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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A private mission to rescue an ailing NASA space telescope may now need a rescue of its own. The LINK spacecraft — designed by private company Katalyst Space to boost the orbit of NASA’s ageing Swift Observatory — is reportedly spinning unexpectedly in the weeks after its launch, so much so that stabilizing the spacecraft will likely delay the telescope rescue.

Katalyst’s LINK spacecraft launched July 3 from a mid-air Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket mounted aboard a modified Lockheed Martin L-1011 airliner. The spacecraft lifted off after less than a year of development, on a mission to catch NASA's nearly 22-year-old Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory before the telescope falls back to Earth.

While teams at NASA and Katalyst are working hard to stabilize the new LINK spacecraft, the next few weeks will be a delicate balance of getting LINK ready before Swift falls back to Earth (which is expected to occur this autumn), while not putting Swift at undue risk.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said there’s still time. "We are not giving up yet," he wrote late Thursday (July 30) on X. "This remains a very cool, very low-cost, high-potential, high-reward mission, and another step toward a more autonomous future where missions like this routinely upgrade, repair, service, and boost satellites."

LINK was supposed to rendezvous with Swift about a month after its early-July launch, but now it looks like late August is the earliest possible date, according to the latest update. That’s because the $30-million LINK began spinning in recent days after electrical power issues affected two of the devices that control the spacecraft’s orientation, known as reaction control system (RCS) wheels. Only one of the three RCS is working properly.

As of Thursday (July 30), Katalyst’s mission blog said engineers reduced the rotation with engine fires from the spacecraft, and that work is ongoing to stabilize the spacecraft. LINK is now spinning at four degrees a second, instead of the previous nine.

"Over the last 48 hours, the Katalyst team has worked to reduce LINK’s rotation while assessing current spacecraft functionality and its control system," Katalyst representatives wrote.

All the troubleshooting has delayed LINK’s expected arrival near NASA's Swift Observatory — a legacy telescope designed to detect gamma-ray outbursts — into late August. Time is of the essence, as Swift is expected to fall too far for help by autumn. The observatory has already reduced its science work to stay as streamlined as possible, so that drag doesn’t pull it into the atmosphere this summer.

Swift must stay above a minimum rescue altitude of 185 miles (298 kilometers) for the mission to succeed, agency models suggest. For comparison, the International Space Station typically operates at about 250 miles (400 kilometers) in altitude.

NASA has noted that other systems on LINK are working well. "The spacecraft remains power positive and in communication with the Katalyst team," NASA officials wrote in a Tuesday (July 28) update. Assuming LINK’s attitude stabilizes and the spacecraft is healthy enough, teams "will then evaluate revised plans to approach and capture Swift," NASA stated.

Katalyst’s ultimate goal is to refuel and reboost Swift so that the observatory, worth roughly $450 million today when accounting for inflation, will be able to continue its mission. (The mission cost $250 million in 2004, which is much cheaper than the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope that launched almost five years ago.)

Swift was initially mainly tasked with looking at gamma-ray bursts, which are huge explosions that happen after a dying and massive star collapses into a black hole. Swift has gathered many observations of these bursts, but it also looks at other stellar changes (like supernovas or X-ray flares) as well as moving objects like comets and asteroids.

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

If successful, the rescue mission could give Swift many more years — potentially decades — to continue surveying the cosmos, as long as its science instruments continue to function.

Astronomers may have just found a first-of-its-kind phenomenon buried in the shadow of one of the Milky Way's most famous stellar explosions: two stars that died in separate supernovas, after spending millions of years orbiting each other.

Using 16 years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, researchers detected high-energy gamma rays coming from a faint, previously overlooked supernova remnant called G189.6+3.3, which sits right beside the well-studied remnant IC 443 (nicknamed the Jellyfish Nebula). Their analysis suggests that the two remnants aren't just neighbors by coincidence. Instead, they may be the leftover wreckage of a binary star system, making this the first confirmed case of two supernova remnants traced to the same stellar pair.

The findings were published July 21 in the journal Nature Communications.

"We weren't really looking for a binary supernova remnant," study first author Miltiadis Michailidis, an astrophysicist and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, told Live Science. The team originally set out to characterize G189.6+3.3, which had long been overshadowed by its brighter neighbor. IC 443 is one of the best-studied remnants in the galaxy and among the first ever confirmed to accelerate protons — one of the key ingredients thought to produce cosmic rays, the high-energy particles that constantly strike Earth's atmosphere.

By combining Fermi's gamma-ray data with X-ray, radio, ultraviolet and optical observations, the team teased out G189.6+3.3's faint signal and found something strange: Instead of glowing uniformly, its northern half was dominated by accelerated protons, while its southern half was dominated by electrons. It's the first time such a clean split has been spotted within a single remnant.

The explanation, they found, came down to the environment: The northern edge of the remnant presses against a dense cloud of hydrogen gas, which gives fast-moving protons something to collide with, thereby producing gamma rays, Michailidis said. The southern half lacks that dense material, letting a different, electron-driven process take over instead. Ultraviolet observations showed that the northern shock wave had slowed after slamming into the cloud, backing up that interpretation.

Earlier work had already shown that IC 443 interacts with the same cloud, which implies that both remnants sit at roughly the same distance from Earth. To rule out coincidence, the researchers simulated 1 million hypothetical binary star systems and calculated how often two unrelated remnants would wind up this close together purely by chance. Depending on the method used, the odds came out to somewhere between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 100. In other words, it's highly likely that the two supernova remnants are related.

The team also estimated when each star likely exploded, finding that the two blasts were probably separated by tens of thousands of years. That finding is consistent with one star in a binary pair going supernova first, with its companion following suit long afterward.

Rather than relying purely on computer models, astronomers can use this real-world system to test long-standing theories about how massive binary stars live, interact and eventually explode.

Michailidis said the team's next step is to search for similar binary remnant pairs elsewhere in the galaxy, to understand why this system has stood alone until now. He pointed to one particular payoff: Measuring the distance between two remnants' explosion centers can reveal how much energy a supernova actually released — a quantity that, until now, astronomers could only estimate from theory. "Now we can actually test it," he said.

Hundreds of spectators who attended the recent launch of a Chinese rocket witnessed a truly shocking sight when a bolt of lightning struck the ascending vehicle in midair.

Stunning photos show the exact moment the zigzagging beam of electricity surged around the rocket's fuselage and through its exhaust plume before shooting down toward Earth's surface.

Despite being hit with at least 100 million volts of electricity, the uncrewed rocket safely reached space and successfully deployed its payload in orbit.

The stricken spacecraft, a Long March 3B rocket, lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China on July 23 at around 8 p.m. local time, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. But around 30 seconds after leaving the ground, the rocket was suddenly hit by lightning, which illuminated the sky in the blink of an eye.

Video footage from the launch (see below) shows a large crowd of people with raincoats and umbrellas collectively gasping as lightning hits the rocket and then loudly cheering as the spacecraft continues its climb, unimpeded by the electrical discharge.

A translated statement from the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. released later the same day said the mission was a "complete success" and that the Long March 3B correctly deployed its payload, the Tianlian-2 (06) satellite, a geostationary relay satellite that will help support China's Tiangong space station.

However, the statement did not mention the lightning strike.

Modern spacecraft are designed to have highly conductive shells that divert massive electrical charges around their exteriors without impacting critical interior infrastructure or any crew they might be carrying. This works similarly to a Faraday cage, a protective enclosure that prevents certain types of electromagnetic radiation from entering or exiting. Similar designs are also used in commercial planes, which are struck by lightning at least once per year, on average, according to the National Weather Service.

Despite this, rockets normally launch only in good weather to minimize the risk.

Previous incidents

It is unclear exactly how many rockets have been struck by lightning throughout the history of spaceflight, but there have been several notable examples.

Perhaps the most famous incident was during NASA's Apollo 12 mission, which successfully landed a trio of astronauts — Charles Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon — on the lunar surface in November 1969. Shortly after liftoff, the Saturn V rocket carrying the astronauts was struck by lightning twice as it climbed into the atmosphere. Some nonessential instruments and sensors experienced "permanent effects" from the strikes, according to one recently released report. However, these issues did not stop the spacecraft from safely ferrying the astronauts to the moon and back.

