Astrology has a long history, stretching back thousands of years and permeating across numerous ancient civilizations. In modern times, astrology is big business — and it's growing. In 2025, the industry was estimated to be worth around $3 billion.

In this excerpt from "What Science Says About Astrology" (Columbia University Press, 2026), author and science journalist Carlos Orsi looks at a study of 20 million people that sought to test whether star signs have a role in romantic compatibility.

The most robust use of data to test astrology is the study of love signs conducted by David Voas in 2007, involving data from more than 20 million people from the 2001 census from England and Wales. Voas tested the hypothesis that certain sun signs were "more compatible" for romantic relationships.

The use of the supposed romantic compatibility/incompatibility between signs or planetary configurations to test astrology's validity has a long history. This strategy was, for example, employed by Carl Jung (1875–1967) in his work on astrology and synchronicity and in the classic study by Bernie Silverman.

The idea of astrological compatibility or incompatibility in love has strong popular appeal. The book "Love Signs", by Linda Goodman (1925–1995), an almost 1,000-page tome, continues to be reprinted and sold 30 years after the author's death (as of this writing, the most recent edition dates from 2020). In general, signs separated on the zodiac wheel by angles of 60° and 120° are considered favorable for love, while those separated by 180° are seen as extremely incompatible. Right angles also tend to be interpreted as bad omens.

Voas explains the rationale of his study this way: People born during the month-long periods defined by a particular sun sign are supposed to share certain dispositions, for example, to be generous or sensitive or stubborn. These tendencies affect personal relationships.

We know from everyday experience as well as a mass of social scientific data that people who are similar in age, education, social class, religion, ethnicity and so on are far more likely to marry than those who are different in these respects. Couples are regarded as being well or poorly matched on the basis of appearance or personality. If astrological compatibility exists, its effects should be observable.

This last point — that the effects should be observable — is crucial. Astrologers often complain that tests based solely on sun signs are unfair because a sun sign's influence represents only a fraction of an entire birth chart's meaning. However, a sample of 20 million people, like Voas's, neutralizes this objection.

Even if the sun sign accounts for only, say, 0.1% of overall romantic compatibility, in a sample composed of 10 million couples, this should result in an excess of 10,000 formed by people with compatible signs, above and beyond what would be expected if astrology had no effect. Or, as the author states, "With a sufficiently large sample, we should be able to detect any tendency for some signs to attract or repel each other."

The study's initial goal was to find an excess of pairings between signs deemed compatible by the consensus of astrological literature. Unfortunately, Voas writes, such a consensus was hard to find: "There is no great consistency among astrologers, and a survey of books and websites reveals a considerable variety of views concerning propitious pairings." So he opted for the least common denominator, searching for any deviation from basic probability: "In this research I look for evidence that any combination of signs is found more or less often than would be expected to occur by chance."

The results were at least intriguing: The initial analysis indicated an excess of couples where both partners had the same sign or adjacent signs — e.g., more Capricorns with Capricorns or Capricorns with Aquarians than expected. There were about 22,000 extra couples with matching signs beyond what chance would predict and an additional 5,000 couples with adjacent signs. Could this be astrology in action?

Voas dug deeper into the data and discovered more anomalies. For example, the excess of couples born in the same month was even greater (23,000) than that of couples with the same sign, and the proportion of couples with the same birth date was 41% higher than expected by chance. "Now while there may be some people who are drawn to each other because they share a birthday, the excess probably reflects response error for the most part," he wrote. "Census forms are typically completed by one member of the household, and that individual may — through carelessness or forgetfulness — write in his or her birthday when entering details for the spouse."

Other statistical anomalies attributed to errors include an excess of birth dates recorded as January 1 (probably a placeholder when the actual date is unknown), instances of matching days in different months, and matching months with different days. Voas's challenge, then, was distinguishing these potential data entry errors from any real astrological effect — if one existed.

"The partial overlap between astrological signs and months of birth allows a crucial test," he wrote, noting that the first 10 days of the period covered by any sign falls in one month while the other 20 or so fall in the next (for example, Aries runs from March 21 to April 20). So was a person born in the last days of March more likely to be married to someone born in the early weeks of March or perhaps the early weeks of April? In the first case, their spouse would be from the same month but a different sign; in the second, from a different month but the same sign.

"The results were conclusive. The couples whose birthdays belonged to the same sign but fell in different months were no more numerous than chance would dictate. By contrast, there were more combinations of birthdays from different parts of the same month than expected. This excess in shared months of birth is probably the result of response error, but in any event sun sign is not a factor."

The slight excess of couples with adjacent signs was explained by a data-imputation technique used in the British census to fill in missing or illegible data. One partner's birth date was imputed as the first day of a month and the other's as the first of the following month. When these imputed data points were excluded from the sample, the "adjacent sign" effect disappeared. The bottom line is that an analysis of 10 million couples in England and Wales revealed no astrological effect.

But Voas's work illustrates how easy it is to get lost in data or be swayed by enthusiasm. Someone who had stopped at the first step — finding an excess of couples with the same sign — might have mistakenly presented census data as validation for astrology.

This article is excerpted from What Science Says About Astrology by Carlos Orsi. Copyright (c) 2026 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Folk medicine practitioners in 16th-century Europe left ingredients and fingerprints smudged on their manuals while developing remedies for minor ailments. Now, researchers are studying the chemical traces Renaissance people left behind to understand how they experimented with novel cures.

Two German medical manuals — "How to Cure and Expel All Afflictions and Illnesses of the Human Body" and "A Useful and Essential Little Book of Medicine for the Common Man" — were published in 1531 by eye doctor Bartholomäus Vogtherr. His systematically gathered recipe books for common ailments, like hair loss and bad breath, quickly became bestsellers in Renaissance domestic medicine.

One copy of Vogtherr's works, in the collection of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester in England, is covered with 16th- and 17th-century scribbles and notes that suggest users tested the recipes in the manual and made their own additions. These fingerprints contained invisible chemical traces of proteins, and for the first time, researchers have worked out how to analyze these remnants.

In a study published Nov. 19 in the journal American Historical Review, researchers reported their success at using proteomics analysis to identify the materials that medical practitioners were using as they flipped through Vogtherr's book centuries ago.

"People always leave molecular traces on the pages of books and other documents when they come into contact with paper," study co-author Gleb Zilberstein, a biotechnology expert and inventor, told Live Science in an email. "These traces include components of sweat, sometimes saliva, metabolites, contaminants, and environmental components." Proteins and peptides are part of this mixture and are "often invisible to the naked eye," Zilberstein added.

To analyze the proteins and peptides (molecules made up of strings of amino acids), the researchers first used specially made plastic diskettes to capture the proteins from the paper. Then, they used mass spectrometry to detect individual amino-acid chains that could be identified as specific proteins.

In total, the researchers sequenced 111 proteins from the Vogtherr manual. Most of the proteins were from the practitioners themselves, the team wrote in the study, but several were associated with plants or animals that were featured in the curative recipes.

"Peptide traces of European beech, watercress, and rosemary were recovered next to recipes recommending the use of these plants to cure hair loss and to strengthen the growth of facial and head hair," the researchers wrote, and "lipocalin recovered next to a recipe that recommends the everyday use of human feces to wash one's bald head for overcoming hair loss points to reader-practitioners following such instructions."

Other collagen peptides were harder to identify. One extracted protein could match either tortoise shell or lizards. While 16th-century medical literature mentions that turtle shells were reported to cure edema (fluid retention), pulverized lizard heads were used to prevent hair loss. But the protein was discovered on a page next to Vogtherr's hair-growth recipes, suggesting that the user of the medical manual may have experimented with lizards as hair-care therapy.

Another surprising discovery was the recovery of collagen peptides that may match a hippopotamus next to recipes discussing ailments of the mouth and scalp. Hippos were a popular curiosity across early modern Europe, and their teeth were thought to cure baldness, severe dental problems and kidney stones. The traces of hippo proteins may suggest that Vogtherr's readers struggled with tooth issues, the researchers wrote, as recipes to cure stinking breath, mouth ulcers and black teeth are dog-eared and annotated in the manual.

"Proteomics help contextualize both the symptoms that people possibly struggled with when turning to recipe knowledge for help and the bodily effects of recipe trials and treatments," the researchers wrote.

The scientists hope their novel analysis of invisible proteins clinging to centuries-old books will contribute to a better understanding of early modern household science.

"In the future, we plan to expand this work and examine other historical books," Zilberstein said, as well as "to identify individual readers based on their proteomic data."

Conspiracy theory quiz: Test your knowledge of unfounded beliefs, from flat Earth to lizard people

"Science is never settled" has become a go-to slogan for populists seeking to legitimise politically convenient but fringe scientific positions. In 2020, MAGA Republican Representative Nancy Mace was asked whether she agreed that climate change is the result of humanmade greenhouse emissions. She responded: "My opponent has said that the science is settled on this. Well, the science is never settled. Scientists will tell you that."

In February, Senator Roger Marshall argued more money should be spent on investigating widely debunked links between autism and vaccines, saying "I'm a physician. Science is never settled. That's what makes us scientists."

The phrase has also crossed the Atlantic. When asked if President Donald Trump was right to share widely debunked claims about a link between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism, U.K. Reform party leader Nigel Farage replied, "I have no idea." When pressed on whether he would "side with medical experts who say it's dangerous nonsense," he responded, "When it comes to science, I don't side with anybody… because science is never settled."

The issue is, of course, that in many areas, from the theory of evolution to the theory of gravity, science is very much settled. To pretend otherwise is to misrepresent the position of the scientific community.

That doesn't mean that scientific positions are eternally fixed and can't be updated in light of new evidence. It means that our current best explanations have been tested enough for us to be confident that they are good descriptions of the way things work.

Myth of overturned consensus

A favorite trope of climate denialists is that scientists in the 1970s predicted "global cooling" — an imminent ice age. It's a smart argument, because if you can suggest that the exact opposite of global warming was once the prevailing view, surely you throw the current consensus on climate science into doubt?

Despite media attention and much discussion of the idea, global cooling was never a consensus scientific position. Reviews of the literature at the time show that even 50 years ago, global warming dominated scientific thinking about the Earth's short-term climate future. That climate change is the result of greenhouse gas emissions is now very much the consensus scientific position.

There are, however, examples in science where consensus positions have been modified or updated. Gravity is a classic case. Galileo established that acceleration due to gravity is the same for all objects near Earth's surface. But it wasn't until Newton that we had a universal theory of gravitation.

Newton's theory unified the behavior of objects falling on earth with the motions of planets. For years, every measurement seemed to confirm it, and the theory became known as a "law" that nature was thought to obey without exception.

But as experiments expanded and instruments improved, the edges of Newton's "law" began to fray. When dealing with strong gravitational fields like those near a black hole, or when calculating to high precision or over short astronomical distances, Newton's law wasn't sufficient. In the 20th century, Einstein's general relativity filled many gaps — resolving a range of seeming astronomical anomalies and describing how light bends near a black hole.

Yet even the relativistic interpretation of gravity is not perfect. We know, for example, that it must break down inside a black hole.

First Galileo's and then Newton's theories were superseded, and we know Einstein's isn't correct in every situation. Does that mean these earlier theories are useless and not examples of settled science? Definitely not.

In contexts where these theories have been rigorously tested and shown to give the correct answers (to a given degree of precision), they remain valid. They aren't wrong — just special cases of the more general theories, valid within a given domain of legitimacy in which they were originally postulated and tested.

In the same way, whatever supersedes Einstein's theory will have to include it as a special case. The example of gravity shows that scientific knowledge can evolve yet still be considered settled within its domain of legitimacy. We can point to other consensuses, like evolution or germ theory, as settled science that has been expanded and generalized over time.

Scientific 'facts'

There are also questions that most would call definitively settled. That Earth is round, not flat, is perhaps the most obvious. But whether we choose to call this a "fact" or not depends on how we define the word. If we demand 100% certainty, science can't provide it. If you want certainty, you need to look to mathematics, where knowledge is built through deduction from axioms (a fundamental set of premises), independent of the world.

Science, in contrast, built on evidence and induction, can only ever offer increasing confidence. A key premise of the scientific method is openness to new evidence. If you consider yourself 100% certain, then no new evidence, however convincing, can change your mind. That is not good science.

However, if you accept that science provides evidence for hypotheses, it can offer what we might call indisputable evidence — so robust that disputing it isn't a tenable position. Overturning the not-flat worldview would require such a massive reconsideration of what we understand about reality as to make it practically impossible.

So, "settled science" does not mean we know something with absolute certainty, but that the weight of evidence is heavily in favor of this interpretation. Perhaps more importantly, if someone wants to change the currently held conception, the burden of proof is on them.

All scientific knowledge comes with uncertainty. That is the hallmark of good science. But uncertainty doesn't mean we cannot confidently assert that entropy always increases (the second law of thermodynamics) or that Earth orbits the sun.

Science embraces uncertainty and is open to revision when new information appears, but that does not mean we shouldn't take a position when the evidence stacks up on one side of the balance. Issues that have been rigorously tested can still be considered settled.

Not being 100% certain isn't the same as being 50-50. Admitting doubt isn't the same as both-siding a one-sided issue. The fact that scientists acknowledge uncertainty isn't a reason for championing false balance. But these are the fallacious positions populists are taking when they say "I have no idea" or "I don't side with anybody" on scientific questions.

So when you hear a politician dismissing scientific consensus with phrases like "science is never settled," don't confuse what they are saying with an argument for intellectual humility. They are bluntly attempting to undermine inconvenient truths. Truths which can evolve and grow more nuanced over time, for sure — but whose foundations are strong enough to remain robust in their domain of legitimacy, even as the structure grows around them.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

Even if you don't recall many facts from high school biology, you likely remember the cells required for making babies: egg and sperm. Maybe you can picture a swarm of sperm cells battling each other in a race to be the first to penetrate the egg.

For decades, scientific literature described human conception this way, with the cells mirroring the perceived roles of women and men in society. The egg was thought to be passive while the sperm was active.

Over time, scientists realized that sperm are too weak to penetrate the egg and that the union is more mutual, with the two cells working together. It's no coincidence that these findings were made in the same era when new cultural ideas of more egalitarian gender roles were taking hold.

Scientist Ludwik Fleck is credited with first describing science as a cultural practice in the 1930s. Since then, understanding has continued to build that scientific knowledge is always consistent with the cultural norms of its time.

Despite these insights, across political differences, people strive for and continue to demand scientific objectivity: the idea that science should be unbiased, rational and separable from cultural values and beliefs.

When I entered my Ph.D. program in neuroscience in 2001, I felt the same way. But reading a book by biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling called "Sexing the Body" set me down a different path. It systematically debunked the idea of scientific objectivity, showing how cultural ideas about sex, gender and sexuality were inseparable from the scientific findings. By the time I earned my Ph.D., I began to look more holistically at my research, integrating the social, historical and political context.

From the questions scientists begin with, to the beliefs of the people who conduct the research, to choices in research design, to interpretation of the final results, cultural ideas constantly inform "the science." What if an unbiased science is impossible?

Emergence of idea of scientific objectivity

Science grew to be synonymous with objectivity in the Western university system only over the past few hundred years.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, some Europeans gained traction in challenging the religiously ordained royal order. Consolidation of the university system led to shifts from trust in religious leaders interpreting the word of "god," to trust in "man" making one's own rational decisions, to trust in scientists interpreting "nature." The university system became an important site for legitimizing claims through theories and studies.

Previously, people created knowledge about their world, but there were not strict boundaries between what are now called the humanities, such as history, English and philosophy, and the sciences, including biology, chemistry and physics. Over time, as questions arose about how to trust political decisions, people split the disciplines into categories: subjective versus objective. The splitting came with the creation of other binary oppositions, including the closely related emotionality/rationality divide. These categories were not simply seen as opposite, but in a hierarchy with objectivity and rationality as superior.

A closer look shows that these binary systems are arbitrary and self-reinforcing.

Science is a human endeavor

The sciences are fields of study conducted by humans. These people, called scientists, are part of cultural systems just like everyone else. We scientists are part of families and have political viewpoints. We watch the same movies and TV shows and listen to the same music as nonscientists. We read the same newspapers, cheer for the same sports teams and enjoy the same hobbies as others.

All of these obviously "cultural" parts of our lives are going to affect how scientists approach our jobs and what we consider "common sense" that does not get questioned when we do our experiments.

Beyond individual scientists, the kinds of studies that get conducted are based on what questions are deemed relevant or not by dominant societal norms.

For example, in my Ph.D. work in neuroscience, I saw how different assumptions about hierarchy could influence specific experiments and even the entire field. Neuroscience focuses on what is called the central nervous system. The name itself describes a hierarchical model, with one part of the body "in charge" of the rest. Even within the central nervous system, there was a conceptual hierarchy with the brain controlling the spinal cord.

My research looked more at what happened peripherally in muscles, but the predominant model had the brain at the top. The taken-for-granted idea that a system needs a boss mirrors cultural assumptions. But I realized we could have analyzed the system differently and asked different questions. Instead of the brain being at the top, a different model could focus on how the entire system communicates and works together at coordination.

Every experiment also has assumptions baked in — things that are taken for granted, including definitions. Scientific experiments can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

For example, billions of dollars have been spent on trying to delineate sex differences. However, the definition of male and female is almost never stated in these research papers. At the same time, evidence mounts that these binary categories are a modern invention not based on clear physical differences.

Related: Is there really a difference between male and female brains? Emerging science is revealing the answer.

But the categories are tested so many times that eventually some differences are discovered without putting these results into a statistical model together. Oftentimes, so-called negative findings that don't identify a significant difference are not even reported. Sometimes, meta-analyses based on multiple studies that investigated the same question reveal these statistical errors, as in the search for sex-related brain differences. Similar patterns of slippery definitions that end up reinforcing taken-for-granted assumptions happen with race, sexuality and other socially created categories of difference.

Finally, the end results of experiments can be interpreted in many different ways, adding another point where cultural values are injected into the final scientific conclusions.

Settling on science when there's no objectivity

Vaccines. Abortion. Climate change. Sex categories. Science is at the center of most of today's hottest political debates. While there is much disagreement, the desire to separate politics and science seems to be shared. On both sides of the political divide, there are accusations that the other side's scientists cannot be trusted because of political bias.

Consider the recent controversy over the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory panel. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, saying they were biased, while some Democratic lawmakers argued back that his move put in place those who would be biased in pushing his vaccine-skeptical agenda.

If removing all bias is impossible, then, how do people create knowledge that can be trusted?

The understanding that all knowledge is created through cultural processes does allow for two or more differing truths to coexist. You see this reality in action around many of today's most controversial subjects. However, this does not mean you must believe all truths equally — that's called total cultural relativism. This perspective ignores the need for people to come to decisions together about truth and reality.

Instead, critical scholars offer democratic processes for people to determine which values are important and for what purposes knowledge should be developed. For example, some of my work has focused on expanding a 1970s Dutch model of the science shop, where community groups come to university settings to share their concerns and needs to help determine research agendas. Other researchers have documented other collaborative practices between scientists and marginalized communities or policy changes, including processes for more interdisciplinary or democratic input, or both.

I argue a more accurate view of science is that pure objectivity is impossible. Once you leave the myth of objectivity behind, though, the way forward is not simple. Instead of a belief in an all-knowing science, we are faced with the reality that humans are responsible for what is researched, how it is researched and what conclusions are drawn from such research.

