists selected GS18660 for observation because it looked stretched out in older Hubble Space Telescope images.

"We therefore did not target GS18660 specifically as a ring galaxy," Michele Perna, a postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish Astrobiology Center and the first author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "When we observed it with JWST [Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument], the much more detailed data revealed the prominent ring structure and allowed us to investigate the galaxy in three dimensions."

Using JWST, the team looked at the galaxy's unique shape, tracked the motions of its hot gas, analyzed the gas's chemical properties, and studied the galaxy's star formation history.

Intruder-driven rings

When a small galaxy plunges through the center of a larger galaxy, the impact creates a wave of dense gas that ripples outward, similar to how water moves when a stone is dropped into a pond. As a result, a collisional galaxy is formed. Gas piles up along the wave and forms stars, producing a ring. These galaxies are rare in the local universe, and the few candidates found in the distant universe have been hard to confirm.

Several clues support the case for GS18660 as a collisional ring galaxy. For one, the researchers spotted a small companion galaxy, moving away from GS18660 at about 264 miles per second (425 kilometers per second). They also detected a bridge of gas linking the two, and the velocity along it changed, Perna noted. The change in velocity along this bridge-like structure indicates that the companion and GS18660 may be interacting.

Its position is also important, Perna added ‪—‬ the companion is located roughly along the main galaxy's minor axis, consistent with where an intruder would be expected to appear after a head-on plunge through the galaxy's disk.

Backed by stars

Using the companion's speed and distance, the team estimated a rough timeline for the impact. It revealed that the collision happened about 17 million to 42 million years earlier in the galaxy's history. This time scale seems reasonable, Conselice said.

He explained that it is difficult to determine the age of a past interaction directly, but that if one did occur, it must have happened around the time a rapid star-formation episode began and its age should be consistent with the average ages of the star clusters.

Looking at star formation rates with different instruments, the team estimates that 10% to 20% of the stellar mass in the ring formed in the past few tens of millions of years. This suggests that the collision and the ring's burst of new stars might have happened at the same time, so they were most likely caused by the same event, Perna explained.

"It is not, by itself, definitive proof of a collision, but together with the bridge and the ring morphology, it strengthens the case for a recent impact," Perna noted.

The discovery may also shed light on how common these kinds of collisions used to be. Whereas earlier estimates suggested that collisional rings in the early universe might be about as rare as they are today ‪—‬ around 1 in 10,000 galaxies ‪—‬ the new findings hint that head-on collisions that form ring galaxies may be more common in the early universe.

"If GS18660 is confirmed as a collisional ring, it would therefore suggest that we need to revisit our estimates of how frequently these systems occur in the distant universe," Perna said

Another explanation?

The team expressed caution about how much the data can prove. "It is really the combination of several pieces of evidence rather than one single observation," Perna said. "So we regard the collisional interpretation as our preferred scenario rather than a definitive conclusion."

Conselice thinks the evidence presented in the paper is consistent with a genuine collisional origin for the ring. "It looks to me like the merger hypothesis is more likely, given the nearby galaxy intruder and the stability of the intruder galaxy and the main galaxy itself," Conselice said. “Overall, it is convincing evidence that a past interaction and/or merger has occurred for this galaxy system based on the light distribution."

The other competing explanation involves a stellar bar. It proposes that the ring was not made by an intruder at all. GS18660 also shows a bar-like structure running north to south, and bars can funnel gas and stars into rings at specific distances from the center. Perna said the team cannot yet tell whether this is a true stellar bar or a result of the interaction.

A bar would be an exciting finding, too. JWST has already discovered barred galaxies in the early universe, including CEERS-2112. But researchers have not yet found a clear example of a bar-driven ring so early in the universe.

"Whether the ring was triggered by another galaxy or by the internal dynamics of GS18660," Perna said, "the result would tell us something important about how galaxies were already becoming structurally organised when the universe was only a few billion years old."

Editor's note: This article was updated on Oct. 29 to correct a typo. In the image caption, the lead researcher's surname was mistakenly written as "Pera," rather than "Perna." This has been corrected.

When a seagull stares you down, scientists recommend that you stare right back at it to keep your dignity (and your french fries) intact.

Two years ago, astronomers at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory put this idea — and their brand-new telescope — to a test of cosmic proportions, aiming an experimental 144-megapixel camera at the menacing blue eye of the Seagull Nebula (IC 2177).

Located about 3,700 light-years from Earth, the Seagull Nebula is a conglomeration of three giant, billowing clouds of irradiated gas. The "head" of the bird, featured in Rubin's image above, is a cloud called Sharpless 2-292. Its pink plumage is made of hydrogen gas, which glows brightly as ionizing radiation flies forth from the young stars at the cloud's center. The bird's blue "feathers" are clouds of dust reflecting the light from young, blue stars nesting elsewhere in the region.

It's unclear who won this stellar stare-down. If the bird appeared to blink, that's only because its eye is really the triple-star system HD 53367, a flickering trio of very young and energetic stars actively shaping the cloud around them.

The Rubin Observatory, meanwhile, had to avert its gaze quickly; this image is just one of about 16,000 exposures taken of the night sky between Oct. 24 and Dec. 11, 2024, according to the National Science Foundation, which co-manages Rubin along with the U.S. Department of Energy. Taken with the aforementioned Commissioning Camera (ComCam), the deep-space photos served as an early test of the observatory's hardware, software and image-processing capabilities.

ComCam's test image is remarkably crisp — but what's even more impressive is that Rubin has since upgraded to a camera with more than 20 times the field of view. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera currently mounted on the observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope takes 3,200-megapixel images of the night sky every 30 seconds, completing a full scan of the entire southern sky every few nights, Tony Tyson, Rubin's chief scientist, previously told Live Science.

Now that the Legacy Survey of Space and Time has officially begun, Rubin will spend the next 10 years photographing the sky night after night, creating a time-lapse movie of the universe that is expected to reveal millions of cosmic wonders, from exploding supernovas to newfound comets and exoplanets. Perhaps it will even spot another bird.

Like what you see? Take a look at the hidden details in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's debut images here.

October's full "Hunter's Moon" is about to rise, and skywatchers will get two great chances to see it appear on the eastern horizon around sunset.

Although it officially turns full at 12:11 a.m. EDT on Monday (Oct. 26), the Hunter's Moon will appear almost perfectly full as it rises on both Sunday (Oct. 25) and Monday evenings, giving skywatchers two opportunities to observe it.

October's full moon is nicknamed the Hunter's Moon because it was traditionally a signal for hunters to prepare for the coming cold winter by hunting, slaughtering and preserving meat, according to Time and Date. That's an Anglo-Saxon name; Native American names for October's full moon include the Drying Rice Moon, the Falling Leaves Moon and the Freezing Moon.

The first chance to see the Hunter's Moon comes just before sunset on Sunday, when the almost-full moon will rise in the east. The second opportunity comes on Monday, when the moon — still essentially 100% illuminated — will again rise just after sunset. Because it will be in a slightly darker sky, Monday's moonrise will likely be more dramatic.

As it rises Sunday, the moon will appear in the constellation Aries, and Saturn will be to its upper right. On Monday, it will rise above the Pleiades open cluster (M45).

For the best view on either evening, find somewhere with a clear view low to the eastern horizon and be in position shortly before moonrise where you are. An elevated viewpoint, open field or coastline is ideal because buildings, trees and hills can delay the moment the moon becomes visible.

Although the full moon will look magnificent with the naked eye, a backyard telescope or good stargazing binoculars can help you zoom in on various lunar features.

The Hunter's Moon may appear unusually large thanks to the "moon illusion," which makes the moon seem bigger when it's seen beside familiar objects, such as trees and buildings, near the horizon. The illusion stems from the fallacies of how our brains use distance to perceive size.

October's Hunter's Moon isn't a supermoon, but it comes immediately before a notable sequence of four consecutive supermoons. The first will be the next full moon, the Beaver Moon, on Nov. 24, followed by full moons in December, January and February. A supermoon occurs when a full moon happens while the moon is relatively close to Earth in its slightly elliptical orbit, making it appear somewhat larger and brighter than average.

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

The Milky Way's supermassive black hole is surrounded by a surprising trove of heavy metals, according to new observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The metals may offer new clues about how Earth got its share of heavy elements — but it could also make one of the greatest mysteries about our local black hole even harder to solve.

In astronomy, metals refer to any element heavier than hydrogen or helium, with common examples including oxygen, carbon, iron or gold. These elements are forged through nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars that are reaching the ends of their lives, before being sprayed into space and incorporated into new generations of stars.

Scientists say the material spotted by JWST likely came from supernovas ‪—‬ stellar explosions that blasted the metal into the region around Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the monster black hole in the middle of our galaxy.

The metals, detected as gas, appear to have the same composition as several nearby stars, which suggests both the stars and the gas originated at the same time. Researchers shared the observations in a paper published Oct. 19 in The Astronomical Journal, following up on work published in The Astrophysical Journal in May.

"We know there's a black hole at the centre of our galaxy pulling material into itself, but we see that it's eating a lot less material than other supermassive black holes, and more slowly," Nicole Ford, first author of the new paper and a doctoral student in astrophysics at McGill University in Montreal, said in a statement. "Part of understanding why this is happening means looking at the properties of the materials available for it to consume, including gas, dust and the stars orbiting around it."

JWST orbits at Lagrange point 2, which is about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth in the opposite direction of the sun. The telescope identified the heat signatures of specific gas clouds billowing near the black hole, as well as the metal content within those clouds.

"These findings could advance understanding of how metals are distributed around supermassive black holes in more distant galaxies, as well as the processes that supplied Earth with many of these elements," McGill researchers said in the statement. The metals' presence "influences how quickly gases cool, which in turn influences how readily the gas can be drawn into a black hole," they added.

The previous study in The Astrophysical Journal showed that gas emissions near the black hole have been influenced by conditions in the local clouds. Unfortunately, this means the gas alone cannot serve as a proxy for how often the black hole has been active, the researchers said.

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

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found what may be one of the most distant supernovas ever observed. And in a stroke of cosmic luck, the team thinks they're seeing what the explosion looked like just days after it ignited.

The supernova, named AT 2026abck, dates to around 1.15 billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than one-tenth of its current age and bursting with massive stars flickering into life. The massive exploding star violently released its light over 12.5 billion years ago, according to the researchers — so long ago that the distance between us has effectively ballooned sixfold due to the expansion of the universe.

The discovery was described in a paper that was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv Sept. 29 and has not yet been peer reviewed. According to the study authors, this ancient speck of light is stupendously bright.

"At its peak, the supernova is about 8 billion times the brightness of the sun … almost as bright as the whole Milky Way Galaxy," study co-author Xiaohui Fan, an observational cosmologist and professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, told Live Science via email. "Over the course of the explosion, it radiates the energy that the sun will radiate over about 2 billion years."

A beacon from the beginning of space-time

The newly discovered supernova shines brilliantly at over 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit (16,000 degrees Celsius). Its incandescent shell of ejected material has billowed to a radius of approximately 46 astronomical units ‪—‬ about 46 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or about as far as Pluto swings at its farthest point from the sun.

The supernova's host galaxy, designated ID101411, holds about 6.3 billion solar masses and is "forming new stars more than ten times faster than our Milky Way," first author Mingyang Zhuang, an observational astrophysicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science via email.

As with other early galaxies, ID101411 is deficient in metals, meaning any elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, because not enough time had passed to create those heavier elements in the forges of massive stars and their apocalyptic explosions.

The study authors estimate that they observed the supernova as it would have looked just four to 10 days after it exploded. Although this is relatively common, spotting one at such an incredible distance "is extremely rare," Zhuang emphasized. "You have to observe the exact same tiny patch of sky repeatedly with [JWST], and the explosion has to happen at the right moment. We were lucky."

There's another layer of luck that made the discovery even more remarkable: It was observed without the aid of a cosmological quirk called gravitational lensing — a phenomenon predicted by Einstein in which the gravity of a massive object in space bends and magnifies the light emitted by objects behind it.

"Most supernovas this far away were found with help from a massive foreground galaxy cluster acting as a natural magnifying glass," Zhuang explained. "It's the most distant one we've actually seen appear."

This supernova was discovered as part of the NEXUS Treasury program, in which JWST intermittently scours patches of the sky for ancient explosions. It had previously observed the explosion's host galaxy over the past few years and finally witnessed the supernova on Aug. 7 of this year.

An explosion in slow motion

Intriguingly, the star had not yet exploded in JWST's previous viewing, on May 28, 2026, meaning that 71 days passed on our Earthly clocks, even though only about 12 days passed in the supernova's own time frame.

This highlights a mind-bending cosmological effect: The universe's expansion doesn't just stretch space; it slows down time from our perspective.

"Because the universe has expanded since this light was emitted, everything about this explosion appears to us in slow motion, about six times slower than it actually happened," Zhuang said. "Changes that took one week at the supernova take about six weeks to unfold from our point of view."

Mysteries still remain about the nature of this ancient explosion that shone so brilliantly we can observe it across nearly the entire universe.

Rather than a conventional core collapse supernova ‪—‬ in which a star between approximately eight and 50 times the mass of the sun exhaust its nuclear fuel and suffers a rapid core collapse and subsequent explosion ‪—‬ the recently discovered supernova may be one of the universe's rarest, most powerful explosions, the study authors said. Known as a superluminous supernova, this type of explosion releases tens or hundreds of times more energy than conventional supernovas. Whether the explosion continues to heat up or starts to cool could reveal exactly what is happening in its environment and what caused it, the team said.

"Our interpretation is still preliminary," Zhuang concluded. "Follow-up observations will tell us more about exactly what kind of explosion this was."

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

One of the best fall meteor showers peaks this week, when pieces of the famous Halley's Comet streak across Earth's atmosphere as fast-moving "shooting stars."

The Orionid meteor shower will peak overnight Wednesday (Oct. 21) through Thursday (Oct. 22), potentially producing around 20 meteors per hour under a dark sky, according to Time and Date. The Orionids are caused when Earth passes through the debris left by Halley's Comet, which last passed through the inner solar system in 1986 and will return in 2061.

Halley's Comet is presently beyond the orbit of Neptune, according to The Planets Today, but it doesn't need to be close to Earth to cause "shooting stars." Every time the comet travels through the inner solar system, heat from the sun causes it to shed dust and rocky particles along its orbital path. Earth's own orbit takes the comet through streams of that ancient debris several times a year, with the particles vaporizing as they slam into our planet's atmosphere.

The Orionids are particularly fast meteors, striking Earth's atmosphere at around 41 miles per second (66 kilometers per second). They can produce bright streaks, occasional fireballs (extremely bright, sometimes colorful meteors) and "persistent trains" — glowing trails that remain visible briefly after a meteor has disappeared. The best way to view them is with the naked eye, although a nice pair of stargazing binoculars or a small backyard telescope will help you enjoy more sights during peak skywatching season this fall.

Halley's Comet produces not one but two annual meteor showers. Its orbit comes close to Earth's at two different points, so our planet encounters the comet's debris twice each year — once during the Orionids in late October, and again during the Eta Aquariid meteor shower in early May.

There's a slight complication with the Orionids this year. A 71%-illuminated waxing gibbous moon will brighten much of the night, making it harder to spot meteors. However, the moon will set early Thursday morning, creating a valuable window of darkness before dawn. That's also when the constellation Orion will be high in the sky, making the predawn hours the best time to watch.

You can trace the paths of Orionid meteors back to their radiant: the famous red supergiant star system Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. (That's why the shower is called the Orionids.) However, there's no need to look directly at Orion. Meteors seen farther from the radiant can produce longer streaks across the sky; each one comes from a tiny piece of Halley's Comet completing a journey that began many centuries ago.

A mysterious "guest star" recorded by medieval astronomers nearly 850 years ago has revealed new secrets after scientists obtained the clearest images yet of its explosive aftermath.

New observations of Pa 30, thought to be the leftovers of a historic supernova called SN 1181, show that its spectacular firework-like filaments are not smooth streams of material. Instead, they consist of chains of tiny gas knots.

SN 1181 is so called because astronomers in China and Japan recorded its brief appearance in the year 1181, when they saw it as a naked-eye object in the constellation Cassiopeia. Eight surviving texts date its appearance to between Aug. 4 and 6 of that year. The mysterious object remained visible for 185 days.

"It's rare to get this level of detail on a supernova we can date to a specific week in history," Timothy Cunningham, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Warwick who led an international team of researchers to study the object, said in a statement.

SN 1181 is one of only five supernovas in the Milky Way galaxy known to have been witnessed from Earth before the invention of the telescope. (Those optical instruments first appeared in the Netherlands in 1608.) Now, advanced ground-based telescopes can produce wonderfully detailed images of those historic remnants. This latest image is from the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and reveals about 10 times more filamentary structures in Pa 30 than have been seen before. This extraordinary detail gives astronomers fresh clues about the unusual explosion and the environment surrounding the star.

