Experts have also revealed the most probable launch date for the next-generation spacecraft, confirming that it will likely lift off ahead of schedule — and could begin collecting data before the end of 2026.

Roman is NASA's next flagship space telescope, following on from the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched in 2021. The orbital observatory is named after pioneering scientist Nancy Grace Roman — who served as NASA's first chief astronomer between 1960 and 1962 — and will work alongside Hubble and JWST, rather than replacing the existing telescopes.

New photos, released Dec. 4, show Roman standing upright in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope is around 42 feet (12.7 meters) tall and weighs a hefty 9,184 pounds (4,166 kilograms). It began construction in February 2016, and the project has so far stayed within its initial budget of $4.3 billion, researchers say.

Once launched, Roman will be positioned around 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth at a Lagrange point — a fixed point relative to our planet where the gravity of two objects cancels out. Its specific Lagrange point will be Sun-Earth L2, where JWST and the European Space Agency's Gaia and Euclid space telescopes already reside.

"Completing the Roman observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said in a statement. "Transformative science depends on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered — piece by piece, test by test — an observatory that will expand our understanding of the universe."

"With Roman's construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery," Julie McEnery, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard and Roman's senior project scientist, said in the statement. "In the mission's first five years, it's expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies."

What will Roman do?

Roman is equipped with two key instruments, which will define its objectives throughout its initial five-year mission. (Roman will likely remain operational beyond five years, but researchers have only planned what it will do until then.)

The first is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), a 288-megapixel camera attached to a 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) mirror, capable of capturing high-definition photos of the outer solar system, the edges of the visible universe and anything in-between in infrared light too faint to be seen by human eyes.

One of Roman's main goals will be to create the most detailed map of the Milky Way's center yet in the Galactic Plane Survey, which will account for at least 25% of its total observing time. But it will also search the wider universe for things like distant galaxy clusters and giant "cosmic voids," which could help reveal the identity of dark matter and dark energy, NASA recently announced.

But the telescope's secret weapon is arguably its Coronograph Instrument, which will block out the light from distant stars, allowing WFI to snap photos of their surrounding exoplanets, which would normally be obscured by stellar glare.

As of September 2025, scientists have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets in roughly 30 years. However, Roman is expected to find more than 15 times as many in half a decade, which would be a huge boon to scientists exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

"The question of 'Are we alone?' is a big one, and it's an equally big task to build tools that can help us answer it," Feng Zhao, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California and the Roman Coronagraph Instrument manager, said in the statement. This device could "bring us one step closer to that goal," Zhao added.

In total, Roman is expected to collect more than 20,000 terabytes of data over the course of its initial five-year mission, which is equivalent to the storage space of around 3,000 iPhones: "The sheer volume of the data Roman will return is mind-boggling," Dominic Benford, a NASA researcher and Roman's program scientist, said in the statement.

When will Roman launch?

For years, Roman's prospective launch has been earmarked for May 2027, with some predicting this date would be pushed back, like other previous NASA missions. For example, JWST was originally planned to launch in 2014, according to the Planetary Society.

However, early last year, rumors began to spread that Roman would not only meet its deadline but may actually launch early.

And on Jan. 5, at the 247th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, Arizona, project scientists confirmed that these rumors were true, revealing that, as it stands, the earliest likely launch date for Roman is Sept. 28, according to Space News.

Roman will launch onboard one of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, meaning it will need to be transported more than 900 miles (1,450 km) from Goddard before lift-off. This is scheduled to occur in June, and whether or not this happens on time will give us a better indication of how likely a September launch date really is.

Once Roman is in orbit, it will take approximately 90 days for mission scientists to carry out the necessary steps to start collecting data, according to NASA. Therefore, if the telescope does launch on Sept. 28, it will likely start collecting data around Dec. 27.

NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov emerged from NASA's SpaceX Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft, which splashed down in darkness off the coast of California at 3:41 a.m. ET on Thursday (Jan. 15).

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told a news conference that all members of the crew are "safe and in good spirits."

The landing marks the completion of an unprecedented early return of the astronauts due to an undisclosed medical issue affecting one of the crew. This is the first time that an ISS mission has been cut short for health reasons, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

Crew-11 launched into space on Aug. 1, 2025, and was scheduled to remain aboard the ISS until another crew replaced them in mid-February. However, on Jan. 7, NASA postponed a spacewalk outside of the ISS because of a medical issue that arose with one of the astronauts, before announcing the early return of the whole crew the following day.

The Dragon capsule undocked from the ISS at 5.20 p.m. ET on Wednesday (Jan. 14), before heading back to Earth. After the capsule landed in the Pacific Ocean, it was loaded onto a SpaceX recovery ship. The astronauts were then assisted out of the capsule and placed on stretchers, which is standard practice for all returning astronauts, before being taken to routine medical checks.

All four crew members are now attending a local hospital. NASA has not named the astronaut who experienced the medical problem or provided any details on the medical issue, citing medical privacy. The agency previously confirmed that the issue only involved one individual.

"The crew member of concern is doing fine," Isaacman said. "We will share updates on their health as soon as it's appropriate to do so."

The crew was originally meant to be replaced at the ISS by Crew-12, which won't arrive there until next month. Such a disruption to staff rotation is unusual. However, there are other astronauts living on the ISS, including NASA's Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev.

The model, built by a team from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing and the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, was detailed in a paper published in December 2025 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The new lunar timekeeping method promises to remain accurate over a 1,000-year time span.

But why create a distinct lunar clock in the first place? For the answer, we turn — as we so often do — to Albert Einstein.

Because the moon has less gravity than Earth does, time passes slightly differently there. This effect was first predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. For every 24 hours that pass here on terra firma, the moon gains about 56 microseconds, according to NASA.

While small, this discrepancy adds up over prolonged periods — a fact that could pose major issues for future crewed moon missions, like NASA's Artemis initiative or Russia and China's joint International Lunar Research Station. (Mars is an even bigger challenge, with clocks there ticking about 477 microseconds faster per Earth day.)

Astronauts living and working on the moon will need to be able to coordinate video calls, data sharing, and navigation with their Earthbound colleagues — hence the need for an algorithm that can reliably convert Earth time to moon time. In 2024, researchers introduced the idea of Lunar Coordinate Time (TCL), an equation that resolves this relativistic time dilation based on the distance from a particular point on the moon relative to Earth's gravitational field.

"This is not just about telling time — it's about navigation, communication, and safety," Sergei Kopeikin, an astronomer at the University of Missouri and co-author of the TCL paper, told Live Science in an email.

The new system from the team in China builds on Kopeikin's original algorithm. It essentially calculates a version of the TCL equation very quickly while considering some additional factors, like Barycentric Coordinate Time (TCB), an International Astronomical Union standard. The researchers dubbed the system "lunar time ephemeris," or LTE440.

Kopeikin called LTE440 "a solid piece of engineering." It shows that China is serious about moving forward with its ambitious moon program. However, he noted that NASA is still developing its own lunar time system, called Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC). The agency aims to finalize the system, which will be anchored in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for maximum interoperability across time zones, by the end of this year.

Likewise, the European Space Agency is currently fielding applications for its own moon clock. These systems may use LTE440 as a benchmark to cross-check space agencies' calculations, but it remains to be seen whether the Chinese system will become the international standard.

Ultimately, the moon's time standard needs to be coordinated across countries, or else we risk plunging lunar research into chaos. "If we fail," Kopeikin said, "we risk a 'time zone war' in space."

In a new study, researchers investigated the identity of "little red dots." These mysterious objects from the early universe have characteristics of both galaxies and supermassive black holes but don't quite fit the description of either.