Most recently, in 2019, a Russian Soyuz rocket was struck by lightning while carrying a communications satellite into low Earth orbit, Ars Technica reported.

Lightning can also hit rockets on the launchpad, which is what happened in the lead-up to the Artemis I mission in 2022. The uncrewed Space Launch System rocket, which launched NASA's first moon mission in 50 years, was struck by lightning during a "wet dress rehearsal" around seven months before launch. However, strikes like these are exceedingly rare nowadays, as most launchpads are surrounded by towers designed to attract lightning away from standing rockets, according to The Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Although these spacecraft remained relatively unscathed, the same cannot be said for an Atlas-Centaur rocket (dubbed AC-67) that was destroyed in 1987 after being struck by lightning 48 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A NASA report later revealed that the electrical discharge had triggered a "single-word memory alteration" in the rocket's navigational computer, which caused it to veer sideways and completely break apart.

Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star that marks Orion's shoulder, has kept skywatchers company for thousands of years — and it may have had company of its own the whole time.

Astronomers say they've captured the clearest image yet of a faint star orbiting tightly around Betelgeuse, in what they're calling the strongest evidence so far that the famous red supergiant isn't flying solo. The find was announced by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on Tuesday (July 28) and detailed in a new paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Betelgeuse, usually one of the top 10 brightest stars visible from Earth, naturally swells and shrinks as it pulses across a cycle of 400 days, according to NASA, which causes the star to wax and wane in brightness. But for decades, scientists have puzzled over an extra pattern: a slower dimming and brightening outside of this 400-day cycle that repeats roughly every six years.

Two independent teams — one led by astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of Harvard University, the other by Jared Goldberg, a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York — each modeled that long-term wobble using decades of brightness and velocity data, and converged on the same explanation: the pattern comes from a hidden companion star, orbiting so close to Betelgeuse's bloated surface that it's nearly impossible to see.

However, their calculations suggested that there might be a moment, in December 2024, when that companion would swing far enough away from Betelgeuse that we might be able to photograph it.

So that December, a team led by Paris Observatory astronomer Miguel Montargès trained the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope on Betelgeuse. They then spent months combing through the data, and the effort paid off: they found what looks to be this companion star, now nicknamed Betelgeuse B.

"The fact that we can still discover a nearby companion, more massive and brighter than the Sun, around such a well-studied star is remarkable," Montargès said in an ESO statement. "These are among the best moments in science: seeing something new, unexpected."

One surprise: the companion turned out to be beefier than expected. Scientists had guessed it was roughly as massive as our sun, but the new images suggest it's actually two to three times heavier — which also makes it brighter and easier to spot than predicted.

However, the researchers say they need one more image of this star. To be certain that the companion is really there, we still need to observe it in one year on the other side of the star, but there is very little space left for doubt,"adds Montargès.

If confirmed, the discovery could reshape how astronomers think about Betelgeuse's fate. As a red supergiant, it's in the final stage of its life and will eventually end in a supernova explosion — though pinning down exactly when is notoriously difficult, says Montargès. "The question is … whether this companion is going to have an impact on the evolution of the red supergiant," Montargès said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following a trail of galactic crumbs

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

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

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

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

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

Dark matter deficiency is linked to a violent past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For thousands of years, humans looked at Mars and wondered what lay on its surface. Fifty years ago this week, we finally found out when NASA's Viking 1 became the first spacecraft ever to land on the Red Planet and transmit images from its surface. It was humanity's first view from the surface of another planet.

Viking 1 had been programmed to take its first image just 25 seconds after touchdown, according to NASA. It occurred at 7:53 a.m. EDT on July 20, 1976 — exactly seven years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It was supposed to coincide with the U.S. Bicentennial on July 4, 1976, but the landing was delayed by the search for a flat landing zone.

Although the spacecraft landed safely at Chryse Planitia, north of the equator, mission controllers still had to wait another 19 minutes for the radio signal confirming success to cross the 212 million miles (340 km) between Mars and Earth.

Forty minutes after touchdown, the confirming image began appearing on monitors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, slowly building line by line from left to right. Dr. Thomas Mutch, leader of the Viking lander imaging team, never forgot the moment.

"I studied the black screen, waiting for that narrow strip that will signal the first few lines of the first picture," he said. "Rocks and sand are visible and — finally at the far right — one of the spacecraft foot pads, a symbolic artifact that stamps our accomplishment with the sign of reality … Time and time again I repeat, 'It's incredible.'"

The image revealed a solid, slightly rocky surface, with dust and pebbles thrown up by the landing already settling back onto the spacecraft. Viking’s first color image came the next day, with a panorama following a few days later.

The Viking mission consisted of four spacecraft: two orbiters and two landers. Viking 1 was joined six weeks later on the surface by Viking 2, which landed in Utopia Planitia, also in the northern hemisphere. Meanwhile, the two orbiters mapped Mars and relayed data — including more than 52,000 orbital images and 4,500 photographs from the surface — back to Earth.

Viking transformed our understanding of Mars, but its most intriguing scientific result remains unresolved. The landers carried the first experiments designed to detect life directly in Martian soil. Although the mission's official conclusion was that no convincing evidence of life had been found, some scientists have continued to argue that one of the experiments produced a genuine biological signal; others argue that Viking’s experiments destroyed the very evidence of life that they sought to prove. Discoveries by later missions — including organic molecules detected by Curiosity and perchlorate salts found by Phoenix — have prompted some researchers to revisit the Viking data.

Viking 1 fell silent in 1982, two years after Viking 2, following a software error during an update. The intrepid spacecraft showed us the surface of another planet for the first time, but whether Viking 1 also found the first hints of life off-Earth remains one of planetary science's most enduring mysteries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smeared signals

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science word of the day: Parsec

Pronunciation: PAHR'-sek

What it means: Ah, the humble parsec, thorn in the side of George Lucas. In 1977, Lucas' "Star Wars: Episode IV ‪—‬ A New Hope" script had Han Solo bragging that the Millennium Falcon completed the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. The problem? Parsecs are a unit of distance, not a unit of time. This has caused angst among Star Wars fans for 49 years and counting.

But when we hit you with this definition, you're going to forgive Lucas for assuming the parsec was some sort of extra-fancy space second. Here it goes: A parsec is a unit of distance required to cause a heliocentric parallax of one arc second. Ouch.

Let's break it down. Heliocentric parallax is a way to measure the distance to a far-off object, such as a star, by measuring how it appears to move in comparison to another distant object (usually another star). An arc second is a fragment of an angle of an arc equal to 1/3600 of a degree.

This means a parsec is a unit of distance that makes a star seem to move 1/3600 of a degree compared with another distant star. It turns out that this equals 206,265 times the distance of Earth to the sun, or 3.26 light-years.

How to use it in a sentence: The 2018 movie "Solo: A Star Wars Story" tries to retcon Han Solo's brag about parsecs by claiming he was talking about distance all along ‪—‬ but we're not sure we're buying it.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

There's nothing more disorienting than falling asleep in transit only to wake up and find you've somehow drifted billions of miles beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Fortunately for NASA's New Horizon spacecraft, which scientists just awakened from a nearly yearlong hibernation at the solar system's edge, all systems are in "good health," according to a NASA statement. Now, with the probe recovered from its 321-day sleep and beginning to transmit science data again, New Horizons appears ready to continue its mission of studying the mysterious boundary where the sun's realm ends and interstellar space begins.

"Every status report through this hibernation period was 'green,' meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week," Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in the statement.

New Horizons launched in 2006, breaking the record for fastest-ever space launch at roughly 36,400 mph (58,500 km/h). On its way to the edge of the solar system, the spacecraft picked up speed during a flyby of Jupiter in 2007 and then again while passing Pluto in 2015. Today, New Horizons is about 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, or roughly 64 times the distance from Earth to the sun (64 astronomical units, or AU).

With the exception of the twin Voyager probes that launched in 1977, New Horizons is the farthest working spacecraft in the universe. (Two other probes, Pioneer 10 and 11, have traveled farther, but each stopped working several decades ago.)