"These images give us the clearest picture yet of Pa 30's structure, and it's not what we expected," said Cunningham, whose team published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal. "The filaments are made of chains of tiny knots rather than smooth streaks, providing new constraints on the nature of the space around the star before it exploded and the physical processes that have shaped the expanding ejecta."

The knot-like structures may have resulted from variations in temperature or density in material surrounding the star as debris from the explosion expanded.

Pa 30 contains another unusual feature: a surviving star that sits almost exactly at the center of the remnant. That's highly unusual, because a supernova explosion typically sends stars away from their original positions. It suggests that the original explosion was highly symmetrical, the researchers said.

Furthermore, Pa 30 is thought to be a Type Iax supernova. Unlike standard Type Ia supernovas, which destroy their stars, a Type Iax event is a lower-energy, incomplete explosion of a white dwarf star that can leave behind a remnant known as a "zombie star." It's the only Type Iax supernova ever found.

Stellar cores called white dwarfs come in an astonishing array of colors, including what scientists say is the first known green star and the reddest star ever found, new research reveals.

A white dwarf star is the dense, cooling core that remains after a low- to medium-mass star runs out of fuel. The new study, published Thursday (Oct. 15) in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments, shows that white dwarfs come in far more colors than their name suggests.

White dwarf stars got their moniker because the first known examples glowed in either white or pale blue. The new study, however, suggests that "white" dwarfs also emit visible-light colors like pink, green, cyan, purple and yellow.

"Most stars, including most white dwarfs, behave like 'perfect radiators,' so their colour is set almost entirely by temperature. But nobody had really looked into what else might be possible for white dwarfs," Mark Hollands, an astronomer at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and first author of the study, said in a statement. "It turns out these incredibly dense stars can produce colours nobody expected, and some of them genuinely surprised me."

The variety of colors is possible due to white dwarfs' densities compared with main-sequence stars, the study suggests. Cooler white dwarfs have a density of about 1 gram per cubic centimeter, much like flowing water on Earth. The density of these white dwarfs is also millions of times denser than the sun's visible surface, or photosphere, leading to unusual conditions.

"Any trace elements that may be present, such as carbon, calcium and sodium, interact with the surrounding dense helium plasma and absorb light across a wider range of colours than they would at lower densities," the researchers said in a statement. "This shifts a star's colour away from the orange, white and blue [typical] of a perfect radiator."

White dwarfs are far away and small, making it difficult to verify their color. So, in the new study, astronomers inferred the colors using spectra, the distinctive chemical fingerprints produced by stars' light. The team analyzed the spectra within a model of color vision that the human eye can see, making the color pop out.

Scientists found that carbon-rich white dwarfs tend to be purple or pink, while those that contain debris from asteroids or comets are usually yellower. Cyan or pale-blue white dwarfs occur when hydrogen and helium molecules strike each other in very dense atmospheres.

The team also discovered WD J1330+6435 — a green star that contains rocky material. The green comes from the additional elements of calcium, lithium and sodium in the star's atmosphere, creating a unique "chartreuse green appearance" that would be visible to the human eye, if we could see it up close.

"The traces of sodium in the atmosphere of this white dwarf absorb the orange part of the spectrum, leaving behind a ghostly green glow," Hollands explained, adding that the one-of-a-kind green star "feels like something out of science fiction." The team also discovered what is likely the reddest star ever found. This white dwarf, called WD J1011+2845, is located roughly 48 light-years from our planet. It has carbon closer to its surface — because the element is being lifted from the interior, due to strong convection currents — that is bending the star's light. This process is making a "deep salmon-pink glow" because the carbon molecules are obstructing the star's other wavelengths.

Overall, in the sample of stars studied — 151 white dwarfs within 65 light-years of Earth — about 1 in 30 white dwarfs glowed in a color other than white. This could mean there are far more colorful stellar remnants littering the universe than anyone anticipated.

What color is the moon? Ask an Earthling, and you'll get a predictably monochromatic answer: white or gray.

But ask the four crewmembers of NASA's Artemis II mission — who spent nearly seven hours circling the moon from just 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) from the lunar surface this April — and you'll wonder if they're talking about the same dusty satellite we can see from Earth.

Yellow, brown, green, blue and tan features fan across vast volcanic plains and lurk at the edges of ominous craters, according to the crew's in-the-moment observations, which were shared this week in NASA's Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report. The 130-page document catalogs everything crewmembers Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen saw during their historic close flyby of the moon on April 6, drawing from 814 gigabytes of photo, video and audio recordings taken from the Orion crew capsule.

This rainbow of lunar color represents distinct geological features that could inform future missions on where to land and where to explore as the world's space agencies race to set up a permanent presence on the moon.

One spot that particularly enthralled the astronauts (and is featured in the image above) is the Aristarchus Plateau — a broad, elevated region on the northwestern edge of the moon's nearside. The region hosts one of the moon's densest collections of ancient volcanic features, including swaths of dark lava deposits and colorful volcanic glasses.

Koch, mission specialist for Artemis II, was shocked to see distinct yellow shades in the region; she likened the plateau to "a yellow snow-capped mountain," with sunlight-reflecting craters providing the bright "snow." She went on to call the region "a jaundiced cheek of the Moon."

"There are so many colors now," Glover, Artemis II's pilot, added while photographing the area. "There's also a green. I see brown, especially Aristarchus and north toward the north pole. … It kind of flows down from the north in brown streaks."

According to the report authors, these colorful hues "could be associated with orange (titanium-rich) and green (magnesium-rich) glass beads respectively," similar to volcanic glass beads collected by the Apollo 15 and 17 missions on separate parts of the moon.

"Chaos across the entire area"

Another colorful patch of the lunar surface that caught the crew's attention was Orientale Basin — a huge, young and multiringed impact crater that's about three times as wide as Massachusetts, according to NASA. Straddling the moon's near and far sides, this massive bull's-eye is rarely visible from Earth, but it dominated the crewmembers' field of view as they orbited around the side of the moon.

"It has just created chaos across that entire area," Wiseman, commander for the mission, said at the time.

When flying over this sprawling basin, the crew noted gray, brown, tan and green below. The largest, outermost ring in the basin contained "almost swamp-like colors," Koch reported, while Glover spotted what looked like "dusted peaks" and "white on the very edges of [the mountains], the spines, the ridgebacks." Chains of craters parading away from the impact site looked "like bubbles rising from a team of scuba divers below," Koch added.

While these may sound like off-the-cuff observations, the Artemis II crew spent more than two years training to study and describe the moon's geology. Their regimen included visiting craters on Earth, taking lessons individually and in classrooms, conducting simulated flybys and, according to the report, bringing "self-selected reference materials" into the Orion capsule to read on the way to the moon.

Thanks to this training, the crew's observations provided a wealth of scientific information that no autonomous camera or orbiter could, the report said.

"The Artemis II mission demonstrated the exceptional value of human observation and cognition as scientific assets in planetary exploration," the report authors concluded. "Unlike cameras, which capture isolated moments and often narrow subsets of a scene, human observers continuously interpret their surroundings, integrating realtime visual perception with contextual understanding."

Or, to put that in Glover's more relatable words to mission control, "It's quite a wicked view."

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

Astronomers have detected the most distant burst of radio signals ever seen: an explosion that's emitting waves of energy from more than 10 billion light-years away.

The event, named FRB 20240304B, is known as a fast radio burst (FRB). Astronomers have detected thousands of FRBs before this. But because these events last only milliseconds, they are extremely difficult to study and their origin stories remain unclear.

In this case, however, astronomers managed to use a radio telescope array and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to chart the event, with JWST narrowing down the precise host galaxy that FRB 20240304B came from. The study, published Thursday (Oct. 8) in the journal Science , sheds more light on a time when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, showing that FRBs arose early in our cosmos' history. The detection more than doubles the previous distance record for FRBs.

The JWST played an instrumental role in the discovery, study co-author Themiya Nanayakkara, a senior lecturer at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, told Live Science in an email. The email was written in collaboration with study first author Manisha Caleb, a senior lecturer in astrophysics at the same university.

For example, JWST's observations showed that the host galaxy was smaller than expected, was "metal-poor" (had few elements besides hydrogen and helium), and was forming a lot of stars. These characteristics could offer new clues about the environments in which FRBs arise, giving more information about the mysterious events. Researchers suggest that this FRB may have been linked to a magnetar, a highly magnetic star core left after a supernova.

Zooming in with the James Webb telescope

The ancient FRB was initially detected with MeerKAT, an array of 64 radio telescopes in South Africa. Nanayakkara said MeerKAT revealed "both the detection of the fast radio burst and, importantly, a very precise position on the sky."

The researchers knew the FRB was far away because of the large dispersion of the radio signal, but initial searches with powerful ground-based telescopes, "saw essentially nothing; it looked like empty sky," the researchers told Live Science. "The most likely explanation was that the galaxy was simply too faint to be detected in those observations. That is where JWST became transformative."

The science team successfully got time on JWST with a program called Director’s Discretionary Time, which is aimed at time-sensitive observations. The researchers started by using JWST's Near Infrared Camera to trace the radio signal and take a very deep image of the target region.

"Suddenly, there it was: a very faint galaxy almost exactly where we expected the host of the FRB to be," Nanayakkara said. The researchers then used JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph to obtain a spectrum (wavelengths of light broken into different chemical signatures), which showed hydrogen and oxygen.

"These spectral features act like fingerprints: because we know the wavelengths at which they are produced in the laboratory, we can measure how much they have been shifted by the expansion of the universe," Nanayakkara explained. "That gave us a very precise redshift of about 2.15. We are therefore seeing this galaxy as it was when the universe was only around three billion years old, so roughly one-fifth of its current age."

Because the host galaxy is fairly young, it supports the idea that at least some FRBs are generated by magnetars, which are more likely to appear in spry galaxies where intense star formation is occurring, the team said.

The team plans to continue hunting for FRBs with JWST.

"We do not know what the sources will be yet," Nanayakkara said, as that depends on what pops up in the sky and is spotted by ground-based radio telescopes. "Once our radio telescopes find and localize a suitable new source, we can trigger the JWST observations. So it is quite exciting, because we really have no idea what we will find when we combine the power of these two types of telescopes."

Long before it became the luminous spiral galaxy we call home, the Milky Way was a sprawling, chaotic swarm of thousands of small galaxies, new research shows.

The findings suggest that in the first 2 billion years after the Big Bang, the region of the universe that would become our galaxy was littered with thousands of smaller galaxies of many sizes and shapes. Over time, these galaxies collided and merged into the single galaxy in which we reside today.

"Looking at these results, it's very clear that the physics happening right after the Big Bang has direct impact on what we see today in the local universe," study co-author Harley Katz, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, said in a statement.

To understand more about the early universe, astronomers build sophisticated computer models that encode the laws of nature to see how the cosmos may have evolved. The new work, which is the result of three years of supercomputer simulations, is the most detailed tracing yet of how a galaxy like ours came to be. It also arrives just as astronomers need a stronger yardstick for what they're seeing in the early universe.

Megatron, the cosmic transformer

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can peer farther into the early universe than any previous telescope, and its discoveries have often defied computer models. For instance, JWST found surprisingly bright early galaxies and a mysterious new class of compact galaxies dubbed "Little Red Dots." These anomalies demonstrate that current computer models need an update to handle the complex physics of the early universe, the researchers said.

To bridge that gap, the scientists built a new suite of supercomputer simulations they call Megatron. By tracing ancient gas, starlight and chemistry from 180 million years to 2 billion years after the Big Bang, Megatron predicts the distinct light signatures of its virtual galaxies, according to the statement. Because JWST collects the same type of spectral data across a similar span of cosmic time, scientists can directly cross-reference the simulation against real observations to pinpoint what the old models are missing, the team said.

The simulation also tracks how the universe's first stars formed, died and forged the essential elements that make life as we know it possible. By comparing the simulation with JWST observations of early galaxies and with the chemical traces left in ancient stars, scientists can better understand how those first stars enriched their surroundings, the researchers said.

"Together, these complementary observations allow us to test competing models of the first stars in ways that weren't previously possible," study co-author Martin Rey, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Bath in the U.K., said in a separate statement.

The scientists detailed their findings in one of the six papers the Megatron collaboration published Sept. 30 in The Open Journal of Astrophysics.

Assembling the Milky Way

The team's simulation begins 180 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe is devoid of stars and galaxies and holds only pristine gas. As the next 2 billion years pass,, the model captures how the very first stars light up the dark universe and kick off "cosmic dawn," eventually culminating in those stars' violent deaths. As they die, the stars spread newly forged heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron into the surrounding gas, laying the building blocks for future stars and planets.

The simulation ends 2 billion years after the Big Bang, but the Milky Way's mergers continued long after this point, and scientists are still discovering traces of the small galaxies that have joined it. The most recent massive merger, with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, began more than 6 billion years ago and is still unfolding.

The simulation results help scientists understand how certain physics parameters impact the early universe, and better match up JWST's observations with computer models. But it also highlights areas that need further study.

"But there are also things we're not getting right, which is interesting too — what are the parts we're still missing?" Katz said in the statement. "That can lead you into new directions and new questions."

Megatron team members in the U.K. are now developing the next generation of simulations, backed by dedicated time on the country's supercomputers. Those simulations will include more complex physics, such as active black holes, which JWST has revealed to be surprisingly common in the early universe, the researchers said.

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

A 1,000-mile-long (1,600 kilometers) Martian cloud that emerges and then quickly disappears from the Red Planet's sky nearly every day is even weirder than scientists realized. New simulations suggest that the eerie apparition can only be explained using "exotic physics" that have been theorized but never seen on Earth or anywhere else in the solar system.

The mysterious floating mass, dubbed the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC), frequently emerges above Arsia Mons, a 12-mile-tall (20 km) extinct volcano located in the Tharsis region, just south of the Red Planet's equator. The water vapor cloud was first spotted in 2018 by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and has since appeared nearly every morning throughout Mars' spring and summer, when increased solar radiation triggers strong surface winds. But it lasts only a few hours each day, before fully evaporating.

The AMEC can stretch up to 1,100 miles (1,800 km) long, around one-twelfth of Mars' circumference. For context, that is roughly twice the length of the U.K. or the distance between New York City and Miami.

Although the Red Planet is no stranger to giant dust clouds and occasional "iridescent streaks" of carbon dioxide, it is almost completely devoid of atmospheric water vapor. That makes it extremely rare for puffy, Earth-like clouds to form there, let alone ones so vast. As a result, scientists have struggled to explain this whacky weather.

But in a new study published Wednesday (Oct. 7) in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers used Mars Express data to create new simulations in an effort to finally explain the AMEC. Initially, the team struggled to recreate the puzzling phenomenon. But when they abandoned traditional meteorological principles in favor of a more out-of-the-box explanation, they were eventually successful.

"To create the AMEC in our modelling, we found that we needed to include some exotic physics … physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature," study first author Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who was affiliated with Sorbonne University in Paris at the time of the study, said in a statement. "Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped."

"Wholly unexpected"

The AMEC is an orographic cloud, meaning it forms as strong winds push water vapor up and over a raised structure, such as a mountain. Similar clouds also exist on Earth, including the "Levanter" cloud, which occasionally forms above the Rock of Gibraltar in southern Europe. However, the Martian equivalent cannot be explained by the same processes that occur on our planet.

On Earth, clouds form via a process called heterogeneous nucleation, in which moist air cools and condenses into ice crystals that form around tiny atmospheric particles, such as dust, salt, pollen or soot. But while Mars has plenty of atmospheric dust, that's not what's happening there.

"For the AMEC, it seems that cloud formation takes place without needing any of this 'stuff' [in the air]," said Hernández-Bernal, who has been studying the AMEC for the past six years. "Water vapour turns directly into icy cloud particles without any middle step. It's akin to droplets of condensation appearing in the middle of a room, rather than on a window."

The researchers call this "homogeneous nucleation" and say it has never been seen before in a planetary atmosphere. "It's wholly unexpected," Hernández-Bernal added.

Other scientists previously predicted that homogeneous nucleation could occur in Earth's upper atmosphere or in the skies above Venus. However, this has been deemed highly unlikely because it requires humidity levels roughly 100,000 times greater than those on our planet's surface.

Given that modern-day Mars is almost completely devoid of water, it may seem unlikely that its humidity levels could reach such lofty heights. However, the Mars Express data tells a different story.

As wind rises up the slopes of Arsia Mons, which is more than twice as tall as Mount Everest, it creates a powerful wave that shoots air into the upper atmosphere at tremendous speed. The researchers calculated that the temperature of this air can drop by up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in just 10 minutes. This not only makes it easy to freeze but also greatly increases the humidity within the wave, allowing homogeneous nucleation to take place, the simulations show.

So where does all this water come from? Some of it is already in the atmosphere, but some likely originates at the summit of Arsia Mons, which is covered with a thick layer of frost, the researchers suggested.

"A big success"

The new simulations mark a big step forward in our understanding of the AMEC and wider Martian meteorology.