The new study found that these enigmatic dots may be young supermassive black holes after all, cocooned in dense clouds of gas that mask telltale signs of their true nature. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Jan. 14) in the journal Nature.

Little red dots were first observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shortly after the spacecraft began collecting data in 2022. They were initially thought to be compact, star-filled galaxies, but they were present too early in the universe to have formed so many stars — at least under our current understanding of galaxy evolution.

Instead, other researchers suggested that the unusual objects might be early supermassive black holes. Light emitted by energized hydrogen atoms around the dots suggests that the gas is moving at thousands of miles per second, tugged along by the gravitational pull of the object at the center.

"Such extreme speeds are a smoking gun of an active galactic nucleus," meaning a hungry supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy that's pulling in matter, Rodrigo Nemmen, an astrophysicist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, wrote in an accompanying article published in the journal Nature.

But unlike supermassive black holes, little red dots haven't been observed emitting X-rays or radio waves. And regardless of whether the dots are black holes or early galaxies, they appear to have too much mass to have formed as early in the universe as they did.

Black hole metamorphosis

In the new study, the researchers looked closely at the light emitted from these objects to better understand their nature. The scientists studied spectra from 30 little red dots, each one collected by JWST's infrared instruments.

The light emitted from the little red dots closely matches the light that the team predicted would be emitted from a supermassive black hole surrounded by a dense cloud of gas. That gaseous cocoon could have trapped X-ray and radio emissions from the growing black holes, blocking them from reaching JWST.

When the team recalculated the masses of the little red dots under the new interpretation, they found that the dots were about 100 times less massive than previously thought. Together, the evidence suggests that little red dots are growing supermassive black holes that are accreting the surrounding gas.

"These are the lowest mass black holes at high redshift, to our knowledge, and suggest a population of young [supermassive black holes]," the researchers wrote in the study. (Redshift describes how light stretches toward the redder end of the electromagnetic spectrum as it crosses the expanding cosmos; a higher redshift signifies a more distant object.)

"With the corrected mass estimates, [little red dots] fit standard theories of cosmic evolution," Nemmen wrote. Confirming the findings will involve studying more little red dots to explore whether this "cocoon" phase is common, and determining what role it plays in black hole growth.

Every star in the Milky Way is constantly spinning around the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, dubbed Sagittarius A*. Most of these stars, including the sun, are preceded by a bow shock, which pushes material around the star, similar to the waves generated around the bow of a ship as it moves through the water. These bow shocks are created by outflowing gas and dust from the star, which collides with and pushes against the interstellar medium — the leftover matter and radiation that exists in the gaps between stars.

Other, smaller and less active stars do not have bow shocks because they lack outflowing material, meaning they offer up little to no resistance against the interstellar medium. Some of the best examples of bow shock-free stars are white dwarfs, the shriveled husks left behind from the cores of massive stars that have died in violent supernova explosions.

But in a new study, published Jan. 12 in the journal Nature Astronomy, a group of astronomers discovered a white dwarf, named RXJ0528+2838, that is surrounded by a bow shock. The rule-breaking star is located roughly 730 light-years from Earth and is part of a binary system, alongside another sun-like star that is slowly being devoured by the cosmic zombie.

Using observations from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the study team mapped out this surprising shock wave, which extends around 4,000 Earth-sun distances from the stellar pair and is at least 1,000 years old. Images also show that the bow shock contains a dense cloud of multicolored gas and dust, or a nebula, which only adds to its mystery.

"We found something never seen before and, more importantly, entirely unexpected," the study's other co-lead author Simone Scaringi, an astronomer at Durham University in the U.K., said in an ESO statement.

"Our observations reveal a powerful outflow that, according to our current understanding, shouldn’t be there," added the study's other co-lead author Krystian Iłkiewicz, a postdoctoral researcher at Poland's Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center. "This discovery challenges the standard picture of how matter moves and interacts in these extreme binary systems."

Given that RXJ0528+2838 is part of a binary star system, the obvious explanation for its bow shock is that its partner star is outflowing material that is colliding with the interstellar medium. However, the researchers strongly believe this is not the case.

In a binary system like this, the most massive star — which, in this case, is the superdense white dwarf — slowly devours its partner by pulling material from its surface. This means that RXJ0528+2838's partner does not outflow like similar stars of its size, because the white dwarf also hoovers up any outflowing material.

This process normally leaves a disk of excess stellar material circling the more massive star, which could also generate a similar type of stellar outflow. However, there is no visible disk around RXJ0528+2838, which strongly suggests this isn't happening.

"The surprise that a supposedly quiet, diskless system could drive such a spectacular nebula was one of those rare 'wow' moments," Scaringi said.

Instead, the researchers suspect that RXJ0528+2838's mysterious "outflow" may be tied to its immensely strong magnetic field. This invisible energy source is also the reason why the white dwarf has no disk, because it is sucking up everything around it, similar to a black hole.

However, the researchers cannot identify the exact mechanism by which the magnetic field acts to replicate the effects of a stellar outflow, which they have dubbed the "mystery engine."

The researchers are now on the hunt for similar systems that may offer clues as to what is going on with RXJ0528+2838. Luckily, ESO's upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — the successor of VLT, which is due to go online as early as 2028 — will likely help with this.

ELT will allow astronomers "to map more of these systems as well as fainter ones and detect similar systems in detail, ultimately helping in understanding the mysterious energy source that remains unexplained," Scaringi said.

Two telescopes peered deep into space at the galaxy GS-10578, nicknamed "Pablo's Galaxy," after the name of the astronomer who previously studied it. The galaxy is large for its age: roughly 200 billion times the mass of the sun, with most of its stars lighting up between 11.5 billion years and 12.5 billion years ago. (For reference, the universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old.)

To scientists' surprise, they learned a supermassive black hole embedded in the galaxy slowly removed the cold gas needed for stars to grow, instead of (as models predict) tearing the galaxy apart.

"Pablo’s Galaxy appears to have 'lived fast and died young'," researchers wrote about the new work, published in Nature Astronomy on Monday, in a University of Cambridge statement. "It stopped forming new stars, despite its relatively young age, due to an almost total absence of the cold gas stars need to form."

The research team described the death as happening "by a thousand cuts," because the black hole heated up gas moving through the galaxy. This meant any cold gas was choked off from resupplying the galaxy, making it more difficult for stars to form.

"There was essentially no cold gas left. It points to a slow starvation, rather than a single dramatic death blow," lead author Jan Scholtz, from Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, said in the statement.

The results came by analyzing data from both the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). ALMA revealed no traces of carbon monoxide, which is an indicator of cold, star-forming hydrogen gas, in the galaxy. JWST, meanwhile, showed the supermassive black hole shooting out neutral gas at 400 kilometers per second (nearly 900 mph). At such rates, the galaxy would have run out of star fuel in only 16 million to 220 million years, a fraction of the typical billions of years for stars to die out.

Pablo's Galaxy appears to be representative of galaxies from the young universe that appear to be aging faster than expected. "Before Webb, these were unheard of," Scholtz said. "Now we know they're more common than we thought – and this starvation effect may be why they live fast and die young."

Astronomers have spent years cataloging thousands of worlds orbiting distant stars, assuming that if something has the mass of a planet and exerts a gravitational pull on its parent star, it must be a planet.

But there may be a ghostly alternative lurking in the early universe. In a recent paper that was uploaded to the arXiv preprint server but has not been peer-reviewed, researchers suggest that some "exoplanets" we've detected might actually be something far more exotic — primordial black holes.