Like the Voyager twins, New Horizons is on a trajectory toward the heliopause — the extreme outer edge of the sun's influence, where solar wind collides with the interstellar medium.

The Voyager probes proved that this dividing line is a measurable, physical boundary in space, marked by a hot, thick plasma barrier. However, New Horizons will eventually pass this boundary with far more sensitive instruments than the Voyagers held, enabling it to collect the most detailed data about this region ever.

But there's still a long way to go. The heliopause is estimated to begin about 120 AU from the sun — nearly twice as far as New Horizons has traveled so far. In the meantime, a long and lonely journey through the Kuiper Belt awaits. In the coming weeks, the spacecraft will begin conducting a study of hydrogen in the outer reaches of the heliosphere as it sends back the hoarded trove of data from its year in hibernation.

According to NASA, each transmission between New Horizons and Earth takes about 8 hours and 52 minutes, with that delay growing all the time.

In the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons may also have the chance to study peculiar, icy objects similar to the peanut-shaped space rock Arrokoth, which the probe flew by in 2019. This was the furthest object in the solar system ever to receive a close spacecraft flyby; whether New Horizons will break its own record again in the coming years is an open question.

After using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer back toward the beginning of time, astronomers have proposed a radical new explanation for one of the universe's most flummoxing phenomena.

Little red dots (LRDs) are mysteriously compact, brilliant celestial objects found predominantly when the universe was less than 10% of its current age.

As revealed by JWST's unmatched infrared sensitivity, LRDs emerged incredibly early, only around 600 million years after the Big Bang, and then began disappearing about a billion years later.

Now, in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers have proposed a novel formation mechanism for LRDs: They may be birthed by previously undiscovered celestial companions, whose intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation causes gas clouds to collapse into incredibly dense and exotic objects, like "black hole stars."

"The most surprising aspect… is that these little red dots are not just 'red dots,' but there is a more complex emission nearby and around them," Josephine Baggen, an astronomer at Yale University and first author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "We think those what we call 'companions' are starlight."

Connecting the dots

In the study, the researchers compiled a sample of 83 LRDs, imaged with JWST, from ultradeep surveys. They found that 36 of the 83 LRDs, including over 80% of the brightest ones, hosted at least one companion that shined bright in blue-ish ultraviolet light; little red dots with little blue companions.

These companions had masses ranging from hundreds of millions to billions that of the sun, suggesting that they may be star clusters or relatively small early galaxies, Baggen told Live Science.

These UV-spewing companions spurred the formation of LRDs from immense gas clouds, the team's new proposal states. Normally, cold molecular gas clouds fragment and condense into stars. But the intense UV irradiation from the companions halted the fragmentation process, potentially squeezing the gas clouds into supermassive stars that directly collapsed into black holes while skipping the explosive supernova stage that normally marks these stars' deaths.

This proposal helps to explain why LRDs appear bright in red optical light and UV wavelengths, with a dip between the two caused by the wavelengths of light absorbed by hydrogen gas. Rather than originating from a single object, the optical red light derives from the LRD, the UV light comes from its nearby companion, and the dip is thought to be caused by the dense cocoon of gas around the LRD.

As a result, the researchers suggested that all LRDs may have such partners but they may be too close together to be distinguished. Conversely, some companions may be separated by greater distances than the researchers accounted for in this study, requiring future observations to zoom out.

Galactic potential?

Intriguingly, this work may illuminate a couple of early-universe enigmas. First, the black holes manifesting from these interactions may be between 100,000 and 1 million solar masses, forming the "seeds" necessary to explain how ancient supermassive black holes grew so surprisingly massive so early in cosmic history.

Additionally, because LRDs may merge with the relatively small, UV-spewing galaxies that birthed them, this process may have created the impressively immense galaxies all around us today.

"We do think that this might be the birth of the supermassive black holes around these UV companions, born 'outside the galaxy,' [which] will eventually merge," Baggen told Live Science. "Whether this is what happened to the Milky Way in its earliest phases, we cannot really say, but it is plausible! There is still a lot of debate about how LRDs evolve and what they turn into at later times."

Science word of the day: Heliosphere

Pronunciation: HEE'-lee-uhs-feer

What it means: The heliosphere is the region around the sun that's affected by the solar wind, a flow of charged particles emanating from the sun. Think of the heliosphere like a giant bubble encompassing the sun and planets, reaching out into space at three times the distance of Pluto. This bubble protects the solar system from radiation emanating from outer space, but the solar wind can also erode planetary atmospheres. Luckily, Earth is protected by its own bubble, the magnetosphere, which helps deflect the solar wind.

How to use it in a sentence: Because the entire solar system is traveling through space, scientists have long pictured the heliosphere as comet-shaped, but recent research suggests the bubble of solar wind looks more like a sad, deflated croissant.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

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

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

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

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

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

Cosmic gas leak

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

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

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

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

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

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

A step forward in the hunt for life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See more space photos of the week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who will see Apophis?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sugar, space, and everything nice

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

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

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

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

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

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

On April 6, the four crewmembers of NASA's Artemis II mission swooped around the far side of the moon in their Orion spacecraft, disappearing from Earth's sight and losing all contact with humanity for roughly 40 minutes.

At the same time, some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away, Chris White, the mission's lead communications officer, was nervously pacing the halls of NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, waiting for the chance to do his job again.

"It was all nerves," White, the lead integrated communications officer (INCO) on Artemis II, told Live Science. In addition to maintaining communication with the Orion spacecraft (an impossible task while the moon blocked every signal), the INCO team also controlled its exterior cameras — a job White had previously done for the International Space Station (ISS).

The team knew for over a year what Orion's lunar flyby would entail, and which shots the cameras should capture. They had sent a checklist of nearly 300 commands to Orion that morning, telling the cameras exactly what to do after the spacecraft vanished behind the moon. All that remained was to wait.

After 40 minutes, bits of telemetry data started popping up on White's monitor as the Orion crew reemerged safely from behind the moon. Voice contact soon followed. But it would still take another day for Orion's flyby photos to traverse the space between the moon and Houston. When White finally opened the file the next morning, his body failed him.

"I opened a photo — the eclipse photo — and I couldn't breathe," White said. "I was like, 'There's no way that this turned out this well on the first try.'"

The INCO team's incredible Orion spacecraft photos have now been viewed by tens of millions of Earthlings. Live Science recently spoke with White to get the inside story of the images and the entire Artemis II mission as it was seen from NASA mission control.

Brandon Specktor: In a nutshell, what was your job on the Artemis II mission?

Chris White: During the mission, the INCO console manages all of the communication systems on the spacecraft, as the name kind of implies. We handle not just the video and the camera system but also the onboard audio system — which was the first flight for that — the system for radio communication and the optical communication system, which was a laser system on Artemis II. We also handle a couple of other minor systems.

BS: What was the vibe during liftoff?

CW: So, for liftoff, I was in the back, in a support room. The vibe was intense. Everybody was laser-focused on the task at hand. During simulations leading up to it, we had fake, simulated CGI views [of liftoff] to give us an idea of what we were going to see. I always thought, "Man, it's going to look so much cooler in real time." But then during liftoff, I looked up from my console screen zero times to look at the live video. So I didn't see a lot of that footage until the next day, when I had a chance to breathe.

The INCO team was basically flat-out busy for at least the first three flight days. For a lot of my team, it wasn't until after flight day three where things — and I'm going to use air quotes — loosely "calmed down." I don't think any of us truly relaxed until the vehicle was safely in the water.

BS: Let's talk about the lunar flyby. What was your experience watching along with the crew as they got closer and closer to the moon?

CW: It was incredible. I've seen the moon through the ISS cameras, and I'd watched the moon, over the course of the previous five flight days, slowly get larger and larger. But there was something logarithmic — almost like it just got really large very quickly on flight day six as we got close to the moon.

And the moon looked wrong, which sounds kind of crazy to say. We're so used to the way that the moon looks from our perspective here on the Earth, that when the vehicle was coming at it from an angle, you could see more of the backside of the moon. So you're in awe of it approaching and getting larger and realizing what's about to happen ‪—‬ but also my brain hurt trying to reconcile what I was seeing, because it didn't look correct. The shape and texture were different than what my brain expected.