"We don't have nearly as much information about Mars' atmosphere as we do about Earth's, so reproducing the AMEC to this degree is a big success for the model," Hernández-Bernal said.

The findings would not have been possible without the Mars Express orbiter, which used three instruments — the Visual Monitoring Camera, the High Resolution Stereo Camera and the OMEGA instrument — to map out how the AMEC takes shape and evolves every day. It is also one of the only Mars spacecraft that can see Arsia Mons in daylight.

"Mars Express discovered the AMEC, has followed up and monitored it for years, and is now helping reveal the secrets of its formation," Colin Wilson, the project scientist for Mars Express, who was not involved in the new study, said in the statement.

The discovery is also a reminder that, despite sharing the same basic principles, weather systems do not behave the same on other worlds as they do on Earth, which could have big implications for solar system exploration and the hunt for extraterrestrial life on distant exoplanets.

"While clouds on Earth and Mars seem to be governed by the same 'rules', understanding this exotic Martian cloud required exotic physics — and this may be true elsewhere in the cosmos," Wilson said.

Astronomers have spotted a never-before-seen type of "phoenix planet" rising from the ashes of a dying alien sun. The discovery, which the scientists say was "completely unexpected," raises hopes that more of these reborn alien worlds could be lurking throughout the cosmos — and may offer a glimpse of our own solar system's fate.

The unnamed exoplanet was spotted circling the white dwarf HS 0209+0832, which is located roughly 270 light-years from Earth. White dwarfs are stellar remnants, sometimes dubbed "zombie stars," that form from the leftovers of massive red giants that run out of fuel before eventually collapsing into shriveled husks. HS 0209+0832 is a particularly young white dwarf, still burning at around 63,000 degrees Fahrenheit (35,000 degrees Celsius), which suggests it made this transition within the past few million years.

Scientists previously discovered some surprising heavy elements within the visible spectrum of HS 0209+0832, which was first captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in the late 1990s. These elements ‪—‬ which included aluminium, titanium and nickel ‪—‬ are not normally found inside white dwarfs, so their presence suggested that something unusual was going on. But until now, there was not enough data to figure out what.

In the new study, published Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers took a closer look at HS 0209+0832. Using some of Hubble's updated instruments and data from other observatories, the team captured a more detailed spectrum of the stellar zombie. This revealed a high concentration of additional heavy elements, including zinc and copper, as well as niobium, which has never been seen in a white dwarf before.

The researchers think these out-of-place elements were created during the death throes of the former red giant and later coalesced into a "second-generation" planet around the newly forged white dwarf. They suspect the atmosphere of this hypothetical planet is being stripped by the white dwarf's stellar winds, causing the rare elements to fall back onto the zombie star.

Follow-up observations then revealed a recurring dip in the brightness of HS 0209+0832, suggesting that an exoplanet was repeatedly passing in front of the undead star. Based on the alien world's orbit, which lasts approximately 4.4 Earth days, and the duration of its transits in front of the star, the team predicted that the planet is roughly the size of Jupiter. (Its close proximity to the white dwarf also supports the hypothesis that its atmosphere is being stripped away.)

"Second-generation planets are worlds that form out of the material a star casts off as it dies," study first author Jamie Williams, a doctoral candidate in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Warwick in the U.K., said in a statement. "They're incredibly rare, and finding one around a white dwarf was completely unexpected. It's a bit like finding a planet that has risen from the ashes of the very star it once orbited."

"Completely unexpected"

This is not the first time astronomers have spotted an exoplanet around a white dwarf. For example, in 2019, some of the authors of the new study previously spotted an alien world surrounding the white dwarf WDJ0914+1914. However, in that case, they were confident that it was a first-generation world that somehow survived its star's fiery end.

But the heavy elements that seem to be falling onto HS 0209+0832 — and the relative lack of other elements common in first-generation planets, such as silicon and iron — suggest that's not what's happened for this recently detected world.

"This pattern of elements is a telltale sign of the 's-process,' a nuclear reaction that builds heavy elements inside dying stars during their bloated red giant phase," study co-author Nicholas Stone, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in the statement. "It's a chemical signature no ordinary, 'first-generation' planet should carry, which told us that this new planet was something different."

Instead, the newly detected exoplanet likely formed directly from the material that was shed by the dying red giant after it expanded and before it collapsed in on itself.

Similar phoenix planets have been spotted alongside other stellar remnants, such as pulsars, which form when stars explode as supernovas. However, until now, such worlds have never been seen around a white dwarf.

Rising from the ashes

"What's remarkable about the planet around HS 0209+0832 is that this isn't a planet from somewhere else, or a survivor from the system's birth, it looks like it was built from the very material its own star cast off as it died," study co-author Boris Gänsicke, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick who also helped to discover the exoplanet around WDJ0914+1914 in 2019, said in the statement. "In a sense, this system has given birth to a new world using the foundations of the old one."

HS 0209+0832 may have once harbored other exoplanets when it was a red giant. But if they existed, these alien worlds likely perished in flames as the dying star ballooned — similar to what experts think will happen to Earth when the sun runs out of fuel and transitions into a red giant in around 5 billion years.

Once the sun has finished bulging, it will turn into a white dwarf too. The new discovery hints that our star could also host brand-new worlds after it has transformed, creating a sort of solar system 2.0.

"Finding this one example raises the question of how many more might be out there and might our own solar system host a second-generation planet formed from the ashes of our sun," Gänsicke said.

However, more work is required to figure out exactly how the newfound exoplanet formed and, as a result, how likely this scenario is. The researchers suspect that another object, such as a lost stellar sibling, may have been required to create the new world.

"Forming the protoplanetary disc in this situation is not easy and helps explain why these planets are so rare," Williams said. "To form a disc of material necessary to birth a planet, HS 0209+0832 likely required a companion star that pulled the ejected material back into orbit, rather than letting it escape."

The Draconids, one of the year's most unpredictable meteor showers, will peak this week. Although only a few "shooting stars" are expected, the shower has a history of producing spectacular meteor storms with little warning.

The Draconid meteor shower takes place Oct. 6-10 each year, peaking on Oct. 8-9, when around 10 "shooting stars" per hour are expected. Whereas most meteor showers are best seen after midnight or during the dark hours before dawn, the best time to view the Draconids is in the evening, according to Timeanddate.com, making it one of the more convenient meteor showers of the year. Just after dark Thursday (Oct. 8) will be the best time to look.

The Draconids are different from most other showers because their radiant — the point from which their meteors appear to originate — is in the constellation Draco, the Dragon, which is highest in the sky in the evening. It's also circumpolar in much of the Northern Hemisphere, so it never sets below the horizon. However, there's no need to stare directly at Draco, because meteors can appear anywhere in the sky.

This year, the Draconid meteor shower peaks at the perfect time of the month for dark skies. Because the new moon occurs Saturday (Oct. 10), there will be no significant moonlight when the Draconids reach maximum activity.

However, the Draconids are notoriously unpredictable; while just a handful of meteors per hour are expected, the shower can sometimes produce huge meteor storms. For example, during the Draconids' peak in 1933, Europe saw 500 meteors per minute, according to NASA, and during the 1946 peak, 50 to 100 meteors were seen per minute in the U.S.

The source of the Draconids is Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, which was discovered in 1900 and orbits the sun every 6.6 years. It was last in the inner solar system in 2025 and will return in 2031.

Each October, Earth passes through streams of dust and debris left along the comet's orbit. When those tiny particles strike Earth's atmosphere, they heat up and vaporize, creating streaks of light in the night sky.

Most observers will probably see only a few Draconids this year, but with a meteor shower this unpredictable, it's always worth looking up. The best way to see the Draconids is with the naked eye, but a good pair of stargazing binoculars or a nice backyard telescope will help you enjoy the feast of fall skywatching events on the horizon. Amazon has great deals on skywatching gear this week, so it's a perfect time to get involved.

Researchers have observed the strongest candidate yet for a "microblazar" — a dazzling object that has long been predicted to exist but never spotted.

Observations of microblazars would give astronomers closer views of black holes emitting powerful jets of energy and help them understand how these extreme objects behave.

Blazars are some of the most energetic objects in the universe. They are a type of quasar — a brightly glowing object fueled by a supermassive black hole stripping material from its host galaxy and then ejecting some of it in powerful, opposing jets of particles and radiation. To qualify as a blazar, one of those near-light-speed jets needs to point directly at Earth. Astronomers have previously discovered smaller versions of quasars, dubbed microquasars, and long theorized that there must be smaller versions of blazars as well.

Now, an international team led by astronomers in Spain, the Netherlands and Argentina has described a microblazar in a study accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"It is the first time that we have a serious candidate," Josep Martí, an astronomer at the University of Jaén in Spain and first author of the study, told Live Science.

The object, called IRAS 18293-0941, is located in our galaxy, about 12,000 light-years from Earth, and it's hidden behind a veil of dust. It is a binary system that includes a black hole that orbits a hot, gigantic star every 11 days. Matter from the star falls into the black hole, and some of this material is jettisoned into the surrounding environment in two opposing jets. One of those jets flares toward Earth.

These objects, as well as microquasars in general, are tricky to observe, Martí said. "Because of stellar evolution, you need to catch the system at the right time," he added. "The microquasar phase of evolution is very short, and so it is difficult to find one in that phase."

Theorists predicted that microblazars would have special characteristics that should help define them. These features include powerful emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum, rapid changes in brightness (variability), and a hotspot behind them where its opposing jet heats up the interstellar medium in the opposite direction of Earth.

To observe IRAS 18293-0941, the study authors used a variety of instruments ‪—‬ including the Calar Alto Astronomical Observatory in Spain, a network of radio astronomy telescopes called the European VLBI Network, and the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa ‪—‬ as well as archival data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

They found that IRAS 18293-0941 has all of the expected microblazar characteristics, except one ‪—‬ variability. Microblazars have rapid variability, which means their brightness changes a lot in a short period, because one of the jets is facing Earth and small changes in brightness are amplified by an effect called Doppler boosting.

Martí said IRAS 18293−0941's lack of rapid variability could be explained by the dense cloud of gas surrounding it, which could smooth out quick fluctuations in brightness.

The researchers are currently investigating whether the observed area behind the microblazar is in fact a hotspot, study co-author Pedro Luque-Escamilla, an astronomer at the University of Jaén, told Live Science.

Even with one of the expected features missing, this object is a promising candidate for the first known microblazar. "The claims and the results of the paper are sensible and there are no questionable hidden assumptions," Kinwah Wu, a theoretical astrophysicist at University College London who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. "The source in this paper had shown signatures of interactions between the jets and the ambient material, which naturally leads to [particle] interaction."

Svetlana Jorstad, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Astrophysical Research at Boston University who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email that the new study was "very interesting, important and comprehensive."

Itumeleng Monageng, an astronomer at the University of Cape Town who was also not involved in the research, added that the team's observations "presents a previously overlooked mechanism for generating some of the highest energy emissions observed."

Microblazars "may power some of the universe's most energetic processes," Monageng told Live Science in an email.

Martí, J., Luque-Escamilla, P. L., Marcote, B., Abaroa, L., Aguasca-Cabot, A., Combi, J. A., Romero, G. E., Paredes, J. M., García, F., Fogantini, F., Saavedra, E. A., Del Ser, D., & Van Den Eijnden, J. (2026). A Galactic microblazar as a potential accelerator of ultra-high-energy particles. Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202661105

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

You may have watched the moon block out the sun during a solar eclipse, but have you ever seen it do that to a planet? Early Tuesday (Oct. 6) morning, skywatchers across much of eastern North America will have an opportunity to watch a crescent moon pass directly in front of Jupiter. The rare alignment won't happen again for 11 years.

During the event, known as a lunar occultation, Jupiter will disappear behind the moon for up to about an hour before suddenly reappearing. The occultation will be visible before dawn from much of the eastern and central U.S., Canada and the Caribbean, while parts of Africa will experience the event during daylight, according to In-The-Sky.org.

The moon will be a beautiful waning crescent, just 20% illuminated, and Jupiter will shine brightly alongside it. The pair will rise together in the east early Tuesday morning and gradually appear to move closer as the moon travels eastward against the background stars.

When the occultation begins, Jupiter will remain hidden behind the moon for roughly an hour. No telescope will be needed to watch Jupiter disappear and reappear. However, a pair of binoculars or a small telescope will make the event much more dramatic.

Through a telescope, Jupiter will look like a tiny disc rather than a point of light and will take about a minute to disappear completely behind the moon. An easy way to photograph the event is to use a smart telescope to image the moon. (Here's everything you need to know about lunar photography).

Below are the times when Jupiter will disappear and reappear in 10 major cities Tuesday morning, according to the International Occultation Timing Association.

• Chicago: 3:22-4:17 a.m. CDT
• Atlanta: 4:15-5:17 a.m. EDT
• Detroit: 4:16-5:20 a.m. EDT
• Miami: 4:20-5:09 a.m. EDT
• Washington, D.C.: 4:20-5:24 a.m. EDT
• Philadelphia: 4:22-5:26 a.m. EDT
• New York: 4:23-5:27 a.m. EDT
• Toronto: 4:25-5:22 a.m. EDT
• Boston: 4:26-5:30 a.m. EDT
• Montreal: 4:30-5:26 a.m. EDT

Outside the occultation path, Jupiter won't disappear at all. Instead, it will appear to be skimmed by the crescent moon — still a potentially spectacular sight that could produce some amazing photos. From across much of the world, the crescent moon and Jupiter will appear exceptionally close together.

The next lunar occultation of Jupiter visible from North America will occur on Nov. 27, 2037, according to When The Curves Line Up.

The debut images from a new Earth-observing satellite have just given us a view of the impossible: giant auroras rippling over the North Pole in broad daylight.

Earth's auroras are one of our planet's signature wonders — a sight worth advertising in interstellar travel guides, alongside our perfect total solar eclipses, bright shooting stars and majestic blobfish. They are the beautiful result of electrical storms in the atmosphere, appearing when charged solar particles skate along Earth's magnetic-field lines and collide with light-emitting molecules near the poles. (Auroras do exist on other planets, but they are usually not in bright visible colors like ours.)

To human eyes, auroras come out only at night and rarely stray from the poles. That's what makes these first observations from the joint European-Chinese Smile mission, which officially began science operations this week, so special.

Captured in ultraviolet light, the stunning images show a huge, serpent-like ring of charged particles coiling around the North Pole in July 2026. In the foreground, Earth appears ghostly and featureless, glowing like a half moon. The aurora writhes around our planet's sunlit side, covering about a third of it, while Earth's dark nightside bleeds into the background sky. Far behind, bright stars fall like raindrops as Smile shifts subtly in its orbit.

The view alone is worth smiling about, but the new images also promise exciting science to come. Taken just two weeks after scientists first turned Smile's Ultraviolet Aurora Imager on, the observations show that the satellite's instruments are working as they should and that the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and Chinese Academy of Sciences mission can officially begin.

Launched on May 19, Smile will spend the next three years watching Earth from a highly elliptical orbit that takes it about 75,000 miles (121,000 kilometers) over the North Pole — about a third of the way to the moon. From there, Smile can observe the North Pole for a record-breaking 45 hours at a time, offering an unprecedented view of solar activity there.

In addition to the Ultraviolet Aurora Imager, Smile carries three more science instruments to detect X-rays, magnetic fields and light ions over Earth.

This week, scientists also tested the spacecraft's soft X-ray imager by pointing it at the distant supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, located about 11,000 light-years from Earth (image above). Although the camera is working fine, the detector is still picking up a bit too much light when aimed at Earth, so it will require a bit more calibration from scientists on the ground.

Scientists have a new tool for mapping the universe's perplexing acceleration.

A Canadian telescope designed to chart the distribution of hydrogen gas across the ancient universe has proved it can do so using only its own data for the first time, without the help of other telescopes. The results took seven years to prove, but the payoff could be huge.

According to the authors of a new study published Monday (Sept. 28) in The Astrophysical Journal, the telescope could give scientists a new, cost-effective way to study dark energy, the poorly understood force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate over time.

"Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and the raw material from which stars form," study co-author Arnab Chakraborty, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, said in a statement. "Its faint radio emission acts like a cosmic tracer, revealing how matter is distributed across space."

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a set of radio telescopes, principally located near Penticton, British Columbia, that map the entire northern sky every day. Before the results from the new study, CHIME had to confirm its own observations with other telescopes — an expensive and time-consuming process.

It was important for CHIME to look at the universe's ancient hydrogen gas with its own data, to serve as an independent point of measurement that did not rely on other telescopes, the team explained. The new paper, which was nearly a decade in the making, is based on 94 nights of observations in 2019 that were carefully double-checked before publication. The telescope can detect radio signals as far back as 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was a fraction of its current age.

"We worked very hard to convince ourselves that this wasn't a false alarm," Chakraborty said. "After all the tests, the signal remained. That gave us confidence we were seeing real hydrogen from the distant universe."