These are not your garden-variety black holes, born from dying stars. Instead, they are hypothetical leftovers from the Big Bang itself, formed when the newborn universe was a chaotic, high-pressure soup of energy. These "mini" black holes could have the mass of Earth or Jupiter but be the size of a grapefruit.

Our current methods for finding planets are exceptionally good at measuring mass but less so at determining the physical size of a planet. For example, we often use the radial velocity method — a technique that involves watching a star "wobble" because the gravity of an orbiting object is yanking on it. If the wobble is big, the object is heavy. If the wobble is small, the object is light.

But here's the catch: A planet with the mass of Neptune and a black hole with the mass of Neptune produce the exact same wobble.

In an attempt to separate the two, the authors of the new study looked at exoplanets that have been detected via these wobbles but have never been seen crossing the face of their star — a process called a transit. When a planet transits, it blocks some light, telling us its physical size. If an object pulls on a star but never blocks any light, it might be because it is too small to see, or it might be because it is a black hole.

The researchers identified several intriguing suspects, including Kepler-21 Ac, HD 219134 f and Wolf 1061 d. These objects are heavy enough to make their stars wobble, yet they remain invisible to our telescopes. The team pointed to microlensing events — brief flashes of light caused when a massive object passes in front of a distant star and acts like a magnifying glass — as potential hiding spots for these ancient nomads.

The authors admitted that these candidates are merely representative possibilities, rather than a definitive gallery of tiny black holes. Most will likely turn out to be ordinary planets that just happen to have tilted orbits that prevent them from transiting.

The next decade of data from missions like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — a NASA telescope that will take a broad survey of exoplanets, due to launch as soon as this fall — will be crucial for learning more about these objects. We might catch one evaporating via Hawking radiation, a theoretical process whereby black holes slowly leak energy until they vanish. If so, we might discover that the universe is a lot more crowded with ancient black holes than we ever imagined.

Launched in 1999, the SETI@Home project enlisted millions of volunteers around the world to help identify unusual radio signals in data from the Arecibo Observatory — a massive radio telescope in Puerto Rico that collapsed in 2020 due to a cable failure. Though the project ended prematurely with the telescope's demise, citizen scientists nonetheless identified more than 12 billion signals of interest in 21 years of data.

Now, the researchers behind the project have narrowed that daunting list down to the top 100 candidate signals, which they are studying in detail with China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) — now the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, following the death of Arecibo.

So far, there is no smoking-gun evidence of alien transmissions from any of these radio sources. However, the team is enthusiastic that their vast dataset will help make future hunts for extraterrestrials even more effective.

"If we don't find ET, what we can say is that we established a new sensitivity level. If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it," computer scientist and project co-founder David Anderson said in a statement. "We have a long list of things that we would have done differently and that future sky survey projects should do differently."

ET enters the group chat

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a branch of science that aims to detect and communicate with advanced alien civilizations using radio signals — the idea being that, if humans have made it this far technologically, hypothetical alien lifeforms might have too.

The Arecibo telescope was a star player in the SETI field; in 1974, a team of scientists including Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sent a radio transmission from Arecibo to a nearby star cluster in hopes of reaching an intelligence audience. The famous "Arecibo Message," transmitted in binary code, included a human stick figure, a double-helix DNA structure, a model of a carbon atom and a diagram of a telescope. (Sadly, E.T. has yet to phone home about it.)

One big challenge for SETI is that space is overflowing with radio waves; everything from cold hydrogen molecules to exploding stars emits some form of radio energy. Finding a meaningful detection of radio signals from intelligent aliens among all this cosmic noise borders on the impossible.

To help narrow the search, the co-founders of SETI@Home turned to crowd sourcing. The team asked volunteers to download a free software program to their home computers, borrowing each computer's processing power to analyze Arecibo's latest scans of the night sky.

Starting in the mid-1990s, the team planned their project with 50,000 volunteers in mind. But within a year of the project starting, more than 2 million users in 100 countries were running SETI@Home on their computers.

"It went way, way, way beyond our initial expectations," Anderson said. "I would like to let that community and the world know that we actually did some science."

Expanding the search

In two papers published in 2025 in The Astronomical Journal, Anderson and his colleagues describe the vast dataset their contributors collected, and how the team analyzed it for the top candidate signals.

The project focused on radio signals coming from the Milky Way near the radio wavelength of 21 centimeters, which is the wavelength used to map hydrogen gas in the galaxy. Astronomers routinely observe the universe at this frequency; a hypothetical alien civilization would know that, and make use of that frequency to boost their chances of being detected, the researchers explained.

Using a supercomputer provided by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, the team eliminated billions of false signals and Earth-based sources of radio interference, dropping the candidate pool down to a million. The team then analyzed the most promising 1,000 radio sources manually, whittling them down to the top 100 contenders.

So far, nothing unusual has jumped out of the results.

"We are, without doubt, the most sensitive narrow-band search of large portions of the sky, so we had the best chance of finding something," astronomer and SETI@Home project director Eric Korpela said in the statement. "So yeah, there's a little disappointment that we didn't see anything."

However, what is computationally possible today far outpaces what was possible in 1999, when the project began, Korpela added. Similar surveys are being conducted by FAST and other radio telescopes around the world; the hunt for alien intelligence will continue, and the data analysis will only get faster and more reliable going forward.

"There's still the potential that ET is in that data and we missed it just by a hair," Korpela concluded.

The Artemis Program aims to send humans back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. The program will also take the first woman to the moon.

Artemis 2 is the first crewed spaceflight in the mission program. Four astronauts will take a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth, testing systems ahead of the Artemis 3 mission, which aims to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028.

"We are moving closer to Artemis II, with rollout just around the corner," Lori Glaze, the acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said in a statement released Jan. 9. "We have important steps remaining on our path to launch and crew safety will remain our top priority at every turn, as we near humanity's return to the Moon."

NASA previously announced that the launch window for Artemis 2 could be as soon as Feb. 5, 2026, but no later than April 2026. However, the Artemis mission has previously experienced delays and, as with all spaceflight missions, the latest proposed dates are subject to change.

In preparation for the test flight, NASA is planning to move the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, which will hold the crew, to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than Saturday (Jan. 17). The rocket has a 212-foot-tall (65 meters) core stage and will stand 322 feet (98 m) tall — higher than the Statue of Liberty — when capped with the crew capsule.

The distance between NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch pad is only 4 miles (6 kilometers), but moving massive rockets is a slow and delicate process, and the journey is expected to take up to 12 hours, according to the statement.

NASA will delay the rollout if weather conditions are unfavorable or there are technical issues. The space agency noted that its engineers have been troubleshooting in the lead-up to launch. For example, they worked on leaky ground support hardware that is needed to supply Orion with oxygen.

After the rollout, NASA plans to run a wet dress rehearsal at the end of January. This is a prelaunch test to fuel the rocket, which is composed of more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of cryogenic propellants. The test will also include things like a launch countdown, practice removing the rocket propellant, and safety procedures. Assuming all goes well, NASA will then conduct a flight readiness review before committing to a launch date.

The space agency wants to have a sustained presence on the moon as part of the Artemis Program, with the moon also serving as a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of putting humans on Mars.

Scientists discovered the incoming comet, dubbed C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS), on Sept. 8, 2025, in images captured by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) — a pair of 5.9-foot (1.8 meters) reflector telescopes located on the summit of Hawaii's Haleakalā volcano. It is currently around 216 million miles (348 million kilometers) from Earth, around halfway between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, according to TheSkyLive.com.

C/2025 R3 is a long-period comet, meaning it likely takes more than 1,000 years to orbit the sun, and probably originates from the Oort cloud — a giant reservoir of comets and other icy objects near the edge of the solar system. Astronomers have yet to narrow down the comet's orbital pathway, so they do not know how long the ice ball takes to circle our home star. But similar discoveries in recent years have revealed comets that have not passed by Earth for tens of thousands of years.