With this knowledge, we have the opportunity to intentionally set societal values that inform scientific investigations. This requires decisions about how people come to agreements about these values. These agreements need not always be universal but instead can be dependent on the context of who and what a given study might affect. While not simple, using these insights, gained over decades of studying science from both within and outside, may force a more honest conversation between political positions.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

After 15 years of debate, a study that announced the alleged discovery of an arsenic-eating microbe has been retracted by the journal Science due to contaminated and flawed data. However, the original study authors disagree with the move.

The microbe strain, labeled GFAJ-1, was recovered from the salty water of arsenic-rich Mono Lake in California by a research team led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA's Astrobiology Institute.

Wolfe-Simon and colleagues grew GFAJ-1 in petri dishes while replacing phosphorus — a crucial component of DNA — with arsenic, which is usually highly toxic to living organisms, they reported. The team published their findings in the journal Science in 2010.

Before the paper came out, NASA hyped the finding by telling the media it would hold a news conference "to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." Soon after, the GFAJ-1 microbe discovery quickly went viral, and it was hailed as a breakthrough in astrobiology. It upended biologists' understanding of the basic requirements for life, ostensibly proving that "arsenic life" was possible.

"What we've found is a microbe doing something new — building parts of itself out of arsenic," Wolfe-Simon said in a 2010 NASA statement. "If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven't seen yet?"

But critiques of the study quickly flowed in, and by the time Science published the paper in a 2011 print issue, the original study was accompanied by eight technical comments from outside experts pointing out key scientific flaws in the methods and interpretations.

Related: What's the best evidence we've found for alien life?

In 2012, two studies published in Science tried to replicate the arsenic-eating findings of Wolfe-Simon and colleagues. Both studies determined that GFAJ-1 could tolerate high levels of arsenic but could not use it instead of phosphorus as a building block for life.

Although the controversial "arsenic life" study was never replicated, it was not retracted because there was no deliberate fraud or misconduct. But in the past five years, Science has begun retracting papers for reasons other than fraud and misconduct. On Thursday (July 24), Science decided to officially retract the study by Wolfe-Simon and colleagues.

"One of the Technical Comments had pointed out that the nucleic acids that were analyzed were not sufficiently purified," Valda Vinson, executive editor of the Science journals, and Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science journals, wrote in a blog post. "Given the evidence that the results were based on contamination, Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data."

The study's authors, however, do not support the retraction.

"Disputes about the conclusions of papers, including how well they are supported by the available evidence, are a normal part of the process of science," they wrote in an eLetter, also published Thursday. "While our work could have been written and discussed more thoroughly, we stand by the data as reported."

Periodic table of elements quiz: How many elements can you name in 10 minutes?

New research suggests that the explosive death throes of massive stars, known as supernovas, may have had dramatic effects on our planet's climate over its distant history. Investigating historic incidents of these events could help scientists predict similar events in the future and prepare for them.

Supernovas occur when stars that are much more massive than the sun reach the end of their nuclear fuel supplies and can no longer support themselves against their own gravity. The complete gravitational collapse that results creates either a neutron star or a black hole, and also sends out a blast of energy and high-speed particles that can traverse star systems and entire galaxies in some cases.

It's estimated that if a supernova erupted within around 30 light-years of our planet, our atmosphere would be violently ripped away, and all life on Earth would perish. Thus, it stands to reason that if a massive star erupted within hundreds of light-years of Earth, this cosmic blast may not be fatal, but could result in extreme changes to our atmosphere, astronomers say.

"We have abrupt environmental changes in Earth's history," research author and senior researcher at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Robert Brakenridge, said in a statement. That's solid, we see these changes. So, what caused them?

"When nearby supernovas occur in the future, the radiation could have a pretty dramatic effect on human society. We have to find out if indeed they caused environmental changes in the past."

Brakenridge is hardly the first person to consider the possibility of past and future incidents of supernovas impacting Earth's atmosphere.

Related: Could a supernova ever destroy Earth?

However, past studies have focused on the physics behind such an incident. Instead of doing this, Brakenridge attempted to apply these theories to empirical evidence of such events observed both on Earth and in space.

Tree rings hide a record of supernova explosions

First off, Brakenridge turned to data from a range of powerful space telescopes, which have long been collecting data about the characteristics of supernovas.

This helped the researcher build a more detailed model of how supernova radiation would interact with Earth's atmosphere than had been possible previously.

This new model revealed that a sudden burst of high-energy photons, the particles of light, from a supernova would eat away at Earth's ozone layer. This is significant because the ozone layer shields our planet from harmful radiation from the sun.

Without this shielding, solar radiation would begin to degrade methane in the stratosphere, the second-lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. This molecule is a major driver of Earth's greenhouse effect. That means as methane is diminished, the heat-trapping greenhouse effect would be hampered, causing Earth to cool.

In turn, this would result in Earth receiving more high-energy ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which can be extremely harmful to life. Thus, Brakenridge predicts that the follow-on effects of supernova radiation bombarding Earth could include animal extinctions, increased wildfires and global cooling.

The fact that Earth doesn't seem to be currently under bombardment by radiation from a nearby supernova (phew!) means this model can't be tested in real-time. That led Brakenridge to turn to Earth's geological record to hunt for past incidents.

Particularly useful to the scientist were tree rings that can reveal ancient atmospheric conditions. That's because trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere into their trunks, within which rings form as the tree grows and supernova radiation bombarding Earth should lead to an increase in radioactive isotopes of carbon in our planet's atmosphere.

Brakenridge examined tree ring records spanning around 15,000 years, spotting 11 tell-tale spikes in radioactive carbon. The researcher theorizes these spikes could correspond with 11 times Earth was blasted with supernova radiation.

"The events that we know of, here on Earth, are at the right time and the right intensity," Brakenridge said.

Currently, the scientist can't be totally confident that these spikes are connected to supernovas.

Another possible culprit for these spikes that needs to be eliminated are solar flares from the sun. To eliminate this possibility, researchers can cross-check these tree-ring results with evidence locked away in other geological sources such as ice cores and sediment from the ocean floor.

Further investigation of the possible connection between supernova radiation and Earth's atmosphere could help humanity prepare for future events.

This may become particularly relevant when the proximate red giant star known as Betelgeuse, located around 700 light-years away, goes supernova. This is predicted to happen within the next 100,000 years.

"As we learn more about our nearby neighboring stars, the capability for prediction is actually there," Brakenridge concluded. "It will take more modeling and observation from astrophysicists to fully understand Earth's exposure to such events."

The team's research was published in the June edition of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

Since the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, a number of actions aimed at slashing federal science spending and restricting research topics have begun to worry the American scientific community.

These include firing many — then rehiring some — staff across major science agencies, as well as holding up over a billion dollars in federal funding and triggering a pause in graduate admissions and faculty job postings at universities. Executive orders prompted the flagging of research projects for review based on whether they contain words like "female" or "gender," and scrubbing peer-reviewed papers from agency websites if they conflict with the current administration's policy priorities.

In response, scientists have begun to mobilize. On her Bluesky feed, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in clinical psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, posted on Feb. 9 simply, "Get in Dorks, we are going protesting."

Delawalla is the lead organizer of Stand Up for Science, a grassroots movement with three main policy goals: to end political interference in science, to secure science funding, and to defend diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in science.

Related: Trump executive order calls mental health prescriptions a 'threat' — why?

On Friday (March 7), people in more than two dozen cities across the U.S. attended Stand Up for Science rallies. The main rally was held in D.C., with speakers like Bill Nye slated to talk, and 31 other cities held their own events.

Live Science reported from two of these locations — New York City and Raleigh, North Carolina — to learn more about what science supporters want from the U.S. government.

In New York City

Hundreds of rally attendees assembled in Washington Square Park in Manhattan under a bright-blue sky, although they occasionally had to grasp their signs tightly as they were buffeted by gusts of strong wind.

The crowd represented a wide range of age groups and vocations. Young children teetered on their caregivers' shoulders, high schoolers hoisted homemade cardboard signs, members of professional groups crowded together for a group photo in front of the square's iconic arch, and prominent professors stood alongside members of state government.

Among the clever and emphatic signage was the giant head of the beloved Muppets character Beaker, worn by an attendee affiliated with the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University.

Although many attendees were scientists, not all were.

"I think all expertise is under attack. That's really why I'm here," said Randi from Brooklyn, a retiree who previously worked in construction and asked that her last name not be used. "When you undermine expertise, then nobody knows what the facts are." She said she "had to come out" to the event after she heard that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was telling scientists to scrub their research papers of "words that might cause trouble."

"I think they're going after experts of all kinds, trying to bankrupt them so that eventually functions that scientists do will all be privatized," Randi told Live Science.

Two young attendees, Caitlin and Amalia, who declined to give their last names, held up signs reading, "Science is for everyone" and "Girls just wanna have fun-ding for research." In regard to the recent developments in the federal government, Amalia, a high-school senior who plans to major in biology in college, said, "I'm just kind of in awe — shock — that this is all going on."

Among the medical providers in attendance was Dr. Michelle Ng Gong, secretary of the American Thoracic Society (ATS), a medical society dedicated to accelerating the advancement of global respiratory health. The work of ATS is aimed at preserving lung health, in terms of both caring for patients and understanding factors that affect lung health, such as climate change and pollution, Gong said.

Cutting National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for diverse research teams and studies that aim to meet the needs of all patients is "basically gambling on our futures," she emphasized.

"Scientists have always tried to speak through our work, and our publications," she added. "But now I think we need to do a better job of communicating overall the impact that science has on day-to-day life."

That point was driven home by the chant "Science, not silence," which the crowd called out between the speakers featured at the rally. When asked to raise their hands if their work relies on federal research funding, the majority of the crowd reached to the sky.

Among the formal speakers at the rally was Dr. Claire Pomeroy, president and CEO of the Lasker Foundation, which gives out the coveted Lasker Awards for biomedical research. She spoke of her experience during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when she couldn't offer patients solutions; she could only hold their hands and attend their funerals. Science changed that — now, people with HIV can lead long, prosperous lives, and the infection can be prevented with powerful medications.

Attacks on science put those kinds of breakthroughs in jeopardy, Pomeroy emphasized. She encouraged those gathered to stay informed and keep their networks outside science in the loop, as well. "We have to spread the message beyond this crowd," Pomeroy said.

Josh Dubnau, a Stony Brook University professor who studies ALS and other neurodegenerative disorders, underscored the wide range of jobs that NIH funding supports — tens of thousands of jobs in New York State, alone, he said. He called the funding cuts and firings orchestrated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and other federal actors a "planned and coordinated assault" on science, as well as on America's education system.

Dubnau urged the rally attendees to band together in response, not stay silent in an attempt at self preservation.

Additional speakers included Griffin Gowdy, a biomedical researcher with Scientists Rebellion, a collective calling for action to address the climate crisis, who encouraged attendees to start or join organizations assembling on behalf of the scientific enterprise.

"Like a burning Tesla battery that not even Poiseden himself could put out, we will never stop fighting for what's right," Gowdy quipped.

Several New York politicians also stepped to the microphone, including state Assemblymember Harvey Epstein and state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal.

Epstein, who also teaches an environmental law clinic at CUNY Law School, acknowledged there will be cuts to federal funding but called on the crowd to collectively stand up to "bullies in the White House" despite that.

Hoylman-Sigal condemned Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for claiming measles can be cured with vitamin A and fish oil amid the ongoing outbreak in Texas and said it's "not right" that anyone is dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.

To conclude his talk, Hoylman-Sigal also thanked scientists for their role in making it so that HIV is no longer a death sentence; as a gay man, Hoylman-Sigal was grateful for the lives HIV drugs have spared within the LGBTQ+ community.

In Raleigh

A crowd of around 500 people gathered slowly but steadily on Halifax Mall, a block from the state capitol building and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. A stiff wind blew posters willy-nilly as people listened to speakers, including Jamie Vernon, the executive director of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society headquartered in North Carolina's "Research Triangle."

Protest leaders encouraged the gathering of young, mid-career and retired scientists and supporters to take occasional "warm-up breaks" while chanting phrases like "What do we want? Science! When do we want it? Now!" and "Vaccines are awesome, imagine if we lost 'em."

Toxicologist Noelle Muzzy told Live Science that she organized the Raleigh Stand Up for Science rally because "in one sentence: science is under attack."

The executive orders affecting funding, federal jobs and censorship were at the forefront for Muzzy. "All of that is limiting what we can do as researchers. That's very concerning, not just for career scientists but also for the general public," she said, adding that "we're going to be losing access to new technology that could save lives and produce medical treatments as well."

But the general tenor of the Raleigh event was optimistic, even as many signs satirized the language that President Trump and Elon Musk in particular have used recently to denigrate science they deem worthless, such as "Transgender ≠ Transgenic."

"I'm here because I support science in every way, shape and form. Not only for myself and my colleagues personally, but for everyone because science is, in fact, for everyone," McKenzie Gehris, a graduate student in pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science. She had a poster of the muppet Beaker that read, "This is the only orange muppet I trust to tell me about science."

"The research that scientists do across the country helps cure diseases, helps figure out things about our climate and the world that we live in," Gehris said. "It's important that we fund that sort of research."

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken centre stage in basic science. The five winners of the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics shared a common thread: AI.

Indeed, many scientists — including the Nobel committees — are celebrating AI as a force for transforming science.

As one of the laureates put it, AI's potential for accelerating scientific discovery makes it "one of the most transformative technologies in human history". But what will this transformation really mean for science?

AI promises to help scientists do more, faster, with less money. But it brings a host of new concerns, too — and if scientists rush ahead with AI adoption they risk transforming science into something that escapes public understanding and trust, and fails to meet the needs of society.

The illusions of understanding

Experts have already identified at least three illusions that can ensnare researchers using AI.

The first is the "illusion of explanatory depth". Just because an AI model excels at predicting a phenomenon — like AlphaFold, which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for its predictions of protein structures — that doesn't mean it can accurately explain it. Research in neuroscience has already shown that AI models designed for optimised prediction can lead to misleading conclusions about the underlying neurobiological mechanisms.

Second is the "illusion of exploratory breadth". Scientists might think they are investigating all testable hypotheses in their exploratory research, when in fact they are only looking at a limited set of hypotheses that can be tested using AI.

Finally, the "illusion of objectivity". Scientists may believe AI models are free from bias, or that they can account for all possible human biases. In reality, however, all AI models inevitably reflect the biases present in their training data and the intentions of their developers.

Related: 'It might pave the way for novel forms of artistic expression': Generative AI isn't a threat to artists — it's an opportunity to redefine art itself

Cheaper and faster science

One of the main reasons for AI's increasing appeal in science is its potential to produce more results, faster, and at a much lower cost.

An extreme example of this push is the "AI Scientist" machine recently developed by Sakana AI Labs. The company's vision is to develop a "fully AI-driven system for automated scientific discovery", where each idea can be turned into a full research paper for just US$15 — though critics said the system produced "endless scientific slop".

Do we really want a future where research papers can be produced with just a few clicks, simply to "accelerate" the production of science? This risks inundating the scientific ecosystem with papers with no meaning and value, further straining an already overburdened peer-review system.

We might find ourselves in a world where science, as we once knew it, is buried under the noise of AI-generated content.

A lack of context

The rise of AI in science comes at a time when public trust in science and scientists is still fairly high , but we can't take it for granted. Trust is complex and fragile.

As we learned during the COVID pandemic, calls to "trust the science" can fall short because scientific evidence and computational models are often contested, incomplete, or open to various interpretations.

However, the world faces any number of problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality, that require public policies crafted with expert judgement. This judgement must also be sensitive to specific situations, gathering input from various disciplines and lived experiences that must be interpreted through the lens of local culture and values.

As an International Science Council report published last year argued, science must recognise nuance and context to rebuild public trust. Letting AI shape the future of science may undermine hard-won progress in this area.

If we allow AI to take the lead in scientific inquiry, we risk creating a monoculture of knowledge that prioritizes the kinds of questions, methods, perspectives and experts best suited for AI.

This can move us away from the transdisciplinary approach essential for responsible AI, as well as the nuanced public reasoning and dialogue needed to tackle our social and environmental challenges.

A new social contract for science

As the 21st century began, some argued scientists had a renewed social contract in which scientists focus their talents on the most pressing issues of our time in exchange for public funding. The goal is to help society move toward a more sustainable biosphere — one that is ecologically sound, economically viable and socially just.

The rise of AI presents scientists with an opportunity not just to fulfil their responsibilities but to revitalize the contract itself. However, scientific communities will need to address some important questions about the use of AI first.

For example, is using AI in science a kind of "outsourcing" that could compromise the integrity of publicly funded work? How should this be handled?

What about the growing environmental footprint of AI? And how can researchers remain aligned with society's expectations while integrating AI into the research pipeline?

The idea of transforming science with AI without first establishing this social contract risks putting the cart before the horse.

Letting AI shape our research priorities without input from diverse voices and disciplines can lead to a mismatch with what society actually needs and result in poorly allocated resources.

Science should benefit society as a whole. Scientists need to engage in real conversations about the future of AI within their community of practice and with research stakeholders. These discussions should address the dimensions of this renewed social contract, reflecting shared goals and values.

It's time to actively explore the various futures that AI for science enables or blocks — and establish the necessary standards and guidelines to harness its potential responsibly.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Isaac Newton once wrote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (That's sometimes been interpreted as a sarcastic remark directed at his rival Robert Hooke, who may have had a pronounced curvature of the spine, although many historians dispute this.) But Newton was expressing the truth that all science proceeds from previous achievements — and even the most famous scientists relied on the diligent and sometimes thankless work of their little-known colleagues. In celebration of these unsung stalwarts of science, here are 32 important scientists you've (probably) never heard of.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

In her 1925 doctoral thesis, the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin proposed that stars are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium — an idea that revolutionized science but was initially met with skepticism. According to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Payne-Gaposchkin was renowned for her work on variable stars, and wrote several books. She was born in England in 1900, immigrated to the United States to study astronomy at Harvard College Observatory, and died in 1979.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Born in Tamil Nadu, India, in 1887, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan caught the attention of British mathematician G. H. Hardy, with whom he collaborated and who sponsored his move to Cambridge in England. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Ramanujan is best known for his work on number theory, infinite series and fractions, while several areas of his work — including elliptical functions and Riemann zeta functions — still inspire modern mathematical research. Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32; his cause of death is debated.

Ellen Swallow Richards

In 1868, the pioneering American engineer and chemist Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) became the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a degree in chemistry. According to Cornell University, she is regarded as the founder of the field of home economics, which applied scientific principles to domestic life, and she is considered one of the first environmental engineers thanks to her groundbreaking research on water quality and sanitation.

Oliver Heaviside

Born in London in 1850, mathematician and physicist Oliver Heaviside made developments in electromagnetic theory. These include work on transmission lines that advanced long-distance telephony and his prediction of a layer of Earth's ionosphere — sometimes called the Heaviside layer, or the Kennelly-Heaviside layer — that reflected some radio waves and allowed radio broadcasts around Earth's curvature. Heaviside died after falling from a ladder in 1925.

Dorothy Hodgkin

British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin is renowned for her pioneering work in X-ray crystallography and her development of methods for determining molecular structures using X-ray diffraction. Among other compounds, she researched the structures of drugs such as penicillin and insulin, which had significant implications for medicine and biochemistry. Hodgkin was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1910; won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964; and died in the U.K. in 1994.

Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks

Born in 1890, Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks was an American cellular biologist who made important contributions to toxicology. They include her 1932 discovery that the dye methylene blue, which is commonly used to stain organic samples in biology, can also act as an antidote to poisoning by carbon monoxide and cyanide. She was also an advocate for the role of women in science and faced challenges in securing a research position at the University of California because her husband, Sumner Cushing Brooks, was also a researcher there and anti-nepotism policies prevented her appointment. She died in 1981.

Nettie Stevens

The American geneticist Nettie Stevens was one of the first scientists to identify sex chromosomes. Her studies of mealworms showed that males produced two distinctive types of sperm, which always resulted in either male or female offspring; and her meticulous research showed the presence of X or Y sex chromosomes in the sperm. Her work laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the X-Y sex determination system, which is now a cornerstone of genetics. Stevens was born in Cavendish, Vermont in 1861 and died in Baltimore in 1912.

Ashoke Sen

Indian theoretical physicist Ashoke Sen is a pioneer of string theory and noted for his contributions to quantum field theory and black hole entropy. Sen was born in Kolkata in 1956 and has studied in the United States and the United Kingdom; his research has laid the foundations for explorations into the fundamental nature of the universe. He now lives and teaches in Bangalore, where he is a leading voice in the pursuit of a unified theory of everything.

Hermann Minkowski

Mathematician Hermann Minkowski is most famous for developing a geometric interpretation of Einstein's theory of special relativity. Among his other innovations, he proposed the idea of space-time, which combines the three physical dimensions of space with the fourth dimension of time into a unified mathematical framework. He also made important contributions to number theory and the geometry of numbers. Minkowski was born in Lithuania in 1864, when it was still part of the Russian Empire, and died in Germany in 1909 at the age of 44.

Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya

Indian physicist and mathematician Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya (1918-2010) made important contributions to general relativity, including a solution to Einstein's field equations that describes the gravitational field of a radiating star; earlier solutions had assumed only a nonradiating mass. He also contributed to the professional advancement of science in India after its independence from Britain in 1947, which included forming the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation and leading the Indian Mathematical Society.

Maurice Hilleman

American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman (1919-2005) was a pioneer of vaccinology and is thought to have saved millions of lives. In the 1950s, while working for the U.S. Army, he identified the mechanisms by which influenza viruses mutate, which allowed the creation of better vaccines and prevented the possible outbreak of flu pandemics. He also developed vaccines for hepatitis B and meningitis, and his vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella were combined into a single injection, known as the MMR vaccine, to simplify childhood immunizations.

Emmy Noether

German mathematician Amalie "Emmy" Noether (1882-1935) made important contributions to abstract algebra, particularly in what are known as ring, field and group theories, which laid the foundations for modern algebra. Her "Noether's theorem" linked symmetries in physical systems with the principles of energy conservation and is now a cornerstone of physics. Noether was born in Germany but emigrated to the United States in 1933, after her university professorship, along with those of other Jews, was revoked by the Nazis.

Abdus Salam

Abdus Salam (1926-1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist who contributed to the scientific understanding of fundamental forces. One of his key achievements was the theory of the electroweak force, which combined the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force — a step toward a unified theory of everything. With his colleagues, Salam was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics for this work. Salam also championed scientific collaboration between countries and co-founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, in 1964.

Saharon Shelah

Mathematician Saharon Shelah is a leading figure in model theory, which explores the relationships between logical structures and their interpretations, and set theory, which studies sets of mathematical objects and their properties. Shelah's work examines the foundations of mathematics — particularly the structure and properties of mathematical objects. He was born in Jerusalem in 1945; in 2001, he won the Wolf Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics.

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Indian polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) is known for his contributions to the fields of physics, botany and biology. He invented an instrument called the crescograph, which can detect minute changes in plant tissues in response to fluctuations in light, temperature and other factors. His experiments in this field challenged the prevailing view of plants as passive entities and showed they were sensitive to their environments. He also conducted research into radio waves and independently achieved wireless transmission in 1895.

Aristarchus of Samos

Aristarchus of Samos was an ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer who lived from roughly 310 to 230 B.C. in the city-state of Samos. He is thought to be the first to develop the heliocentric model of the solar system, in which the planets orbit the sun. A few centuries after Aristarchus, however, most astronomers preferred the geocentric model, in which the sun and planets orbited the Earth; and that was the dominant theory until it was challenged in the 16th century A.D. by the Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus had developed his own heliocentric model, and seems not to have known about Aristarchus.

John Michell

No portrait survives of the early English scientist John Michell (1724-1793) but he made important contributions to several scientific fields, including astronomy and geology. Michell was a friend of the astronomer William Herschel and was the first to determine that double or "binary" stars were in fact orbiting each other. Before this, Herschel and other astronomers believed the many double stars they had seen were just tricks of alignment, and that one of the stars was much further behind the other. But Mitchel showed there were far too many observations of double stars than could occur at random. He also showed that star clusters like the Pleiades could not have occurred at random, which indicated the stars in such clusters shared a common origin. Michell was the first scientist to apply statistics to astronomy; statistical techniques are now a cornerstone of the field.

Daniel Hale Williams

Daniel Hale Williams (1858-1931) was a pioneer in modern medicine and an important Black American scientist. He performed the world's first successful heart surgery in 1893, by controlling the bleeding of a man who had been stabbed in a fight. Williams co-founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, which was the first Black-owned and -operated medical institution in the United States. He was a vocal critic of racial disparities in health care and co-founded the National Medical Association, a professional organization for Black doctors facing limitations in the medical community.

Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky

Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky was born in 1862 in Russia. He was an important electrical engineer and invented the first practical alternating-current (AC) induction motor that could easily convert electricity into mechanical power. Earlier AC motors were complex and unreliable, but Dolivo-Dobrovolsky's invention paved the way for the wide-scale adoption of national AC grids. He also designed transformers to vary AC voltage, which allowed it to be transmitted over long distances. In the 1890s, he helped build the world's first long-distance AC power transmission system between Frankfurt and Offenbach, Germany. He died in 1919.

Marguerite Perey

French nuclear chemist Marguerite Perey, born in 1909, was a student of the Polish-French physicist and chemist Marie Curie. She worked for many years as Curie's personal assistant at Curie's Radium Institute in Paris, where she learned how to isolate and purify radioactive elements. In 1935, while studying the radioactive element actinium, Perey discovered the 87th element of the periodic table, which she called "francium" after her home country. She'd hoped the radioactivity of francium would help diagnose cancer in patients, but in fact it was carcinogenic; Perey developed bone cancer and died in 1975.

Sofya Kovalevskaya

Sofya Kovalevskaya, born in 1850, was a Russian mathematician who made important contributions to mathematical methods of analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was the first woman to obtain a modern doctorate and the first woman in Northern Europe to be appointed to a full professorship. Her most notable contribution was the development of the "Kovalevskaya top" — equations that describe a virtual spinning top within a gravitational field — thereby solving what was one of the most complex problems in classical mechanics. She lived in Sweden after the 1870s and died in 1891 at the age of 41.

Émilie du Châtelet

Émilie du Châtelet was an 18th-century French natural philosopher and mathematician who is best known for her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton's 1687 book "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica," often called the "Principia." Her commentary made several contributions to Newtonian mechanics, including an additional conservation law for the kinetic energy of motion, and she developed new ideas about the relationship between energy and the mass and velocity of an object. Du Châtelet was born in 1706 and died in 1749 from complications during childbirth.

Hero of Alexandria

Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria was an engineer and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, when it was ruled by the Romans in the first century A.D. He is credited with the invention of a steam-powered device called the aeolipile, or "Hero's engine," which featured a primitive steam turbine. He also developed the technology behind windmills — an important contribution to civilization. In mathematics, he is best remembered for Heron's formula, which is a way of calculating the area of a triangle using only the lengths of its sides.

Johann Rudolf Glauber

Born in 1604 in Karlstadt, Bavaria (which in 1871 became part of the German Empire), Johann Rudolf Glauber is considered one of the first chemical engineers, and his inventions often had commercial uses. He was the first to describe "chemical gardens," in which inorganic chemicals immersed in a sodium silicate solution appear to "grow" into complex structures. In 1625, Glauber discovered sodium sulfate, also known as "Glauber's salt," which is now a major chemical commodity used to make detergents and paper. He died in about 1670, possibly from poisoning by the chemicals he used in his work.

Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham

Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen, was born in Basra, now in southern Iraq, in about A.D. 965. He lived mainly in Cairo, Egypt, until 1040, during the Islamic Golden Age. He is sometimes called "the father of modern optics" and made important discoveries in the field, including a theory of vision that argued, correctly, that it occurred in the brain. (Earlier theories had suggested light rays were emitted from the eyes.) He also studied reflections, refraction, and the nature of images formed from rays of light.

Norman Borlaug

American agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) is known as "the father of the Green Revolution." His research contributed to global food production, and he spent decades developing disease-resistant strains of wheat that are now planted around the world. Borlaug also championed the transfer of farming technologies to developing nations, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and stressed the importance of population control to achieve long-term food security.

Annie Jump Cannon

Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) was a pioneering American astronomer nicknamed "the census taker of the sky" for her meticulous work classifying stars. She studied physics and astronomy at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and worked at Harvard College Observatory from the late 1890s, where she developed a classification method based on the spectra of stars that was first used by astronomer Edward Pickering. Cannon had exceptional eyesight and classified over 350,000 stars in her lifetime, sometimes at a rate of more than 5,000 stars a month. Her classification system played a crucial role in the development of the modern stellar classification system, which is based on a star's temperature and surface conditions.

Fritz Zwicky

Born in 1898 in Bulgaria to a Swiss father and a Czech mother, Fritz Zwicky emigrated to the United States in 1925 and studied astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. Zwicky developed many astronomical concepts, and with astronomer Walter Baade described neutron stars and supernovae — the powerful explosions of massive stars. His greatest contribution to science, however, was suggesting that galaxy-scale concentrations of what's now called dark matter — he called it "dunkle materie" in German — may be the cause of anomalies in the behavior of galaxies within galactic clusters and the orbital speeds of stars at the edges of galaxies. He died in 1974.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) was an Indian-American astrophysicist who studied the evolution of stars. His most famous research resulted in his determination of what's now known as the Chandrasekhar limit, which is the point at which a star that has run out of fuel will collapse into a white dwarf. Each of these incredibly dense stellar remnants can be smaller than Earth but have a mass greater than that of the sun. His research expanded into the study of black holes, which initially were not widely accepted but now are regarded as both an important feature of astronomy and possible clues to the nature of the universe. Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on stellar evolution.

Ida Noddack

German chemist Ida Noddack (1896-1978) was the first woman to hold a professional position in Germany's chemical industry. Her most famous discovery, which she made with her husband Walter Noddack and collaborator Otto Berg, was their isolation in 1925 of the 75th element on the periodic table, a rare metal they named "rhenium" after the river Rhine. The element had been predicted decades earlier, and the discovery confirmed the theoretical structure of the periodic table. Noddack was also one of the first scientists to suggest that the nuclei of some elements bombarded with neutrons could split — a phenomenon now known as nuclear fission.

Eunice Foote

The 19th century American scientist and inventor Eunice Foote (1819-1888) carried out early research on the greenhouse effect, in which some atmospheric gases trap heat from the sun near Earth's surface. In 1856, she presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science demonstrating the effect of the sun's rays on different gases and suggested this had taken place in Earth's atmosphere and affected its climate. But Foote, as a woman in the 19th century, was not permitted to read her own paper at the meeting, so a male professor read it on her behalf.

Kary Mullis

American biochemist Kary Mullis revolutionized molecular biology with his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique. He conceived the idea in the 1980s while working for an early biotechnology company. It allows the rapid amplification of specific DNA sequences within a controlled environment, sharply reducing the amount of starting DNA required and cutting the time needed for analysis. PCR can detect DNA from viruses, bacteria and genetic mutations, and it is now a cornerstone of medical diagnostics, genetics, forensics and archaeology. Along with Michael Smith, Mullis was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the invention. He was born in 1944 and died in 2019.

A scientist who spent a record-breaking 100 consecutive days living in a seafloor habitat has just resurfaced. Last month, while he was still underwater, Live Science got the chance to chat with him about this unique experience and the initial scientific findings of his mission.

Joseph Dituri, a 55-year-old biomedical engineer with the International Board of Undersea Medicine and a former U.S. Navy saturation diver, lived inside the Jules' Undersea Lodge off the coast of Florida for 100 days between March 1 and June 9. The mission, known as Project Neptune, was a scientific endeavor to study the effects of living in a high-pressure environment for a sustained period.

Dituri, who goes by the nickname "Dr. Deep Sea," eclipsed the record for the longest stay in an underwater fixed habitat, beating past record holders, Bruce Cantrell and Jessica Fain, scientists who spent 73 days living in the Jules' Undersea Lodge in 2014, according to Guinness World Records.

On May 19 (Day 80 of the mission), Dituri spoke with Live Science from the Jules' Undersea Lodge to explain what it was like to live underwater in a confined space and how his body and brain had changed over time. 

Related: What are the deepest spots in Earth's oceans?

Living underwater 

The Jules' Undersea Lodge sits 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface of the green-tinged Emerald Lagoon in the coastal waters off Key Largo. The habitat has a surface area of around 100 square feet (9 square meters) and is pressurized to around 1.7 atmospheres. "It's basically like a really small RV," Dituri told Live Science. 

Dituri's days underwater were jam-packed. He conducted medical tests on himself, taught students in his class at the University of South Florida, did press interviews, shared videos on Instagram, worked out with resistance bands, spoke to schoolchildren and went scuba diving in the lagoon via the habitat's moon pool — the only way in and out of the lodge.

"I have almost no downtime," Dituri said. "But it's a really good thing to stay busy when you're trapped in a small space." 

Dituri learned to stop keeping track of how far along he was to avoid getting fixated on the amount of time remaining. "I've stopped counting the days," Dituri said. "You've just got to set your mind to it and do it."

Around 50 other individuals — including family members, doctors, scientists and schoolchildren — visited during his stay, which helped alleviate the mental challenges of prolonged confinement and solitude. Being virtually connected to the outside world has also helped, Dituri said. "But it's not the same as seeing people in person."

Dituri's career in the U.S. Navy helped him overcome the psychological challenges of living underwater, but some aspects of the experience still shocked him.

"One of the things that has surprised me the most is how much I miss the sun," Dituri said. "I want to go out and take a peek." But what Dituri actually missed most during the mission was skydiving, he said.

Collecting data 

A research team of doctors and scientists continually monitored changes to Dituri's  physiology by analyzing samples of his blood, urine and saliva. They also carried out a variety of tests, including electrocardiograms (EKGs) to test his heart function, electroencephalograms (EEGs) to test his brain activity, pulmonary function tests to see how well his lungs were working, pupillometry tests to monitor the pressure in his skull, and regular blood pressure tests. Researchers also monitored his sleep using advanced wrist-based sensors, and he underwent various psychological evaluations regularly.

Dituri shared some of the initial results from these tests with Live Science. He said that during the 80 days he had already been underwater, his oxidative stress — damage to cells caused by reactive byproducts of oxygen breakdown, which is known to play a role in aging — had decreased by two-thirds and that "all the inflammatory markers in his body" had been cut in half. He also noted an increase in his stem cell count and the length of his telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes that naturally shorten throughout a person's lifetime. His cholesterol levels also dropped. 

However, a "total shocker" was that the percentage of his sleep made up by REM sleep, or the stage of sleep where most dreaming occurs, increased from between 35% to 40% up to more than 60%. People who stayed overnight in the habitat showed smaller increases in REM sleep, he added.

In a more recent interview with the Daily Mail on Day 93 of his mission, Dituri claimed that because of the accumulation of all of these factors, he now feels "10 years younger."

Dituri also exercised with a new type of resistance band designed to help astronauts maintain muscle mass in space, though the research team hasn't disclosed the results yet.

None of these findings have been peer-reviewed or replicated yet, which are key elements of the scientific method, Dituri said. As such, more research is needed to make concrete conclusions.

Dituri hopes his sojourn underwater helps spread a message of ocean conservation. At least 3,000 children learned about the mission, either via video calls or in person, which is "unheard of" in such a short time, he added. This has allowed him to teach the "next generation" why the ocean is so important.

The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT may be a decent mimic of human workers in several fields, but scientific research is not one of them, according to a new study that used a computer program to spot fake studies generated by the chatbot. But the AI is still capable of fooling some humans with its science writing, previous research shows. 

Since bursting onto the scene in November 2022, ChatGPT has become a hugely popular tool for writing reports, sending emails, filling in documents, translating languages and writing computer code. But the chatbot has also been criticized for plagiarism and its lack of accuracy, while also sparking fears that it could help  spread "fake news" and replace some human workers. 

In the new study, published June 7 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, researchers created a new computer learning program to tell the difference between real scientific papers and fake examples written by ChatGPT. The scientists trained the program to identify key differences between 64 real studies published in the journal Science and 128 papers created by ChatGPT using the same 64 papers as a prompt.

The team then tested how well their model could differentiate between a different subset of real and ChatGPT-generated papers, which included 60 real papers from the journal Science and 120 AI-generated counterfeits. The program flagged the AI-written papers more than 99% of the time and could correctly tell the difference between human-written and chatbot-written paragraphs 92% of the time. 

Related: AI's 'unsettling' rollout is exposing its flaws. How concerned should we be?

ChatGPT-generated papers differed from human text in four key ways: paragraph complexity, sentence-level diversity in length, punctuation marks and "popular words." For example, human authors write longer and more complex paragraphs, while the AI papers used punctuation that is not found in real papers, such as exclamation marks.

The researchers' program also spotted lots of glaring factual errors in the AI papers.

"One of the biggest problems is that it [ChatGPT] assembles text from many sources and there isn't any kind of accuracy check," study lead author Heather Desaire, an analytical chemist at the University of Kansas, said in the statement. As a result, reading through ChatGPT-generated writing can be like "playing a game of two truths and a lie," she added.

Creating computer programs to differentiate between real and AI-generated papers is important because previous studies have hinted that humans may not be as good at spotting the differences.

In December 2022, another research group uploaded a study to the preprint server bioRxiv, which revealed that journal reviewers could only identify AI-generated study abstracts — the summary paragraphs found at the start of a scientific paper — around 68% of the time, while computer programs could identify the fakes 99% of the time. The reviewers also misidentified 14% of the real papers as fakes. The human reviewers would almost certainly be better at identifying entire papers compared with a single paragraph, the study researchers wrote, but it still highlights that human errors could enable some AI-generated content to go unnoticed. (This study has not yet been peer-reviewed.)

The researchers of the new study say they are pleased that their program is effective at weeding out fake papers but warn it is only a proof of concept. Much more wide-scale studies are needed to create robust models that are even more reliable and can be trained to specific scientific disciplines to maintain the integrity of the scientific method, they wrote (themselves) in their paper.

Between a cutting-edge gravitational wave detector roaring back to life and the discovery of a 3,000-year-old bakery still covered in flour, the world of science once again thrilled us with another week of groundbreaking news. And nothing is more groundbreaking right now than the combined mass of New York City’s 1,084,954 buildings, which are literally causing the city to sink at the rate of about 0.08 inches (2.1 millimeters) per year.