BS: And the colors too, based on what the astronauts said. Did you notice anything unusual about the moon's coloration?

CW: It was hard to tell. The bandwidth limitations of being that far away from Earth made it hard to distinguish a lot of those finer details. But there was a moment where we looked at it and we were like, "I think we can tweak the exposure on this." It was a little too dark, and then we bumped it up a little bit. And all of a sudden, these muted grays became a little bit more brown. I was not expecting to be able to see that from our cameras.

You see it much more in some of the high-res photos that the crew took. But it was honestly shocking to see how much more color shows up even just a little bit as you get closer.

BS: As you were doing that flyby, did you have a strict checklist of shots you had to take?

CW: Yeah, absolutely. Flyby was a heavily choreographed event for the Orion cameras, as well as the crew and the science community. But we had started working on that plan well over one year earlier, and we knew exactly what shots we wanted and when we wanted them. The timing of all that shifts slightly, depending on exactly when you launch. So we had a framework in place, and then we just tweaked the timing in the 24 hours leading up to the events.

I think it was something like 290 total commands over the course of eight hours. We just scripted and time-tagged and put them on the vehicle, so it just clicked through them.

BS: How does that work during the eclipse phase, when you were out of contact?

CW: So we knew when Earthset ‪—‬ and, therefore, the start of the loss of signal (LOS) ‪—‬ would be and when Earthrise would be. And so we had the cameras flip into kind of a time-lapse mode at that point and then take a 30-second interval time lapse as the Earth got smaller and smaller and smaller behind the moon. All of that was scripted.

And then, behind the moon, during the LOS, it continued to take photos at a slower pace. I think it was like once every few minutes. We had all that on a timer, basically.

BS: How soon after the lunar flyby did you get to see the images?

CW: Luckily, we had a great optical comm pass that same night. So all those photos came down via laser to the Earth, and I saw them the next day. I didn't see them in the moment; I saw them the next day.

And I opened that photo — the eclipse photo — and I couldn't breathe. I was like, "There's no way that this turned out this well on the first try."

BS: Is that the photo that stands out most to you from the flyby?

CW: Yeah, it absolutely is. A lot of the photos you take in space, people are like, "Oh, where are the stars?" And it's because you have to expose the camera to the very bright, shiny spacecraft in front of you, and all the stars fade away into the blackness in the background.

But because the sun was behind the moon, you have the moon in the foreground in focus, the sun kind of bleeding out from behind it. The stars and the planets are all there. You can see Venus; you can see Saturn; you can see Mars. And then you have the glow of the spacecraft — it's not lit by the sun, but by the Earth — in the foreground. It was an incredible photo.

BS: What were you guys doing during that loss-of-signal phase? What was the vibe like then?

CW: I was pacing around the control center. The INCO team is responsible for keeping communication with the vehicle as much as we can, and there's not really much that we can do about that when you put a celestial body between us and the crew.

It's all nerves. It's all of the, "Hey, did we configure everything correctly? Are communications going to come back on the other side?" So just to distract myself for the 40 minutes that we were at LOS, I just kind of walked around the building and chatted with other people, just to try to keep myself distracted.

It wasn't until about three or four minutes after Earthrise that we started getting stable video, and then the crew called down. And that was really when I breathed a sigh of relief, once I heard voice coming down from the vehicle again.

BS: Do you feel different after this mission?

CW: People keep asking me that. I don't know that I've had quite enough time to fully unpack the mission. But I think it's slowly sinking in that we just sent four people around the moon, literally further away from Earth than ever. And I think, not only did we change them and the flight control team from that experience, but I think we changed a lot of people's perceptions of the moon, which is awesome.

BS: Do you know what your role for Artemis III is going to be?

CW: I definitely still plan to be on the INCO team for Artemis III. I will not be the lead for that mission. But I definitely still plan to be on console and hope to take some even more incredible photos during that mission.

BS: Any closing thoughts?

CW: I just want to stress what a team effort this was. The vehicle cameras had a script and a plan that involved not just the INCO team. But to point these cameras, I have to get the solar arrays swung forward in a specific direction, so I have to coordinate with the power guys. I have to sometimes ask the GNC [guidance, navigation and control] team to rotate the vehicle itself, which is entirely different from how we do things on ISS. There was our imagery team handling camera settings and proper exposure. There's the engineers who developed these systems.

This was not just me and the INCO team on console. It was truly a full flight control team effort to get these.

Editor's note: This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Are you a NASA nerd? See how well you score on our Artemis quiz to find out!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A secretive Chinese spacecraft has captured the first-ever close-up photo of one of Earth's temporary "quasi-moons" after arriving there for a potential first-of-its-kind landing.

The space probe is supposed to scoop up samples from the newly imaged space rock and return them to Earth next year. However, the blurry photo and the timing of its release hint that this may be trickier than initially thought.

The Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) probe, named Tianwen-2, launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southern China on May 28, 2025, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. Its primary target is Kamo'oalewa, also known as 2016 HO3, a fast-spinning asteroid that is classified as a quasi-satellite of Earth. That means it circles the sun alongside our planet, making it appear as if it were gravitationally bound to Earth when, in fact, it isn't. (This is only a temporary association; Kamo'oalewa will eventually fall out of sync with Earth and drift away from us.)

The CNSA has released minimal information about the parameters and timeline of the Tianwen-2 mission and only shared the first photo of the spacecraft several weeks after its launch. Based on one unverified timeline, Live Science previously reported that the probe had most likely arrived at Kamo'oalewa on June 7. However, Chinese officials have remained tight-lipped about the probe's progress.

But on Monday (July 6), the CNSA finally confirmed that, after a roughly 400-day-long journey spanning more than 600,000 miles (1 million kilometers), Tianwen-2 is now circling Kamo'oalewa, according to the state-run news outlet Xinhua. The agency also revealed that the probe first inserted itself into the asteroid's orbit on June 7, as originally predicted.

The announcement was accompanied by the first clear photograph of Kamo'oalewa, captured at a distance of around 12.5 miles (20 km) from the quasi-moon. The blurry image suggests the space rock is around 130 feet (40 meters) across, according to the South China Morning Post, which is on the lower end of previous estimates that suggested the asteroid was up to 330 feet (100 m) wide.

Initial readings also suggest that Kamo'oalewa is a rubble-pile asteroid, which means it is loosely bound together and has an unstable surface. Until now, researchers were unsure of the asteroid's composition and hoped it had a solid, rocky surface, which would have allowed the spacecraft to attempt a first-of-its-kind landing using an "anchor and drill" technique. (It now seems unlikely that this sampling method will be used.)

The asteroid's small size, fragile composition and fast spin will make it harder for the probe to collect samples from the space rock's surface, even with other tried-and-true techniques. The new image also hints that there are few flat spots on the space rock where the probe could land safely.

"This greatly increases the complexity of the sampling process and the risk of the mission, making it much more difficult," CNSA representatives wrote in a report, according to the South China Morning Post.

The unverified mission timeline, which correctly predicted the probe's arrival date, stated that the sampling attempt would commence July 4. However, the fact that this has seemingly not happened yet further suggests that Chinese scientists are struggling to figure out how to collect their desired samples.

CNSA officials wrote that the probe "will progressively conduct more detailed scientific exploration to acquire data on the asteroid's morphology, material composition and internal structure, laying the groundwork for subsequent sample collection operations."

If Tianwen-2 does manage to snag some samples, the probe will release them in a capsule during a flyby of Earth in November 2027, and they will reenter the atmosphere at around 27,000 mph (43,500 km/h). This would make China the third country to successfully collect and return asteroid samples to Earth, following Japan, which returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020, and the U.S., which acquired material from the space rock Bennu in 2023.

Researchers hope the returned samples will help unravel the secrets of the early solar system and potentially shed light on how key compounds, such as organic molecules and water, ended up on Earth. They may also shed light on the seven other quasi-moons that are currently known to co-orbit the sun with our planet.

Some experts previously theorized that Kamo'oalewa may be a fragment of the moon that was knocked loose from our permanent companion by an ancient meteor strike. Others have even attempted to pinpoint which crater the asteroid may have come from and hope that the samples will help confirm their hypothesis.