C/2025 R3 is currently speeding toward the sun and will reach perihelion — its closest point to our home star — on April 20. It will come within 47.4 million miles (76.3 million km) of the sun, which is somewhere between the orbits of Mercury and Venus.

Just one week later, on April 27, the comet will make its closest approach to Earth, coming within 44 million miles (70.8 million km) of our planet, which is more than 180 times farther from us than the moon is.

Astronomers don't yet know how brightly the comet will shine during its solar flyby, Live Science's sister site Space.com recently reported. Some researchers have predicted that it will reach an apparent magnitude of 8, meaning it would be visible only via a decent telescope or pair of stargazing binoculars. But others estimate that it could reach magnitude 2.5, which would make it clearly visible to the naked eye. (Apparent magnitude is measured on a reverse logarithmic scale, meaning a lower number equates to a greater brightness.)

When to see comet C/2025 R3

The best chance to see C/2025 R3 will likely be just before perihelion, around April 17, when a new moon will darken the night sky, making it easier to spot objects on the cusp of naked-eye visibility. But by its closest approach to Earth, the comet may become obscured by the sun, making it harder to spot. Viewers in the Southern Hemisphere may also get a good look at the comet in early May.

Whether the comet becomes visible to the naked eye may depend on a phenomenon known as forward scattering, which occurs when a comet is positioned directly between Earth and the sun, as C/2025 R3 will be. If this happens, the comet's tail will likely scatter more sunlight, thereby increasing its brightness, according to Space.com.

A comet's brightness also depends on how it reacts to increased solar radiation: When a comet gets closer to the sun, it soaks up more sunlight, causing it to release trapped ice and gases, which reflect sunlight toward Earth. But it is too early to predict exactly how this will affect C/2025 R3.

During its perihelion and flyby of Earth, C/2025 R3 will be located in the constellation Pisces, just beneath the Great Square of Pegasus, according to Space.com.

The next "Great Comet"?

Several stunning comets have passed by Earth in recent years, including the explosive "devil comet" 12P/Pons-Brooks and the "once-in-a-lifetime" Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, which passed by in 2024, as well as the superbright comets Lemmon and SWAN, which simultaneously lit up our skies last year.

In 2025, astronomers also discovered the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which dominated headlines due to wild and unfounded rumors that it was an alien spaceship. It reached its closest point to Earth in December but is now rapidly moving away from us, and will soon disappear forever.

At present, there are not many noteworthy comets predicted to pass by us this year, which has led many to speculate that C/2025 R3 will be 2026's "Great Comet" — a superlative title often used to describe the brightest comet of a given year.

However, there is always a chance that an even better and brighter comet will soon be discovered and make a similar spectacular flyby later in the year.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular new image of the largest and most unusual protoplanetary disk ever observed around a single star. The object, officially known as IRAS 23077+6707 and nicknamed "Dracula's Chivito," is a dusty disk that resembles a sandwich.

Rich in gas and dust, a protoplanetary disk is where planets — both rocky worlds, like Earth, and gas giants, like Jupiter — can form around young stars. Dracula's Chivito could, in theory, contain a vast planetary system. Its name references both its appearance and its discoverers, who come from Transylvania, Romania (home of the fictional Dracula), and Uruguay, where the national dish is the chivito, a sandwich of sliced beef, ham, mozzarella, tomatoes and olives — which resembles the layers of gas and dust in the protoplanetary disk.

In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers estimate that the cosmic sandwich spans nearly 400 billion miles (640 billion kilometers) — more than 100 times the diameter of our inner solar system, where all the known planets orbit. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from Earth, the object was first identified in 2016 and has now been confirmed as a massive planet-forming disk.

Thought to contain a hot, massive star or a pair of stars at its center, the enormous disk is surprisingly chaotic, with bright wisps of material seen far above and below the disk.

"The level of detail we're seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging," Kristina Monsch, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. "These new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected."

The system contains bright, vertically stretched filaments of gas on only one side, while the opposite side has a sharp edge.

"We were stunned to see how asymmetric this disk is," co-investigator Joshua Bennett Lovell, also an astronomer at the CfA, said in the statement. "Hubble has given us a front row seat to the chaotic processes that are shaping disks as they build new planets — processes that we don't yet fully understand but can now study in a whole new way."

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

These nine strange cosmic objects, spotted in archival data from the James Webb Space Telescope, cannot easily be characterized by their features. They are small and compact, but they don't appear to host active supermassive black holes or to be quasars, enormous black holes that glow as brightly as galaxies, according to new research.

Researchers have dubbed the cosmic oddballs "platypus galaxies" because, like platypuses — rare egg-laying mammals — they are difficult to classify, Haojing Yan, an astronomer at the University of Missouri who led the team, said when presenting the findings at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix this week.

"The detailed genetic code of a platypus provides additional information that shows just how unusual the animal is, sharing genetic features with birds, reptiles, and mammals," Yan said in a statement describing the research, which is available as a preprint via arXiv. "Together, Webb's imaging and spectra are telling us that these galaxies have an unexpected combination of features."

Looking at this collection of galaxy characteristics, he added, is like looking at a platypus. "You think that these things should not exist together, but there it is right in front of you, and it's undeniable," he said.

For example, typical quasars — which are extremely luminous and energetic objects — have emission lines in their spectra that look a bit like hills. The spectra also indicate that gas is circulating quickly around a supermassive black hole in the center.

Yet the nine newfound galaxies have narrow and sharp spectra, signaling that the gas is moving more slowly. Although some galaxies with narrow and sharp spectra have supermassive black holes in their centers, unlike that group, the new galaxies don't look like "points" in the images.

So if the mysterious objects aren't quasars and they don't host supermassive black holes, what are they? One possibility is that they represent a newly found type of star-forming galaxy that populated the early universe, which JWST is optimized to see.

But even that possibility is confusing the team, co-investigator Bangzheng Sun, a graduate student at the University of Missouri, said in the same statement.

"From the low-resolution spectra we have, we can't rule out the possibility that these nine objects are star-forming galaxies," Sun said. "That data fits. The strange thing in that case is that the galaxies are so tiny and compact, even though Webb has the resolving power to show us a lot of detail at this distance."

If that's the case, it may be that JWST is looking at a type of even earlier galaxies than have ever been spotted. If that is indeed what JWST is seeing, Yan said, perhaps there is more to learn about how galaxies evolved.

"I think this new research is presenting us with the question, how does the process of galaxy formation first begin?" Yan said. "Can such small, building-block galaxies be formed in a quiet way, before chaotic mergers begin, as their point-like appearance suggests?"

The team said they will need more galactic samples to further the research. Luckily, JWST is still early in its observing lifetime. The telescope launched in 2021 and is expected to last at least another 15 years in its deep-space position, gazing at faraway objects in the early universe.

The black hole, which is leaving behind a stunning contrail of stars in its wake, confirms more than five decades of research. And it's not the only celestial object offering evidence for long-standing astronomical theories this week — there was also Cloud-9, a failed galaxy discovered by the Hubble telescope, that appears to be held together by dark matter.

Meanwhile, NASA's SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) unveiled its first complete, all-sky mosaic of the universe; Chile's ALMA telescope discovered a set of galaxies so hot they shouldn't exist; and the first images from the fledgling Vera C. Rubin Observatory revealed an enormous asteroid spinning at a record-breaking speed.

Human and Neanderthal ancestor found in Casablanca

Last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals possibly found in Casablanca, Morocco

A collection of 773,000-year-old bones found inside a Moroccan cave shifted the potential origins of modern humans from East to West Africa this week.