An accompanying paper published in The Astrophysical Journal includes more information about where hydrogen is found in the cosmos. This study suggests that about 2% of hydrogen is "neutrally atomic" — meaning the atoms contain a balance of just one proton and one electron, resulting in no overall electric charge — which is "broadly consistent" with measurements by other telescopes, Shabbir Shaikh, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and a co-author of both papers, said in the statement.

Mapping the distribution of this common gas could reveal new clues about the expansion of the universe at different times in cosmic history. In future research, the team plans to go through CHIME's other seven years of observations to gather more information about its hydrogen gas studies.

Researchers have discovered an exoplanet that travels around its small, red star backward, much like a rubber duck spinning against the current in a whirlpool. The discovery could give insight about how exoplanets form around the most common types of stars in our galaxy.

It's a mystery why the alien world, called GJ 3090 b, orbits its star backward (also called a retrograde orbit). Stars and planets usually form from the same rotating disk of gas and dust, called a protoplanetary disk. Newly formed celestial objects normally rotate in the same direction as the protoplanetary disk, because changing the rotational direction requires a lot of energy applied in the right way.

Astronomers have discovered a few exoplanets with retrograde orbits before; these orbits often happen when the gravitational attraction of other massive objects in their star systems scrambles the planets' orbits. However, this newly discovered planetary system doesn't seem to have any massive objects that could have changed the retrograde planet's orbit, researchers reported in a study published Sept. 21 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"We looked for the kind of massive companion that could have forced the planet into such an extreme orbit," study co-author Yann Carteret, an astronomer at the University of Geneva, said in a statement. "We may need to think differently about how this system acquired its unusual architecture."

A planetary mystery

For their new study, the researchers analyzed 23 hours of observations from two exoplanet-hunting instruments installed on a 12-foot-wide (3.6 meters) telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. They saw the retrograde planet cross in front of its star 10 times. Each time it passed in front of the star, the starlight reaching Earth dimmed a little. Measuring the extent and duration of that dimming revealed the planet's size and information about its orbit.

What made this detection particularly difficult was the type of star: an M dwarf. These stars are small, relatively cool and so dim that even the closest M dwarf stars to Earth can't be seen with the naked eye. About three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way are M dwarfs, so studying them is particularly important for understanding our galaxy's exoplanets.

The star system in question is made of two, or possibly three, planets smaller than Neptune, each of which takes less than 16 days to orbit the star. GJ 3090 b is the innermost planet, completing an orbit about once every 2.9 days. Its orbit is one of the most misaligned ones scientists have detected so far, at a whopping 136 degrees out of alignment with the star's spin, making the planet nearly upside down ‪—‬ similar to Venus in our solar system.

Because GJ 3090 b is the planet closest to the star, it's unlikely that its orbit was disturbed by a massive planet or a hidden binary star; the other planets in the system are not upside down. And because they're farther from the star, a large gravitational disruption would probably affect them more, not less.

Instead, the researchers suggested that the unusual planet may have simply been born upside down. If a lot of gas and dust from outside the star system got sucked into the system, it might have replaced the protoplanetary disk with a second, newer disk at a different angle to the original, which could have formed the retrograde planet. The amount of material making up the inner planets (formed from the dusty, gaseous disk) is less than the amount that would pull on the star's spin enough to make the star change its rotational direction, keeping the system in a balanced misalignment, the researchers explained.

"The idea that a planetary system could be rebuilt from a second, differently oriented disk is particularly exciting," Vincent Bourrier, an astronomer at the University of Geneva and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "It suggests that the environment around a young star can play a much bigger role in determining the architecture of its planets than we might have expected."

Saturn is about to reach its annual opposition this week, when it appears at its brightest and biggest all year and becomes the only planet visible all night.

The short, exciting period for skywatchers has more to do with where Earth is in its orbit than with Saturn's journey around the sun. Opposition occurs when Earth moves directly between a planet and the sun, placing the two planets on the same side of the solar system. For observers on Earth, that means Saturn appears opposite the sun in the sky, just like a full moon (hence the name "opposition"). Saturn therefore rises in the east around sunset, 100% illuminated, before reaching its highest point around midnight and finally sinking toward the western horizon around sunrise.

This year's opposition occurs Sunday (Oct. 4), making the few weeks on each side an excellent time to start looking. At 784 million miles (1.26 billion kilometers) away, Saturn will be relatively close to Earth, causing its disk to appear about as large as it gets through a telescope and making its pale-yellow light shine more brightly than at other times of the year. You won't need any equipment to find it; under a clear sky, Saturn will be easily visible to the naked eye as a bright, steady point of light, between the constellations Pisces and Cetus.

Once you've located Saturn, the best way to view it is in a backyard telescope so you can see the planet's rings in sharp relief. Try it yourself — observing Saturn's rings for the first time is one of the most memorable sights available to amateur astronomers. Larger apertures and higher magnifications may also reveal some of Saturn's moons, including Titan, the planet's largest satellite, but even a relatively modest backyard telescope can reveal Saturn's rings.

The rings themselves are particularly interesting this year. Saturn's axial tilt means our viewing angle of the planet's rings changes throughout its roughly 29-year journey around the sun. After the rings appeared almost edge-on from Earth in 2025, they're gradually opening up again, giving observers an increasingly clear view.

You don't need to restrict your observing to the night of opposition; Saturn will remain a prominent evening target throughout October. However, the nights of Sept. 30 to Oct. 4 offer an ideal combination of brightness, visibility and all-night observing. There are also plenty of other great stargazing sights to look for this fall.

If you've been waiting for an excuse to point a telescope at Saturn, this is your moment. The next time Saturn will be at opposition will be Oct. 18, 2027.

Moving toward Lagrange point L2 around a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is about to begin its study of our universe.

Launched on Aug. 30, the space telescope has already released its first images before its 300-megapixel camera is fully calibrated, capturing clusters of stars as blurry green rings. Once Roman's Wide Field Instrument is fully functional, the telescope should produce images as crisp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope but encompassing an area 100 times larger in each snap, NASA has stated. Experts hope to use these images to uncover more information about dark energy and possible habitable exoplanets.

With Roman's first test images now published, we asked our readers what they're most excited about with this new space telescope.

Over 270 readers responded, with the largest voting group, 57%, picking "Habitable exoplanets" as their response.

When talking about the possibility of life on other planets, one reader commented, "I'm sure the telescope will find plenty of new worlds outside our solar system, and a fair amount in habitable zones as well, but on if these planets have life of any sort I can't imagine any space telescope will [be] able to detect any signs."

Following behind this majority, 27% of readers chose "The possible source of dark energy." One reader reflected their interest in dark energy by writing, "Since dark matter and dark energy seem to make up most of our Universe, it seems imperative that we at least know SOMETHING about them. Except that they exist."

Another commenter echoed this statement, writing, "Dark energy and dark matter, according to our current knowledge, composes the majority of the mass of the Universe yet we are not really sure what they are and exactly what their influence is on our Universe. That is a huge gap in our knowledge base. It is not something that would be good to know, it is something we must know before we go where no man has gone before."

The smallest voting group, representing 9% of respondents, admitted, "I don't know, but I will use its pictures for my desktop wallpaper." If you fall into that group, we recommend checking out our Space Photo of the Week and Earth from Space series to get more image options for all your devices.

An enormous, ongoing cosmic "fart" is causing a mysterious zombie star to flare up repeatedly, shining bright pulses of X-rays toward Earth, a new study reveals. The unprecedented observations shed light on how some of the universe's most extreme objects interact with one another.

Around 13,000 light-years from Earth lies an unusual binary star system, known as BP Crucis. It contains a blue hypergiant star roughly 60 times larger than the sun, dubbed Wray 977, alongside a neutron star — the undead and ultradense remains of a star that exploded via a supernova — that astronomers have labeled GX 301-2.

This stellar "zombie," which contains the same mass as our home star packed into an object roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, is a type of neutron star called a pulsar, which has an extremely powerful magnetic field and spins rapidly. This means it constantly shoots out a wobbling beam of powerful electromagnetic radiation, including X-rays, into the cosmos at regular intervals. When this beam aligns with Earth — approximately every 11 minutes, in the case of GX 301-2 — our planet's telescopes detect a flash.

However, unlike most other known pulsars, GX 301-2 also emits frequent X-ray flares (separate from the regular beams), which cause it to shine much brighter at repeated intervals. And, until now, researchers were unsure why.

In the new study, published Sept. 18 in the journal Science Advances, researchers used the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) — a space telescope jointly operated by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — to take a closer look at BP Crucis. In doing so, they discovered that the neutron star flared up every time it passed through a giant plume of "stellar wind plasma" shooting out of its hypergiant partner.

This is the first time that researchers have ever detected this type of stellar material interacting with a neutron star, or with any other similar stellar remnant, opening the door to studying similar systems in the future.

"We've never before seen clear indications of wind plasma falling onto a compact object," study first author Roi Rahin, a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "We can now test our understanding of these processes in much greater detail."

Whoever smelt it … explodes?

All stars that actively burn via nuclear fusion release streams of radiation and charged particles known as stellar wind. The sun emits such a stream, known as the solar wind, which can trigger vibrant aurora displays near Earth's poles.

However, massive stars like Wray 977 blow stellar winds that are much more extreme. The blue hypergiant emits a single giant plume of concentrated ionized gas, or plasma, that spills out at around 335,000 mph (540,000 km/h). (Scientists think the stellar wind is likely sculpted into a single, concentrated plume due to the gravitational effects of the star's ultradense neighbor.)

GX 301-2 circles Wray 977 every 41.5 days and experiences its X-ray flares when it reaches its closest and farthest points from its partner, with the strongest flares occurring at its closest point. As a result, researchers had long suspected that the flares occurred when the neutron star passed through the stellar wind plume. However, they had no way of proving this without more evidence.

During a 16-hour observation period coinciding with one of the neutron star's flares, researchers used XRISM to capture highly detailed X-ray spectra, revealing "rapidly changing emission and absorption lines" that showed how the plume ebbed and flowed around GX 301-2, NASA representatives wrote.

"We could see how the dense stream of plasma acts very close to the neutron star," study co-author Nazma Islam, an astronomer at the Manipal Centre for Natural Sciences in India and formerly a researcher at UMBC and NASA Goddard, said in the statement. "It was clear that these observations were groundbreaking, but at the same time this meant the analysis had to be especially detailed."

Using this data, the researchers could simulate exactly how the plasma fell onto and swirled around the passing neutron star. When enough stellar material has accumulated on its surface, the stellar zombie explodes, unleashing the bright flashes we can detect on Earth.

The team now hopes to use XRISM to study future flaring events to better understand the relationship between GX 301-2 and Wray 977's windy plume.

"The BP Crucis system is an ideal laboratory for studying wind-fed pulsar accretion," Brian Williams, XRISM project scientist at NASA Goddard, said in the statement, and XRISM is "an ideal instrument for advancing our understanding of the processes involved."

Behold: one of the largest panoramas from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) released to date. This busy and breathtaking image offers a remarkably detailed view of IC 348, a nearby stellar nursery where astronomers are investigating some of the smallest objects produced by star formation.

IC 348 is one of the closest stellar nurseries to Earth and appears in this near-infrared image as an intricate landscape of stars, glowing material and sweeping clouds of gas and dust.

Across the scene, young stars punctuate the dark and luminous clouds. The concentration is greatest around the center, where bright stars show JWST's distinctive diffraction spikes — a result of the telescope's optical structure. In the upper-right of the image, still-forming protostars launch streams of material.

And lurking all around this colorful nursery are strange objects that challenge the very definition of a star.

Stars come in all shapes and sizes, from massive stars that explode as supernovas after only a few million years to the smallest and most common stars, red dwarfs, which last for many billions of years. However, there is also a class of substellar objects called brown dwarfs — objects halfway between giant gas planets, like Jupiter, and stars.

In the hunt for tiny brown dwarfs in IC 348, researchers used Webb’s NIRCam instrument in 2024 to survey part of IC 348 and found 39 brown dwarf candidates. The following year, Webb’s NIRSpec instrument studied the light of 15 of them. Nine were identified as new substellar members of the cluster, with the faintest estimated to have masses of around two Jupiters — the least massive brown dwarfs ever found.

How small the smallest brown dwarf can be is an open question in astrophysics. They form as molecular clouds of dust and gas collapse under their own gravity, much like regular stars do. However, unlike stars, brown dwarf cores never become hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium. The brown dwarfs — or "failed stars," as they're sometimes called — in this JWST image will help researchers constrain the limits of how tiny these strange objects can get.

The upper-right portion of the panorama provides a dramatic look at another stage of star formation. Protostars hidden within the dusty environment fire jets into nearby gas and dust, producing luminous, eye-catching jets and streams known as Herbig-Haro objects. These gargantuan jets can stretch trillions of miles into space; just one tiny detail in one of JWST's biggest images yet.

But if that tremendous view still isn't enough for you, IC 348 was also recently snapped by NASA's Chandra Observatory, which captured the stellar nursery and other cosmic objects shining purple in brilliant X-ray light.

When you think of objects close to the sun, Mercury, the solar system's innermost planet, probably comes to mind. But has any other object — natural or artificial — gotten closer to our star? And what's the closest an object has gotten to the sun while still escaping?

Many objects have reached much closer than Mercury, including asteroids, comets and spacecraft, experts told Live Science.

At its closest point to the sun, called perihelion, Mercury comes within 29 million miles (47 million kilometers) of our star, according to NASA.

But several known asteroids come even closer. Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at Carnegie Science, an independent research institute in Washington, D.C., said such asteroids, with orbits that cross Mercury's, are called Mercury-crossers. They have highly eccentric orbits, meaning "they did not form in this location but were likely scattered from the main asteroid belt towards the Sun," he told Live Science in an email. A search through NASA's Small-Body Database for such asteroids shows 2024 YL3 is the current record holder. This 463-foot-long (141 meters), skyscraper-size rock has a perihelion of 6.4 million miles (10.3 million km).

Another group of celestial objects, though, may beat 2024 YL3. These are proposed asteroids that are thought to have circular orbits within Mercury's path. Dubbed Vulcanoids, their name comes from Vulcan, a theoretical planet once hypothesized to exist in this region.

Martin Beech, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Regina in Canada, told Live Science in an email that numerical models show such asteroids would have stable orbits between 5.58 million and 23.23 million miles (8.98 million to 37.39 million km) from the sun's center. This means some Vulcanoids may whiz even nearer the sun than Mercury-crossers do. There's just one glitch: Like their namesake planet, Vulcanoids haven't been shown to exist, and a 2013 study found no trace of them.

But some spacecraft have come much, much closer. For instance, NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which launched in 2018, studied the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. For the primary mission's final three orbits, the probe took an eccentric path with a perihelion of merely 4.5 million miles (7.3 million km) from the sun's center. At this distance, illustrated graphically on the mission's official webpage, the spacecraft flew through the corona, where a carbon foam shield protected the probe from the extreme heat.

"Sungrazers" and "sun-diving" comets

Another class of natural objects — dubbed sungrazing comets — reach closer still. A 2018 study described such comets as coming closer than 1.49 million miles (2.39 million km) of the sun's center, although any of these comets' precise solar proximity would depend on their orbital parameters.

Man-To Hui, a researcher at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, told Live Science that small sungrazers — some of which are just 30 feet (10 m) wide —break up as they rotate because they get nonuniformly heated, while the sun's powerful gravity pulls apart larger ones. Nonetheless, several escape unscathed; one of the closest observed so far was the Great Southern Comet of 1887, which came within an incredible 446,187 miles (718,070 km) from the sun.

But the real "winners" are "sundiving," or "sunstriking," comets. Such comets likely abounded in the early solar system, although they're thought to be rare nowadays. These comets would cross the sun's visible surface, or photosphere, plunging into the sun. Although no one has detected such a sundiver yet, the 2018 study noted that a comet would need a perihelion less than the sun's radius, or 432,244 miles (695,630 km) from the sun's center. There are no second passes, though ‪—‬ all sundiving comets are destroyed within the sun.

So, the detected object that got closest to the sun was the Great Southern Comet of 1887. If a sundiver is ever spotted, however, it would become the new record-holder, edging out the Great Southern Comet by 13,943 miles (22,439 km).

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

One of the most famous full moons of the year will climb into the eastern sky on Saturday, Sept. 26. This year, the Harvest Moon will make its appearance with Saturn shining nearby — and you'll have another chance to see it rise on Sunday, Sept. 27, too.

Officially full at 12:49 p.m. EDT on Saturday, the full moon will be best seen rising in the eastern sky later that day, at the time of moonrise where you are. It will appear in the constellation Pisces.

This month's full moon earns the Harvest Moon nickname because it's the full moon closest to the September equinox, which fell on Tuesday (Sept. 22). This year, it coincides with the Mid-Autumn Festival — also called the Moon Festival — which is held in Chinese and Vietnamese communities on the day of the Harvest Moon, according to Timeanddate.com. However, the Harvest Moon's significance goes beyond traditional nicknames, because the moon behaves a bit differently around this point in the calendar.