"I am curious to find out the answer about its origin, since the debate on its [potential] lunar origin is still very open," Marco Fenucci, a mathematician at the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre who has co-authored multiple studies on Kamo'oalewa, previously told Live Science. Any returned samples should "definitely give us an answer to this matter," he added.

After its close approach to Earth next year, Tianwen-2 will slingshot farther into the solar system to begin its secondary mission to study 311P/PanSTARRS — a peculiar object beyond Mars that displays characteristics of both comets and asteroids — in 2035.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening to the edge of a black hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

A remarkable black hole collision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new way to explore extreme gravity

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

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

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

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

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

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

More observations will be needed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to sculpt a universe from scratch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revealing celestial birth and death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was first published May 18, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See more space photos of the week:

This week's science news was all about goings on in space, with reports that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) picked up a signal from a mysterious, never-before-seen substance on Pluto and Titan.

The space telescope detected a specific absorption line in the spectra of these worlds' atmospheres, revealing the characteristic trace of a unique and unknown molecule. It's unclear exactly what the molecule could be, and the mystery is made even more compelling by the fact that the environments of Pluto and Titan are very distinct.

Farther afield, the JWST's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, spotted "impossible" light from a galaxy we shouldn't even be able to see. And in the busy skies surrounding our own planet, scientists are dreaming up a scheme to drop a giant "airbag" that could protect us from solar storms, sending spacecraft into orbit to save doomed telescopes, and also giving answers to why metal sticks together in space.

And just in time for Independence Day weekend, the sun has launched a string of eruptions to Earth that will likely paint the night skies with colorful auroras.

China's 'Great Green Wall' grows faster than natural forests

66 billion trees have been planted in China's Great Green Wall — and they appear to be growing faster than natural forests

China is no stranger to engineering projects designed to bring its environment to heel; we've recently covered the Asian powerhouse's attempts to tame nature through the creation of atmospheric rivers, the world's biggest dam and water transfers. But these are hardly China's only forays into sculpting its natural environment, with the country having planted more than 66 billion trees along its northern borders to halt the advance of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts.

Now, new research has revealed a startling detail about the trees in this "Great Green Wall": they're growing significantly faster than natural forests. Exactly why remains a mystery, but, as Live Science contributor Brian Owens reveals, it could be due to a stronger response from the trees to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Discover more planet Earth news

—'It sounds so impossible': Student studying fungus that makes users hallucinate tiny people may be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough

—'Uncharted territory': Record high ocean temperatures confirmed for June as El Niño strengthens its grip

—Study suggests life on Earth has around 1.8 billion years left — but the biosphere might evolve to survive even longer

Life's Little Mysteries

Are CAPTCHAs obsolete in the age of AI?

Are you a robot? It used to be a question that only humans could answer — by clicking on traffic lights or strings of warped and grainy characters, or Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs). But what happens now that autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents can ace some of these trials without detection? Have they made CAPTCHAs obsolete?

—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

Medici murder mystery solved

Ancient-DNA analysis solves 500-year-old mystery of what killed 2 Medici brothers

The Medici family ruled Renaissance Tuscany with an iron fist, fulfilling their ruthless ambitions with methods so underhand that the name of their most famous advisor, Niccolò Machiavelli, became a synonym for skulduggery.

So, when two brothers from the infamous family died under mysterious circumstances, it was believed for 500 years that they were murdered, possibly by arsenic poisoning. Now, science has revealed the true culprit behind the medieval cold case, and it's not what we expected.

Discover more archaeology news

—Ancient ring discovered underground in Scotland could be a Stonehenge-like monument

—500-year-old freeze-dried potato snacks discovered in Inca storage room in Peru

—2,000-year-old scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius eruption finally deciphered with help from AI

Also in science news this week

—Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs best US machines to be ranked world's fastest

—The hantavirus outbreak is over, WHO declares

—Rise in cancer in younger adults may be explained by faster 'biological aging,' early study hints

—Dead-end bitcoin mining wastes as much energy as Switzerland's entire hydropower generation capacity

—CERN shuts down Large Hadron Collider until 2030, upgrading the atom smasher to its most powerful form yet

—Scientists figured out how to shrink huge ultrafast lasers so they fit on a tiny chip ‪‪—‬ the 'holy grail' of the field

Science Spotlight

Japan's bold experiment to curb antibiotic misuse has been a huge success. Could it work in the US?

Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat in the U.S., with more than 2.8 million Americans developing antimicrobial-resistant infections each year. The solutions to this worrying trend can be very complex— such as moving agricultural systems away from their overreliance on antibiotics, or preventing the rapid spread of superbugs through international travel.

But stopping doctors from overprescribing antibiotics is one of the easiest strategies in the battle against this "silent pandemic." And it turns out that Japan has already fought it with some success, driving down antibiotic overuse with an innovative new policy. To investigate further and ask what notes the U.S. should be taking, Live Science's health editor Nicoletta Lanese visited Japan and reported back on their investigation.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are a smattering of our best expert opinion pieces, alongside a crossword, an interview and a quiz, that we published this week.

— Computer scientists are rushing to tame AI's voracious appetite for energy [Opinion]

—'It's more than a hope, it's a guarantee': The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's 10-year movie of the universe is about to 'blow our minds,' chief scientist Tony Tyson says [Interview]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #50: Longest-serving president in US history — 1 across [Crossword]

—Ancient empires quiz: Can you match these lands to the historical powers that ruled them? [Quiz]

Science photo of the week

Bull's-eye! Enormous 'bow and arrow' galaxy is unlike anything radio astronomers have ever seen

If you ask me, it looks more like a rusty anchor, or a blurry deep-sea fish. But whichever way you see it, the newly discovered "bow and arrow" galaxy — or, more formally, the RAD-Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy (RAD-BAARG) — is an oddball unlike any other recorded.

The galaxy's unique structure is likely the result of gravity, which is warping RAD-BAARG into a funhouse mirror version of its former self as it falls into a nearby galaxy cluster. A shock front from this plunge surrounds the galaxy as it moves through hot gas.

Follow Live Science on social media

Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BS: Which feed will you be watching most closely?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A molecular mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High-risk rescue mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researchers have proposed creating a novel satellite constellation, dubbed StormWall, that could shield Earth from the worst effects of solar "superstorms" that we are otherwise unable to mitigate. The innovative idea, which would essentially create a giant airbag in front of our planet, could prevent trillions of dollars in potential damage and is "quite feasible," experts say.

Over the past few years, we have been bombarded by dozens of solar storms as the sun reached the most active phase of its roughly 11-year solar cycle, called solar maximum. These events are often triggered by large clouds of incoming plasma, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which often follow powerful explosions on the sun's surface known as solar flares. Such storms frequently paint vibrant auroras across our skies, but their effects are not always benign.

Every century or so, the sun spits out a supercharged storm, such as the Carrington Event of 1859, that is several orders of magnitude stronger than a typical CME. If such a storm were to hit us today, it could wipe out every satellite orbiting Earth, dose astronauts with lethal levels of radiation, damage power grids and even knock out the internet.

Currently, the only way we can prepare for the next superstorm is to get better at forecasting them and design our spacecraft and ground-based infrastructure to deal with their arrival as best as possible. However, a new study published June 2 in the journal Space Weather presents a more proactive approach.

In the new paper, researchers propose launching six bus-sized satellites into a geosynchronous orbit, around 22,500 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth. At this altitude — far above the International Space Station and most other satellites — the mini spacecraft swarm would sit and wait for the next "big one." If and when such a storm were spotted, the satellites would empty giant canisters of gas around the edge of Earth's invisible magnetic shield, or magnetosphere, creating a giant wall of plasma that would cushion and divert an incoming CME.

The team’s simulations show that this plasma wall could cut the intensity of a superstorm down by more than half. This would not completely shield us, but it could help avoid any worst-case scenarios, similar to having an airbag during a car crash, study co-author Daniel Welling, a space physicist at the University of Michigan, told Science magazine. "It's as if you could install an airbag in the magnetosphere," he said.