There are a lot of fossil hominins in Africa — at least until about a million years ago and again after 500,000 years ago — but a gap exists between these two time points that makes tracking the evolutionary history of humanity difficult.

That's what makes the discovery of the new fossils, found inside Casablanca's Grotte à Hominidés, a very exciting development for paleoanthropologists, with the remains believed to come from the last common ancestor to modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Discover more archaeology news:

—One of the last Siberian shamans was an 18th-century woman whose parents were related, DNA study reveals

—60,000-year-old poison arrows from South Africa are the oldest poison weapons ever discovered

—Tiny bump on 7 million-year-old fossil suggests ancient ape walked upright — and might even be a human ancestor

Life's Little Mysteries

Did any cat breeds develop naturally?

There are more than 600 million cats around the world, but did any of the roughly 10% that are purebred evolve naturally? Or are they all the result of human selection? The answer is more complicated than it first seems.

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

US government slashes childhood vaccine schedule

US government overhauls the childhood vaccine schedule in unprecedented move

Federal health officials announced an unprecedented shift in the childhood vaccine schedule this week, reducing the number of shots universally recommended to kids 18 and under from around 17 to 11.

The unilateral decision is a step toward the longtime goal of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other vaccine skeptics to reduce the number of vaccines given to children. While officials claim the move will more closely align the U.S. with other developed countries, experts say the decision lacks scientific backing and will lead to more sick children.

Discover more health news:

—New US food pyramid recommends very high protein diet, beef tallow as healthy fat option, and full-fat dairy

—Leonardo da Vinci's DNA may be embedded in his art — and scientists think they've managed to extract some

—'Mitochondrial transfer' into nerves could relieve chronic pain, early study hints

Also in science news this week

—Huge ice dome in Greenland vanished 7,000 years ago — melting at temperatures we're racing toward today

—Rare 2,000-year-old war trumpet, possibly linked to Celtic queen Boudica, discovered in England

—Orbiting satellites could start crashing into one another in less than 3 days, theoretical new 'CRASH Clock' reveals

—Hundreds of iceberg earthquakes are shaking the crumbling end of Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best science histories, skywatching guides and quizzes published this week.

—Sophie Germain, first woman to win France's prestigious 'Grand Mathematics Prize' is snubbed when tickets to award ceremony are 'lost in the mail' — Jan. 9, 1816 [Science history]

—Jupiter will outshine every star in the sky this weekend — how to see the 'king of planets' at opposition [Skywatching]

—How much do you really know about T. rex, the king of the dinosaurs? [Quiz]

Science in pictures

'Wolf Supermoon' gallery: See the first full moon of 2026 in pictures from across the world

The first full moon of 2026, called the Wolf Moon, shone brightly in the Northern Hemisphere's skies at the start of this week. It will be the biggest and brightest full moon of the year until November, but if you missed the spectacle we compiled this handy gallery of lunar shots from around the world.

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.

Back in April 2024, astronomers spotted a growing group of sunspots on the solar surface. This new active region (AR), dubbed AR 13664, quickly swelled in size, eventually reaching a diameter 15 times wider than Earth by early May. It then quickly unleashed a barrage of X-class solar flares — the most powerful type of solar explosion — that fired a series of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) toward Earth, which successively slammed into our planet's magnetic field.

This triggered a G5-level ("extreme") geomagnetic storm between May 10 and May 13, which was the most powerful of its kind since 2003 and painted widespread auroras around the globe.

But the giant sunspot's journey didn't end there. Like other massive sunspots, AR 13664 was able to survive several trips around the sun, which enabled researchers to keep tabs on it for longer than usual — and it put on quite the show. (Sunspots only remain visible on the sun's Earth-facing hemisphere for up to two weeks at a time before rotating out of view, but they reappear if they survive the trip across our home star's far side.)

In a new study published Dec. 5 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers analyzed observations of AR 13664 spanning 94 consecutive days between April 16 and July 18, 2024, which equates to roughly 3.3 trips around the sun. Thanks to images captured by NASA's Solar Orbiter, which circles the sun, researchers were able to keep tabs on the sunspot as it rotated out of view.

"It’s a milestone in solar physics," study lead author Ioannis Kontogiannis, a solar physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), said in a statement. "This is the longest continuous series of images ever created for a single active region."

In the paper, the team revealed that AR 13664 unleashed a total of 969 solar flares. This included 38 X-class flares and 146 M-class flares, which are also capable of impacting Earth's magnetic field. The rest were lower-level, including C-class and B-class flares, which pose no threat to our planet. Most of the biggest flares were directed away from Earth, which is why more geomagnetic storms did not occur.

The largest flare was a suspected X16.5 magnitude blast, which occurred on the sun's far side from Earth on May 20, 2024. That’s significantly more powerful than an X9 blast that occurred on Oct. 3, 2024, which is currently listed as the most powerful flare of the last 8 years. However, as AR 13664's blast was partially obscured by its location on the sun, researchers cannot officially declare a new record.

AR 13664's epic journey around the sun is a reminder of the immense power of our home star, especially during solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, when the number of sunspots and solar storms sharply rises.

We have likely just finished the most recent solar maximum, which started in early 2024, much earlier than scientists initially predicted it would. This peak phase was also much more active than previous maxima, with a 23-year peak in visible sunspots and a record number of X-class flares in 2024.

The researchers behind the new study note that studying these events can help scientists to better predict similar events in the future, which is important as they can impact Earth-orbiting spacecraft as well as some ground-based infrastructure.

"We live with this star, so it's really important we observe it and try to understand how it works and how it affects our environment," Kontogiannis said.

After dominating the night sky for more than a month, Jupiter will reach opposition this Saturday (Jan. 10). This marks the point when Earth lies directly between Jupiter and the sun, putting the gas giant opposite our star in Earth's sky. The result is a brilliant, unmissable light in the eastern evening sky that shines all night long. At magnitude -2.7, Jupiter will outshine every star for many weeks.

(In astronomy, a lower magnitude corresponds to a brighter object. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, has an apparent magnitude of about -1.4.)

Shining in the constellation Gemini near the bright stars Pollux and Castor, Jupiter's opposition is the best time to see the giant planet because it rises at sunset, climbs highest around midnight, and sets at dawn. It's a prime opportunity for both novice and experienced skywatchers to get an extraordinary look at the "king of the planets."

How to see Jupiter and its moons

To marvel at Jupiter's dominance at night, you'll need nothing more than a clear sky. However, even a modest pair of binoculars (8×42 or 10×50) will reveal Jupiter as more than just a bright dot; you'll see a small, steady disk and the planet's four largest moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Known as the Galilean moons, they appear as tiny points of light lined up beside the planet, changing position each night.

With a small telescope, the view becomes even more impressive. Use a low-power eyepiece to center Jupiter in your field of view, and then switch to a higher magnification. Two or more dark cloud bands should be visible crossing the planet's disk — signs of Jupiter's powerful jet streams. Under steady atmospheric conditions, the famous Great Red Spot — a massive storm that's been raging on Jupiter for around 190 years — also may come into view in the planet's southern hemisphere.

While Jupiter steals the show, Saturn is also visible in the early evening sky, hanging lower in the southwest after sunset. Though fainter, its iconic rings are still visible through a telescope — a treat for any observer.

Jupiter will remain well placed for evening viewing throughout January and into February. It's an ideal time to observe it under dark skies, before it gradually shifts westward in the coming months.

Jupiter won't disappear after opposition. On June 9, it will form a striking triple conjunction with Venus and Mercury in the twilight sky. Then, on Nov. 15, it meets Mars in a spectacular close conjunction just before sunrise.