Speaking of weighty objects, paleontologists in Argentina discovered the remains of a ginormous long-necked titanosaur, which measured about 100 feet (30 meters) long. The dinosaur’s fossils were so heavy that when being transported to Buenos Aires for study they caused a traffic accident and smashed the asphalt on the road. Thankfully no bones, human or dinosaur, were broken.

Finally, we know that life is full of little mysteries (and we should know a thing or two about them), but what has been really taxing us this week are whether octopuses have nightmares, what China is dropping off in space, and whether we’ll ever find evidence of a "dark matter star". However, one thing we are now a little more certain of is the answer to evolutionary scientists’ chicken-or-egg equivalent — which came first, the comb jelly or the sea sponge?

Picture of the week

This unusual little critter is an extremely rare albino echidna, one of two known mammals in the world (along with platypuses) in which females lay eggs but also produce milk. Spotted earlier this month on a road in New South Wales, Australia, this all-white, quill-covered creature has been named Raffie by local authorities. 

Albinism is a genetic condition that interferes with the body's production of melanin, the main pigment that colors animals' skin, fur, feathers, scales and eyes. When melanin cells don’t function properly, it can make animals appear partially or completely white. 

"An albino echidna is a rare sight," representatives of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) wrote in a Twitter post on May 22, 2022. "Spotting a non-albino echidna is also pretty uncommon," officials added. 

Weekend reading

• Scientists in Germany have worked out that a massive dinosaur from Brazil ate "'like a pelican,"' but why is the study, not the finding, causing an uproar?
• Speaking of dinosaurs, have you seen our exclusive preview of the new Prehistoric Planet season?
• Summer is nearly here, but not everywhere can expect to feel the heat — these are the coldest places on Earth.
• If you’re planning a trip to space any time soon you can expect some weird things to happen to your body and also see some similarly weird things if you look out the window of your rocket. It might be better if you just sleep through the whole experience.

And finally…

The James Webb Space Telescope continues its impressive run of discovering secrets of our universe, spying a gargantuan geyser on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus blasting water hundreds of miles into space — could it contain chemical ingredients for life?

It's been a busy week in science news when it comes to animals, where we discovered why a tiny jumping spider is such a bad actor, revised our best estimates for how many T. rexes once roamed Earth, and found out how Australian authorities are doing to save koalas from chlamydia. 

Elsewhere, a mysterious noise 70,000 feet (21,000 meters) up in the atmosphere is baffling scientists, while further afield, the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted what could be an ancient "water world" in a nearby star system.

Closer to home, we've uncovered a 5,400-year-old tomb in Spain that perfectly captures the summer solstice, a pair of 2,300-year-old scissors and a "folded" sword in a Celtic cremation tomb, and the ruins of a Roman watchtower in Switzerland. 

Delving further back in human history, we shared the latest research on our human relatives, which revealed that Neanderthals passed down their tall noses to modern humans. And looking back even further, we saw evidence that the very spark of life on Earth may have been caused by solar superflares.

Picture of the week

This colorful image of Earth portents the early signs of El Niño forming in the Pacific Ocean. 

Using data from NASA's Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, the picture shows Kelvin waves (in red and white, which represent warmer water and higher sea levels) moving across the Pacific. Scientists consider these waves to be a precursor to El Niño when they form at the equator and move the warm upper layer of water to the western Pacific. 

"We'll be watching this El Niño like a hawk," Josh Willis, a project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement. "If it's a big one, the globe will see record warming." 

Weekend reading

• Can you guess which is the heaviest organ in the human body?
• If you want to bring the cosmos indoors, check out our roundup of the best star projectors.
• Bad actors they may be, but which spiders are the deadliest?
• Did Noah's flood really happen? Nope, but it is a story much older than the Bible, and researchers are still learning about its roots.

And finally…

Don't miss your last chance to see the ethereal Earthshine next week. The phenomenon, also known as Da Vinci glow, is sunlight reflected first by Earth onto the lunar surface, then again into the eyes of the viewer. The effect is a faint, ghostly glow on the shadowed part of the moon's Earth-facing side. It's not to be missed.

Planets may have begun forming in our solar system when the sun was still young — millions of years earlier than previously thought, a new study of long-dead stars suggests.

In the study, published Monday (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature Astronomy, astronomers analyzed the mixture of different elements in the atmospheres of more than 200 white dwarfs — dead, dim husks of stars that were once as massive as our sun, or larger.

The study authors found clear evidence that these stars were "polluted" with heavy elements like iron, magnesium and calcium. According to the authors, white dwarfs typically have pristine atmospheres, and these elemental anomalies could only result from collisions with ancient asteroids called planetesimals — the rocky building blocks of early planets — that burned up in the stars' atmospheres eons ago.

This is not the first time that white dwarfs have been caught wearing the corpses of would-be planets in their atmospheres. However, the types of elements detected in these particular stars suggest that the burnt-up planetesimals once had iron cores, meaning they had gone through the long process of melting and hardening known as differentiation — the same process that gave Earth its rocky mantle and iron core billions of years ago.

In order to have endured this long melting process, those iron-cored planetesimals must have formed within the first million years of their solar systems' lives, the researchers wrote — far earlier than most models of planet formation suggest.

"The cause of the melting can only be attributed to very short-lived radioactive elements, which existed in the earliest stages of the planetary system but decay away in just a million years," lead study author Amy Bonsor, an astronomer at Cambridge University in the U.K., said in a statement. "In other words, if these asteroids were melted by something which only exists for a very brief time at the dawn of the planetary system, then the process of planet formation must kick off very quickly."

Today's leading theories of planet formation suggest that planets originate from icy disks of gas and dust that orbit young stars; over time, tiny particles in these disks stick together, forming ever-larger objects. Eventually, rocky planetesimals emerge. Some of these planetesimals continue to accrete matter from their surroundings, becoming planets, while others remain as asteroids — like the ones that apparently crashed into the white dwarfs in the new study.

Most theories hold that planetesimals don't appear in a solar system until their host star has already reached its final size, many millions of years after the star's birth. But this new study suggests that that cannot always be the case; in order for a dead star to contain the remains of iron-rich asteroids in its atmosphere, then that star and its planetesimals must "grow up together," the study authors wrote. And that pushes back the start of planet formation by millions of years.

"Our study complements a growing consensus in the field that planet formation got going early, with the first bodies forming concurrently with the star," Bonsor said. This type of planet formation may be "ubiquitous" among solar systems, including our own, she added.

That doesn't mean that Earth, or any other planet, is older than was previously thought; the study's findings only suggest that the physical process of planet formation begins much earlier than prevailing models have claimed. 

Astronomers have detected an enormous extragalactic structure hiding in an uncharted region of space far beyond the Milky Way's center.

This phantom region, known as the zone of avoidance, is a blank spot on our map of the universe, comprising somewhere between 10% and 20% of the night sky. The reason we can't see it — at least with standard visible light telescopes — is because the Milky Way's bulging center blocks our view of it; the center of our galaxy is so dense with stars, dust and other matter that light from the zone of avoidance gets scattered or absorbed before reaching Earth's telescopes.

However, researchers have had better luck uncovering the zone's secrets with telescopes that can detect infrared radiation — a type of energy that's invisible to human eyes, but powerful enough to shine through dense clouds of gas and dust. Infrared surveys of the zone of avoidance have found evidence of thousands of individual galaxies shining through the cosmic fog, though little is known about the large-scale structures that lurk there. 

Now, researchers have combined data from several of those infrared surveys to reveal the most colossal structure ever detected in the zone of avoidance, according to a study published Oct. 28 on the preprint database arXiv.org. (This study has not yet been peer reviewed, though it has been submitted for review to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics).

Located approximately 3 billion light-years from Earth, the mysterious structure appears to be a large cluster of galaxies drawn together by a shared center of gravity. Using observations from the VVV Survey — a survey that studies the Milky Way's central bulge at infrared wavelengths using the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy in Chile — the study authors found evidence of at least 58 galaxies bundled together in a small plot of the zone of avoidance.

Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally-bound objects in the universe; the largest known clusters contain hundreds of thousands of galaxies bunched together. Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell just how wide or massive the newly discovered cluster is, given the vast distances and myriad obstructions sitting between the cluster's stars and Earth. 

However, the mere detection of this colossal object shows that the zone of avoidance may not be as inscrutable as was once thought. Future infrared studies — including potential observations by the James Webb Space Telescope, which has already used its infrared camera to take the deepest image of the universe to date — should further help scientists unlock the hidden secrets beyond the Milky Way's bulge.

On Oct. 25, the moon's shadow swooped in front of the sun during the last partial solar eclipse of 2022. Sky watchers in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa and Asia saw anywhere from 15% to 85% of the sun's surface obscured by the moon, resulting in some truly spooky eclipse views in the pre-Halloween sky. As for the rest of the world? Nothing to see but an average, blazing-bright sun that was secretly smiling at us with its chaotic magnetic activity.

If you were one of the many Earthlings who missed the eclipse, NASA has you covered. Using data from the Hinode satellite — a solar observatory jointly managed by space agencies in the U.S., Japan, the U.K. and Europe — NASA has shared a video of the eclipse as seen from space. You can watch it now — and see the entire eclipse play out in just 30 seconds — above or on NASA's website.

As Hinode orbited Earth, it caught three different views of the eclipse over the course of about three hours. Seen through Hinode's X-ray telescope, the moon appears completely black, while the sun blazes bright red in the background.

Related: Get ready, the next great North American total solar eclipse is 2 years from today

Unlike the view from Earth, Hinode's orbiting vantage point allowed it to see not just a partial eclipse, but also an annular eclipse — that is, an eclipse in which the moon covers the center of the sun, allowing only a thin ring of fire to peek around the edges. (This ring of fire is also called an annulus, taken from the Latin word for "little ring.")

Those aching to see an annular eclipse from Earth need only wait another year; the next one will be visible Oct. 13, 2023, to viewers in the western United States, as well as parts of Central America, Colombia and Brazil, according to Timeanddate.com.

The Hinode satellite launched out of Japan in September, 2006. The satellite's primary mission is to study the sun's magnetic field, in order to understand the mechanisms that drive large solar eruptions such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, according to NASA.

After collapsing into pieces in December 2020, the mighty Arecibo Observatory has a final parting gift for humanity — and it's a doozy.

Using data collected by Arecibo between December 2017 and December 2019, scientists have released the largest radar-based report on near-Earth asteroids ever published. The report, published Sept. 22 in The Planetary Science Journal, includes detailed observations of 191 near-Earth asteroids, including nearly 70 that are deemed "potentially hazardous" — that is, large asteroids with orbits that bring them within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) of Earth, or roughly 20 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.

Fortunately, none of these newly described asteroids pose an immediate threat to Earth; according to NASA, our planet is safe from deadly asteroid impacts for at least the next 100 years. However, scientists still pay close attention to near-Earth objects like these in case their trajectories happen to shift by some fluke of nature — say, a bump from another asteroid — thereby putting them on a collision course with Earth.

The new report also flagged several asteroids deemed worthy of future study, including an oddball space object called 2017 YE5 — an ultra-rare "equal mass" binary asteroid, made of two nearly identical size rocks that are constantly orbiting one another. (Each of the rocks is estimated to measure between 2,600 and 2,950 feet, or 800 to 900 meters, in diameter). The asteroid's high radar reflectivity may indicate an abundance of water ice beneath its surface, possibly making it a never-before-seen class of icy, equal mass, near-Earth asteroid, the researchers wrote.

With this new "treasure trove" of data, scientists can better measure these asteroids' shapes, sizes and spin periods, which are crucial metrics for assessing the potential risks that the asteroids may pose to our planet, lead study author Anne Virkki, a researcher with the Department of Physics at the University of Helsinki in Finland, said in a statement.

"The amount of valuable data collected is unique, and these results could not have been achieved with any other existing facility," study co-author Flaviane Venditti, head of Arecibo's Planetary Radar Science Group, added.

The Arecibo Observatory was constructed in Puerto Rico in 1963, becoming the world's largest and most powerful radio telescope. Its iconic 1,000-foot-wide (305 m) telescope dish became world famous in the 1990s after it was featured in movies such as "Contact" (1997) and "GoldenEye" (1995). By then, the observatory was already known in the scientific community for beaming humanity's first message to aliens into space in 1974.

More recently, Arecibo's observations of asteroids played a direct role in planning NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, in which scientists crashed a spacecraft into the near-Earth asteroid Dimorphos and altered its orbital period by 32 minutes.

Arecibo's career ended abruptly in December 2020, after two critical support cables snapped, leading to the complete collapse of the telescope. In October 2022, the National Science Foundation — which owns the site on which Arecibo was built — announced that the telescope will not be replaced or repaired, much to the dismay of scientists and space lovers around the world. 

Researchers are still analyzing a backlog of data from Arecibo, the team noted — so the world's most famous dead telescope may still have more scientific gifts to offer us from beyond the grave in the years to come.

They say that when you smile, the world smiles with you. And when the sun smiles, the world gets bathed in plasma barf.

Such is the unfortunate subtext of an adorable new image of our closest star, which seems to be smiling down upon us with a joyful chibi grin. Snapped on Oct. 26 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (a satellite that has been recording solar activity since February 2010), the image shows three distinct, dark splotches in the sun's atmosphere that resemble a pair of button eyes and a cheery triangular mouth.

Perhaps the sun heard some good news. Perhaps it is tickled that we have finally discovered evidence of devastating solar storms hidden in ancient tree rings — the closest thing the sun has to "deep cuts" in its catalog of catastrophic outbursts.

Those happy blotches are, in fact, coronal holes — regions in the sun's corona, or outermost atmosphere, where solar wind gushes into space, according to NASA. (Don't try to see them with your home telescope; coronal holes are visible only in ultraviolet and X-ray light, which are well beyond the scope of human vision.)

Much like sunspots, which are dark blotches of chaotic magnetic activity that occur down on the sun's surface, coronal holes appear black because they are cooler than the plasma that surrounds them. From these cool portals, the sun's constant wind of charged particles streams into space at more than 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h).

We can see the smiley sun's coronal holes so clearly because the solar wind from those holes is blowing directly toward Earth. Astronomers expect the electric wind to crash into Earth's magnetic field sometime Saturday or Sunday (Oct. 29 and 30), possibly inducing a minor geomagnetic storm, according to Spaceweather.com.

The weakest class of geomagnetic storms – the G1 class – can frazzle satellites in orbit and cause small power grid fluctuations on Earth. In brighter news, these storms also tend to push the aurora borealis to lower latitudes than usual, giving more skywatchers a chance to see the sun's particles dance through our planet's atmosphere. Isn't that something to smile about?

This is hardly the first case of cosmic pareidolia — the human tendency to see faces in inanimate objects — to make news over the past few years. From scientists drawing a vague outline of Godzilla over an unassuming cloud of star gas, to Mars researchers identifying a Muppet on the Red Planet, this truly is a golden age of putting a friendly face on the cold, callous, plasma-spewing cosmos.

If the truth is out there, America's space experts may soon find it. On Monday (Oct. 24), NASA officially launched an independent study into UFOs — or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — the agency announced in a statement.

The study will run for the next nine months, with a team of 16 leading experts — including astrophysicists, aerospace industry executives and former astronauts — digging into as much data as possible about reported UAP sightings. This study is independent of the U.S. Department of Defense's (DOD) ongoing investigations into UAPs, and will "lay the groundwork for future study on the nature of UAPs" at NASA and across government agencies, according to the statement.

"Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters, said in the statement. "Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies."

During the nine-month investigation, the study team will look at unclassified data gathered by civilians, government agencies and private companies related to any observations in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or natural phenomena, according to NASA. The team's three-pronged approach will include identifying available UAP data, figuring out ways to gather more data in the future, and developing methods for studying that data in ways that advance NASA's scientific understanding of UAPs.

The team will publicly release a report on its findings in mid-2023.

There is no evidence that UAPs are related to aliens, NASA noted. However, the space agency has numerous research programs devoted to uncovering signs of extraterrestrial life in the solar system (including potential microbial life on Mars) and far, far beyond.

According to a 2021 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the most likely explanations for UAPs are "airborne clutter," such as birds and balloons; atmospheric phenomena, such as ice crystals; classified government projects; or "technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity." 

Outside of NASA, the U.S. government's renewed interest in UAP investigations dates to 2017, when several videos taken by U.S. Navy aircraft leaked to the media. The now-infamous videos showed unidentified aircraft moving in seemingly impossible ways, with no explanation.

The government subsequently declassified the footage and, in September of this year, revealed that there is more military footage of UAP encounters but the DOD will not be releasing the footage due to "national security concerns." In July, Congress approved funding for the DOD to open a new office focused exclusively on managing reports of UFO sightings by the U.S. military.

Some of the largest clouds of heat-trapping methane gas ever detected are currently floating over New Mexico, Iran and several other "super-emitter" hot spots around the world, according to a new NASA report.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to the warming of the atmosphere. Although it's less abundant than carbon dioxide (CO2), methane can trap 80 times more heat pound-for-pound than CO2, according to NASA. Human activities like the fossil fuel, natural gas, agriculture and waste industries contribute methane to the atmosphere, and understanding where the methane emission hot spots are can help scientists better understand humanity's impact on the warming climate.

NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), which was installed on the International Space Station in July to help scientists understand how dust affects climate change, managed to detect methane plumes as well.

EMIT detected more than 50 methane "super-emitters," or facilities and infrastructure that emit methane at high rates. These super-emitters occur all over the world, from the Southwest United States to Central Asia and the Middle East.

Related: There's so much methane in this Arctic lake that you can light the air on fire

The super-emitters spotted by EMIT include an oil field in New Mexico, southeast of Carlsbad; oil and gas infrastructure in Turkmenistan east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar; and a waste processing complex south of Iran's capital Tehran.

Methane plumes from these sources ranged from 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) to 20 miles (32 km) wide, and researchers estimate that these three sources together emit around 170,000 pounds (77,110 kilograms) of methane per hour. 

"Some of the plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen — unlike anything that has ever been observed from space," Andrew Thorpe, a scientist leading the EMIT methane research at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a NASA statement. "What we've found in just a short time already exceeds our expectations."

EMIT was originally designed to help researchers understand another atmospheric phenomenon that affects climate — dust that is swept around the globe from Earth's largest deserts. The minerals that make up the dust can trap or reflect heat, depending on their chemical makeup, and until now, there wasn't an instrument capable of producing high-resolution data about these minerals. 

EMIT identifies different minerals through spectroscopy, or analyzing the light that the minerals reflect. Each mineral reflects light in a slightly different way, allowing EMIT to identify each mineral like a fingerprint. Because methane also absorbs infrared light in a unique way, EMIT can detect it.

The team expects that the instrument could detect hundreds more methane hotspots around the world, allowing scientists to better understand where Earth's methane comes from. Methane doesn't last as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — the heat-trapping gas lasts just decades versus CO2's centuries-long-lifetime — and climate experts say that reducing methane emissions could have a much more immediate effect (relatively) on slowing climate warming. 

"We have been eager to see how EMIT's mineral data will improve climate modeling," Kate Calvin, NASA's chief scientist and senior climate advisor, said in the statement. "This additional methane-detecting capability offers a remarkable opportunity to measure and monitor greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change."

When a blast of solar energy slammed into Earth in June 2015, the resulting rain of particles tore a 250-mile-wide (400 kilometers) hole into the upper ozone layer, new research has found.