Because we currently have no way to defend ourselves against these storms, the researchers argue that such a system is vital and should be constructed as soon as possible.

"It's like people in a village who see a river flooding — maybe they can predict when that will happen, but probably what's even better is if they could build a storm wall. That's what we're proposing here," study first author Brian Walsh, a plasma physicist and space weather expert at Boston University, said in a statement. The only difference is that "it would help all people on the planet," he added.

Protecting the planet

StormWall was inspired by Earth's natural response to a solar storm. When CMEs impact our planet, they temporarily weaken the magnetosphere — known as a geomagnetic disturbance — allowing solar radiation to flood the upper atmosphere and trigger auroras. But this also causes oxygen ions to rise into the magnetosphere, where they accumulate on the sun-facing side of our planet, creating a bubble that helps shield us from incoming radiation while the magnetosphere is compromised.

The idea of StormWall is to create this protective barrier before the storm arrives so that the geomagnetic disturbance is not as strong as it otherwise would be. To do this, the proposed satellites would dump around a dozen oil trucks' worth of a reactive gas — such as barium, lithium, sodium or calcium — into the magnetosphere. This gas would accumulate on the sun-facing edge of the magnetosphere and quickly become ionized by the sun, creating a massive plasma barrier that would not only push back against an incoming CME but also help divert it around our planet.

To demonstrate StormWall's potential effectiveness, the team simulated how the satellites would have impacted the May 2024 solar storm (also known as the Mother's Day storm), which occurred when a series of CMEs struck our planet in quick succession, triggering the most powerful geomagnetic disturbance since 2003. They found that the satellites could have reduced the intensity of the resulting geomagnetic disturbance by as much as 84%.

"When you apply some really serious physics to it, it does work," Walsh said. "And the amount of mass we need, the launch capacities — it's all within our capabilities."

One of the most surprising aspects of the new proposal is the amount of gas being released by the satellites: It equates to only around one-millionth the weight of a typical CME, yet this can cut a solar storm's power in half — so the "scheme punches far above its weight," according to Spaceweather.com.

"I definitely would want this"

Some concerns need to be addressed before StormWall could become a reality. For example, similar geoengineering projects — most of which have been proposed to tackle the effects of human-caused climate change — have been criticized for the inadvertent impacts they may have on our planet.

However, while follow-up studies will be needed to make sure it is safe, the researchers are confident that the ionized gas would not affect Earth's magnetosphere or upper atmosphere in any way. Once deployed, the plasma wall would quickly dissipate and be blown clear of our planet by solar wind.

There is also the issue of money. The StormWall satellites, with their massive gas canisters, would be among the heaviest spacecraft ever launched and would likely require massive rockets, such as SpaceX's Starship, to put them into geosynchronous orbit. While a proper cost analysis has yet to be completed, this would likely cost billions of dollars.

However, considering the potential damages from solar storms, the researchers argue that StormWall would be well worth the money. The May 2024 solar storm, for example, cost U.S. farmers around $500 million due to malfunctions with GPS equipment. And that's just a drop in the bucket compared with what a Carrington-level storm would cost; the study researchers estimate that such a superstorm could cause up to $3.4 trillion in damage.

Another issue is that StormWall is a one-and-done solution. Once the gas canisters are empty, they need to be refilled or completely replaced, which would create a substantial additional cost. But again, if the benefits significantly outweigh the cost, this would be a no-brainer.

Even when taking all of these challenges into account, several experts believe StormWall is not only a good idea but also achievable on a relatively short timescale.

The proposal is "highly innovative and appears to be quite feasible in the near term," Allison Jaynes, a space physicist at the University of Iowa who was not involved in the study, told Science magazine.

And given that there are currently no viable alternatives, it would help put people at ease about the next superstorm.

"If I knew that a 100-year disturbance was coming and it would knock out power grids, I definitely would want this," David Sibeck, chief of heliophysics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Science magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

A low-hanging 'micromoon'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solar tug of war

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

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

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

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

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

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

So long, Mercury and Venus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See more space photos of the week:

If you push two metal plates together on Earth, nothing happens. But if you take those same plates into the vacuum of space, they can fuse into a single piece of metal.

This phenomenon, called cold welding, has been a known hazard for spacecraft engineers for a long time. So what's actually happening at the atomic level, and why does space make it so much easier?

The answer comes down to a lack of oxygen in space, experts told Live Science.

Metals are made of lattices — structures where atoms are bonded to one another. But atoms near the surface of a metal aren't bonded to anything on the outward-facing side. If given the chance, they'll "reach out" and share electrons with the surface of another piece of metal.

But on Earth, nearly every metal surface is coated in an oxide layer. The layer is just a few atoms thick and forms when metal meets oxygen. "Once the oxide is formed, it's over," Julia Greer, a materials scientist at Caltech, told Live Science. "Then it can't cold weld anymore, because the oxygen basically passivates these bonds."

That thin oxide acts like an insulating wrapper. Without it, the free electrons at the surface of one metal piece stop recognizing which atom they belong to. "Those electrons don't know if it's in this piece or if it's in that piece, so they begin sharing the electrons, and essentially that cold welds things together," Sven Bilén, a professor of engineering design and aerospace engineering at Penn State, told Live Science.

In space, there's no oxygen to rebuild that layer once it's gone. The cold and the radiation make things worse. Bombardment from solar and ionic radiation in orbit can scour metal surfaces clean, Greer said, leaving freshly exposed atoms primed to bond. "Everything in space is conducive to cold welding," she said.

Metal surfaces are never perfectly smooth, either. At a microscopic level, they're jagged ‪—‬ more like tiny mountain ranges than flat plains, said Zachary Cordero, an aerospace engineer at MIT.

Pressing two surfaces together, especially with any sliding or vibration, can shear off the oxide layer that formed while the metal was on Earth and flatten those peaks into metal-to-metal contact. "You're breaking up the surface oxide, and you're forming metallurgical bonds," Cordero said.

Why cold welding worried early spacecraft engineers

Cold welding in space has long been a problem. "If there is cold welding, things can become stuck in place," Cordero told Live Science. "If you have a deployable structure and there's cold welding, you might freeze the mechanism, or a door might become locked, or something might become immobilized, which you don't want."

For example, say you were to add a metal screw to a metal door. After a while, you would not be able to unscrew it because it would have become part of the door.

Bilén pointed to NASA's Galileo probe, which launched in 1989: lubricant loss and launch vibrations during launch are thought to have stripped the oxide layer from parts of its furled high-gain antenna. When engineers attempted to deploy the antenna in 1991, it never fully opened.

Some metals are more troublesome than others. Gold and platinum don't form an oxide layer at all, even on Earth, which makes them notoriously prone to cold welding. "Gold definitely is a very notorious metal for cold welding," Greer said, adding that gold's softness lets it conform easily to whatever surface it touches and it bonds even more easily.

How to prevent cold welding in space

To prevent components from accidentally fusing in orbit, engineers rely on a few strategies. One is anodizing, a process that locks an artificial oxide layer onto a metal surface. Another method is to coat moving parts with dry lubricants, such as molybdenum disulfide, to physically keep surfaces from touching.

A third strategy is to pair dissimilar metals — for instance, gold next to a "body-centered" metal, like molybdenum — so their atomic structures don't mesh as neatly. "Their packing order is not quite perfectly aligned, and so there'll be a lot more energetic kind of barrier to overcome," Greer said.

Before launch, hardware also gets shaken on vibration tables and cycled through extreme hot-and-cold swings inside vacuum chambers, simulating the stresses of liftoff and orbit to catch problems on the ground.

Even with all of those precautions, cold welding can still happen. Bilén recalled bolts in his own lab's vacuum chamber fusing shut after a move across campus. They eventually had to be drilled out. "It happens even on Earth," he said.

See how much you know about human exploration into space with our spaceflight quiz!

This week, we've taken one tantalizing step closer to finding out if there really was life on Mars, after NASA's Perseverance rover uncovered the highest concentration of organic molecules on the Red Planet to date.

The data comes from mudstones in Jezero crater, which once hosted a deep lake. Last year, researchers described a piece of rock with patterns resembling those left by microorganisms on Earth as one of the clearest signs yet of past Martian microbes.