The next opposition of Jupiter will occur on Feb. 6, 2027.

As detailed in a study published Nov. 10 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and presented this week at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, this odd object is located more than 14 million light-years from Earth, near the spiral galaxy Messier 94 (M94). Cloud-9 is a cosmic relic, a primordial building block of galaxies that confirms the critical mass threshold needed for a body of gas and dark matter to collapse into a galaxy.

As a result, the discovery of Cloud-9 strongly supports a cornerstone of the leading cosmological framework that aims to explain the structure and composition of the universe — the Lambda cold dark matter model (LCDM). One of the model's major predictions is that dark matter settles in halos, which may or may not grow heavy enough to anchor galaxies.

"These 'dark halos' should be plentiful, however most of them do not retain any hydrogen gas, thus remaining invisible," Deep Anand, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the study's lead author, told Live Science via email. "Cloud-9 lies at the very upper end of the dark halo mass range, thus allowing it to retain its gas, and therefore being visible through radio observations. This is indeed a strong confirmation of a cornerstone prediction of LCDM."

Accordingly, Cloud-9 offers the first hint of evidence that the universe could be teeming with low-mass dark matter halos that remain devoid of stars, as theory predicts.

Digging up a cosmic fossil

Astronomers discovered Cloud-9 three years ago with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou, China. The massive radio telescope has been "very productive in finding similar clouds" and may find others in the future, study co-author Andrew Fox, also an astronomer at STScI, told Live Science via email.

Previously, the researchers used the Very Large Array, a 28-telescope array in New Mexico, to focus on the peak of Cloud-9's radio emissions, originating from its 5,000-light-year wide core. However, the observations failed to identify the object's true nature, potentially owing to telescope sensitivity limits. Perhaps Cloud-9 was simply a ho-hum dwarf galaxy that was too faint to be properly viewed by ground-based facilities, the researchers considered.

But, as described in the new study, a follow-up with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys revealed a much rarer phenomenon, one that astronomers had been seeking for years: a "theoretical phantom object" and the first-ever confirmed RELHIC, or Reionization-Limited H I Cloud. In other words, a cloud of neutral hydrogen, a natal leftover from the early cosmos and a unique "window into the dark universe," Fox said in a NASA press statement.

This hydrogen detection was proof that Cloud-9 was not a typical dwarf galaxy, but something stranger.

To be or not to be a galaxy

The researchers analyzed the gas in Cloud-9 based on the radio waves it emits, and found the gas contributes about one million suns worth of mass to the strange object. That alone is not enough to keep such a large gas cloud together. So, assuming that the system is held together by a balance between gravity, gas pressure, and gas heating, Cloud-9's dark matter component must weigh in at around five billion solar masses, the team calculated.

This mass hits a sweet spot "remarkably close" to the independently theorized critical mass threshold. At this threshold, Cloud-9 falls just short of having enough mass to collapse into a galaxy, but is massive enough, due to its dark matter component, to keep itself together.

Cloud-9 is also in thermal equilibrium with the cosmic ultraviolet (UV) background, the UV energy streaming from all the universe's stars, active black holes, and hot gas. This energy keeps gas ionized, or electrically charged, and relatively hot, suppressing galaxy formation. This also contributes to the cloud's total lack of stars.

However, the researchers conclude that Cloud-9 may not be irrevocably doomed to eternal darkness. It may still gather enough mass to become a galaxy, though the exact mechanics that would allow this are speculative.

Whatever its fate, Cloud-9 serves as a physical benchmark that shows that current dark matter models, as well as galaxy formation theories, are on the right track.

An exceedingly rare relic from the ancient universe

Future studies will search for failed galaxies similar to Cloud-9 — though finding them is much easier said than done, for multiple reasons. First, such dim objects are easily outshined by other celestial sources.

These clouds are also ephemeral, and likely to be eradicated by a process known as ram pressure stripping, which robs them of their gas as they move through intergalactic space. In fact, Cloud-9 appears to be already perturbed by the relatively hot circumgalactic medium around its neighbor galaxy, M94, the researchers said.

"To survive as a dark, gas-rich cloud into the present-day, a system must meet two stringent, and statistically rare, criteria," Alejandro Benitez-Llambay, principal investigator of the program to study Cloud-9 and an astrophysicist at the University of Milano-Bicocca, told Live Science via email. "First, its dark matter halo must have an atypically slow assembly history; if it grew too quickly in the early universe, the gas would have collapsed to form stars before the cosmic UV background could heat it up. Second, the system must remain sufficiently isolated." Fewer than 10% of such gas clouds may have remained as starlessly pristine as Cloud-9, Benitez-Llambay added.

Finally, as a dark-universe ambassador, Cloud-9 is a crucial reminder that the stunning panoramas of stars we see in most astronomical images represent a small proportion of the cosmos as a whole — the shiny things we can see tell only part of the cosmological story.

The spacewalk was planned for 8 a.m. ET on Thursday (Jan. 8) to finish preparing a power channel where a new solar array is set to be installed on the ISS. American astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman were scheduled to exit the space station for 6.5 hours in what would have been Cardman's first spacewalk. (Fincke has already performed nine spacewalks.)

NASA did not name the crew member experiencing the medical problem or share any further details about the emergency, but the agency has confirmed that the issue involves one individual whose condition is stable.

"These are the situations NASA and our partners train for and prepare to execute safely," a NASA spokesperson wrote in an email update on Thursday.

Nevertheless, the agency has confirmed it will bring Fincke, Cardman and two other astronauts, who are part of the current four-person crew aboard the ISS, home early from their stay at the orbital outpost. "Safely conducting our missions is our highest priority, and we are actively evaluating all options, including the possibility of an earlier end to Crew-11's mission," the spokesperson said.

Crew-11 arrived at the ISS on Aug. 2, 2025. Fincke and Cardman were joined by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov for a six-month mission, after which the astronauts were set to be replaced by Crew-12 as part of the space station's regular staffing rotation.

Crew-12's launch is scheduled for mid-February. It is unclear what returning Crew-11 home early would mean for the ISS, as such changes to the usual rotation are highly unusual, but there are other astronauts living on the space station at the moment — including NASA's Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev, who arrived at the orbiting lab aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that destroyed its launching pad in November.

NASA has said it will announce a target return date in the coming days.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated following NASA’s confirmation that Crew-11 will return earlier than originally planned.

The potential confirmation by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), published on the preprint server Arxiv on Dec. 3, has not yet been peer-reviewed. But it has been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters and lead study author Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, has published several peer-reviewed papers about candidate supermassive black holes in recent years.

Van Dokkum says this is the first confirmation of a runaway supermassive black hole, following five decades of theory and research about these objects. "The obvious next step is to look for more examples," he told LiveScience.

Tracing a stream of stars

The candidate black hole was first spotted back in 2023 by van Dokkum's team, who saw a faint line in an archival Hubble Space Telescope image. The sight was so strange that the team followed up with fresh observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Observations back then showed that the black hole has a mass of 20 million suns, and that the strange line was a "wake" of young stars stretching 200,000 light-years across space — twice the diameter of the entire Milky Way. The Hubble image captures a moment in time when the universe was roughly half its current age of 13.8 billion years.

"We suspected that this strange object might be a runaway supermassive black hole, but we did not have 'smoking gun' proof," van Dokkum said. So, for their new research, the team turned to JWST, a deep-space observatory that is unique in its "sensitivity and sharpness," van Dokkum said, "to see the bow shock that is created by the speeding black hole."

The resulting imagery astounded the team.