Fortunately, the ozone hole only appeared in Earth's mesosphere — a high layer of the atmosphere that extends from about 31 to 53 miles (50 to 85 km) over Earth — and did not extend down to the much more important ozone layer in the stratosphere, which protects Earth from harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, the researchers found.

Still, the ozone depletion in the mesosphere was far greater than researchers previously thought possible — and future events like this could alter climate patterns in lower layers of the atmosphere, all the way down to Earth's surface, the team wrote in their study.

In the new paper, published Oct. 11 in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers analyzed a specific type of aurora known as an isolated proton aurora. Unlike the auroras that cause the famous northern lights and their southern counterparts, isolated proton auroras are far smaller and fainter, appearing as isolated spots of green light rather than great bands of color looping through the sky. These fainter auroras also occur at lower latitudes than the northern and southern lights, which appear above the North and South Poles, respectively.

Isolated proton auroras occur when the sun belches out a barrage of fast-moving particles, which zip through space, crash into Earth's magnetosphere (the region around Earth dominated by the planet's magnetic field) and surf into the lower levels of the atmosphere on magnetic field lines. In the mesosphere, these extraterrestrial particles charge up local gas molecules, creating potentially hazardous compounds called nitrogen oxides and hydrogen oxides, according to the researchers.

Scientists already knew that these aurora-generated oxides can eat away at ozone — a pale blue gas that occurs naturally in Earth's atmosphere — but they've never understood to what extent. So, in the new study, a team of international researchers studied a single, isolated proton aurora that appeared over Earth on June 22, 2015. Using data from the International Space Station, plus various other satellite- and ground-based electromagnetic wave detectors, the team measured the number of charged particles over the aurora and the amount of ozone that was depleted beneath it.

The team found that, within an hour and a half of the aurora's appearance, a hole almost as wide as the Grand Canyon is long had opened in the mesosphere's ozone layer, directly under the aurora. This was a much greater amount of ozone destruction than the team had predicted in simulations — however, they added, the hole is expected to heal naturally and cause no long-term decline in ozone in the mesosphere.

Humans shouldn’t face any increased risk of UV damage from this hole, mainly because the aurora didn't seem to affect the far more important ozone layer in Earth's stratosphere (which sits around 9 to 18 miles, or 14.5 to 29 km, over Earth's surface). This thin layer of gas is responsible for shielding the planet's surface from most of the sun's harmful UV light, and has been in decline for three years in a row due largely to human use of ozone-depleting chemicals. (Fortunately, long-term trends suggest that this critical ozone layer is becoming healthier).

But the finding is still significant, as ozone depletion in the mesosphere is thought to alter the climate in lower levels of the atmosphere in ways that scientists don't totally understand. According to the study authors, this research should help clarify those trickle-down effects.

On Tuesday (Oct. 25), the moon's shadow appeared to creep over the face of the sun during the last solar eclipse of 2022.

Though the eclipse was just partial, with most viewers seeing between 40% and 60% of the sun's surface obscured by the moon at the eclipse's peak, the event nonetheless drew out sky-watchers with cameras, telescopes and paper eclipse viewers around the world. The eclipse was visible from most of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the western parts of Asia, beginning in the U.K. around 10 a.m. BST (9:00 a.m. UTC).

While this was the last chance to catch the moon obscuring the sun for the rest of 2022, the rest of the world will have a chance to view a total lunar eclipse just a few weeks from now. On Nov. 8, the lunar eclipse will be visible from North America, parts of South America, Central and Eastern Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

In the meantime, enjoy these stunning — and spooky — photos of October's ultimate solar spectacle.

Spied through some trees in Hyderabad, India, the moon's shadow sneaks over the sun during the last partial eclipse of the year on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022.

The moon appears to take a Pac-Man-size bite out of the sun during the partial solar eclipse on Oct. 25, 2022. This photo was snapped in Jerusalem, Israel.

Dust drifts through the air in Cairo, Egypt, as the year's last solar eclipse unfolds on Oct. 25, 2022.

Viewers in Russia saw up to 86% of the sun eclipsed by the moon on Oct. 25, 2022. Here, in Moscow, a star ornament atop a building sneaks into frame as the shadow of the moon appears to fall over the sun.

A bird in Ankara, Turkey photobombs the year's last solar eclipse on Oct. 25, 2022.

Photographer Evrim Aydin also captured the ghostly silhouette of this crescent moon ornament atop a mosque in Ankara, Turkey, with the eclipsing sun in the background on Oct. 25, 2022.

The moon obscured a particularly large chunk of the sun for viewers in Erbil (also spelled Arbīl or Irbīl), the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, on Oct. 25, 2022.

This composite photo shows several views of the partial solar eclipse as seen over L'Aquila, Italy on Oct. 25, 2022.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has trained its lenses on the infamous "pillars of creation" – a vast, sculptural expanse of gas, dust and baby stars in the Milky Way that has captivated sky-watchers with its beauty for decades.

The resulting image, jointly released by NASA and the European Space Agency on Oct. 19, is just as stunning as you'd hope. The cosmic close-up captures the signature three-finger form of the pillars in unprecedented detail – including red, lava-like squiggles at the tips of several pillars that represent supersonic jets of matter blasting out of still-forming stars.

But beyond the surface-level beauty, the image also reveals a hidden multitude of never-before-seen, newly-formed stars in and around the gas clouds. According to NASA, this upgraded view of the iconic pillars will help astronomers hone their models of star formation, allowing them to count the precise numbers of stars and quantities of gas in the region.

Located in the Eagle Nebula about 6,500 light-years from Earth, the pillars became world famous in 1995 after the Hubble Space Telescope first revealed their beauty. The towering blobs of gas and dust – the tallest of which spans about 4 light-years from base to tip, or about the distance from Earth to its closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri – have been likened to castles in the sky, cosmic stalagmites or glimpses of a deep-space coral reef.

In reality, the pillars are the surviving clumps of gas in a once-gargantuan hydrogen cloud, which has slowly been eroded away by the intense radiation of massive newborn stars, according to NASA.

Over millions of years, starlight has sculpted the gas cloud into the finger-like shapes we see today – but even now, the pillars are slowly being eroded away by the young stars in and around them.

Even with their beauty slowly fading – and slightly more gas shaved off of their edges in every new telescope observation – the pillars of creation still remain one of the most iconic structures in the night sky.

Astronomers have spotted a bright blast of high-energy light that may be the most powerful cosmic explosion ever detected. 

The high-energy emission known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the most powerful type of explosion seen in our universe since the Big Bang – likely represents the moment a dying star collapsed into a black hole, triggering a tremendous supernova explosion, astronomers said.

The incredible blast, officially dubbed GRB 221009A, was first spotted by gamma-ray and X-ray telescopes, including NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, on Oct 9.The initial detection sent teams of astronomers around the world scrambling to observe the aftermath of the cosmic explosion, resulting in several additional detections over the following days. Astronomers have since given the burst the affectionate nickname "the B.O.A.T" — standing for the brightest of all time. GRB 221009A is thought to be brighter than other highly energetic GRBs by a factor of at least 10, Jillian Rastinejad, a Northwestern University doctoral candidate whose team spotted the burst on Oct. 14, told Live Science.

"Photons have been detected from this GRB that has more energy than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produces," Rastinejad said, referring to CERN's massive underground particle accelerator. She added that while the LHC can generate energies as high as 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) — or 13 trillion electron volts — GRB 221009A produced photons with energies of at least 18 TeV and possibly even higher.

"GRB221009A was discovered by multiple satellites and was so bright that it 'triggered' Swift [NASA's gamma-ray detecting satellite] multiple times — normally GRBs only trigger it once," Wen-fai Fong, a Northwestern astrophysicist and Rastinejad's Ph.D. advisor, told Live Science. "Initially, we suspected that it was a transient [the family of emissions to which GRBs belong] within our own Galaxy. However, the community was able to obtain a distance measurement and realized it was extragalactic and the community realized it was an extremely bright GRB. This is when things got really exciting."

Going out with a bang

Located 2.4 billion light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Sagitta, GRB 221009A is thought to be the result of a massive star reaching the end of its life and going supernova.

GRBs like this are usually associated with star collapse — a process that occurs when a massive star runs out of fuel for nuclear fusion and can no longer support itself against gravitational collapse. This process also triggers a massive cosmic explosion — a supernova.

This violent and powerful explosion would have left behind a neutron star — a collapsed star core that packs about a sun's-worth of mass into a ball no wider than a city — or even a black hole. At the moment, however, scientists have yet to confirm the origins of GRB 221009A.

"Based on the massive energy released and long duration of the explosion, GRB221009A was likely caused by the collapse of a massive star with up to 30 times the mass of our sun," Brendan O'Connor, a University of Maryland/George Washington University observational astronomer who led another team that detected the GRB, told Live Science. "Proof of the massive star explosion requires the detection of a supernova following the GRB. We are currently looking for this supernova and using the Gemini observatory to find initial evidence."

The scientists involved in the discovery of GRB 221009A are also unsure why this particular GRB is so bright and energetic, Fong said.

Months of GRB data to come

GRB 221009A is so bright it will take months for it to become too faint to see with telescopes, meaning astronomers have time to study it. Amateur astronomers have even been getting in on the act of observing the GRB,Rastinejad said, but further study will soon have to take a hiatus.

"At the end of November, GRB 221009A is going to be so close to the sun, that we just can't see it with our telescopes anymore," she said. "So we're gonna have this period between December and kind of the middle of February 2023 where we're not going to really know what's going on. That's kind of a bummer."

When the GRB 221009A emerges from the other side of the sun the astronomy community will be able to continue to track its afterglow to constrain the jet opening angle of the GRB, and thus get a handle on its true energy.

O'Connor believes that observing GRB 221009A in multiple wavelengths of light in the coming months could be key to unlocking the secret of its origins.

"The full dataset will require a detailed analysis and interpretation, but right now we are just excited to be witnessing history in this once-in-a-century explosion," O'Connor added.

This won't be the only mystery astronomers aim to decipher using GRB 221009A. Observing this GBR in greater detail may help determine where the universe's heavy elements are created.

"It's theorized that the most energetic GRBs could be birth sites of some of the universe's heavy elements, so this GRB serves as an unprecedented laboratory to test that theory," Fong said.

The team wants to see  if supernovas could synthesize heavy elements such as gold. 

So, they'll be measuring the spectra of light emitted by material blasted away by the supernova that created GRB 221009A.

Chemical elements absorb and emit light at specific wavelengths, meaning looking for these "fingerprints" in the spectra from this recent supernova could reveal the presence of freshly synthesized heavy elements. 

"GRBs are the most extreme explosions in our universe, so what's not to love?!" Fong concluded. "They are energetic, evolve on fast timescales, and can serve as excellent laboratories of the universe's most extreme processes."

Astronomers have detected a gargantuan blast of energy from space that appears to be doing the impossible: Traveling seven times faster than the speed of light.

This is, of course, an optical illusion — a rare and mind-boggling phenomenon called superluminal motion, which occurs when particles come very close to moving at the speed of light. In this case, scientists detected a jet of energy blasting out of a stellar collision site at a staggering 99.97% of the speed of light — about 670 million mph (1.07 billion km/h), according to a study published Oct. 12 in the journal Nature.

The jet in question is the result of a cosmic cataclysm that first made waves in the scientific community in 2017. That year, scientists detected a violent collision between two neutron stars — ultra-dense, collapsed star cores that pack a sun's-worth of mass into a ball no wider than a city — located roughly 140 million light-years from Earth. The collision was so powerful it created ripples in the fabric of space-time; such disturbances are known as gravitational waves.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these space-time ripples in 1916, and it took scientists 100 years to find the evidence to prove it, following a collision between two black holes that was detected in 2016. The gravitational waves released by the colliding neutron stars in 2017 — a signal named GW17081 — were the first to be detected from a source other than black holes, proving that more than one type of cosmic catastrophe is capable of creating them.

Gravitational waves are invisible to the naked eye, but can be detected with instruments such as the Large Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Pasadena, California. So, after LIGO detected the first blast of waves from the colliding stars in 2017, astronomers around the world trained their telescopes on the merger to learn whatever they could about it. Before long, astronomers saw visible evidence of a high-speed jet of particles, blazing out of the collision site and lighting up globs of matter that had been ejected by the stars.

In their new paper, astronomers analyzed that jet with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory and several additional radio telescopes on Earth. With these observations, the team calculated both the actual speed of the jet, and the perceived physics-defying speed.

The beyond-light-speed illusion arises from the difference in speed between the particles in the jet, and the light particles (or photons) that they emit. Because the jet's particles move nearly as fast as the light they emit, it can appear as though particles in the early part of the jet are arriving at Earth at nearly the same time as photons in the later stages of the jet — making it appear as though the jet is actually moving faster than the speed of light.

Astronomers have observed this illusion at play in several other cosmic objects before, including in a near-light-speed jet blasting out of the Messier 87 galaxy in the Virgo constellation. So far, all instances of superluminal motion can be explained with math in a way that doesn't shatter the known laws of physics.

Researchers studying the aftermath of a gargantuan black hole collision may have  confirmed a gravitational phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.

According to new research published today (Oct. 12) in the journal Nature, the phenomenon — which is known as precession and is similar to the wobbling motion sometimes seen in a spinning top — occurred when two ancient black holes crashed together and merged into one. As the two massive objects swirled closer together, they released enormous ripples through the fabric of space-time known as gravitational waves, which surged outward across the cosmos, carrying energy and angular momentum away from the merging black holes.

Scientists first detected these waves emanating from the black holes in 2020, using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S. and Virgo gravitational wave sensors in Italy. Now, after years of studying the wave patterns, researchers have confirmed that one of the black holes was rotating madly, to a degree never seen before.

The spinning black hole was twisting and turning 10 billion times faster than any previously observed black hole, which distorted space and time so much that it caused both black holes to wobble — or precess — in their orbits.

Researchers have observed precession in everything from spindle tops to dying star systems, but never in objects as enormous as binary black hole systems, in which the two cosmic vacuum cleaners orbit around a common center. However, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted more than 100 years ago that precession should occur in objects as large as binary black holes. Now, the study authors say, this rare phenomenon has been observed in nature for the first time.

Related: Are black holes wormholes?

"We've always thought that binary black holes can do this," lead study author Mark Hannam, director of the Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff University in the U.K., said in a statement. "We have been hoping to spot an example ever since the first gravitational wave detections. We had to wait for five years and over 80 separate detections, but finally we have one!"

The black holes in question were many times more massive than the sun, with the larger of the two estimated at about 40 solar masses. Researchers first caught wind of the binary pair in 2020, when LIGO and Virgo detected a blast of gravitational waves released by the supposed collision of the two black holes. The team dubbed this collision GW200129, for the date of its discovery (Jan. 29, 2020). 

Since then, other scientists have pored over that initial gravitational wave data, uncovering ever odder secrets about this epic collision. (Though because scientists only have gravitational waves to go on and no direct observations, they can't pinpoint the black holes' precise location). 

For instance, in May 2022, a team of researchers calculated that the merger between the two black holes was both massive and lopsided, according to Live Science’s sister site Space.com, with gravitational waves blasting out of the collision in one direction while the newly merged black hole was likely "kicked" out of its home galaxy at more than 3 million mph  (4.8 million km/h) in the opposite direction.

This new research in Nature suggests that the two black holes had a chaotic relationship before their violent merger. As the two gargantuan objects tugged at each other in an ever-closer orbit, they began to wobble like tipsy tops, precessing several times every second. According to the study authors, this precessing effect is estimated to be 10 billion times faster than any other ever measured.

These findings vindicate Einstein, who predicted that such effects were possible in some of the universe's largets objects. But the results also raise the question as to whether wibbly wobbly black hole mergers like this one are as rare as once thought.

"The larger black hole in this binary, which was about 40 times more massive than the Sun, was spinning almost as fast as physically possible," said study co-author Charlie Hoy, a researcher at Cardiff University at the time of the study, and now at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. "Our current models of how binaries form suggest this one was extremely rare, maybe a one in a thousand event. Or it could be a sign that our models need to change."

Can a pair of stars have a toxic relationship? Consider this as you get to know the newly discovered star system ZTF J1813+4251, a tight-knit stellar couple with such tyrannical control over one another that they complete a full orbit of each other once every 51 minutes — the shortest orbit detected in any binary star system to date, according to research published today (Oct. 5) in the journal Nature.

Astronomers discovered the clingy star system about 3,000 light-years from the sun, in the constellation Hercules, while combing through a database of more than 1 billion stars. There, a bright sun-like star with roughly the same mass as Jupiter lives out its last healthy years in the company of a white dwarf — the shriveled husk of a once-mighty star that is, technically, already dead and done burning fuel. But, from beyond the stellar grave, the white dwarf's gravity continues to suck hydrogen out of the sun-like star's atmosphere, slowly diminishing the larger star and accelerating its inevitable doom.

This is not unusual in astronomy; more than 50% of all stars in the Milky Way are binary pairs of two or more stars, sharing a mutual center of gravity while robbing each other of precious fuel. However, astronomers have discovered few binary star systems with orbital periods shorter than an hour — especially systems including large, sun-like stars, which take many hours to complete a single orbit. When astronomers saw the two stars in Hercules eclipsing each other's light every 51 minutes, they knew they'd stumbled upon something strange.

"This one star looked like the sun, but the sun can't fit into an orbit shorter than eight hours — what's up here?" lead study author Kevin Burdge, a physicist at MIT, said in a statement.

In their new paper, the researchers give that strangeness a name. According to the study authors, these stars belong to a rare class of binary star system called a "cataclysmic variable." These systems occur when a white dwarf and a sun-like star draw closer and closer together over billions of years, allowing the white dwarf to gobble up material from its companion. As the dwarf star feasts, it can trigger enormous flares of light that appear, from a distance, like supernova explosions or some other type of cosmic cataclysm, the authors said.

Researchers have long suspected that stars like these are capable of reaching incredibly short orbital periods if given enough time. This is only possible if the star system transitions to a new diet, so to speak; once the hungry white dwarf finishes stripping the hydrogen from its companion star's atmosphere, it begins devouring helium from the companion star's exposed core. Because helium is denser and heavier than hydrogen, the core of the sun-like star should be sufficiently massive to remain in a super-tight binary orbit with its white dwarf companion.

According to the study authors, this oddball star system in Hercules appears to be in the midst of just such a transition — and the system's orbital period should only get tighter and shorter. Using computer simulations, the team calculated that, in roughly 70 million years, the two stars will draw so close to each other that their orbit will drop down to just 18 minutes — far shorter than any star system ever seen.

From there, mass loss will cause the sun-like star to expand rather than contract, and the two stars will finally start to drift apart for the next several hundred million years, the team said. At that point, the couple's orbital period will settle into a groove of roughly 30 minutes, giving the binary pair some much-needed space in their final years together before the larger star burns out.

While this sort of binary relationship has been theorized to exist, this new research marks the first time that it has been seen in action, according to the study authors. This answers a "big open question" about the orbital limits of cataclysmic variable star systems, Burdge said, and should provide plenty of fodder for further study in the years to come.

As to whether the larger star is in a toxic relationship? Perhaps it's best to ask again in a few hundred million years.

On Oct. 9, the full Hunter's Moon will rise once again, reaching peak illumination at approximately 4:54 p.m. ET (8:54 p.m. UTC). As with all full moons, the moon will appear bright and full during the night before and the night after the peak, offering skywatchers three chances to bask in the autumn moonlight.