Now, scientists have confirmed the widespread presence of complex carbon-based molecules in this area of the crater, which they suggest indicate the presence of fossilized microbes.

Going even further back in history, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed how early galaxies lived fast and died young, offering a possible preview of our own galaxy's death.

Elsewhere in space, JWST captured the formation of a distant star, 1,280 light-years away in the constellation Orion, while the Euclid space telescope snapped the most detailed photo of the Milky Way ever taken.

Weird human cousin gets even weirder

'A weird result from an already weird hominin': Archaeologists discover all Homo naledi skeletons found in South African cave are female

Homo naledi surprised scientists once again this week. Found in a South African cave in 2013, the small-brained, two-legged relative to modern humans is thought to have lived around 300,000 years ago. Since its initial discovery, the enigmatic hominin has shocked scientists with a string of baffling revelations. In 2023, researchers found evidence that H. naledi may have used fire in the cave. This early hominin may also have buried its dead. Now, archaeologists have analyzed genetic material in the enamel of nearly two dozen skeletons at the site and found that they are all female.

"The bottom line is this is a weird result from an already weird hominin," Elizabeth Sawchuk, curator of human evolution at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

Discover more archaeology news

—Hanging lamp in the form of a sandaled right foot: A 1,600-year-old bronze lamp with multilayered Christian symbolism

—Early Homo sapiens may have lived in rainforests, new clues suggest — and it could overturn our understanding of human evolution

—Some of the last surviving Neanderthals were remarkably diverse ‪—‬ suggesting inbreeding didn't doom them

Life's Little Mysteries

How did the Romans build such straight roads?

The Romans are known for their transport systems that enabled travel and trade across their enormous empire. Many of these centuries-old streets had a reputation for being extremely straight. Nowadays, building straight roads requires advanced surveying using GPS networks and lasers, as well as careful engineering to flatten the terrain. So how did the Romans do it about 2,000 years before these things were invented?

—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

Water might be 2 liquids

Water might secretly be a mix of 2 different liquids, scientists say

Most of us discount water as the most basic of beverages, but if you look at it at a molecular level, water is actually rather exciting. Think about it: While most liquids are denser in their solid form, water ice floats. That's weird. Water also resists temperature changes better than similar liquids do, and its viscosity decreases under certain pressures.

Some scientists have hypothesized that these weird behaviors come about because water consists of not one, but two liquids ‪—‬ a dense one and a less-dense one that constantly switch places. Now, with the help of AI, we have proof of this weirdness.

Discover more weird news

—We've spent decades looking for the wrong type of alien radio signals, new paper claims — and there's an easy way to fix it

—'Weirdos of the sperm whale world' appear to be evolving 2 different dialects, audio recordings suggest

—China's Einstein Probe detected a mysterious cosmic explosion — and scientists have no idea what caused it

Also in science news this week

—The US just approved bemotrizinol, a sunscreen ingredient long used in Asia and Europe. Here's how it works.

—'You can't patch your way out of it': Cheap AI worm can spread between devices without human guidance — but how did scientists create it?

—Water shortages could prevent the US from mining more lithium, deepening reliance on foreign imports

—Diagnostic dilemma: After taking a medicine for years, a man suddenly had weird changes in his taste that made food disgusting

Science Spotlight

'If there's any country that will do it, it's China': Why is China diverting some of the world's mightiest rivers thousands of miles?

People in China's northern megacities have 74 times less fresh water availability than the average American. But China boasts some of the largest rivers in Asia that flow farther south, along with massive water reserves in glaciers in the west. To address this imbalance, the Chinese government has built the world's largest water diversion project, ferrying water from the Yangtze River in the country's center and south over thousands of miles through a complex system of canals, pipes, dams, reservoirs and pumps.

And yet, this is still not enough to satisfy the water needs of the country's thirsty North. Now, China is expanding these routes and planning a third, western route for the project, which will be the most dangerous and ambitious route yet.

Beyond diverting the country's rivers, China is also building the world's largest dam in an earthquake-prone region in Tibet and has invested heavily in creating a permanent "sky river" to help solve the country's water crisis.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are some of the best news analyses, crosswords, interviews, opinion pieces and quizzes published this week.

—9 of the best technology conspiracy theories [Countdown]

— AI companies don't want to be legally responsible for their chatbots. US courts should make them. [Opinion]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #49: 'Short' tempered French emperor — 13 across [Crossword]

— Ancient empires quiz: Can you match these lands to the historical powers that ruled them? [Quiz]

—60 million stars: Euclid space telescope snaps the most detailed photo of the Milky Way ever taken [Skywatching]

Science in pictures

NASA satellite captures wave of warm water hundreds of miles long that signals a devastatingly strong El Niño

New satellite imagery shows a wave of warm water stretching across the Pacific Ocean in a dramatic illustration of the newly declared El Niño. The image shows a red wave as it streaks across the equator and piles up around the west coast of South America.

Ocean patterns like this are known as Kelvin waves. They occur when winds in the Pacific Ocean near the equator temporarily reverse and blow from west to east. This enables warm water to gradually build up in the east,preventing cold waters from rising below.

The wave was spotted by NASA's Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, which measures ocean temperatures through radar scans of changes in sea surface height, caused by heat's expansionary effects upon water. The satellite has already observed several other Kelvin waves this year in anticipation of El Niño.

Follow Live Science on social media

Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

China's top-secret space plane just released another unknown object over Earth, raising concerns about exactly what the mysterious vehicle is up to. The clandestine spacecraft has now deployed at least nine payloads around our planet since 2022 — and we don't know what any of them really are.

The Shenlong, or "divine dragon," space plane is a reusable, robotic spacecraft that China has repeatedly launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) on board vertical rockets, before reentering the atmosphere for a horizontal runway landing — similar to the iconic spacecraft from NASA's now-defunct Space Shuttle program.

The space plane has never been photographed by outside nations, so we have no clear idea what it looks like or how large it is. Officials from China's space sector have yet to reveal any meaningful information about its design or purpose.

Shenlong first launched into space on a two-day mission in September 2020, before completing an eight-month stint in LEO between August 2022 and May 2023, and a nine-month spaceflight between December 2023 and September 2024. It released its first payload shortly after the launch of its second mission and deployed seven more objects during its third mission, six of which were ejected simultaneously.

The space plane's fourth and ongoing mission began on Feb. 7 when it launched atop a Long March 2F rocket that lifted off from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. And to date, there has been no news of its current activities.

But on June 22, the private space surveillance firm LeoLabs, which specializes in tracking spacecraft in LEO, detected "an unknown object in the vicinity [of the spaceplane]," according to a post on X. The mystery payload was initially picked up by one of the company's radars in New Zealand and did not match any other object in the company's catalog.

Later on the same day, LeoLabs representatives added in an update to the post that, following additional observations from across the company's radar network, they had "independently cataloged this object and assessed with high confidence that it was released from the Chinese space plane."

On June 23, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and satellite tracking expert at Durham University in the U.K. and previously with the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, confirmed in another X post that the new object originated from Shenlong and was being tracked by the U.S. Space Force.

McDowell also speculated that it could be a "cubesat" — a small, often box-like satellite frequently deployed as a secondary payload alongside larger spacecraft. However, as with the previously released objects, it is unclear what its purpose might be.

Space News previously reported that Shenlong's primary goal might be to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with other spacecraft and that its payloads may be targets for it to practise flyby maneuvers in orbit.

Others have speculated that the mystery objects could be covert surveillance satellites or possess anti-satellite weaponry, according to Gizmodo. However, to date, there have been no reports of any spacecraft being sabotaged by the space plane or its payloads.

Shenlong has now spent nearly 700 cumulative days in LEO. During that time, amateur photographers snapped some blurry shots of light reflecting off the mysterious space plane. The most intriguing image, captured in August 2024, revealed a bright appendage extending from the main spacecraft. This was most likely a solar array, experts speculated, which is unsurprising considering that most spacecraft are at least partially powered by sunlight.

China is not the only country with a secretive space plane. The U.S. also has its own version, the X-37B, whose two operational models have collectively spent more than 4,200 days in LEO since 2010. However, American officials have been much more forthcoming in revealing information about their space plane's design, mission parameters and research goals.