JWST's mid-infrared instrument rendered the shockwave, or bow shock, at the leading edge of the candidate black hole's escape with unprecedented clarity. "It's a bit like the waves created by a ship," van Dokkum said. "In this case, the ship is a black hole and very difficult to see, but we can see the 'water' — really, hydrogen and oxygen gas — that [the black hole] pushes out in front of it."

Van Dokkum was astonished. "Everything about this object told us it was something really special, but seeing this clear signature in the data was incredibly satisfying," he added.

Aside from JWST's sheer resolution, van Dokkum said his study showed that the observations matched Hubble's and Keck's data in different wavelengths of light. The data "all provide different pieces of the puzzle," he said, "and they fit together beautifully — exactly as predicted by theoretical models."

A supermassive mystery

Studying runaway black holes, like this candidate one, shows scientists more about how galaxies and black holes evolved, van Dokkum said. Most large galaxies have supermassive black holes embedded in their center, including our own Milky Way. Whether they can escape their tight galactic bonds is a longstanding mystery.

The only way that a supermassive black hole could be ripped out of its galaxy, according to van Dokkum, is if at least two of these black holes got extraordinarily close to each other, with the intense gravitational interaction "kicking" one out of place.

The new research suggests the candidate runaway was produced after at least two, and potentially as many as three, black holes all interacted. With masses of at least 10 million suns each, van Dokkum said the violence of the encounter must have been "quite something."

As for where to look next for a runaway supermassive black hole, the research paper notes "several promising candidates," but the interpretation of these systems is difficult. One example is the ambiguous object known as the "Cosmic Owl," which is roughly 11 billion light-years away from Earth.

The Cosmic Owl, according to the new paper, includes two galactic nuclei — each with an active supermassive black hole at the galaxy's heart — and a third supermassive black hole that is, oddly, "embedded in a gas cloud" between the two galaxies.

How that third black hole arrived in a gas cloud is a matter of dispute. Some researchers say the black hole may be a runaway that escaped from one of the host galaxies, but JWST observations by van Dokkum's group challenge that interpretation. Their observations suggest the out-of-place black hole "more likely … formed in-situ through a direct collapse" of gas, produced by shockwaves after the two galaxies nearly collided with one another.

Further study is needed on this, and other objects that may contain possible black hole runaways. Van Dokkum cited the current Euclid and forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescopes as promising survey instruments, since these telescopes are designed to look at the whole sky, unlike JWST. "That will tell us how often this happens — something we'd dearly like to know."

The number of spacecraft orbiting our planet is rising fast, thanks largely to the rise of satellite "megaconsetllations," such as SpaceX's Starlink network. As of May 2025, there were at least 11,700 active satellites around Earth, most of which are located in LEO — the region of the atmosphere up to 1,200 miles (2,000 km) above Earth. For context, that is a 485% increase on the roughly 2,000 satellites in LEO at the end of 2018, before the first Starlink launch in 2019. And all signs suggest that this is only the beginning.

One of the big problems with having so many satellites circling us is an increased chance they may collide with each another, creating clouds of fast-moving debris that could impact other spacecraft, including human-occupied space stations. Satellite operators are largely able to avoid these collisions. However, if they were to lose control of their respective spacecraft — either via a technical glitch, a cyber attack or a massive solar storm — they would be powerless to prevent a potential catastrophe.

In a new study, uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on Dec. 10, researchers proposed a new way of measuring the risk of a collision occurring if every spacecraft was rendered inoperable by one of these worst-case scenarios. The team dubbed this metric the Collision Realization And Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock. By modelling the distribution of spacecraft in LEO, the CRASH Clock shows how long it would take for the first collision to occur. (This is similar to how the infamous "Doomsday Clock" shows us how far we are away from a hypothetical global armageddon.)

"The CRASH Clock is a statistical measure of the timescale expected for a close approach that could give rise to a collision," study co-author Aaron Boley, an astronomer at The University of British Columbia, told Live Science in an email. "The idea is that it can be used as an environmental indicator that helps to evaluate the overall health of the orbital region while enabling people to conceptualize just how much or how little room there is for error."

In the new paper, the team calculated that the value of the CRASH Clock by the end of 2025 was around 2.8 days, with a 30% chance that a collision could occur within 24 hours of an emergency that renders satellites inoperable. This is much less than the clock's predicted value for 2018, estimated to be 128 days, which would have given operators much more time to recover their assets.

These findings have not yet been peer-reviewed, and the study team now thinks that they slightly overestimated how short the CRASH Clock really is, Boley told Live Science. However, the rate at which these timeframes have changed, regardless of their exact values, is what is most concerning. (A new, more reliable value for the CRASH Clock is likely to be published later this year.)

"Seeing that difference [in values] is one factor that motivated us to develop the CRASH Clock further," Boley said. The fact that the value has decreased so significantly already is just as good an "indicator of the stress on orbit" as the CRASH Clock itself, he added.

The value of the CRASH Clock will likely continue to decrease further in the coming years as more satellites are deployed. In 2025, for example, there were 324 orbital launches, which is a new record and represents a 25% increase compared to 2024, SpaceNews recently reported.

The researchers have not predicted exactly how much the CRASH Clock will change in the coming years. However, they suspect that the current trend will continue: "Whether the CRASH Clock decreases will depend on the continued approach to industrializing Earth orbits," Boley said. "It could continue to get shorter if densification of orbital shells continues."

The most likely way that a CRASH Clock scenario would play out is via a sizable solar storm, which can temporarily scramble satellite systems with large doses of radiation, study lead author Sarah Thiele, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, recently told Live Science's sister site Space.com. During such an event, "it becomes impossible to estimate where objects are going to be in the future," she added.

If satellites remained offline for longer than the CRASH Clock value then multiple collisions could occur, which could push us dangerously close to the threshold of the Kessler Syndrome — a theoretical scenario where cascading collisions in LEO triggers causes space junk to exponentially increase to the point where nothing could safely operate there.

The researchers are reluctant to predict a timeframe for this scenario because there are too many variables surrounding subsequent satellite collisions, and nobody really knows at what point the Kessler syndrome will be triggered, Boley said. However, if we are not careful, we may soon "be in the early stages" of an irreversible cascade of collisions, he warned.

The record-breaking space rock, called 2025 MN45, is larger than most skyscrapers on Earth at about 2,300 feet (710 meters) wide. The massive rock completes a rotation in about 113 seconds — making it the fastest-spinning known asteroid over 1,640 feet (500 meters) in diameter.

The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters Wednesday (Jan. 7), is part of an asteroid survey aimed at improving our understanding of how these small bodies formed and evolved.

The study is the first peer-reviewed paper from the Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera — the largest digital camera in the world — which will repeatedly scan the Southern Hemisphere's night sky over 10 years to create an unprecedented time-lapse movie of the universe.

Rocks that roll

Asteroids are essentially large space rocks, and many are remnants of how our solar system appeared early in its 4.5 billion-year-old history, before the evolution of planets and moons. Therefore, by studying asteroids, scientists can figure out how our solar system changed over the eons.

Scientists found 2025 MN45 using the preliminary data release from the Rubin Observatory, which has already revealed thousands of previously unknown asteroids around the solar system after just seven nights of observations. (The 10-year LSST survey has yet to formally begin, but is expected to start in the next few months.)

The asteroid's remarkably fast spin excited the team, as it provides clues about the ancient rock’s composition.

"Clearly, this asteroid must be made of material that has very high strength in order to keep it in one piece," Sarah Greenstreet, an assistant astronomer at the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, said in a statement. "It would need a cohesive strength similar to that of solid rock."