Typically, moonrise occurs roughly 50 minutes later from one day to the next. Around the Northern Hemisphere's autumnal equinox, however, the moon's path meets the eastern horizon at a relatively shallow angle. That geometry reduces the day-to-day shift in moonrise times, resulting in a string of evenings with bright moonlight arriving soon after the sun goes down. Before electric lighting and modern farm machinery, those brighter early evenings provided useful extra illumination during the autumn harvest.

That's not the case anymore, but skywatchers nevertheless have more than one night when the full lunar disk emerges above the eastern horizon into a sky still filled with twilight. Across North America, the moon will rise only about 25 minutes later on Sunday, Sept. 27 than on the previous evening.

Saturn will add another reason to watch. The ringed planet will appear close to the Harvest Moon, rising just beneath it as seen from North America and is easily bright enough to see without a telescope. However, a backyard telescope or stargazing binoculars can give you an even crisper view of both Saturn and the moon. To get the best chance of catching the moon as it appears, find an observing spot with an unobstructed view to the eastern horizon.

The next full moon, known as the Hunter's Moon, will occur on Friday, Oct. 25 or Saturday, Oct. 26, depending on your time zone. It will also be a supermoon, making it appear larger and brighter than average.

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

NASA is moving forward with designing a new space telescope that can see even deeper into the infrared universe than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can.

The new mission, called PRIMA (Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics), is continuing its development to Phase B — the preliminary design and tech phase — according to a NASA statement. Managers will review the mission's progress before officially beginning the telescope's journey to launch; if all goes to plan, PRIMA will embark on a five-year mission no earlier than 2033.

PRIMA's objective is to use a 5.9-foot [1.8 meters] telescope to examine the cosmos in the far-infrared, in a different set of wavelengths than the more famous JWST, which launched in 2021. (Other telescopes, such as Hubble and the newly launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, can also see some infrared wavelengths, but JWST was specifically designed to detect near- and mid-infrared light.) PRIMA's mission focus will be to uncover more information about exoplanet origins, galaxy growth and black hole evolution.

"The key science questions that PRIMA aims to address in relation to planet formation are to quantify the role of water in driving planet formation, [and to] determine the total gas masses and carbon and oxygen abundances in disks to reveal where exoplanets form," Meredith MacGregor, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University who studies how planetary systems form, told Live Science in an email.

"We can't actually address these science questions with JWST," MacGregor added, "because the spectral lines that are required are only in the far-infrared — longer wavelengths than JWST is sensitive to."

The University of Maryland (UMD) and Caltech, which helped develop the mission, each issued statements about the upcoming work.

"I'm most excited about the things I don't yet know," Alberto Bolatto, an observational astronomer at UMD and a co-investigator who leads galaxy evolution research for PRIMA, said in a statement. "I am elated to be part of the future of astronomy — to produce an instrument that is going to be an enormous tool for the astronomy community to move humanity's knowledge forward."

"I am particularly excited about how PRIMA will help us discover and understand the role of powerful molecular outflows in galaxies over cosmic time, and how they shape star formation and the growth of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies," Lee Armus, a staff scientist at Caltech and the PRIMA co-investigator and science operations lead, said in a separate statement.

Dawn of the Probe Explorers

PRIMA has a project cost cap of $1.2 billion, excluding launch and other nonproject expenses; for comparison, JWST cost $10 billion at launch in 2021, not accounting for inflation or launch expenses.

PRIMA is also the first in a new class of spacecraft that NASA is calling Probe Explorers, which are meant to sit somewhere in between flagship, JWST-style missions and smaller agency efforts. Probe Explorers are a part of the decades-old Explorers Program that began with the Explorer 1 launch in 1958 and followed with more than 100 missions. Explorers perform "a wide variety of research and scientific exploration programs for Earth studies, space weather, the solar system, and the universe," according to the agency.

The Probe Explorers were implemented after a recommendation from astrophysicists through the 2020 Decadal Survey, which is a consensus report issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on behalf of the community. NASA funded two concepts at $5 million apiece in 2024 and considered both PRIMA and the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite before announcing the decision to proceed with PRIMA this week.

"NASA selected PRIMA for development after detailed evaluation of concept studies for Probe Explorer missions, based on their scientific merit in alignment with the Decadal Survey's recommendations, feasibility of their development plans on cost and schedule, and use of technologies that could support the development of future large missions," the agency stated Wednesday (Sept. 23).

Should the mission fly as hoped, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will manage PRIMA, with contributions from numerous other NASA centers and international agencies.

In July 2025, a large, bright cosmic object visited from beyond our solar system. Only the third interstellar object ever discovered, the comet — named 3I/ATLAS — swooped through the inner solar system for about four months, briefly making it one of the biggest science celebrities in the world.

The interstellar object's fame stemmed in large part from controversial (and unsubstantiated) claims that it could be a source of intelligent alien technology, even though 3I/ATLAS behaved like a natural comet. However, according to the astronomers who are studying its mysteries in the data collected by dozens of telescopes and spacecraft, the ancient object may still have lessons to teach us about life in the cosmos.

3I/ATLAS is likely a preserved fragment of a planetesimal — a building block of a planet — from a distant system, Martin Cordiner, a researcher in astrochemistry and planetary science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Live Science. Therefore, the comet's composition could offer clues to the prevalence of life's building blocks around distant stars. Some astronomers even hope this cosmic interloper will help constrain how likely life is elsewhere in our galaxy.

Blast from the past

Comets like 3I/ATLAS are important because scientists think they help "seed" planets with carbon-containing chemicals, Darryl Seligman, an assistant professor of astronomy at Michigan State University, told Live Science in an email. Some of these chemicals, like methanol, have simple structures. Others, like amino acids, are more complex. Together, these carbon-containing, or organic, compounds form the basis for biomolecules, like proteins and nucleic acids, that interact to produce life.

Samples returned from space rocks in our neighborhood strongly support the idea that they transported such molecules within the solar system. For instance, fragments from the solar system asteroid Bennu obtained during NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission contain all five nucleotide bases, the building blocks of nucleic acids. Matthew Belyakov, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at Caltech, noted that the Bennu samples also contained 14 of the 20 amino acids that form naturally on Earth.

Inferences about such deliveries are possible only because the rocks are like time capsules: They emerge from the same swirling disk of gas and dust from which planets are born, and the chemical compositions of asteroids and comets don't change much after that. So, by studying space rocks that originate in other exoplanetary systems, "we can learn if they also contain the building blocks of life and could have helped to start life in exoplanetary systems," Seligman said.

Simulations suggest that comets that circle one planet before moving to another could similarly deliver such prebiotic molecules to baby exoplanets. However, there was no supporting observational data to back up this claim.

A chemical potpourri

To figure out which chemicals 3I/ATLAS contains, astronomers have been recording the comet's light intensity across a range of frequencies, using more than a dozen instruments on Earth and around the solar system. This was possible because the comet spewed tons of gas and dust to create a fuzzy bright halo, or coma, after the sun warmed it. Observations of this coma have turned up an eclectic group of chemicals essential for life as we know it.

One is hydrogen cyanide (HCN), which was detected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Despite its notorious reputation as a poisonous gas, HCN is important for creating life. A commentary noted that laboratory experiments dating back to the 1950s ‪—‬ including the famous Miller-Urey experiment, which attempted to recreate the conditions of primordial Earth ‪—‬ have found that HCN is involved in building molecules like amino acids.

The list of ingredients goes on. ALMA data also revealed that 3I/ATLAS released gigantic amounts of formaldehyde and methanol. Additionally, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed 3I/ATLAS spewing the greenhouse gas methane. This is important because, assuming the methane formed on planets in the comet's home system, it could have trapped heat on those planets, thus warming them and making them more hospitable to life.

The presence of all these molecules is significant, Cordiner said, because they are "heavily implicated in terrestrial prebiotic chemistry studies as key carbon and nitrogen feedstocks [raw materials] for helping build life's molecular precursors," he said. 3I/ATLAS is proof that these "feedstocks" also exist in pastures far beyond our solar system's fences.

These findings are especially important because astronomers couldn't study the previous two interstellar objects to the same extent, Seligman said. He noted that 1I/'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever detected in the solar system, was observable for only a few weeks.

"The second interstellar comet 2I/Borisov was discovered right before COVID, so a lot of observations were canceled because of that," Seligman added. (Cordiner noted that the few observations conducted on 2I/Borisov showed that it, too, appears to contain HCN.) In comparison, researchers had almost a year to study 3I/ATLAS with telescopes. These observations have shown that "3I/ATLAS is unique in terms of the *measured* chemical inventory," Cordiner said.

Not indicative of life

All of the chemicals that 3I/ATLAS appears to possess give us data about just one planetary system. But when combined with observations of other astronomical phenomena, 3I/ATLAS shows that the chemical building blocks of life are abundant across our galaxy. For instance, giant molecular clouds — dense regions of gas and dust that give rise to stars — contain nitriles and sugar acids that can form amino acids. The stuff of life, it seems, is plentiful in space.

Ingredients aside, these findings don't prove that life itself has developed in 3I/ATLAS' home system (or anywhere else). All of the organic molecules that 3I/ATLAS appears to contain have simple chemical structures. Cordiner said mixtures of such molecules in the lab have transformed into more complex ones via processes like ice irradiation. However, such compounds have not been found on 3I/ATLAS, despite the billions of years the comet likely spent exposed to the unabated radiation of interstellar space.

Most of the chemicals 3I/ATLAS released while zipping past the sun come from the comet's radiation-exposed upper layers and not from its pristine interior, a January study found. This would mean that what astronomers have measured may not be present in the comet's home system.

Nonetheless, many astronomers, including Seligman's group, are continuing to study 3I/ATLAS' composition. There is also the exciting possibility of future interstellar visitors, which are all but guaranteed to make an appearance, thanks to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is expected to spot dozens more. The elements and isotopes found in these objects will help in "building a map of where bio-precursors reside, across the history of the Galaxy," Cordiner said.

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For the first time, astronomers have detected radio signals coming directly from a planet outside our solar system, according to a new preprint study. Spoiler alert: It's not aliens. But astrophysicists are still very excited about this discovery.

"Astronomers have been looking for radio signals from exoplanets for some time," Suzanne Aigrain, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "There have been tentative, indirect detections before, but this is the first truly convincing direct detection, and it hopefully paves the way for many more."

Artificial radio signals are a key focus in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which involves scanning the cosmos for signs of alien life. Such "technosignatures" could suggest advanced technologies built by intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. However, radio signals can be emitted by natural sources, too.

"There are two natural processes that can produce radio emission in exoplanets," Aigrain said. "One is magnetic reconnection, when the planet orbits really close to the star and its magnetic field interacts directly with that of the star. The other is aurorae (like those we have on Earth and on other solar system planets like Saturn, but much stronger), when energetic charged particles streaming from the star interact with the upper atmosphere of the planet."

"This second effect is what the authors of the paper believe they have detected," Aigrain added.

In the study, a research group led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a graduate student at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, turned MeerKAT, a radio telescope array in South Africa, toward a massive gas giant called Beta Pictoris b, an exoplanet that's 64 light-years from Earth and has a mass roughly 10 times that of Jupiter, according to NASA. They picked up rapid, repeating bursts of radio signals coming from the planet.

At first, it wasn't clear whether the signal was coming from the planet or the star it orbits (named simply Beta Pictoris). However, after comparing the radio images of both the planet and the star with the positions of distant background quasars (bright, active galaxies that act as fixed reference points), the team confirmed that the radio bursts were indeed emanating from the gas giant.

"No radio detection has previously been unambiguously localized to an extrasolar planet rather than its host star," they wrote in the study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet.

Aigrain emphasized that "this is definitely not aliens!" The signals are consistent with what would be expected from auroras, and this finding offers insight into the planet itself. From these measurements, the team calculated the planet's magnetic-field strength, which they estimated to be roughly 1,250 gauss. For comparison, Jupiter's magnetic-field strength is only about 4.3 gauss and Earth's is a measly 0.5 gauss, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Magnetic-field measurements like these are important because we don't fully understand how planets' magnetospheres are generated and what controls how strong they are, Aigrain said. The ability to measure a planet's magnetic field could also help in our search for potentially habitable exoplanets.

"[A] planet's magnetic field shields its atmosphere from the 'wind' of charged particles from [its] star, which might otherwise carry material away from the atmosphere," Aigrain said. "On Earth, for example, the magnetic field has played a key role in retaining the atmosphere and shielding life on the planet from harmful high-energy radiation.

"The planet in this paper is quite massive and has a thick atmosphere, so even without a strong magnetic field it could probably hold on to its atmosphere, and it is not expected to host life," Aigrain added. "But in the future we might be able to make similar measurements for smaller planets, for which this shielding effect would be more important."

MeerKAT is a pathfinder instrument for a new large telescope called the Square Kilometre Array, which is expected to come online in the next few years. This observatory "will be significantly more powerful," Aigrain said, "so there will be many more systems where we can look for this type of signal."

As of Aug. 30, 2026, NASA's Curiosity rover has officially seen the sun rise and set over Mars' reddish horizon more than 5,000 times in its quest to discover if life ever existed there. The rover was originally planned to operate for only two years, but the mission is still going strong more than 14 years after landing on Mars in August 2012.

During that time, the rover has weathered global dust storms and climbed more than 3,200 feet (1,000 meters) up a mountain — although its tires have gotten some rather large holes in them in the process. The rover still uses its 17 cameras to take hundreds of photos every single sol (Martian day), beaming a total of more than 780,000 photos back to Earth for scientists to analyze while mission controllers decide where the rover should roam next.

In honor of the intrepid rover's 5,000th day on the Red Planet, here are 10 of the most iconic photos Curiosity has snapped for Earthlings to admire.

Sol 548: Mount Sharp on the horizon

Curiosity snapped this photo of Mount Sharp on Feb. 19, 2014, about a year and a half after it landed on Mars. At the time, scientists were hopeful the rover could make it to the base of the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers high) mountain to explore interesting terrain previously seen from space. As the years passed, Curiosity more than surpassed that goal; the rover has climbed more than half a mile up into the mountain's foothills, traveling a total of more than 23.6 miles (38 km) from its landing spot, all while conducting important science along the way.

Sol 956: Blue skies on Mars

Curiosity took a photo of the Martian sunset in color for the first time on April 15, 2015, revealing a brilliant blue sky just before the sun dipped behind the shrouded mountains in the distance. The Martian sky is usually yellow to orange, according to NASA. Fine dust particles in the atmosphere scatter red and yellow light across the entire sky. However, the dust is just the right size for some blue light to slip past, so most of the light in the sky near the sun is blue. The effect is much more pronounced when the sun is low in the horizon.

Sol 1128: Curiosity Selfie at Namib Dune

Curiosity has taken numerous selfies over the course of its mission, although the process is a bit more involved than holding up a camera and smiling. This selfie was made from 57 separate images taken on Jan. 19, 2016 using a camera attached to its robotic arm. Here, Curiosity is standing next to Namib Dune, one of the many dark sand dunes that make up the Bagnold Dune Field near Mount Sharp. Curiosity sampled the sand for analysis and scuffed the dune with its wheels so scientists could see how the sand moved.

Sol 1819: Curiosity leaves a thumbprint in the dust

Mars is extremely dusty. The reddish dust gets swept into the atmosphere and cast across most of the planet's surface, making it difficult for scientists to figure out what materials are on the surface just by looking at them. On Sept. 17, 2017, Curiosity dusted off the surface of a rock at Vera Rubin Ridge and took a picture for geologists to compare to rocks on Earth. Based on the reddish purple color, geologists think this rock is fine-grained hematite split by fractures filled with calcium sulfate minerals. It hints that Mars might be a lot more colorful underneath its dusty blanket. Scientists have since discovered ruby-like materials embedded in Martian rocks.

Sol 3466: Totally not a door for aliens

On May 7, 2022, Curiosity sent a curious photo back to Earth that appears to show a small door carved into the face of a cliff. It's hard not to imagine little green people entering it after taking their little green dogs for a stroll across the dusty landscape, but it's not actually a doorway for Martians. The 3-foot-tall opening's boxy shape is caused by vertical fractures intersecting with horizontal layers in the rock, according to NASA. The cliff is highly fractured, and a large chunk of rock that likely fell from the "doorway" is clearly visible nearby.

Sol 3724: Iridescent feather in the sky

Just after the sun went down on Jan. 27, 2023, Curiosity took this photo of a noctilucent (night-shining) cloud that formed much higher in the Martian atmosphere than most other clouds do. Any clouds on Mars are rare, but this one is extra special. Since this cloud is so high up, it's much colder — making scientists think it's made of carbon dioxide (dry ice) instead of water ice. The iridescent colors in the cloud indicate the ice particles making up the cloud are all around the same size, which means the cloud likely just formed at the time of the photo.