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

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

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

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

The backbone of life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cosmic time capsule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distorting signals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A step forward for SETI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gas leak near the dawn of time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A widespread cosmic phenomenon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See more Space Photos of the Week

A Chinese spacecraft has arrived at one of Earth's temporary "quasi-moons" and will soon attempt to land on the space rock to scoop up samples that will be returned to our planet next year. The ambitious mission could help researchers uncover secrets about Earth's main moon and provide clues that may benefit space exploration and planetary defense, experts say.

The Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) probe, named Tianwen-2, launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southern China on May 28, 2025, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported at the time. The car-sized spacecraft sent back its first images a few weeks later, giving us our first glimpse of its secretive design, followed by a selfie with Earth a few months later.

The mission's primary target is 469219 Kamo'oalewa — also known as 2016 HO3 or simply Kamo'oalewa — a near-Earth asteroid discovered in 2016 by astronomers at Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory. It likely spans somewhere between 130 and 330 feet (40 to 100 meters) across and is a "quasi-satellite" of our planet, meaning it's orbiting the sun right alongside Earth in a temporary partnership. (Kamo'oalewa means "oscillating celestial fragment" in Hawaiian.)

Tianwen-2 is predicted to have arrived at Kamo'oalewa on June 7 and inserted itself into an orbit alongside the asteroid, according to an unverified timeline shared by freelance journalist Andrew Jones, a leading expert on China's space program. Around a month later, on July 4, the probe is expected to descend upon the space rock to collect samples from its surface, potentially employing a never-before-seen drilling technique to do so. (The CNSA has not released an official timeline for the mission or shared any recent updates about its progress.)

If successful, the samples are expected to be returned to Earth on Nov. 29, 2027, according to the same timeline. At this point, Tianwen-2 will then slingshot around our planet and head farther out into the solar system for its secondary mission: to rendezvous with and study 311P/PanSTARRS — a peculiar object beyond Mars, which displays characteristics of both comets and asteroids — in 2035.

Samples from Kamo'oalewa could help answer many interesting questions, including the true origin of the object, which some experts believe may have broken off from the moon.

"What makes [this mission] extraordinary is that we don't yet know [the object's] composition or origin," Li Chunlai, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' National Astronomical Observatories and chief commander of Tianwen-2's ground application system, said in a state-sanctioned video translated to English. "We'll only obtain definitive answers after completing our exploration."

What is Kamo'oalewa?

There are currently eight known quasi-moons orbiting the sun alongside Earth, following the most recent quasi-moon discovery in September 2025. Unlike the similarly named "minimoons," which are asteroids that are briefly captured by Earth's gravity for a few months or years at a time, quasi-moons are temporary satellites that slowly circle our planet but are never gravitationally bound to it.

This relationship can last decades, or even centuries. For example, experts think Kamo'oalewa has been accompanying our planet for at least 100 years and could remain alongside it for another 300 years before it starts to fall out of sync with our solar orbit.

"The way Kamo'oalewa moves with Earth is kind of like a dog that might tag along with you for a while on a long walk through the woods, but it's not your dog," Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist and asteroid expert at MIT, told Live Science in an email.

The Ferris-wheel-size space rock is one of the closest quasi-moons to us, with a minimum distance of around 2.9 million miles (4.6 million kilometers) from Earth, or around 12 times farther away than our actual moon. It is also one of the fastest-spinning quasi-moons, rotating around its axis every 30 minutes. But unlike other quasi-moons, which likely originate from the solar system's main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, our current best guess is that Kamo'oalewa is actually a piece of the moon.

This hypothesis is based on observations from 2021 that showed Kamo'oalewa absorbs and reflects light similarly to the moon, hinting that the space rock may be a chunk of lunar material ejected by a long-ago meteor strike. More recently, in 2024, researchers narrowed down the most likely impact crater from which the asteroid originated: the 13.6-mile-wide (22 km) Giordano Bruno crater, located on the far side of the moon. However, there is still a chance that Kamo'oalewa is a main-belt asteroid that just happens to look an awful lot like lunar material.

"I am curious to find out the answer about its origin, since the debate on its [potential] lunar origin is still very open," Marco Fenucci, a mathematician at the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Objects Coordination Centre who has co-authored multiple studies on Kamo'oalewa, told Live Science. This mission should "definitely give us an answer to this matter," he added.

Scientists are also unsure whether Kamo'oalewa is a "solid monolithic rock," like the $100,000 quadrillion asteroid Psyche (the target of NASA's ongoing Psyche mission), or a "rubble-pile-like asteroid," such as Bennu or Ryugu, both of which have been explored by sample-return missions in recent years, Fenucci said.

Scooping up samples

Having arrived at Kamo'oalewa, Tianwen-2 will spend the next few weeks mapping the asteroid's surface at altitudes between 1,000 feet and 12.5 miles (300 m to 20 km) above its surface, according to limited mission details revealed by Chinese scientists in a January study. The resulting map will allow researchers to estimate the asteroid's density and work out the best landing spot.

On July 4, the probe is expected to swoop down and scoop up around 3.5 ounces (100 grams) of surface material, or regolith, from the asteroid, which is slightly less than what NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission managed to grab from Bennu. However, there are multiple ways this sampling process could play out.

If the asteroid is a pile of rubble, the probe will utilize a touch-and-go approach, which involves hovering just above the surface and using a robotic arm to reach out and grab the sample. This method was also used by OSIRIS-REx for Bennu and by Japan's Hayabusa2 mission, which scooped up samples from Ryugu.

But if Kamo'oalewa has a more solid surface, Tianwen-2 will attempt to land directly on the space rock and anchor itself in place before drilling into the asteroid. This has never been attempted before and could allow for longer contact time and "more controlled sampling," according to The Planetary Society.

After collecting samples, the probe will remain alongside the asteroid and conduct further analysis of its size, shape and trajectory.

In late April 2027, Tianwen-2 will depart Kamo'oalewa and begin the six-month journey back to Earth, where it will dump its samples in a return capsule that will fall to our planet's surface as the probe begins its long journey to rendezvous with 311P/PanSTARRS.

The return capsule will reenter Earth's atmosphere at around 27,000 mph (43,500 km/h), researchers wrote in the January study. That's slightly faster than the Orion capsule carrying the Artemis II astronauts traveled as it fell back to Earth in April.

What could we learn from Tianwen-2?

In addition to ending the debate over Kamo'oalewa's origin, samples from Tianwen-2 could reveal more about the solar system and our place within it.

For example, previously returned asteroid samples have helped to "tell us where Earth's water came from, how complex organic molecules were distributed in the early solar system, and how surface processes like space weathering alter asteroid properties over time," Fenucci said. These samples can also be used to "establish a link to known meteorites found on Earth" and help us learn more about these space rocks, he added.

The proximity of quasi-moons and minimoons to Earth also makes them valuable assets for future space exploration missions. Some researchers have proposed using them as temporary bases or refueling stations that could serve as stops on the way to Mars or other faraway destinations. These objects "could become literal stepping stones for human missions to practice what it is like to leave the Earth-moon cradle," Binzel said.

One particular idea that scientists want to explore is whether water can be extracted from these objects. And if Kamo'oalewa is a piece of the moon, that could have implications for NASA's planned moon base. "Someday, it might be possible to extract that water to provide resources for thirsty astronauts or even generate usable rocket fuel from the hydrogen," Binzel said.

Some near-Earth objects also pose a potential risk to our planet. And while Kamo'oalewa will likely never hit us (and would probably only cause localized damage if it did), there are much larger nearby space rocks that could trigger global catastrophes if they were to impact our planet.

"Over the time scale of centuries, these kinds of objects have a chance of striking the Earth," said Binzel, who invented the Torino scale used to measure the impact potential of near-Earth objects. Therefore, a better understanding of space rocks like Kamo'oalewa "can prepare us in how to deal with a threatening object if one were ever discovered," he added.

Finally, this mission will likely provide another opportunity to assess China's space exploration capabilities, which could hint at whether the country could overtake the U.S. as the top nation in space, as some experts predict.