The best time to watch the full moon is around sunset, when the moon will rise over the horizon, according to the Farmer's Almanac. When the moon is low in the sky, it may also appear larger and brighter than usual thanks to a well-known optical illusion, known as the moon illusion. Essentially, your brain perceives the moon as larger when it rises near smaller objects like treetops and skyscrapers, rather than when it is high in the vast and empty sky.

The moon's light will partially outshine the Draconid meteor shower, which is also predicted to peak on the night of Oct. 9. Try to look high in the sky after nightfall to catch sight of a few more shooting stars than usual.

Related: What is the moon phase today?

While many full moon nicknames stem from Native American traditions, October's Hunter's Moon is an exception. According to the Farmer's Almanac, which began publishing Native American moon names in the 1930s, both the Hunter's Moon as well as September's Harvest Moon are tied to the autumn equinox — the official start of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and spring in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Harvest Moon is the name given to the full moon that falls closest to the equinox, meaning it can occur in either September or October, while the Hunter's Moon is the full moon that follows the Harvest Moon. Traditionally, farmers harvested their crops by the light of the Harvest Moon, then went hunting for animals who came out to root through the scraps during the following months.

About once a month, the full moon occurs when the sun, Earth and moon align on an invisible 180-degree line. The moon's orbit is about 5 degrees different from Earth's, so our satellite is usually a little higher or lower than Earth's shadow, enabling the sun's rays to illuminate the side facing Earth.

The next full moon is November's Beaver Moon, or Snow Moon, which rises on Nov. 8.

Originally published on Live Science.

During the Milky Way's roughly 13.6-billion-year history, billions of stars have formed, grown and ultimately died in spectacular supernova explosions. So, where are all of their corpses hiding?

In new research published Aug. 25 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers set out to dig up those long lost stellar bodies (so to speak). Using a computer simulation, the team modeled the initial positions of millions of stars in the early Milky Way (long before its iconic spiral arms developed), then hit a cosmic fast-forward button to show where the shriveled remains of those stars may have ended up after going supernova.

The resulting map revealed a "galactic underworld" of black holes and neutron stars (two forms of extremely dense stellar remnants), which lurks in every corner of the Milky Way — and far beyond it as well. According to the researchers, the galactic underworld stretches more than three times the height of the Milky Way itself, while as many as one third of the galaxy's dead stars have been jettisoned deep into space by the force of their own end-of-life explosions, never to return.

"Supernova explosions are asymmetric, and the remnants are ejected at high speed — up to millions of kilometers per hour," lead study author David Sweeney, a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney, said in a statement. "An amazing 30% of objects have been completely ejected from the galaxy."

The quick and the dead

In their research, the team focused on two types of stellar remains: neutron stars — ultra dense stellar cores that pack a sun's worth of mass into a ball no wider than a city — and black holes, which are enormous objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational pull.

Both types of objects form when massive stars run out of fuel, shedding their outer layers of gas in titanic supernova explosions as their cores collapse inward. If the dying star had a mass at least eight times that of Earth's sun, a neutron star is born; if the star measured more than 25 solar masses, a black hole emerges.

Astronomers have detected both classes of stellar remains in our galaxy, though not nearly enough to account for the billions of dead stars in the Milky Way's past. Finding these ancient remains is tricky for two main reasons: one, the Milky Way has changed shape significantly over the past 13 billion years, meaning the galactic underworld does not neatly overlap with the current distribution of stars in our galaxy; and two, stars that die via supernova can be "kicked" great distances in random directions by the force of the explosion, ending up on the fringes of the galaxy or lost to intergalactic space.

The study authors built a computer simulation to account for this randomness, as well as the changing shape of the Milky Way and many other factors. Their results showed that the greatest concentration of stellar remains can be found bulging near the galaxy's center, where a supermassive black hole exerts an extremely powerful pull. The remainder of the dead stars are scattered wildly to all sides of the galaxy, in clear defiance of the spiral-shaped distribution of stars visible today.

"These compact remnants of dead stars show a fundamentally different distribution and structure to the visible galaxy," Sweeney added.

The team also found that, while the galactic underworld only contains an estimated 1% of the galaxy's total mass, ancient stellar corpses are never far away. The nearest stellar remnant should only be about 65 light-years from the sun — or closer to us than the stars of the Big Dipper constellation.  Hopefully, with a better idea of where to look for them, space surveys like the European Space Agency's ongoing Gaia mission should be able to help exhume the galaxy's ancient dead in greater numbers than ever before.

After dominating the Earth for more than 160 million years, the dinosaurs finally met their doom thanks to a visitor from space. Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid measuring at least 6 miles (10 kilometers) across dealt the dinosaurs' world a devastating blow, triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and climate catastrophes that soon rendered 75% of all living creatures extinct.

But, through all this, Earth itself remained.

Does this mean our planet is immune to an asteroid Armageddon? If the dreaded dino-killing asteroid wasn't enough to end the world, then what would it take? Could a space rock actually destroy the entire Earth — and how big would it have to be?

The short answer is: It would probably take a rock as big as a planet to destroy our planet. But it would take far, far less to obliterate life on Earth — or most of it, anyway.

"An object bigger than Mars hit Earth early in its history and made the moon, without destroying the Earth," Brian Toon, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder who has studied asteroid impacts, told Live Science in an email.

Toon is referring to the giant impact hypothesis — a scientific theory that suggests a Mars-size planet named Theia collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, launching a salvo of rocky debris into space that eventually coalesced into our moon. (Mars measures about 4,200 miles, or 6,700 km wide — more than 500 times the width of the dinosaur-destroying asteroid).

Rather than obliterating our planet, scientists theorize that part of Theia's core and mantle fused with our own, remaining underfoot in the coming eons when the first life evolved. Experts disagree as to whether this ancient collision was head-on or just a glancing blow, but there's no doubt that had anything been alive on Earth at the time, Theia would have wiped it out. (Scientists think life could have appeared as early as 4.4 billion years ago, a few million years after the Theia impact.)

Death from above

As the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs shows, it takes far less than a rogue planet to seriously screw up life on Earth, even if the planet itself remains. NASA considers any space rock a potential hazard if it measures at least 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter and orbits within 4.6 million miles (7.4 million km) of Earth. An impact from such a rock could wipe out an entire city and devastate the land around it, according to NASA.

A collision with a larger rock, measuring at least 0.6 miles wide (1 km wide), would "probably trigger the end of civilization" by unleashing global climate disasters, Gerrit L. Verschuur, an astrophysicist at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, told Scientific American. And if an impactor the size of the dino-killing asteroid arrived today, it would probably render humans (and countless other species) extinct.

"Broadly speaking, the initial impact creates a vast fireball that kills anyone who can see it," Verschuur said. "Then dust from the impact and smoke from the fires girdles the Earth, plunging our planet into a so-called impact winter."

During this season of suffering, so much dust and noxious gas would cloud the sky that plants could no longer turn sunlight into energy via photosynthesis. Plant life would perish around the world, and animals would soon follow suit. Only very small and ground-dwelling animals (like our early mammal ancestors) would have a shot at survival.

Understandably, NASA and other space agencies take the threat of asteroid impacts very seriously, closely monitoring thousands of potential impactors in our solar system. The good news is, there is no threat of any potentially hazardous asteroid reaching our planet for at least the next 100 years.

And, if a potentially hazardous space rock should unexpectedly change course and put our planet in its sights, NASA is testing a plan to deal with it. On Sept. 26, the space agency smashed an uncrewed rocket into a 525-foot-wide (160 m) asteroid called Dimorphos, in hopes of slightly altering the space rock's trajectory.

Thankfully, Dimorphos isn't headed toward Earth. But through this mission — known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) — NASA hopes to test if crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid is a viable means of planetary defense for future asteroid impact scares.

The dinosaurs would be jealous.

Originally published on Live Science.

Nothing passes gas quite like a dying star.

When a star roughly the size of the sun approaches the end of its life, it expels its outer layer of gas into a bright and beautiful bubble known as a planetary nebula. At the center of each bubble, a weakened star continues irradiating its surroundings, sculpting the gas into colorful shapes that astronomers have likened to crabs, reptiles and terrifying screaming faces.

One of the strangest and most baffling of these cosmic cloud paintings is the Cat's Eye Nebula, located about 3,000 light-years from Earth. Seemingly made of several overlapping bubbles of blue gas with long, streamer-like filaments wrapped tightly around them, the nebula has defied clear explanation for centuries.

Now, new research published Sept. 15 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society may finally offer an answer. Using data collected by the San Pedro Mártir National Observatory in Mexico showing the movements of different layers of gas in the nebula, astronomers created the first-ever 3D model of the Cat's Eye Nebula.

Their computer-generated map reveals a pair of perfectly symmetrical rings swirling around the entire length of the nebula's outer shell. According to the researchers, there's only one possible cause of these rings' symmetry: a double-barreled burst of energy known as a precessing jet.

Basically, as the nebula's central star died, it released twin bursts of high-density gas in opposite directions at the same time, the study authors wrote. But rather than remaining fixed in place, the jets began to wobble (or precess) like a spinning top, leaving slowly looping rings of gas twirling above and below the star. 

Jets like these are rare and exist only in binary star systems — that is, systems with two central stars orbiting each other, the authors wrote in the study. These jets provide strong evidence that the Cat's Eye Nebula was once a binary star system that went out with a spectacular bang.

"Precessing jets in planetary nebulae are relatively rare, so it's important to understand how they contribute to the shaping of more complex systems like the Cat's Eye," lead study author Ryan Clairmont, an undergraduate student at Stanford University, said in a statement. "Ultimately, understanding how they form provides insight into the eventual fate of our Sun, which will itself one day become a planetary nebula."

Originally published on Live Science.

Imagine the Milky Way's 100 billion stars as a flat, tranquil pool of water. Now, picture someone dropping a stone the size of 400 million suns into that water. The tranquility is shattered. Wave after wave of energy ripples across the galaxy's surface, jostling and bouncing its stars in a chaotic dance that takes eons to calm.

Astronomers suspect that something like this may have really happened — not just once, but several times over the past several billion years. 

In a new paper published Sept. 15 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers explain how a nearby mini-galaxy — the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy — appears to have crashed through the Milky Way on at least two separate occasions, causing stars all around the galaxy to mysteriously oscillate at different speeds.

Related: Largest galaxy ever discovered baffles scientists

Using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory, researchers compared the movements of more than 20 million stars located throughout the Milky Way, but particularly in the outer regions of the galaxy's disc. The data revealed a mysterious ripple, or vibration, that seemed to be jostling stars all throughout the galaxy.

"We can see that these stars wobble and move up and down at different speeds," study author Paul McMillan, an astronomer at Lund University in Sweden, said in a translated statement.

Through a process that the researchers equated to "galactic seismology," the team modeled a wave pattern that could explain the strange ripple effect setting the Milky Way's stars off-kilter. They concluded that the ripples were likely released hundreds of millions of years ago, when the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy last passed through our galaxy — "a little bit like when a stone is dropped into a pond," McMillan said. It seems likely that a second, even earlier collision between the two galaxies also occurred, the researchers added.

Prior studies have suggested that an ancient collision with Sagittarius may have set off ripples at the Milky Way's center, but this new research is the first to show that those ripples extended all the way to the edge of the galaxy's disk, perturbing stars every step of the way. This new research should help piece together the long and violent history of our galaxy and its smaller neighbor, the researchers wrote.

Today, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is estimated to be about 400 times the mass of Earth's sun — a mere shrimp compared with the Milky Way's estimated mass of 1.5 trillion suns. Scientists suspect that Sagittarius was once much larger, but lost up to 20% of its mass to our galaxy after repeated collisions over the past several billion years.

These collisions likely changed the shape and size of our galaxy too; a 2011 study suggested that the Milky Way's spiral arm is the result of two collisions with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Another study of Gaia data released in 2020 suggested that cosmic crashes between our galaxy and Sagittarius triggered baby booms of new stars in the Milky Way every time the two galaxies met.

Originally published on Live Science.

Researchers in China have discovered a new type of crystal nestled among the volcanic debris of the near side of the moon, as well as a potential fuel source that could help revolutionize the production of clean and efficient energy on Earth.

The small, transparent crystal — named Changesite-(Y), after the Chinese moon goddess Chang'e — is more than a billion years old and is as wide as a human hair, according to Global Times, a Chinese state-run news site. In early September, researchers with the International Mineralogical Association confirmed that the tiny moon crystal has a never-before-seen composition and is related to other minerals found only on the moon or in meteors.

Researchers collected the crystal among roughly 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) of lunar rocks in 2020 during China's Chang'e-5 mission (also named for the aforementioned moon goddess). These rocks were the first lunar samples to be taken to Earth since 1976, and the first lunar samples ever collected by China, according to Vice. The Changesite-(Y) crystal's discovery marks the sixth new mineral to be identified on the moon, and the first identified by China; the five previous discoveries were made by either the United States or Russia.

However, the teeny crystal was not the only remarkable find in the Chang'e-5 moon rock haul. Among the roughly 140,000 lunar particles analyzed, scientists also found traces of helium-3 — a version of the element helium that is exceptionally rare on Earth but is believed to be abundant on the moon.

Related: The moon is rusty, and it’s likely Earth's fault

For decades, scientists have been intrigued by helium-3 as a potential source of fuel for nuclear fusion — a type of energy production that occurs when two light atoms merge into a heavier one under extreme heat and pressure. Nuclear fusion reactions occur naturally in the interiors of stars, but humans have yet to come up with a fusion reactor capable of creating more energy than was put into it.

Helium-3 is a particularly promising fuel source for fusion as it produces significantly less radiation and nuclear waste than  other elements do, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The element does exist on Earth in relatively small quantities, but helium-3 is thought to be much more abundant on the moon, where it has been deposited directly onto the lunar soil for billions of years by solar wind, the ESA said.

Even with no viable reactors to put it in, helium-3 has nevertheless ignited a lunar resource race. Multiple space-faring nations and private companies have expressed interest in mining the moon for its helium-3, including the U.S. and China. Chang'e-5's discovery of a new helium-3 deposit on the near side of the moon could further stoke the global race to plunder the moon's mineral resources.

Originally published on Live Science.

When it comes to planetary rings, Saturn is the undisputed poster child. But now a new contender enters the, er, ring — courtesy of a stunning new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

In the new picture, released today (Sept. 21) by the European Space Agency (ESA), our solar system's eighth planet Neptune shimmers like a glorious crystal ball, with a stack of gauzy rings wrapped magically around it.

Astronomers have known for several decades that the ice giant, located about 30 times farther from the sun than Earth, has five rings made chiefly of icy dust. The new image reveals those frigid rings in crisper detail than any survey has since the Voyager 2 probe passed within a few thousand miles of Neptune in 1989, according to the ESA.

"In addition to several bright narrow rings, the Webb images clearly show Neptune's fainter dust bands," ESA researchers wrote in a statement. "Webb's extremely stable and precise image quality permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune."

Floating near the edge of our solar system, Neptune is a world of near-permanent twilight, invisible to the naked eye. But in visible light images taken by Voyager 2 and the Hubble Space Telescope, Neptune appears a striking blue.

That coloration comes from methane in the planet's cloudy atmosphere, which likely stretches down to great depths within the planet before melding into a super-hot ocean of melted ice, ammonia and other compounds, according to NASA. To the JWST, which uses a special sensor to capture light at near-infrared wavelengths, those methane clouds shine eerily with reflected sunlight, giving the planet a more ghostly, white appearance.

Another striking feature in the new JWST image are Neptune's moons. Seven of the planet's 14 known moons are on display here, including its largest, Triton — seen as the severely spiky point of light in the upper left corner. While it looks like a bright star, Triton is actually just an extremely reflective, icy rock.

"Covered in a frozen sheen of condensed nitrogen, Triton reflects an average of 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it," according to the ESA. "It far outshines Neptune because the planet's atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption at Webb's wavelengths."

The JWST commenced operations on July 12, and has already released an array of spellbinding images of the cosmos, focusing on objects both near to Earth and mind-bogglingly far away. The telescope will continue observing both Neptune and Triton in the coming year, according to the ESA.

Originally published on Live Science.

The sun is a great ball of fiery, electrically charged gas. As the sun advances through its regular 11-year solar cycle, electromagnetic activity on the star's surface gets more and more chaotic. This turbulence inevitably leads to the appearance of sunspots — dark, planet-size regions that form in the sun's lower atmosphere as a result of intense magnetic disturbances.

To most visible-light telescopes, sunspots appear black. But why do they look this way, and are they really black?

It turns out that sunspots aren't actually black. Rather, the darkness is just an optical illusion created by the contrasting heat of sunspots and their surroundings.   

"Sunspots are only dark in contrast to the bright face of the sun," according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). "If you could cut an average sunspot out of the Sun and place it elsewhere in the night sky, it would be about as bright as a full moon."

The reason sunspots appear so much darker than the rest of the sun's visible surface, or photosphere, is because they are much cooler, and the gas underneath a sunspot emits about 25% as much light as the rest of the sun, according to NASA. 

Sunspots are still scorching hot — astronomers estimate that the temperature of a typical one is about 6,300 degrees Fahrenheit (3,500 degrees Celsius) — but the surrounding photosphere blazes at roughly 10,000 F (5,500 C), according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

Sunspots are cool because they form in regions where magnetic fields are especially strong — roughly 2,500 times stronger than Earth's, and far stronger than anywhere else on the sun, according to the NWS. This increases the magnetic pressure exerted on sunspots, thereby inhibiting the flow of heat from the sun's interior to the surface and leaving the region cooler than its surroundings.

The pent-up magnetic energy of sunspots can have some spectacular — and dangerous — side effects. When the magnetic-field lines around sunspots become too tangled, they can snap into new configurations, releasing sudden bursts of magnetic energy. This energy can interact with the surrounding plasma — hot, electrically charged gas that makes up much of the sun — and create an explosion of energy known as a solar flare. 

Related: Could a solar storm ever destroy Earth?

Solar flares always occur in active regions near sunspots, which means the more sunspots there are on the sun at a given time, the more likely a flare is to erupt. Sunspots are more likely to occur near the climax of the sun's 11-year activity cycle, also known as the "solar maximum," when magnetic activity peaks.

The heat from a flare can, in turn, trigger another sort of explosion called a coronal mass ejection (CME), in which charged solar particles blast straight out of the sun’s atmosphere and zoom across space at high speeds.

Most CMEs sail harmlessly into space. But if a CME happens to be aimed at Earth, there can be harmful consequences. As a CME passes over Earth’s atmosphere, it can knock out power grids, cause radio blackouts or damage satellites; life on Earth remains protected by our planet's magnetic field, but astronauts working in space may be hit with higher-than-normal doses of radiation.

But there's a bright side: When a CME hits Earth, the resulting rain of charged particles through our planet's atmosphere causes auroras to appear at much lower latitudes than usual. For that beautiful display of color in Earth's sky, you can thank a big, dark dot on the sun.

Originally published on Live Science.

On July 12, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made history by releasing its debut image: a jewel-filled photo that's been touted as the deepest photo of the universe ever taken.

Besides looking farther across space than any observatory before it, the James Webb Space Telescope has another trick up its mirrors: It can look further back in time than any other telescope, observing distant stars and galaxies as they appeared 13.5 billion years ago, not long after the beginning of the universe as we know it.