Sol 3725: Curiosity finds "Cacao"

The very next day after cloud-gazing, on Jan. 28, 2023, Curiosity found an iron-nickel meteorite measuring about a foot across. The meteorite, nicknamed "Cacao," is one of a handful of meteorites Curiosity has photographed. The rover zapped part of the meteorite with a laser and measured the vapor released to identify what materials the rock was made of. Since Mars is cold and dry compared to Earth, meteorites last much longer on its surface than they do here, and they give clues about how the Martian atmosphere has changed over time. Large iron meteorites discovered on Mars indicate the planet once had a denser atmosphere than it does today.

Sol 4208: Elemental sulfur crystal surprise

In June 2024, Curiosity unintentionally ran over a rock and crushed it, revealing a yellow, odorless surprise: rare crystals of elemental sulfur. While Mars has plenty of minerals that contain sulfur, like sulfate, this was the first time pure sulfur was found. The crystal fragments are about 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) across. On Earth, pure sulfur is formed from volcanic and hydrothermal activity, along with other geologic processes. It's not clear yet how these crystals formed on Mars.

Sol 182 - 4263: All 42 drill samples

Curiosity has collected and analyzed 42 rock samples so far using a small drill attached to a robotic arm. The drill powders the rock so that the samples can be transported to Curiosity's science instruments, which measure their chemical composition. Each sample site is carefully chosen because the rover can only do a limited number of samples before it runs out of special sample cups. This mosaic image shows the impressive variety of materials that Curiosity has sunk its drill into.

Sol 4671: Exploring Martian spiderwebs

Researchers have been intrigued by large geologic structures like stone "spiderwebs" on the Martian surface, previously seen by spacecraft orbiting the planet. Curiosity visited them on the ground, taking this picture of the low ridges and hollows, called boxwork, on Sept. 26, 2025. The ridges, made from hardened minerals deposited by water seeping into cracked rock, are what's left after billions of years of erosion wore away the softer rock around them.

Curiosity's journey continues today. After leaving the boxwork structures last March, the rover set off to explore more of the Martian landscape with its cameras as busy as ever, looking for more evidence that Mars once had the water and chemistry to possibly support ancient microbial life.

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

In one of the first major discoveries from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, scientists have revealed a previously unknown galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Described in a study that hasn’t been peer-reviewed, the galaxy, named Aquarius IV, is one of the lightest, faintest and farthest satellite galaxies ever seen.

This dim cluster of ancient stars was discovered on the extreme periphery of the Milky Way in early test data from the Rubin Observatory, offering a glimpse of the telescope's impressive abilities and shedding new light on our cosmic neighborhood.

Ultrafaint dwarf galaxies (UFDGs) are among the tiniest and faintest galaxies in the universe. These dim little clusters contain at most a few hundred thousand stars, compared with the Milky Way's approximately 100 billion, said Joshua Simon, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science who was not involved in the new research. Instead, "these galaxies are composed almost entirely of dark matter: 99 to 99.9% of their mass is dark, and only 0.1 to 1% is made up of stars," Simon told Live Science in an email.

Because UFDGs are so small and faint, even ones in the Milky Way's vicinity are difficult to detect. Such dwarf galaxies orbit ours, similar to how Earth orbits the sun. In a 2020 study, scientists estimated that hundreds of these satellite UFDGs may exist. However, only around 60 have been found so far, Aashay Pai, a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.

But the Rubin Observatory's supersharp vision is poised to increase that total. The telescope's 3,200-pixel, car-sized camera can detect objects up to 100 million times dimmer than those visible to the naked eye as it takes repeat observations of the night sky every few nights. This makes the observatory well equipped to find UFDGs.

However, the data analyzed in the new study wasn't from the LSST; it came from an earlier test run. This test data, collected between April 2025 and January 2026, was called Early Data Preview 2 (EDP2) and covered roughly 7% of the night sky.

The researchers used computer models on the EDP2 data to identify UFDGs as groups of stars whose brightness and colors suggested they had evolved together. The researchers assumed that these stars were around 13 billion years old, Pai said — nearly as old as the universe itself. This framework allowed them to distinguish UFDGs from stars and other galaxies in front of or behind the observed areas.

With this approach, the researchers detected the previously unseen UFDG. Their findings were published in August in the journal Research Notes of the AAS, which presents non-peer-reviewed work in progress. In the research article, the team states that the newfound UFDG was detected at the eight-sigma significance limit, meaning the chance that this group of stars is a random collection is about 1 in 1.6 quadrillion.

The researchers also verified the galaxy's discovery using older images snapped by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the NSF Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile; the photos showed faint stars that had been overlooked. Although this analysis had a lower significance limit of six sigma — giving it about a 1-in-100-billion chance of being a random fluke — it still supported the tiny galaxy's existence.

The newly discovered satellite galaxy, which the researchers named Aquarius IV, lies in the direction of the constellation Aquarius. Pai described it as "one of the faintest and most compact UFDGs at a large distance." The analyses suggest that the galaxy lies approximately 359,000 light-years from the Milky Way's center. (For comparison, the Milky Way itself is roughly 100,000 light-years long.)

Pai estimated Aquarius IV's mass at about 1,500 times that of the sun. That makes it lightweight relative to the Milky Way, whose mass equals that of 1.5 trillion suns, according to NASA. Furthermore, the absolute magnitude — or intrinsic brightness — of Aquarius IV is -1.9, making it 14 million times dimmer than the Milky Way.

Simon described the discovery of Aquarius IV as robust. However, Pai cautioned that follow-up observations will be required to confirm the object's identity.

Besides fleshing out our map of the nearby universe, studying UFDGs can reveal more clues about the mysterious nature of dark matter, which makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe but doesn't interact with light. Additionally, "the stars in ultra-faint dwarfs are also extremely old, dating back to just after the Big Bang, so they give us a unique window to the properties of the first galaxies that formed," Simon explained.

Pai noted that the Rubin Observatory is expected to find up to 100 such UFDGs during the LSST survey, which officially began in June. The survey will create the most detailed time-lapse video of the universe ever recorded and is expected to reveal millions of changes in the night sky every night, leading to an untold number of discoveries.

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

Since launching in 2009, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) — a robotic satellite about the size of a minivan — has taken more than 3 million photos of the lunar surface. This week, scientists studying a few hundred of those photos announced what they're calling a "once-in-a-century" discovery: the biggest, freshest impact crater ever seen in the solar system. ‪It's the result of a building-size meteorite that slammed into the moon just two years ago.

The new lunar pockmark, named McGetchin crater after the late geologist and lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, is about 728 feet (222 meters) wide, on average, and 141 feet (43 m) deep ‪—‬ imagine a hole as long as two American football fields and deep enough to fit a 14-story building inside.

"We know generally that there's more small things in space than there are large things, so that means we tend to get a lot of small craters on the moon and very few large craters," Julie Stopar, a senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and deputy principal investigator on the LRO's camera team, told Live Science. "So something the size of this crater, we only expect to encounter that once every 130 years, approximately."

McGetchin is nowhere near the moon's largest crater; that honor goes to the South Pole-Aitken basin, a gargantuan gouge about 10,000 times wider than the newly discovered crater. But McGetchin is the largest new crater. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere in images from spring 2024, it's the biggest one scientists have seen in the 17 years that LRO has been active. And now that it's known to the world, some intrepid skywatchers think they've spotted the crater's bright, white debris ring from Earth.

The team described their findings in two papers published Sept. 16 in the journal Science Advances. Live Science spoke with Stopar to find out what this fresh crater can teach us about lunar geology, impact rates and potential risks to the future human visitors to the moon.

Brandon Specktor: The moon is riddled with craters. What's so interesting about this new one?

Julie Stopar: On one hand, it's a nice crater because it's so fresh and new. It hasn't been weathered. On Earth, we see the remnants of impact craters, but a lot of the original details are lost through weathering and degradation and time. But the moon preserves all of that much better.

This crater, in particular, is so fresh and young — it's only about 2.5 years old. It's in really, really good condition. We can study it to understand how impact cratering occurs and all the processes that go along with it.

The other cool thing is that it impacted on the boundary between two different types of deposits on the moon. There's the volcanic mare deposits [dark patches visible from Earth] and there's the highlands, which are ancient crustal material. The highlands are brighter and tend to be hillier, more mountainous, whereas the mare are flat plains, and they're very dark. This impact seems to have occurred right on the boundary between those two areas, so that's reflected in the materials that are excavated by that crater.

BS: The meteorite that made this crater was the size of a three-to-six-story building, according to your team's estimates. Could we have seen this impact from Earth?

JS: Yes. This is a relatively large impact, and from Earth, we have observed flashes associated with smaller impacts. So I think it's possible, under good conditions, that this may have made a flash. We don't know if anyone was watching, though — so if somebody out there has videos that they can dig through, they could go back and look for it.

BS: This impact happened in April or May 2024. One of your colleagues discovered the crater in LRO data in October 2025. Why did it take so long?

JS: LRO orbits the moon about 12 times each day. While we're going around, we can only image a really small portion of the moon on each pass. So you can imagine it takes many, many orbits to go around the moon and to reimage each part of the surface. When we don't have an impact flash to help us decide where to look for these craters, it's basically a random search.

Over time, we eventually will get repeat imaging [of the same area], but it takes years to get that. On top of that, the processing that it takes to make the before and after images

takes a lot of work; basically, you're looking through all the images that have been taken of the moon under the right conditions, and it just takes a lot of time and effort to process that.

BS: Your colleague, Robert Wagner, says he "stopped and dropped everything" when he discovered the crater in LRO's data. What was your reaction when he first showed it to you?

JS: I was surprised that it was so large! But I've seen a lot of similar craters on the moon, so my actual first thought was, "Oh my gosh; this crater might actually help me constrain how old all of these other craters are!"

BS: So because you know this crater is so fresh, it's helping you date other craters you've seen too?

JS: Yes, I've been looking at a bunch of craters, which I think look morphologically [their shape] and albedo-wise [how much light they reflect into space] very fresh. They have the bright ejecta [the material that gets blasted out from the meteor impact]; they have crisp rims. But I don't know how old they are, because they were there before the LRO. I think they're young, but I don't have any proof of age. So that was my first thought: "Oh my gosh; this makes me feel so much better if all these other craters I'm studying are still in really good condition like this one is."

BS: What, specifically, do you hope to learn about the moon from this crater?

JS: There's hope that we can use this to help understand the current impact cratering rate. How much and how often do different sizes of debris in the solar system impact the moon?

And that's important, because people want to go to the surface for exploration, send landers, start building moon bases and so forth, and there's some concern that impactors will be a hazard. So it would be helpful to have a better idea of whether that's a really frequent concern or only a once-in-a-while concern. We can also study things like how the impact angle, the target materials, and the velocity and type of impactor play a role in forming craters.

This crater will help us better interpret all of the others as well. I think this would be a really good crater to go get samples from, because we know when it formed and we have a lot of questions we can answer with that.

BS: How do you see human-made impacts fitting into this? In recent years, several spacecraft have crashed into the moon. Do you see any risks there or more opportunities to study craters?

JS: At this point, it's not too much of a concern to myself about human-made objects destroying natural habitats on the moon. Other spacecraft impacts, like the boosters from the Apollo program, made craters a long time ago. But I think, as there are more people and countries and even companies going to the moon, they'll have to get coordinated so as to not interfere with each other's activities — because that would be a problem. It's just a reminder like, "Hey, guys; you need to talk to each other and get coordinated and make sure you're keeping track of these impacts and your debris, and you're working together."

Otherwise, those craters are interesting because we know the impactor's mass and shape beforehand. It gives us a new insight into how craters form when you have irregularly shaped masses, like hollow cylinders and things like that. They'll also tell us about the moon's surface as well, because it's a different type of impact and it's got a different kind of energy to it and a different shape. So we do learn a lot about the cratering process in general from those.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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NASA's latest space telescope has officially taken its first photos of our universe. Launched on Aug. 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is on its way to Lagrange point L2, a "parking spot" in space about a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth where it will begin scanning deep space.

Using its 300-megapixel camera, Roman captured hundreds of stars as green rings of light. The telescope's Wide Field Instrument hasn't been fully focused yet, which is why these balls of gas appear blurry in the debut test image. But once the instrument is calibrated over the next few months, it should produce images as clear as those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — but which cover an area 100 times larger. Astronomers hope to use these images to help solve some of the biggest mysteries in our universe, including the possible source of dark energy and the search for alien life.

With Roman's first test images now available, what are you most excited about for the future of this space telescope? Answer in the poll below, and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

One of the longest-running meteor showers of the year began on Sunday (Sept. 20), as the Southern Taurids start sending occasional "shooting stars" — and, potentially, spectacular fireballs — across the night sky.

The Southern Taurid meteor shower runs from Sept. 20 through Nov. 20, peaking overnight on both Oct. 13-14 and Nov. 4-5, according to the American Meteor Society. Although only about five to 10 meteors per hour can be expected during the shower's peak, the Taurids have a reputation for producing fireballs — very bright meteors that appear as flashes while falling through the atmosphere.

Patience is often rewarded with some of the most impressive meteors of the year, partly because the Southern Taurid meteors strike Earth's atmosphere at the relatively leisurely pace of around 17 miles per second (27 kilometers per second), meaning they can be visible longer than most meteors and leave glowing trails.

The Southern Taurids are associated with a trail of rocky debris left in the inner solar system by Comet 2P/Encke, according to NASA, and they form half of the broader Taurid meteor complex. Their companion shower, the Northern Taurids, becomes active later in the fall, creating an extended period when Earth encounters debris associated with the same complex.

Although meteor activity begins this month, you'll have to wait a little longer to see the Southern Taurids at their best. An early increase in activity is expected around Oct. 13-14, with rates of regular shooting stars potentially slightly stronger than usual this year, while the principal peak for fireballs will arrive around the night of Nov. 4-5.

The sky conditions will be ideal for the Southern Taurids, with a moonless night sky on Oct. 13-14 and an 18%-lit waning crescent moon rising in the early morning on Nov. 5, though you will also need a clear night to see any shooting stars or fireballs. However, the rates will be too low for most urbanites to justify a trip to a dark location.

Southern Taurid meteors appear to radiate from the constellation Taurus, which climbs higher as the night progresses, but there's no need to stare directly at it. Meteors can appear anywhere overhead, so a wide, unobstructed view of the sky is more useful. Stargazing binoculars and telescopes will not help you spot meteors — however, they may come in handy for some of fall's other skywatching treats, including some rare planetary appearances.

Because the shower's radiant lies close to the ecliptic (the apparent path of the sun as seen from Earth), the Southern Taurids are observable from both hemispheres. However, Northern Hemisphere observers generally enjoy more favorable viewing conditions.

Don't expect celestial fireworks; the Southern Taurids are a slow burn. But with brilliant fireballs possible, they're worth keeping an eye on whenever you're outside after dark this fall.

Imagine opening your eyes for the first time and seeing that the sky is full of green doughnuts.

This was the view that greeted NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which just activated its powerful, 300-megapixel infrared camera for the first time.

The telescope, which launched to space on Aug. 30, is partway through a months-long commissioning process, with NASA scientists testing and tuning each of the spacecraft's instruments as it undertakes a million-mile (1.6 million kilometers) journey to Lagrange point L2 — an orbital "parking spot" where the competing gravity of Earth and the sun will hold Roman in place, alongside the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and other scientific spacecraft.

Roman's camera system, known as the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), hasn't been fully focused yet, so the stars look like lime-colored loops in this debut test image. But so far, all systems are working as they should, according to a NASA statement.

By the time Roman is ready to beam home its first full science images in early 2027, it will be capturing cosmic snapshots as crisp and detailed as those from the Hubble Space Telescope ‪—‬ but each of Roman's images will cover an area 100 times larger than Hubble's.

"After years of effort to build and test the instrument on the ground, we now have confirmation that it is operational in space. This is a huge milestone," Josh Schlieder, chief WFI scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement. "There is much to do, but we are on our way to groundbreaking science."

The wavy rows of squares in the new image are key to Roman's photo-taking power. Each square represents one of Roman's 18 detectors, which translate photons from distant light sources into electrical signals that encode enormous images of the universe. Scientists are preparing for the telescope to beam roughly 1.4 terabytes of data — about five to 10 times the storage capacity of an average smartphone — back to Earth every day.

With all that data, NASA scientists expect Roman to push the frontiers of some of the biggest mysteries in astronomy. Planned long-term surveys of distant galaxies will help scientists discover new objects and calculate the expansion of the universe, potentially shedding new light on the phenomenon of dark energy.

The telescope will also contribute to the search for alien life. By selectively blocking out starlight with Roman's built-in coronagraph — another instrument that NASA successfully tested this week — the telescope will be able to zoom in on exoplanets with unprecedented precision, free from stellar glare. These observations could increase the number of known alien worlds from the current count of over 6,000 to more than 100,000 by the end of Roman's planned 10-year mission.

But in a final piece of good news, that 10-year mission now looks likely to double. According to NASA, a successful thruster burn (combined with bonus fuel loaded onto the spacecraft at launch) means that Roman may be looking at 22 years worth of power rather than 10. Like Hubble, which has continued operating far beyond its initial mission parameters, Roman may be an orbital gift that keeps giving for decades.