How is this possible? How can a machine look "back in time"? It's not magic; it's just the nature of light.

"Telescopes can be time machines. Looking out in space is like looking back in time," NASA scientists explained on WebbTelescope.org. "It sounds magical, but it's actually very simple: Light needs time to travel across the vast distances of space to reach us."

All of the light you see — from the twinkling of distant stars to the glow from your desk lamp a few feet away — takes time to reach your eyes. Luckily, light moves staggeringly fast — roughly 670 million mph (1 billion km/h) — so you'll never notice it traveling from, say, the desk lamp to your eyes.

However, when you're looking at objects that are millions or billions of miles away — as most objects in the night sky are — you're seeing light that has traveled a long, long way to reach you.

Take the sun, for example. Earth's home star sits an average of 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away. That means it takes light about 8 minutes, 20 seconds to travel from the sun to Earth. So, when you look at the sun (although you should never look directly at the sun), you're seeing it as it appeared more than 8 minutes ago, not as it appears right now — in other words, you're looking 8 minutes into the past.

The speed of light is so important to astronomy that scientists prefer to use light-years, rather than miles or kilometers, to measure great distances in space. One light-year is the distance that light can travel in one year: roughly 5.88 trillion miles, or 9.46 trillion km. For example, the North Star, Polaris, sits about 323 light-years from Earth. Whenever you see this star, you're seeing light that's more than 300 years old.

So, you don't even need a fancy telescope to see back in time; you can do it with your own naked eyes. But to look truly far into the past (say, back to the beginning of the universe), astronomers need telescopes like JWST. Not only can JWST zoom in on distant galaxies to observe visible light coming from many millions of light-years away, but it can also pick up wavelengths of light that are invisible to human eyes, such as infrared waves.

Many things, including humans, emit heat as infrared energy. This energy can't be seen with the naked eye. But when infrared waves are viewed with the right equipment, they can reveal some of the hardest-to-find objects in the universe. Because infrared radiation has a much longer wavelength than visible light does, it can pass through dense, dusty regions of space without being scattered or absorbed, according to NASA. Many stars and galaxies that are too far, faint or obscured to see as visible light emit heat energy that can be detected as infrared radiation.

This is one of JWST's handiest tricks. Using its infrared-sensing instruments, the telescope can peer past dusty regions of space to study light that was emitted more than 13 billion years ago by the most ancient stars and galaxies in the universe. 

That's how JWST took its famous deep field image, and that's how it will attempt to look even further back in time, to the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The stars that the telescope will reveal may actually be long-dead today, but as their ancient light makes the lengthy journey across the universe, JWST treats our mortal eyes to a one-of-a-kind time travel display.

Originally published on Live Science.

The skies over Kyiv are swarming with unidentified flying objects (UFOs), according to a new report from the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. 

Of course, given that Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a months-long war that relies heavily on aircraft and drones, it's likely that many of these so-called UFOs are military tools that appear too fleetingly to identify, a U.S. intelligence agency has speculated.

Published to the preprint database arXiv, the report — which has not yet been peer-reviewed — describes recent steps that Ukrainian astronomers have taken to monitor fast-moving, low-visibility objects in the daytime sky over Kyiv and the surrounding villages. Using specially calibrated cameras at two weather stations in Kyiv and Vinarivka, a village about 75 miles (120 kilometers) to the south, astronomers observed dozens of objects "that cannot scientifically be identified as known natural phenomena," the report said.

Government agencies tend to refer to such objects as UAP, short for  "unidentified aerial phenomena."

"We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear," the team wrote. "We see them everywhere."

The researchers divided their UAP observations into two categories: "cosmics" and "phantoms." According to the report, cosmics are luminous objects that are brighter than the background sky. These objects are designated with birds' names — such as "swift," "falcon" and "eagle" — and have been observed flying solo as well as in "squadrons," the team wrote.

Phantoms, by contrast, are dark objects, usually appearing "completely black," as if absorbing all light falling onto them, the team added. By comparing observations from the two participating observatories, the researchers estimated that phantoms range from 10 to 40 feet (3 to 12 meters) wide and can travel at speeds of up to 33,000 mph (53,000 km/h). For comparison, an intercontinental ballistic missile can reach speeds of up to 15,000 mph (24,000 km/h), according to The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

The researchers did not speculate as to what these UFOs may be. Rather, their paper focuses on the methods and calculations used to detect the objects. However, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), it's likely that at least some UAP are "technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity." 

Given the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, it's reasonable to suspect that some UAP described in the new report may be linked to foreign surveillance or military technologies.

According to the ODNI report, other possible explanations for UAP include "airborne clutter," such as birds and balloons; atmospheric phenomena, such as ice crystals; or classified government projects. Neither the U.S. nor Ukraine reports raise the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors.

The U.S. government has openly renewed its interest in UAP investigations since 2017, when several videos taken by U.S. Navy aircraft leaked to the media. The now-infamous videos showed unidentified aircraft moving in seemingly impossible ways, with no explanation.

The government subsequently declassified the footage and recently revealed that more military footage of UAP encounters does exist, though the Department of Defense (DOD) will not be releasing them due to "national security concerns." Earlier this year, Congress approved funding for the DOD to open a new office focused exclusively on managing reports of UFO sightings by the U.S. military. The authors of the new UAP report out of Ukraine added that the country's National Academy of Science is interested in contributing to this ongoing research.

Originally published on Live Science.

Depending on where in the world you'll be Wednesday night (Sept. 14), you may be able to see Uranus disappear. (Don't worry; it'll be back again a few hours later.)

On Wednesday, the sixth planet from the sun will appear to pass directly behind Earth's moon, going completely out of sight for three and a half hours. The great disappearing act, also known as the lunar occultation of Uranus, begins around 4:41 p.m. ET (2041 GMT) and ends by 8:11 p.m. ET (0011 GMT on Sept. 15), according to In-the-sky.org. However, only viewers in Europe, northern Africa and western Asia will be at the exact right angle to see the illusion work. 

Viewers in these regions will still need binoculars or a telescope to see the show, as Uranus is not a naked-eye planet. (Check this map, courtesy of In-the-sky.org, to see which regions will have the best view.)

If you are not in one of those places or you don't have a telescope, don't fret; you can watch the occultation live from Rome thanks to the Virtual Telescope Project, which will begin streaming the event at 4:45 p.m. ET (2045 GMT).

Occultation refers to any astronomical event in which one object appears hidden behind another. This phenomenon is slightly different from an eclipse, which occurs when one object casts its shadow directly onto another – such as when the moon's shadow falls over Earth during a solar eclipse.

From Earth, lunar occultations are the most commonly seen, as the moon looms so large in our sky. However, the moon's close proximity to Earth also means that its position in the sky may appear slightly different depending on which part of the planet you're watching from. As such, all lunar occultations are visible only to narrow swaths of the world that happen to have the exact right viewing angle.

Fortunately, these events are frequent, so another lunar disappearing act is always just around the corner. The last lunar occultation of Uranus that was visible from the United States and Canada occurred just last month, on Aug. 18, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. Uranus emerged triumphant on that night, and it surely will tomorrow, as well.

Originally published on Live Science.

How do you know you're looking at Orion's belt? It's just a waist of space.

Dad jokes aside, Orion is one of the best known and most studied constellations in the Milky Way. With its nearest stars located just a few hundred light-years from Earth, the constellation is home to some of the largest and brightest stars in the sky (including the infamous red star Betelgeuse) and a thriving nursery of fiery, newborn stars ripe for studying.

Now, using the powerful new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers have captured the sharpest and most detailed images of Orion in history.

The images, shared Monday (Sept. 12) in a statement, do not include the infamous triple-star "belt" of Orion, but rather focus on Orion's gassy "sword" hanging just to the south. At the center of the sword lies the Orion Nebula — one of the biggest and brightest star-forming regions close to Earth.

Visible to the naked eye from our planet, the Orion Nebula has for centuries been a popular target for stargazers — including Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who is credited with discovering the nebula's largest star cluster, called the Trapezium, more than 400 years ago. Now, the new JWST images zoom in on the heart of the nebula like never before, revealing shifting sculptures of star-forming gas being whipped into shape by powerful stellar radiation.

"Massive young stars emit large quantities of ultraviolet radiation directly into the cloud that still surrounds them, and this changes the physical shape of the cloud as well as its chemical makeup," Els Peeters, an astronomy professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement. "These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the gas and dust cloud in which they are born."

Shining at the image's center is the bright star omicron 2 Orionis A, located about 186 light-years from Earth. The Nebula itself sits far behind, roughly 1,350 light-years from Earth, where thousands of young stars illuminate and irradiate the gas clouds around them.

The violent interactions between stars and their home cloud can be seen most clearly in the long, brownish strip of gas located behind the central star. This dense wall of gas is known as the Orion bar, and is slowly being pushed out and eroded away by the intense stellar radiation of the hottest, brightest stars in the Orion Nebula. Sprinkled throughout the bar are an array of spectacular and mysterious features, including long, wispy filaments of hydrogen, young stars surrounded by planet-forming discs of dust, and great globs of gas that are slowly collapsing into baby stars before astronomers' eyes.

Galileo would be impressed.

Originally published on Live Science.

Autumn is on the way, and it's time to reap the beauty of September's full moon — popularly called the Harvest Moon.

The next full moon peaks on Saturday, Sept. 10 at approximately 6 a.m. EDT (10 a.m. UTC), although it will appear bright and full in the sky beginning tonight (Sept. 9) and into Sunday (Sept. 11) as well. The best time to catch the full moon is right after sunset, when the moon will rise close to the horizon, making it appear slightly larger than when it's high in the sky.

The moon is back to being a regular old full moon after summer gave us four supermoons in a row — that is, four full moons that rose during the moon's closest approach to Earth during its orbit, making the moon appear larger and up to 16% brighter in the sky than an average full moon, Live Science previously reported. August's "Sturgeon Moon" was the final supermoon of 2022.

September's full moon has been called by its Old European name, the Harvest Moon, since at least 1706, according to NASA. This is the closest full moon to the autumnal equinox, when many crops are harvested in the Northern Hemisphere; additionally, some farmers have historically used the full moon's light to work late into the night harvesting their crops, NASA added.

The moon goes by several non-European names, as well. Best known among them is the Corn Moon, coined by the Algonquin tribes who inhabited what is now the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. The Maine Farmers' Almanac, which began publishing Native American moon names in the 1930s, notes that the Corn Moon rises during the part of the year when  corn, pumpkins, squash and various other fall staples are harvested.

The Harvest Moon frequently coincides with several religious and cultural holidays, including the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrated in China and several other Asian countries, and the 16-day Pitru Paksha period of the Hindu calendar. Last year, the moon also coincided with the start of the seven-day Sukkot holiday in Judaism.

The full moon occurs about once a month when the sun, Earth and moon align on an invisible 180-degree line. The moon's orbit is about 5 degrees different from Earth's, so our satellite is usually a little higher or lower than Earth's shadow, enabling the sun's rays to illuminate the side facing Earth.

The next full moon will be the Hunter's Moon, which falls on Oct. 9.

Originally published on Live Science on Sept. 6 and updated on Sept. 9 with viewing information on the weekend's Harvest Moon.

On Sunday (Aug. 28) a fireball streaked across the sky over the northeastern United States, amazing hundreds of stargazers as the hurtling ball of flame briefly lit up the night.

At least 120 witnesses reported the fireball to the American Meteor Society (AMS), a nonprofit organization that collects reports of meteor sightings around the world. One witness, Eric Lofrgen of Palmyra, New York, fortuitously managed to record the fireball's 5-second approach with his vehicle dashcam. You can watch the brief blaze, courtesy of Lofgren and the AMS, in the video clip above.

Fireballs are a bright class of meteor — a falling space rock that catches fire while plunging through Earth's atmosphere. Meteors qualify as fireballs when their magnitude (or brightness) exceeds minus 4, which is the same magnitude as the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky, according to the AMS. For comparison, the full moon has a magnitude of minus 12.6, while the sun has a magnitude of minus 26.7.

Fireballs are extremely common, if easy to miss. Several thousand fireballs fall toward Earth every day, according to AMS, though a huge majority of these fall over oceans and uninhabited areas, or are simply masked by the brightness of day. Most of these meteors burn up completely in the atmosphere. Typically, a fireball must have a  greater magnitude than minus 8 to stand a chance of crashing into Earth as a meteorite, AMS added. A brighter object typically denotes a larger object, which is more likely to survive the trip through the atmosphere.

It's hard to say how big and bright the meteor that fell over the northeastern U.S. on Sunday was, as the fireball's apparent magnitude changes based on its distance from the observer. Witnesses estimated that the fireball had a magnitude anywhere from zero to minus 26 — meaning some observers saw a ball that shone almost as brightly as the sun.

Reports of the fireball came in from dozens of cities across several states, including New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maine and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada. Most witnesses estimated that the fireball remained overhead for between 1.5 and 3.5 seconds around 8:48 p.m. (ET).

Originally published on Live Science.

Update: This article was updated on Dec. 11 following the successful return of the Orion crew capsule, and the completion of the Artemis I mission.

On Nov. 16, 2022, NASA launched the most powerful rocket ever built on a 26-day trip around the moon. On Dec. 11, an empty crew capsule blazed through Earth's atmosphere and splashed down into the Pacific Ocean.

The first phase of NASA's ambitious, three-part Artemis mission was a success. But whether the mission achieved all its goals remains to be seen.

If all goes to plan, NASA's Artemis program will culminate in 2025/2026 with astronauts setting foot on the moon for the first time in 50 years, and will include the first woman and person of color ever to do so. Ultimately, NASA intends to build a permanent lunar base at the moon's south pole, serving not only as a residence for moon-bound astronauts, but also as a staging ground for crewed missions to Mars and deep space exploration, Pat Troutman, Strategy and Architectures Liaison for NASA’s Moon to Mars Architecture Development office, told Live Science.

However, every journey of a thousand light-years begins with a single step. For Artemis, that first step is making sure that the mighty Space Launch System (SLS) rocket (also known as the Mega Moon Rocket) and the attached Orion Crew Capsule are safe and sturdy enough for humans to one day use. As such, the first phase of the Artemis mission was totally un-crewed, with only three mannequins riding aboard the Orion capsule on its trans-lunar voyage.

"This is the first flight of a major space system," Troutman said. "It's a highly integrated, complex system with lots of energy, and typically you want to test those the first time without people too close."

Phantoms of the moon

What does NASA hope to learn from this un-crewed mission to the moon? According to Troutman, the Artemis I mission will primarily test two things: The performance of the SLS rocket and Orion Crew Capsule, and the safety of the astronauts inside.

For the purposes of the Artemis I mission, those astronauts were played by three mannequins — or "moonikins" — riding inside the Orion capsule.

Sitting up front, Commander Moonikin Campos (named after former NASA scientist Arturo Campos, a key figure in the Apollo 13 mission of 1970) tested out NASA's new space suit, the Orion Crew Survival System flight suit. Behind him sat Helga and Zohar — two "phantoms," or limbless mannequins made of "materials that mimic human bones, soft tissues, and organs of an adult female," according to NASA. (Commander Campos' name was selected through a public contest; Helga and Zohar were named by the German and Israeli space agencies, who are partners on the mission).

Campos and Zohar wore special vests to protect them from the intense solar radiation that Earth's atmosphere usually blocks; the third mannequin went vestless to serve as an experimental control (sorry, Helga). 

All three mannequins sat on chairs rigged with sensors to measure the acceleration and vibrations during the spacecraft's launch and reentry to Earth. By studying the moonikins and their sensor data after the mission concludes, NASA should get a clear picture of the potential bodily strain and radiation exposure that human astronauts can expect to endure during future phases of the Artemis program.

The four "nail-biter" moments

Assessing the durability and functionality of the spacecraft itself is the other crucial objective for Artemis I, Troutman said. And the best tests of the SLS and Orion spacecraft's abilities boil down to four key "high energy events."

The first of those events is the SLS launch, when the 322-foot-tall (98 meters) rocket's four massive RS-25 engines finally ignited, shooting the rocket off of the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and upward on an eight-minute climb through Earth's atmosphere. 

Following the rocket's successful liftoff on Nov.16, the second high-energy event occured about two minutes later, when the SLS's two solid rocket boosters detached from the main rocket stage and parachuted down into the ocean.

"That's always a nail-biter, because you have these large moving bodies and they have to come up and separate and clear," Troutman said. While numerous NASA launches have successfully completed this procedure in the past, "it's still a tricky maneuver to do."

The third big event was the trans-lunar injection — a critical maneuver that lasts about 20 minutes, wherein the now-booster-free spacecraft fired a smaller RL10 engine to push entirely out of Earth's orbit and set off on a trajectory for the moon. Five days later, the Orion spacecraft arrived on the moon's doorstep, orbiting within about 80 miles (130 km) of the lunar surface.

After several weeks of orbiting the moon, taking pictures, and running tests on various spacecraft equipment, the Orion capsule returned to Earth. This set in motion the final high-energy event: the fiery fall through Earth's atmosphere, during which the spacecraft endured temperatures of about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius) — about half as hot as the surface of the sun.

"Orion's going to come screaming down at 11 kilometers a second [6.8 miles per second]," Troutman said. "This is where we'll test Orion's heat shield, which is one of our big objectives for the mission."

Finally, the capsule deployed parachutes and splashed down into the Pacific Ocean off Baja California, Mexico. 

It will take researchers months to assess how the spacecraft fared through these high-energy events. Ultimately, these results will tell NASA whether the Artemis program is ready to proceed to its second phase. In Artemis II, currently planned for May 2024, a crew of real human astronauts will repeat the journey around the moon that their mannequin colleagues embarked on during Artemis I.

"This is the first mission of the future," Troutman said. "We had Apollo, we had ISS [the International Space Station]. The next chapter of the book is Artemis — and this is the first page."

Punches from the sun are overpowering skywatchers these days.

Yet another series of solar flares series shimmied out from the sun on Friday (Aug. 26) after a dazzling show of green-hued auroras crashed through the atmosphere just days ago.

"Sunspot AR3089 is crackling with a series of intensifying M-class [moderate] solar flares," SpaceWeather.com said in a Friday update. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured an especially powerful flare at 7:16 a.m. EDT (1116 GMT) as populations in Europe and Africa experienced a brief radio blackout.

A huge ejection of charged particles from the sun, known as a coronal mass ejection, may strike our planet on Monday (Aug. 29) and spark auroras around the Arctic Circle, according to a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (These shining lights occur when charged particles interact with Earth's magnetic field.)

The sun is certainly feeling forceful these days, as it is generating a surge of space weather to herald the start of its maximum of an 11-year solar cycle of activity.

Related: Hyperactive sunspot just hurled a huge X-class solar flare into space

Swarms of northern and southern lights were spotted earlier this week, including seen from space by the European Space Agency's Samantha Cristoforetti. (The veteran astronaut said it was the most powerful storm yet in her 300 days in space.)

Most space weather at its most dramatic provides a great show for people on or near Earth, but a small number of particularly powerful storms can harm power lines, satellites and other vital infrastructure that our planet depends upon.

The sun is more prone to temper tantrums when it reaches its maximum of activity, as sunspots spread on the surface and magnetic lines twist and snap. If a storm is directed toward Earth, that can create auroras, blackouts and other effects.