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

Astronomers suspect that a never-before-seen variation of a space-time phenomenon could explain an "impossible" black hole merger that has puzzled experts for years. But if their theory is true, it creates an entirely new mystery to solve.

On Nov. 23, 2023, both halves of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) — located in Washington and Louisiana — detected an unusual set of gravitational waves. These ripples in the fabric of space-time can be triggered by some of the universe's most powerful events, such as exploding stars and rapidly spinning neutron stars. But in this case, the signal, dubbed GW231123, originated from a pair of colliding black holes around 2 billion light-years from Earth.

The merger also made waves in the media as the most massive black hole collision to date, with the two parent black holes birthing a singularity around 230 times more massive than the sun. The only problem is that the colliding black holes ‪—‬ which weighed 100 and 130 solar masses, respectively ‪—‬ are too large to be explained by our current understanding of the universe.

The pair dwell in what astronomers call a "mass gap," meaning they are too large to be stellar-mass black holes, created by collapsing stars, but they are smaller than intermediate-mass black holes, which we still do not fully understand. Adding to the strangeness, the black holes were spinning much faster than expected when they smashed into each other.

Researchers have put forward several potential explanations for the black holes' "forbidden" sizes. One study released last year proposed a new pathway by which singularities of this size could form: via the collapse of larger stars that would otherwise explode as supernovas. However, this idea goes against a lot of previous observational evidence.

Now, in a study published Aug. 25 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers propose a simpler, yet equally intriguing explanation for GW231123. They suggest that the signal from the merger was warped by a strange space-time phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which occurs when distant emissions pass through patches of distorted space-time bent by the gravity of massive foreground objects.

This effect has been shown to magnify, or otherwise warp, distant light sources many times before. However, until now, researchers had found no evidence that gravitational lensing could happen to ripples in space-time.

"Like light, gravitational waves can also be deflected, magnified and split into multiple signals by massive objects," study co-author Miguel Zumalacárregui, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, said in a statement. "For gravitational waves, diffraction and interference effects give us an additional way to identify and study lensed signals."

Cosmic magnification

The idea of gravitational lensing was first proposed in 1915 by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which states that the gravity of massive objects, such as galaxies or black holes, warps the space-time surrounding them. If such an object is positioned directly between Earth and another more distant object, then the light from the far-off entity can pass through the distorted space-time, effectively bending around the middle object. As a result, the light can be magnified, diffracted or otherwise altered — just as it might by passing through a glass lens.

This effect can create stunning spectacles, including halos of light known as Einstein rings, unusual cross-shaped structures, and multiple copies of a single light source. By studying these luminous curiosities, researchers can weigh the lensing objects, thus revealing hidden discrepancies caused by invisible dark matter and providing one of our best methods for studying this elusive substance.

In the new study, the researchers modeled how gravitational waves might be altered by a lensing object. They found that the GW231123 signal could have been magnified, which would have greatly exaggerated the masses of the black holes involved.

"If we assume that GW231123 was deflected and distorted by a compact object of about 190 to 850 solar masses — or by an extended structure such as a globular cluster — we can understand the observed high masses," study first author Srashti Goyal, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, said in the statement. "Moreover, the lensing interpretation does not require unusually high spins."

Taking this into account, the total mass of the newly merged black hole would be around 140 solar masses rather than the 230 solar masses researchers initially measured, meaning the colliding black holes that formed it no longer dwell in the problematic mass gap. It also suggests that the black hole may be even farther from Earth than astronomers thought.

However, while the lensing of gravitational waves is theoretically possible, it has never been seen before. The new study is also purely theoretical ‪—‬ the researchers have no direct evidence of lensing, such as an accompanying Einstein ring ‪—‬ so more work is needed to show this may be what happened here, the researchers noted.

A new mystery

The new theory could finally put the mystery of GW231123 to bed. But in doing so, it raises another intriguing question: What lensed the puzzling signal?

In most cases of gravitationally lensed light, the lensing object is something enormous, like a galaxy, which can be trillions of times more massive than the sun. But the researchers' models suggest that any potential lensing object here must be much smaller, and they have not been able to spot anything that fits the bill in between Earth and the origin point of GW231123.

"The nature of the lens remains a major mystery in our analysis, as individual compact lenses with 100 – 1,000 solar masses should be exceedingly rare," Zumalacárregui said. "Future work will need to establish whether such lenses can form, or whether an ensemble of lighter objects, including stars, can explain this event.

If the team can figure out what may have magnified the signal and prove that the space-time ripples have been warped, it could be transformational for future astronomy. If gravitational waves can be lensed, it opens up the possibility of studying ancient black hole mergers or similar cosmic events that would otherwise be too far away for us to detect. The researchers also think that analyzing the diffraction patterns of such signals could provide more clues to the elusive identity of dark matter.

A picture of a distant, shark-shaped cloud of gas in space has earned the top prize in a Royal Observatory Greenwich contest for amateur space photographers.

Dubbed "The Quiet Predator," the image by skywatcher Ali Alobaidly shows off the Shark Nebula (LDN 1235), which is roughly 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. (For perspective, the nearest star system to our planet is only about 4 light-years away.) The stunning image was chosen as the overall winner of the Royal Observatory Greenwich's 18th ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest, whose honorees were announced Thursday (Sept. 17).

Alobaidly took the prize-winning image from the Jahra governorate in Kuwait over two days in August 2025, using an Askar 140 APO telescope, a Sky-Watcher EQ8-R mount and a ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera.

"The juxtaposition of an oceanic predator, prowling the skies above the Kuwaiti desert, is something I find deeply poetic, and it is what first drew me to this remarkable region of the sky," Alobaidly said in a statement. "To me, it represents perfectly my love for both the universe, and the deserts of my ancestors."

Alobaidly's work, as well as 10 ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year category winners, will be on display at the National Maritime Museum in London starting Friday (Sept. 18). Alobaidly received a prize of 10,000 British pounds (about $13,300), while category winners and runners-up received various smaller cash prizes.

Below are several of the individual category winners, along with their breathtaking photos.

Aurorae: "The Crown," by Radoslav Sviretsov (Bulgaria). This image was captured during a strong northern lights display at a small church between Keflavík and Reykjavík, Iceland. The statement noted that the location is "far from light pollution ‪—‬ a place where the sky remains dark and truly alive."

Our Moon: "Venusian Pearl on the Moon," by Petr Horalek (Czechia). This image was taken on Sept. 19, 2025, when the moon passed in front of Venus from the perspective of select locations on Earth. "The most beautiful moment was when Venus had just started to disappear behind the crescent. It looked like a bright pearl on the lunar limb," the observatory judges stated. (Horalek is no newcomer to astrophotography, and Live Science has featured several of his incredible images before.)

Our Sun: "Active Region 4122," by Miguel Claro (Portugal). Claro, a frequent contributor to Space.com, a sister site of Live Science, used a new dual-band telescope to capture the sun's photosphere, or visible surface layer. Claro's work shows convection cells, which are superheated gas or plasma regions on the sun, as well as bright spots between these regions.

People and Space: "A Message from the Ancients," by Max Inwood (Aotearoa/New Zealand). Inwood showcased petroglyphs (ancient rock art) in California's desert in his prize-winning photo. The petroglyph in the image is believed to show the 13 full moons Earth usually witnesses each year.

Planets, Comets & Asteroids: "Saturnian Equinox," by Tom Williams (U.K.). Saturn's rings appear edge-on from the perspective of Earth in this 2025 image showing a rare event during the planet's near-30-year circuit of the sun. Williams' photo displays "the start of local spring in the planet's southern hemisphere," observatory representatives stated.

Skyscapes: "Botswana Star Trail," by Stefano Pellegrini (Italy). This image was captured in Botswana in a location called Nxai Pan, which has large baobab trees. "Pellegrini played with the exposure and saturation, resulting in this almost psychedelic image," observatory representatives said.

Galaxies: "NGC 4753: A Symphony of Dust Lanes in Virgo," by © 智鹏 严and Xinran Li (China). This image, taken in Chile, showcases NGC 4753, a galaxy roughly 60 million light-years from our planet, in the constellation Virgo. The photo highlights a "striking network of dust lanes swirling around its luminous core," observatory representatives explained.

To see the full list of winners and the judges' statements, visit the contest website.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Sept. 18 at 9:30 a.m. ET. An earlier version mistakenly called the constellation Cepheus 'the whale'. In fact, Cetus is 'the whale' constellation.

A "baby" exoplanet, discovered emerging from its cosmic cocoon around a nearby star, is the youngest alien world ever seen, a new study reveals. The planetary infant is less than 1 million years old and could help researchers study how other planets, including our own, took shape.

The juvenile world, dubbed Elias 2-24 b, orbits a newly formed star around 450 light-years from Earth. It is somewhere between two and four times as massive as Jupiter and almost twice as far from its home star as Neptune is from the sun.

Astronomers spotted initial signs of the hefty exoplanet in 2017, when they noticed a small gap in the star's protoplanetary disk — the swirling ring of gas, dust and other stellar debris left over from the star's creation. This gap strongly implied that an exoplanet had formed there after enough of the disk's spinning material had gravitationally clumped together, the process by which most planets form. However, the alien world was not directly visible at the time.

In the new study, published Sept. 16 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers combined observations from three telescopes — the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also in Chile — to take a closer look at the gap in the protoplanetary disk. Not only was the team able to directly image Elias 2-24 b and confirm its existence, but the researchers also dated it, revealing that the alien world is likely less than 1 million years old.

"What makes Elias 2-24 b so remarkable is its age," study first author Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral student with the Institute of Astrophysical Studies (IEA) at Diego Portales University in Chile, said in a statement. "This is the youngest planet detected so far, and because it is still actively accreting material from its surroundings, we're able to observe a stage of planet formation that is rarely seen directly."

The newly confirmed exoplanet is roughly 5,000 times younger than Earth or around 0.008% the age of the oldest known exoplanet, PSR B1620-26 b or "Methuselah," which formed around 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. Compared to the average human lifespan, this makes Elias 2-2 b roughly equivalent to a two- or three-day-old baby.

Record setter

This is not the first time that astronomers have spotted baby exoplanets. But until recently, there has been an age limit on when they become visible to us.

For a long time, the youngest-known exoplanets, which included several worlds orbiting the star PDS 70, were around 5 million years old. This is because telescopes were not powerful enough to spot exoplanets until they had cleared a large enough gap in their star's protoplanetary disks. But advances in telescope design and data analysis have helped researchers push past this age limit: For example, in 2024, astronomers discovered TIDYE-1b, which is believed to be around 3 million years old; and in 2025, scientists detected AB Aurigae b, which could be as young as 2 million years old.

Elias 2-24 b is at least twice as young as any known exoplanet, which is a significant step forward. This provides scientists with a rare opportunity to fill in the current knowledge gaps surrounding the initial stages of planet formation.

"Our planet-formation models already struggled to explain the previous record holders for the youngest known planet," Lucas Cieza, an IEA astronomer who led the 2017 study that first spotted the gap left by Elias 2-24 b, said in a second NASA statement. "Elias 2-24 b shows us that even our best planet-formation models are still missing some important processes."

Mind the gaps

A majority of the more than 6,000 exoplanets discovered so far have been spotted via the transit method, where a distant world passes between its home star and Earth, causing a temporary dip in the star's brightness. However, this doesn't work if the alien worlds lurk within a protoplanetary disk, because the swirling debris cloud permanently dims the star's light when viewed side-on. This has created a bias toward finding older exoplanets.

The only way to spot a juvenile exoplanet is if a star's protoplanetary disk is perpendicular to Earth, so that we are looking at it from the top down or bottom up and can clearly see any gaps within it. But this is much harder because the light from the star often outshines the disks, meaning we are "mostly blind to these baby planets right now," Cieza said.

However, this could change thanks to NASA's soon-to-be-operational Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which launched into space Aug. 30 and is currently calibrating its instruments before beginning its potentially decades-long mission to observe the cosmos. The space telescope is equipped with a state-of-the-art starshade, or coronagraph, which blocks out the light from distant stars, making it easier to study their surroundings. Experts predict that Roman could spot up to 100,000 new exoplanets during its mission and will have less of a bias toward older planets, meaning we should find many more planetary infants.

"This is just the beginning of a new era of discovery," Cieza said. "Roman will take planet hunting to the next level."

The rings around a strange small body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus look mysteriously different from previous views, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest.

The rings encircle Chariklo, which is a centaur, a strange type of object that shows characteristics of both asteroids and comets. Chariklo is only about 400 miles (250 kilometers) in diameter and is part of a large group of tiny objects in the distant solar system.

Scientists first discovered Chariklo's rings in 2013 — making it the first small solar system body found to have rings — and studied them with ground-based telescopes again in 2014 and 2017. When JWST took another look at Chariklo in 2022, a decade had brought a lot of difference, according to a study published Sept. 9 in the journal Science Advances.

"By comparing JWST observations with those obtained … over the last decade, we discovered opposite changes in the two rings: while the inner ring shows significantly higher opacity, the outer ring shows lower opacity, " Pablo Santos-Sanz, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia and first author of the study, said in a statement.

Researchers don't know exactly how the changes took place, but the study authors offered three suggestions. The first is that JWST, which has a fine resolution, was able to see both denser and sparser zones of the rings than previous observations showed. The second is that there were changes in the rings' material or in the grains themselves. Finally, a third possibility is that JWST could see "grains with wavelength-dependent optical properties," meaning the telescope saw effects in composition and grain size that explain the variability.

Santos-Sanz said the research suggests that small bodies with rings — even those orbiting far away from the gravitational influences of planets — may have more changes in their systems than scientists previously thought. "Our results force us to rethink how they form, how they evolve, and what mechanisms maintain their stability," he said.

A theoretical follow-up observation, taken the next time Chariklo passes in front of a star, would help to confirm the new JWST results, the researchers added — especially the apparent decreased opacity of one of the rings and the increased opacity of the other.

"These observations would help disentangle temporal evolution from wavelength-dependent scattering effects, and clarify the physical processes shaping Chariklo’s rings," the researchers stated in the study.

A JWST milestone

The new observations of Chariklo also mark the first time that scientists have planned a JWST viewing campaign specifically around a stellar occultation — that is, the researchers timed the viewing precisely to when Chariklo passed in front of a distant star from the telescope's point of view.

All observations of Chariklo's rings, on the ground and in space, have used stellar occultations. That's because the rings are too faint to be imaged directly, so astronomers must instead learn more about the rings by measuring the dips and increases in brightness as Chariklo passes in front of the background star. Scientists use a similar method to study the atmospheres of alien planets with JWST's infrared instruments.

Chariklo's speed relative to JWST was low, at 1.5 miles per second (2.5 kilometers per second), allowing for fine imaging of the rings. To time the occultation, the researchers used info from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which precisely charts the locations and movements of more than 2 billion stars, as well as calculated the orbit of JWST at a location roughly 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth in the opposite direction of the sun. According to the researchers, the planning and execution of the mission required "extreme precision."

Given that it's the closest planet to the sun, Mercury seems like it should be the hottest planet in our solar system.

However, at a blistering 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius), Venus tops Mercury's 800 F (430 C) highest surface temperature, despite being an average of 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) farther from the sun. So how can the second planet from our star be hotter than the closest planet to it?

It all comes down to reflectivity, atmospheric composition and geological history, experts told Live Science.

Totally different atmospheres

A planet's distance from its star is not the only factor that influences the planet's temperature.

"Distance tells us how much sunlight arrives at a planet, but it does not tell us how much is reflected … absorbed, how efficiently heat escapes, or how effectively the atmosphere transports heat around the planet," Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist who studies planetary habitability at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science in an email. "Those properties can be just as important as distance, and sometimes much more important."

Mercury makes the case in miniature. According to Kane, the planet has essentially no atmosphere, so incoming sunlight strikes bare rock directly, heating it to extreme temperatures during the day. But with barely anything overhead to trap that warmth, Mercury radiates it straight back into space the moment the sun sets. As a result, nighttime temperatures plunge from roughly 800 F (430 C) during the day to about minus 290 F (minus 180 C) at night ‪—‬ a swing of well over 1,000 degrees, he added.

Venus tells the opposite story. Wrapped in an atmosphere that's roughly 90 times as dense as Earth's and consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide, Venus traps heat so effectively that its surface temperature barely changes at all, no matter where the sun happens to be, Kane explained.

A permanent blanket

Sunlight arrives at a planet mostly as near-infrared radiation and visible light, which pass through atmospheres consisting primarily of gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide with relatively little trouble. Once the ground and lower atmosphere absorb that energy, though, they re-release it as infrared radiation, the kind of energy we feel as heat. Carbon dioxide happens to be excellent at grabbing and holding on to infrared radiation, Kane noted.