Related: The worst solar storms in history

NASA, the European Space Agency and other space-faring entities keep an eye on solar weather 24/7 to provide the best protection possible for Earth, satellite managers and the astronauts working above our planet.

If you captured a stunning photo of the northern lights let us know! You can send in images and comments to Space.com by emailing spacephotos@space.com. Be sure to let us know your name, where you were observing from and what it was like to see the auroras.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.

Originally published on Live Science sister site Space.com.

All life on Earth owes its existence to the sun's radiant heat. But what happens when that radiation surges out of control, and billions of tons of charged solar material suddenly barrel our way at thousands of miles a second? What happens when Earth takes a direct hit from a solar flare — and could a strong enough one ever destroy life on our planet as we know it?

The answers are complicated, but most scientists agree on one thing: Earth's magnetic field and insulating atmosphere keep us extremely well protected from even the most powerful solar outbursts. While solar storms can tamper with radar and radio systems or knock satellites offline, the most harmful radiation is sopped up in the sky long before it touches human skin.

"We live on a planet with a very thick atmosphere… that stops all of the harmful radiation that is produced in a solar flare," said Alex Young, Associate Director for Science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Even in the largest events that we've seen in the past 10,000 years, we see that the effect is not enough to damage the atmosphere such that we are no longer protected," Young said in a 2011 video addressing fears that a solar flare would end the world in 2012. 

Still, not all solar flares are harmless. While Earth’s magnetic field prevents widespread death from solar radiation, the sheer electromagnetic power of a flare could disrupt power grids, internet connections and other communication devices on Earth, resulting in chaos and potentially even death. Space weather experts at NASA and other agencies take this threat seriously, and closely monitor the sun for potentially hazardous activity.

What are solar flares?

Solar flares occur when the sun's magnetic field lines become taut and twisted, causing enormous, planet-sized storms of electromagnetic energy to form on the sun's surface. We can see these storms as cold, dark splotches known as sunspots. Around sunspots, huge tendrils of magnetic field lines twist, spool and sometimes snap, creating powerful flashes of energy, or solar flares.

Most energy from a solar flare is radiated away as ultraviolet and X-ray light, Live Science previously reported. However, the intense energy of a flare can also heat up nearby gas in the sun's atmosphere, launching enormous blobs of charged particles known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) out into space. If a flaring sunspot happens to be facing Earth, then any resulting CMEs blast right toward us, typically reaching our planet in anywhere from 15 hours to several days.

Whether or not you've heard of CMEs, you've likely lived through hundreds of them; the sun emits anywhere from one CME each week to several a day, depending on where we are in the sun's 11-year cycle of activity, according to NASA. Most CMEs pass over our planet completely undetected by the general public, thanks to Earth's powerful magnetic field, or magnetosphere.

However, the biggest, most energetic CMEs can actually compress our planet's magnetic field as they pass, resulting in what's known as a geomagnetic storm.

As electromagnetic energy from the sun pours into our magnetosphere, atoms and molecules in Earth's atmosphere become electrically charged, creating effects that can be seen around the world. During such storms, the aurora borealis, typically only seen near the North Pole, can shift down so far that it becomes visible near the equator. 

Radio and radar systems around the world can black out, and electrical grids may become overloaded and lose power. Some experts fear that a sufficiently large CME could create an "internet apocalypse" by overloading undersea internet cables and leaving parts of the world without web access for weeks or months, though this has not happened yet. Satellites and space stations, which orbit beyond the protection of Earth's atmosphere, can also be debilitated by the renegade radiation of CMEs.

Still, even the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history — the 1859 Carrington Event — had no noticeable impact on the health of humans or other life on Earth. If even stronger solar storms battered our planet before this, there is no evidence that they impacted human health either.

"No matter what, flares do not have a significant effect on us here on Earth," Doug Biesecker, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, told the Stanford Solar Center. "What sort of fluxes would have to strike the Earth to wipe us out? I don't know the answer to that, but obviously, we've never even observed a solar event big enough to have any measurable effects on human health."

Star damage

Our nearest star may not pose an extinction threat – but scientists suspect that other nearby stars could. When certain stars run out of fuel and die, they explode in a tremendous supernova that blasts powerful radiation into space for millions of light-years around. These blasts are many, many times more powerful that solar flares; should such an explosion occur sufficiently close to Earth, the dying star could bathe our planet in so much ultraviolet radiation that it strips our protective ozone layer away, making Earth vulnerable to a barrage of charged interstellar particles. 

The authors of a recent study (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Aug. 2020) suspect that the death of a star within 65 light-years of Earth may have done just that about 359 million years ago, at the end of the Devonian Period (416 million to 358 million years ago). A mass extinction at the end of this period resulted in the death of 70% of Earth’s invertebrates, though scientists are not certain what triggered it. However, an examination of fossil spores from the time of the extinction revealed signs of ultraviolet light damage – suggesting that perhaps an exploding star triggered the extinction. 

Fortunately, there are no supernova candidates close enough to Earth to pose such a threat anytime soon, the study authors reassured. We have only our warm little sun to worry about – and our atmosphere makes sure that we stay on that star’s friendly side.

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists have detected a rapidly growing sunspot that’s pointed directly at Earth and could launch an assault of solar energy our way in the coming days.

The sunspot, named AR3085 for the "active region" of the sun in which it appeared, was barely a blip several days ago. Now, it has grown 10 times bigger, morphing into a pair of sunspots that each measure nearly the diameter of Earth, according to SpaceWeather.com. This short gif shows the spot's evolution over about two days.

A number of solar flares — large explosions of electromagnetic radiation that snap off from the sun's surface and launch outward into space— have been detected "crackling" around the spot, according to SpaceWeather.  Fortunately, they are all currently C-class flares, which fit into the weakest of the three tiers of solar flares that government satellites track. A-, B- and C-class flares are generally too weak to have a noticeable impact on Earth. M-class flares are stronger, capable of causing radio blackouts at high latitudes, while X-class flares are the strongest and can cause widespread radio blackouts, damage satellites and knock out ground-based power grids, according to NASA.

If the spots continue to grow over the coming days, they could produce stronger flares that could barrel toward Earth, potentially endangering satellites and communication systems. For now, however, there is no imminent danger.

Sunspots are large, dark regions of strong magnetic fields that form on the sun's surface. These regions — which typically measure as wide as planets — appear darker because they are cooler than their surroundings, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. They form where bands of the sun's magnetic field become tangled and taut, inhibiting the flow of hot gas from the sun's interior and forming cooler, darker regions on the sun's surface.

These pile-ups of magnetic energy often lead to solar flares. The more sunspots that appear on the sun at a given time, the more likely solar flares are to erupt.

The prevalence of both sunspots and solar flares are linked to the sun's 11-year cycle of activity, which transitions between periods of high and low sunspot density every decade or so. The next solar maximum — or the period of highest sunspot activity — is predicted to hit in 2025, with as many as 115 sunspots likely to appear on the sun's surface during its days of peak activity.

Solar activity has been ramping up over the last few years, with numerous X-class flares swooping over our planet since spring 2022 — sometimes within days of one another. The number of sunspots and solar flares will likely increase as time ticks toward the next solar maximum.

Originally published on Live Science.

On a leaf in the Peruvian Amazon, a fly's exoskeleton bursts open. Seven fungal stems emerge, flaring outward in a twisted bouquet. The fungus already took control of the fly's mind and body — now, it's time to find a new victim.

This grim scene, which captures the simultaneous death of a fly and life of a so-called "zombie" fungus that preys upon insects, is the grand prize winner in this year's BMC Ecology and Evolution Image Competition — the second annual photo contest hosted by the scientific journal BMC Ecology and Evolution. Roberto García-Roa, an evolutionary biologist and conservation photographer with the University of Valencia in Spain, snapped the winning image while undertaking research in the Tambopata National Reserve in southeastern Peru.

"The image depicts a conquest that has been shaped by thousands of years of evolution," García-Roa said in a statement. "The spores of the so-called 'zombie' fungus have infiltrated the exoskeleton and mind of the fly and compelled it to migrate to a location that is more favorable for the fungus's growth. The fruiting bodies have then erupted from the fly's body and will be jettisoned in order to infect more victims."

Fungi like the one seen here are entomopathogenic — meaning they act as a parasite in insects, usually killing or seriously debilitating their hosts. These killer fungi earned their  "zombie fungi" nickname because spores can take control of their hosts' brains and central nervous systems.

One zombie fungus that infects cicadas, for example, eats away at the abdomens of male cicadas, then releases psychoactive chemicals that cause the males to mimic female cicada mating behavior, Live Science previously reported. The mating call attracts healthy males to the infected zombie cicada, giving the fungal spores a parade of new hosts to latch onto.

It's not pretty — though some of the runner-up photos in BMC's competition certainly are. Other prize winners include a black-and-white image of a herd of African elephants sheltering from the sun under the branches of a baobab tree, and a close-up of an anole lizard with an air bubble perched over its nostrils so that it can breathe underwater.

You can check out all of this year's winners and honorable mentions at the BMC Ecology and Evolution journal's website, or in the gallery below.

Originally published on Live Science.

As summer slips into autumn and nights begin to grow longer, the final supermoon of the year will make a big splash Thursday (Aug. 11).

Nicknamed the "Sturgeon Moon," August's full moon peaks around 9:36 p.m. EDT on Thursday (0136 a.m. GMT on Friday) — although the moon will appear bright and full on Wednesday and Friday night (Aug. 10 and Aug. 12) as well. If you don't have a clear view from home, you can watch the supermoon rise over Rome thanks to the Virtual Telescope Project. Their live stream begins Friday (Aug. 12) morning at 1:30 a.m. ET (05:30 UT) and will be available to watch on their website anytime after.

Most publications consider this a supermoon, meaning the full moon occurs while the moon is nearest its closest point to Earth, also known as perigee, during the current orbit. The Sturgeon Moon will appear within 90% of perigee, making it a supermoon by most scientific definitions. (Some publications put specific distance or time constraints on supermoons, meaning the Sturgeon Moon may not fit the bill for every publication.) Supermoons can appear larger and up to 16% brighter in the sky than the average full moon, according to timeanddate.com.

Related: Blood Supermoon Lunar Eclipse wows skywatchers around the world (photos)

The Sturgeon Moon will be the fourth supermoon in a row, following the Buck Moon in July, the Strawberry Moon in June and the Flower Moon (which also featured a total lunar eclipse) in May. August's full moon will be the final supermoon of the year, according to the Farmer's Almanac.

Why the fishy nickname? The Maine Farmer's Almanac began printing Native American names for full moons in the 1930s, according to NASA, and these names have become commonplace today. The Sturgeon Moon's name comes to us from the Algonquin tribes of what is now eastern North America, as large sturgeon fish were more easily caught in the Great Lakes at this time of year.

Sadly, the full moon will wash out another cosmic spectacle that's also happening tonight — the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. 

Every year in late July and early August, Earth passes through the rocky debris of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which last swooped by our planet in 1992. As tiny rocks left by the comet fall through Earth's atmosphere, skywatchers can see a parade of shooting stars (actually fiery-hot meteors) in the northern sky. Typically, viewers can see up to 60 meteors an hour during the peak. This year, the moon's bright light will diminish that number to about 10 to 20 per hour, according to NASA.

The full moon occurs about once a month when the sun, Earth and moon align on an invisible 180-degree line. The moon's orbit is about 5 degrees different from Earth's, so it is usually a little higher or lower than Earth's shadow, enabling the sun's rays to illuminate the side facing Earth.

The next full moon peaks on Saturday, Sept. 10. That moon is typically called the Harvest Moon.

Originally published on Live Science on Aug. 8 and updated with information about watching live online and the Perseid meteor shower on Aug. 11.

A "potentially hazardous" asteroid the size of a blue whale is set to zip past Earth on Friday (Aug. 12), according to NASA.

The asteroid, named 2015 FF, has an estimated diameter between 42 and 92 feet (13 and 28 meters), or about the body length of an adult blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), and it will zoom past the Earth at 20,512 mph (33,012 km/h).

At its closest approach, the asteroid — traveling at around than 27 times the speed of sound — will come within about 2.67 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) of Earth, a little more than eight times the average distance between Earth and the moon. By cosmic standards, this is a tiny margin.

Related: Why are asteroids and comets such weird shapes?

NASA flags any space object that comes within 120 million miles (193 million km) of Earth as a "near-Earth object" and any fast-moving object within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) is categorized as "potentially hazardous." Once the objects are flagged, astronomers closely monitor them, looking for any deviation from their predicted trajectories — such as an unexpected bounce off another asteroid — that could put them on a devastating collision course with Earth.  

NASA knows the location and orbit of roughly 28,000 asteroids, which it maps with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) — an array of four telescopes capable of performing a complete scan of the entire night sky once every 24 hours. Since ATLAS came online in 2017, it has detected more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets. Two of the asteroids detected by ATLAS, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, actually hit Earth, the former exploding off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the latter landing near the border of Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, those asteroids were small and didn’t cause any damage. 

NASA has estimated the trajectories of all the near-Earth objects beyond the end of the century, and the good news is that Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years, according to NASA.

But this doesn’t mean that space watchers think they should stop looking. Though the majority of near-Earth objects may not be civilization-ending, like the cataclysmic comet that appears in the 2021 satirical disaster movie "Don't Look Up," there are still plenty of devastating asteroid impacts in recent history to justify the continued vigilance.

In March 2021, a bowling ball-sized meteor exploded over Vermont with the force of 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of TNT, Live Science previously reported. Those fireworks, however, have nothing on the most explosive recent meteor event, which occurred near the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013. As the Chelyabinsk meteor struck the atmosphere, it generated a blast roughly equal to around 400 to 500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb. Fireballs rained down over the city and its environs, damaging buildings, smashing windows and injuring approximately 1,200 people.

If astronomers were to ever spy an asteroid careening straight toward our planet, space agencies around the world are already working on possible ways to deflect the object. On Nov. 24, 2021, NASA launched a spacecraft as a part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which plans to redirect the non-hazardous asteroid Dimorphos by ramming it off course in autumn 2022, Live Science previously reported. China is also in the early planning stages of an asteroid-redirect mission. By slamming 23 Long March 5 rockets into the asteroid Bennu, the country hopes to divert the space rock from a potentially catastrophic impact with Earth.

Originally published on Live Science.

In the dark of Sunday night and Monday morning (Aug. 7 and 8), a surprise solar storm slammed into Earth, showering our planet in a rapid stream of charged particles from the sun. The resulting clash of solar and terrestrial particles in Earth's atmosphere caused stunning auroras to appear at much lower latitudes than usual — and, in southern Canada, triggered a surprise cameo from the mysterious sky phenomenon known as STEVE.

Alan Dyer, an astronomy writer and photographer based in southern Alberta, Canada, caught the wispy ribbons of green and violet light on camera as they shot through the sky.

"STEVE lasted about 40 minutes, appearing as the … aurora to the north subsided," Dyer wrote on Twitter on Aug. 8. "STEVE was 'discovered' here so he likes appearing here more than anywhere else!"

Related: Earliest documented aurora found in ancient Chinese text

As Dyer noted, the strange sky glow called STEVE was first described by citizen scientists and aurora hunters in northern Canada in 2017. STEVE is typically composed of an enormous ribbon of purplish light, which can hang in the sky for an hour or more, accompanied by a "picket fence" of green light that usually disappears within a few minutes. 

The glowing river of light may look like an aurora, but it's actually a unique phenomenon that was considered "completely unknown" to science upon its discovery. Today, scientists have a slightly better idea of what's going on. 

STEVE (short for "strong thermal velocity enhancement") is a long, thin line of hot gas that slices through the sky for hundreds of miles. The hot air inside STEVE can blaze at more than 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius) and move roughly 500 times faster than the air on each side of it, satellite observations have shown.

Whereas the northern lights occur when charged solar particles bash into molecules in Earth's upper atmosphere, STEVE appears much lower in the sky, in a region called the subauroral zone. That likely means solar particles aren't directly responsible for STEVE, Live Science previously reported. However, STEVE almost always appears during solar storms like Sunday's, showing up after the northern lights have already begun to fade.

One hypothesis suggests that STEVE is the result of a sudden burst of thermal and kinetic energy in the subauroral zone, somehow triggered by the clash of charged particles higher in the atmosphere during aurora-inducing solar storms. However, more research is needed to uncover the true secrets of STEVE. In the meantime, we can simply bask in its otherworldly glow and wave back at its twinkling green fingers.

Originally published on Live Science.

Once a year, from mid-July to late August, Earth passes through a cosmic junk heap that pelts our planet with thousands of tiny space rocks no wider than a grain of sand. We call this annual event the Perseid meteor shower — or simply the Perseids.

This year, the Perseids peak in the dark hours between Aug. 11 and 12. Unfortunately, the fact that there's a bright full moon around the same time will dampen the show. You may be able to see 10 - 20 meteors per hour during the peak, according to NASA – down from the 50 to 60 per hour visible on a non-full-moon year. Still, you should be able to catch some shooting stars in the nights leading up to the peak, as well.

The Perseids are one of the most popular and consistent meteor showers of the year. They occur each summer when our planet passes through the vast tail of debris dropped by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which made its last close approach to Earth in 1992.

As Earth swoops through the comet's icy, rocky leftovers, small bits of debris plunge through our atmosphere, heating up to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 Celsius) and streaking through the sky at more than 100,000 mph (160,000 km/h), according to NASA. Most of these tiny meteors burn to a crisp in the atmosphere, though a rare few crash land on the planet's surface, whereupon they earn the new title "meteorites."

While the Perseids last several weeks, the greatest spectacle begins when Earth passes through the densest part of comet Swift-Tuttle's debris cloud. On a typical year, stargazers can expect to see about 60 meteors per hour during the shower's peak, according to NASA. This year, that number will be considerably lower, as the full Sturgeon Moon will obscure some of those falling rocks with its bright light.

To give yourself the best shot at seeing the Perseids peak, Live Science's sister site Space.com recommends heading out to the darkest place you can find in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 12 or one of the nights leading up to the peak. Settle in, as your eyes can take up to 30 minutes to adjust to the darkness, and look north toward the constellation Perseus, which follows behind the bright W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia.

(Meteor showers are typically named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to radiate — in this case, Perseus. In reality, the meteors are right there in the atmosphere.)

Humans have been watching the Perseids for thousands of years. In 1862, two astronomers — Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle — independently discovered a massive near-Earth comet, now known as Comet Swift-Tuttle. A few years later, another astronomer realized that this comet produced the Perseid meteor shower, according to NASA.

Comet Swift-Tuttle is massive — in fact, NASA says, it's the largest object known to repeatedly fly past Earth. The comet's nucleus (the solid, central part of the comet, separate from the bright glow that surrounds it) measures about 16 miles (26 kilometers) wide. For comparison, the Chicxulub asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs only measured about 7.5 miles (12 km) across.

Swift-Tuttle orbits the sun, completing a full pass every 133 years. Astronomers have calculated the massive space rock's trajectory thousands of years into the future, and have found that the comet does not pose any threat of colliding with Earth on its current path.

Swift-Tuttle will make an exceptionally close flyby in the year 3044, according to Space.com, when it will pass within a million miles of our planet. That's painfully close in astronomical terms — but it's still twice the average distance between Earth and the moon, meaning there is little risk for whatever life inhabits the Earth 1,000 years from now.

Originally published on Live Science.