On Venus, the atmosphere is so deep and loaded with carbon dioxide that infrared energy leaving the surface gets absorbed and re-emitted over and over before any of it finally escapes into space. Some of that energy gets redirected back downward, Kane said, further warming the planet's lower atmosphere and surface. However, the heat isn't trapped forever, since energy conservation means that Venus must eventually release the same amount of energy it absorbs.

Notably, Venus doesn't actually soak up more sunlight than Mercury overall. Thick cloud cover reflects roughly three-quarters of incoming sunlight back into space before it ever reaches the ground, and only about 3% of the sunlight that arrives at Venus makes it down to the surface, Kane said. In fact, if that atmosphere and cloud deck were stripped away, a bare-rock Venus would actually run cooler than Mercury, since it would be receiving only about 29% as much sunlight from the start, he explained. It's the blanket, not the sunbathing, that makes Venus the hotter world.

Where the blanket came from

Venus' atmospheric blanket didn't spring into existence all at once, and how it formed is its own open question. Venus shows strong evidence of past and present volcanic and tectonic activity acting to smother the planet in greenhouse gases, Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist and associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, told Live Science in an email.

This volcanic activity has been so intense that Bryne describes modern Venus as sitting in a "post-runaway greenhouse" state, where its extreme heat has become a self-sustaining process regardless of what the planet's interior is doing at any given moment.

The heat isn't being generated from below; it's a consequence of the atmosphere Venus already has, locked in place by the same infrared-trapping effect described above.

Taken together, the experts' answers point to the same underlying lesson: How close a planet sits to its star is only the opening chapter of its climate story. What kind of atmosphere it has and how effectively that atmosphere holds on to heat are usually responsible for the rest.

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

Mercury, which is about one-third the size of Earth, may have shrunk more in its evolution than scientists originally thought.

A new study suggests that the tiny planet may have contracted 10% to 30% more than previous models suggested — meaning the planet’s total diameter shrunk almost 12 miles (19 km) since Mercury was formed. (Mercury’s diameter today is roughly 3,032 miles (4,880 km).

Previous missions overlooked the extent of the shrinkage because impact-crater debris on Mercury's surface hid the evidence, according to a study published Thursday (Sept. 10) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That size difference is important when researchers consider the planet's history, said Gaku Nishiyama, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center Institute of Space Research and an author of the study.

"Because Mercury's evolution is driven by its cooling, the amount of contraction — an indicator of the extent of cooling — is one of the most important observables that can be compared to models for estimating its evolution scenario," Nishiyama told Live Science in an email.

There could also be implications for the planet's composition. For example, more shrinkage at Mercury could mean the planet would have a larger metal core and fewer light elements, such as silicon, inside that core, according to an American Geophysical Union statement.

"The interior of Mercury would reflect its formation," Nishiyama said, and possibly hint at the innermost part of our solar system. "Therefore, to understand how our solar system has evolved up to now, information that can be extracted from this estimation — such as core composition and initial temperature condition — is critical."

A violent history

Mercury and the rest of the solar system planets formed due to the gradual collisions and aggregations of rock and gas upon asteroids and comets. Some of those impacts that created the planets also released a lot of heat. Mercury has been slowly cooling from those ancient impacts, and its interior has been shrinking along the way.

While this kind of cooling affects the entire planet's landscape, impact craters can mask the effects because each crash into the surface generates its own surface changes, including debris and new divots. The craters build up over time, making it difficult to spot more ancient geology underneath.

Nishiyama's team compared two sets of maps from Mercury, using data from NASA's MESSENGER mission, which orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015. One set of maps charted geological features showing contraction, and the other set estimated the roughness of the planet's surface. Their work covered the entire surface and demonstrated that the most rugged spots on the planet have fewer wrinkles from shrinking. In other words, according to Nishiyama, the debris from more recent impacts is covering up the evidence of shrinking.

Nishiyama said more information will help to confirm the estimate. Such data could come from the European Space Agency's BepiColombo spacecraft, which began its arrival sequence at Mercury earlier this month after nearly eight years of space travel. Once the mission settles in, the spacecraft will take higher-resolution imagery of the surface than MESSENGER did. Nishiyama's team expects BepiColombo to pick up smaller impact craters, as well as scarps and ridges, that could further refine the measurements.

"Stay tuned for future topography measurements by BepiColombo," Nishiyama said. "Future data from laser altimetry on BepiColombo will collect more information on planetary contraction by measuring topography more precisely."

Astronomers just dropped a video 27 years in the making: the highest-definition animation of a gargantuan black hole jet blasting out of a distant galaxy and twisting off into space.

The video, made from 116 images taken between 1995 and 2022, captured a blazar known as 3C 345, in the constellation Hercules. A blazar is a sort of quasar — a bright, feeding supermassive black hole embedded in the center of a faraway galaxy — that emits huge jets of gas into its environment. The jets blaze at nearly the speed of light and are charged with highly concentrated X-rays and gamma rays.

As described in an Aug. 26 study in the journal Nature, scientists gathered the images of 3C 345 using decades of observations by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of 10 telescopes spread across the U.S. (VLBA had two programs that caught views of the jet, called BEAM-ME and MOJAVE, which collectively followed hundreds of blazar sources.)

To turn those hundred-or-so images into an animated movie, the team used an AI neural network named Kine, achieving a resolution four times higher than that of any individual image. By doing so, the researchers mapped the speed of the black hole jet to the highest precision yet. (Several study co-authors had previous experience boosting the resolution of distant black hole images while working at the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, the team behind the first image of a black hole.)

"The higher quality of our video reconstruction enabled a detailed measurement of the plasma velocity in the jet," study first author Marianna Foschi, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech, told Live Science in an email.

A big, bright surprise

The researchers were surprised to see that the mighty jet's brightest components were flying at 10 to 13 times the speed of light while the gas surrounding it was zooming at about nine to 12 times the speed of light.

"This is unexpected because the general consensus is that these bright components are shock perturbations moving through the plasma, and as such they should have a higher velocity compared to the surrounding fluid," Foschi said. "Our work does not invalidate the shock model in general, but it puts it into question, at least in the case of this specific source."

VLBA uses radio antennae across the continental U.S. to map the sky, providing a wide view of the universe. But while VLBA has a comprehensive view of the sky, it lacks very fine details. The array is designed to generate a two-dimensional image with elements based on a measurement between two of the array's telescopes. Because the array has only 10 telescopes to do those measurements, however, its pixel resolution is limited.

That's where the Kine AI model makes a difference. The goal of Kine's work, Foschi said, is to develop an imaging algorithm that can create videos of observations at different times, focused on astronomical sources with variable brightness.

Kine is a neural network — a type of machine learning model that uses layers of "neurons" (computing nodes) to learn from a dataset, similar to the way a human brain learns. Kine can "process observations at different times, while learning and leveraging the spatio-temporal correlations present in the data," the research team wrote in the paper, referring to time and the three dimensions of space.

Foschi said the team is eager to apply Kine to other astronomical observations. "We believe this method will drastically change the way jet dynamics is studied from observations," she said. "In fact, our method enables a precise measurement of the projected velocity at any point in the jet."

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The moon may have formed in as few as five hours after the cataclysmic collision between Earth and a long-lost protoplanet, new simulations suggest. The surprising findings could help shed light on other historic impacts throughout our cosmic neighborhood and beyond.

Experts strongly suspect that the moon was created when a Mars-size space rock called Theia smashed into an early version of our planet, back when the solar system was young and extremely unstable. This colossal impact likely would have turned the once-neighboring worlds into spinning clumps of molten rock that eventually coalesced and cooled into the versions of Earth and the moon we see today. Without this collision, which also may have left chunks of Theia buried deep within our planet, many scientists think that life may have never existed on Earth.

Lunar rocks collected during NASA's Apollo missions have provided evidence to support this theory, dubbed the giant impact hypothesis. These samples also tell us that the moon is around 4.5 billion years old, meaning the collision occurred roughly 100 million years after the sun was born. But although scientists have previously simulated the impact event, it has been tricky to ascertain exactly how the moon formed and how long it took to emerge after the Earth-Theia collision.

In the new study, published Sept. 1 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers conducted a series of simulations focusing on the varying potential geological properties of both Earth and Theia prior to their collision. This factor has been relatively understudied until now.

"When you simulate the Earth and the moon as colliding bodies with [different] geologic properties, it changes how the moon forms out of that impact — that's something we considered unnecessary before," study first author Adeene Denton, a geologist and planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.

Until now, simulations of the Earth-Theia impact have focused mainly on the masses of the colliding neighbors. But in the new study, the researchers were most interested in the material strength of the two bodies, particularly the hardness of their exteriors.

"Models have evolved to include material strength, something that's really important when you're studying collisions between smaller bodies like asteroids," Denton said. "We weren't sure if it would matter for the moon or not. When we did the simulations, we found it actually matters quite a bit."

The main factor in the strength of colliding bodies is temperature. Both Earth and Theia were very young when they smashed together, so they were still hot and had soft or molten surfaces. These properties would have cushioned the collision, allowing the debris to stay largely intact and enabling the moon to form more quickly. But when the giant impact hypothesis was first proposed (in 2001), researchers initially thought the collision occurred much later, meaning that the bodies would have cooled and become more brittle. In this case, their collision would have created a larger field of rocky debris that would have taken longer to coalesce.

Researchers simulated the collision using a range of potential temperatures and found that under the most extreme scenario — where the pair were at their hottest — the moon could have formed in just five hours. However, this is just one potential outcome, and there is no way of knowing exactly how hot — and, therefore, how strong — Earth and Theia really were when they smashed together.

When the moon took shape, it was initially covered with a magma ocean that took hundreds of millions of years to solidify. Even then, its increased proximity to Earth meant that it was likely a volcanic hellscape. However, over time, it moved away from our planet, cooling further, and it is now assumed to be geologically dead. (The moon is continuing to slowly move away from us and could eventually escape our planet's gravity entirely, if the dying sun doesn’t destroy it and us first in around 5 billion years.)

The new simulations highlight the importance of material strength in planetary impact modeling, which could change what we know about other ancient collisions, like the one that knocked Jupiter's moon Ganymede off its axis or the one that birthed Saturn's moon Titan.

Additionally, the findings could have implications in the search for exomoons — the hypothetical moons of distant exoplanets, which have so far remained elusive, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. Until now, one of the main ways astronomers have been hunting for these alien satellites is by looking for debris fields around exoplanets. However, if the moon is anything to go by, these debris fields could be very short-lived and difficult to identify.

It looks like a gigantic treasure chest left open among the stars — but instead of gold and jewels, this strange cosmic structure contains dozens of newborn suns. This new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals the aptly named Treasure Chest, a colorful cloud of gas and dust in the Carina Nebula, one of the Milky Way's richest star-forming regions.

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the Southern Hemisphere constellation Carina, the nebula stretches roughly 260 light-years across and contains some of the most massive stars in our galaxy, as well as tens of thousands of young protostars. It's also home to the "Cosmic Cliffs," which appeared in JWST's first collection of science images, released in 2022.

The Treasure Chest is a cometary globule, an isolated cloud with a dense, dark head and a sweeping tail. Although such objects are named for their resemblance to comets, this one looks more like a wooden chest with its lid propped open and light spilling from inside.

JWST's Near-Infrared Camera reveals the source of that glow: a compact cluster of about 70 young stars embedded in the dust. The most massive one is a rare O-type star — extremely large, bright, and short-lived stars — measuring roughly 19 times as massive as the sun.

Astronomers estimate that the cluster is around 1.3 million years old, although earlier estimates suggested it could be as young as 100,000 years. Many of its stars are still surrounded by the gas and dust from which they were born. Over time, radiation from the cluster's stars will disperse that material, exposing stars that are currently hidden.

The Treasure Chest's unusual shape is also influenced by something outside the JWST image. About 39 light-years away, as measured across the sky, is Eta Carinae, the most luminous object in the Carina Nebula. Eta Carinae famously underwent its "Great Eruption" in the 19th century, when it briefly became one of the brightest stars in Earth's night sky. The system contains at least two stars, including one about 100 times as massive as the sun and roughly 5 million times as luminous. Together with the nearby Trumpler 16 star cluster, its intense radiation and stellar winds are blasting away the Treasure Chest's less-dense gas and helping to sculpt the cloud into its distinctive shape.

The Treasure Chest won't always look like this. Radiation and winds from the young stars inside it, combined with the assault from massive stars nearby, will gradually erode the remaining gas and dust. Eventually, the cosmic chest will disappear, revealing its true jewels — the stars within it.

New Hubble observations have revealed a dramatic, 10-sided jet surrounding Saturn's south pole, and it appears to be evolving before our eyes.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently snapped a high-resolution view of the striking "atmospheric wave," which appears to have begun forming in 2023, archival Hubble images show. Scientists are curious about how this "decagon" popped up so quickly, given that Saturn's other famous multisided wave — a hexagon at the north pole — has been observed on the planet for 40-plus years.

"The question is, why did it suddenly form now when we haven't seen one before?" Amy Simon, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and co-author of a new study describing the observations, said in a statement.

"The northern hexagon has been there every time we've looked for more than 40 years," Simon added. "This feature is different — it appears to be strengthening, giving us the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop."

Scientists can see the wave persisting through several atmospheric layers, which means it extends beyond the cloud tops. The wave is also found in a large jet stream at Saturn. More observations with Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be required to see how the wave is generated and what the decagon illustrates about atmospheres in large gas giants like Saturn.

The images were obtained as part of Hubble's Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program, which uses some of the telescope's time to image the solar system's outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — once a year. The goal is to obtain long-term observations of these worlds, to supplement spacecraft orbiting or flying by.

From Earth's perspective, Saturn is slowly orbiting in its roughly 29-year journey of the sun so that its south pole is visible from our planet, allowing for a good view of the changing decagon. Hubble, in fact, was not the first to see signs of this decagonal shape; it was ground-based observatories that spotted a mysterious undulating band around Saturn’s south pole in 2024.

Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, first author of the study and a researcher in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of the Basque Country, and amateur astronomers Trevor Barry and Jean-Paul Oger first spotted the forming wave. The trio used the university's Planetary Virtual Observatory Laboratory, which brings in observations from around the world, to make the Saturnian discovery.

While more images in 2025 showed the wave starting to move into a decagon structure, Hubble was able to obtain high-resolution images without Earth's atmosphere in the way.

The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017, didn't see the feature, hinting that it hadn’t started forming yet, according to NASA. "Given Saturn's symmetry in its north-south jet stream system, we have been searching for a counterpart to Saturn's northern hexagon on the south pole in Hubble images since 1990," Sánchez-Lavega said.

Both Hubble and JWST are expected to provide more opportunities to look at the ringed planet's developing decagon in the near future. In the meantime, Saturn isn’t the only solar system planet with perplexing polar features; 2017 images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft showed that Jupiter’s south pole is studded with gigantic, oval-shaped cyclones that echo the chaos of the planet’s famous Great Red Spot.

In this single Hubble Space Telescope image, tens of thousands — possibly millions — of stars bound tightly by gravity sparkle as one. This is NGC 6723, a glittering globular cluster about 27,000 light-years away, in the constellation Sagittarius.

Also known as the Chandelier Cluster, this swarm of stars is one of about 150 known globular clusters that orbit in the halo of the Milky Way, though others may remain hidden behind thick cosmic dust or crowded star fields at the galaxy's bright core.

Globular clusters like NGC 6723 are among the most ancient structures in our galaxy. What baffles astronomers most is the age of the stars within them. These clusters often contain stars older than 10 billion years, with some dating back almost to the beginning of the universe itself 13.8 billion years ago. They likely formed early in the history of the Milky Way, billions of years before the thin disk of stars where the sun now orbits took shape.

It was once thought that all stars inside a globular cluster formed at the same time, from the same material, during a single burst of star formation. If that were true, the stars would have the same age and chemical composition.

However, Hubble's view demonstrates that this is not the case. The cluster is densely packed at the center, where many bright-blue stars appear concentrated, while orange stars are more prominent toward the edges. Blue stars are younger than orange stars, suggesting that globular clusters can have complex histories, with different populations of stars and subtle chemical differences among them.

Hubble first observed NGC 6723 in visible and near-infrared light as part of a major survey of 65 globular clusters in 2013. It found that massive stars sink toward the center of a cluster, while lower-mass stars drift outward. In 2013 and 2014, Hubble studied NGC 6723 to search for small chemical differences between stars and to measure the spread of ages of stars within the cluster. Two epochs were found, with the second burst of stars happening about 634 million years after the first.

One leading idea is that globular clusters formed when enormous gas clouds collapsed rapidly in the early universe. However, recent simulations also suggest that some globular clusters may be the surviving cores of ancient dwarf galaxies that were stripped of their outer stars by larger galaxies. Either way, they're a fossil remnant hinting at how galaxies evolve.

Globular clusters are not unique to the Milky Way. They are found around many kinds of galaxies, including spirals, giant ellipticals and dwarfs. The Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, is estimated to host about 460 globular clusters, while the giant elliptical galaxy M87 contains roughly 15,000 globular clusters, according to NASA.