"This is somewhat surprising," added Greenstreet, who also leads a Rubin working group about near-Earth objects and interstellar objects, "since most asteroids are believed to be what we call 'rubble pile' asteroids, which means they are made of many, many small pieces of rock and debris that coalesced under gravity during solar system formation or subsequent collisions."

Thousands more to come

In general, fast-spinning asteroids could have reached that state after a collision with another space rock, the study team said. It is also possible that 2025 MN45 is a remnant of a much larger asteroid that was shattered by a cosmic crash.

Most asteroids in the solar system are in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But most fast-spinning asteroids that astronomers have observed are much closer to Earth, simply because they are easier to see, the study authors noted. 2025 MN45 is a main-belt object, where most asteroids (as they are loose piles of rubble) must take at least 2.2 hours to rotate in order to avoid fragmentation. Anything that rotates faster than that "must be structurally strong," they wrote.

That said, 2025 MN45 is not the only fast spinner in the main asteroid belt. In addition to 2025 MN45, Rubin's first dataset includes 16 "super-fast" rotators, each of which has a rotational period of between 13 minutes and 2.2 hours, as well as two "ultra-fast" rotators with spins of less than two minutes each. All of these asteroids are also longer than 100 yards (90 m), and all but one of the newfound asteroids lives in the main belt.

The commissioning data from Rubin, which was released last June, underwent a deeper look in the new paper, which was also discussed Wednesday at a news conference at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix.

The huge set of observations has about 1,900 never-before-seen asteroids, according to the statement. There will be many more to come when Rubin formally begins its 10-year survey of the sky in the coming months.

The first of at least four such maps anticipated from SPHEREx, the new composite of more than 100 individual exposures promises to reveal unprecedented details of the night sky.

"It's incredible how much information SPHEREx has collected in just six months — information that will be especially valuable when used alongside our other missions' data to better understand our universe," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

"I think every astronomer is going to find something of value here," he added, "as NASA's missions enable the world to answer fundamental questions about how the universe got its start, and how it changed to eventually create a home for us in it."

'102 new maps of the entire sky'

Though modest in size and cost, SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) is built to tackle some of astronomy's biggest mysteries, from probing the universe's explosive beginnings to tracing the icy ingredients delivered to planets that may have helped life to emerge.

SPHEREx's defining strength is its panoramic vision. The spacecraft surveys the entire sky every six months, splitting incoming light into 102 distinct infrared "colors" that are invisible to the human eye. The first of these observations, its new map released in December 2025, will allow scientists to chart the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in three dimensions and to study stars, dust and other cosmic objects in remarkable detail.

"We essentially have 102 new maps of the entire sky, each one in a different wavelength and containing unique information about the objects it sees," Domagal-Goldman said in the statement.

Launched on March 12, 2025, SPHEREx took less than a month to open its eyes on the universe. Its debut image, containing more than 100,000 galaxies and stars, signaled to scientists that the spacecraft was performing as designed.

Over its planned two-year mission, the $488 million telescope will scan the entire night sky every six months and collect data from more than 450 million galaxies. To accomplish that, SPHEREx will capture roughly 3,600 images per day, according to NASA, with each full-sky pass layered atop the last to reveal ever fainter cosmic details.

"That's an amazing amount of information to gather in a short amount of time," Beth Fabinsky, the deputy project manager for SPHEREx, said in the statement. "I think this makes us the mantis shrimp of telescopes, because we have an amazing multicolor visual detection system and we can also see a very wide swath of our surroundings."

One of SPHEREx's central science goals is to study cosmic inflation, a theorized burst of rapid expansion of the universe that occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. During that fleeting moment 14 billion years ago, space itself ballooned outward, smoothing the early universe and leaving behind subtle patterns, or ripples, that still influence how galaxies are distributed today.

By mapping the universe in three dimensions on such an enormous scale, SPHEREx is expected to record the statistical distribution of these inflationary ripples, which could help scientists narrow down the elusive physics that powered the universe's early growth.

The observatory will also act as a cosmic scout within the Milky Way, surveying vast clouds of gas and dust for interstellar dust grains coated with frozen water, carbon dioxide and other icy compounds that may have helped seed planets, and potentially life.

Photobomb threats

As SPHEREx continues its survey, however, it does so amid a growing challenge for space-based astronomy.

Recent simulations modeling how future satellite megaconstellations will appear to orbiting telescopes suggest that more than 96% of exposures from SPHEREx — along with those from the Hubble Space Telescope and two planned space observatories, China's Xuntian telescope and the European Space Agency's ARRAKIHS mission — would be negatively affected.

Because each SPHEREx image covers a patch of sky roughly 200 times larger than the full moon, nearly every image it captures could contain at least one streak from a passing spacecraft, the analysis, published in early December in the journal Nature, found.

With today's satellite population of about 15,000 expected to swell to 1 million by the end of the 2030s, astronomers warn the damage could be irreversible, as once a faint cosmic signal is obscured, the lost scientific information cannot be fully recovered.

The scorching cluster existed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, blazing far earlier and hotter than current models of galaxy cluster formation predict should be possible. The discovery suggests that the predicted patterns of cluster growth might need a rethink, researchers reported Jan. 5 in the journal Nature.

Galaxy clusters are collections of dark matter and hundreds to thousands of galaxies, all bound together by gravity. Those galaxies are separated by a mix of gas known as the intracluster medium. As galaxy clusters form, the intracluster medium heats up due to gravitational interactions within the cluster and energy emissions from young stars and black holes. But this process takes a long time, and scientists have only rarely observed a hot intracluster medium in young galaxy clusters.

"Understanding galaxy clusters is the key to understanding the biggest galaxies in the universe," study co-author Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University who conducted the research while at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), said in a statement. "These massive galaxies mostly reside in clusters, and their evolution is heavily shaped by the very strong environment of the clusters as they form, including the intracluster medium."

In the new study, researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a powerful radio telescope located in Chile, to observe a bright, young galaxy cluster known as SPT2349-56, whose light was emitted just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. This cluster is relatively small — about the size of the Milky Way's outer halo — but it contains more than 30 active galaxies and three supermassive black holes, and it forms stars more than 5,000 times as fast as the Milky Way.

Using a phenomenon called the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, the team found that the gas in the intracluster medium is at least five times hotter than current theories of cluster formation predict it should be for its relatively young age.

"We didn't expect to see such a hot cluster atmosphere so early in cosmic history," study coauthor Dazhi Zhou, a PhD student in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia, said in the statement. "In fact, at first I was skeptical about the signal as it was too strong to be real."

But it was real — and that could mean that galaxy clusters can form more quickly than expected.

"This tells us that something in the early universe, likely three recently discovered supermassive black holes in the cluster, were already pumping huge amounts of energy into the surroundings and shaping the young cluster, much earlier and more strongly than we thought," Chapman said.

In future studies, the team plans to investigate what this unusual cluster might mean for the formation and evolution of existing galaxy clusters.

"We want to figure out how the intense star formation, the active black holes and this overheated atmosphere interact, and what it tells us about how present galaxy clusters were built," Zhou said. "How can all of this be happening at once in such a young, compact system?"

However, while this thought experiment raises interesting questions about alien intelligence, it does not provide any evidence that these signals actually exist.

So far, the quest to uncover alien intelligence has focused on finding evidence of distant human-like civilizations. For example, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute — the world's leading organization dedicated to searching for alien life — spends most of its time searching for radio signals from distant exoplanets or heat given off by technological megastructures, such as the theoretical Dyson sphere.

However, some scientists believe that these searches suffer from an "anthropocentric bias" — meaning we're trying to understand nonhuman entities through a distinctly human lens — and do not account for potential civilizations that are wholly different from our own. Due to this bias, we may be overlooking promising signs of life.

In the new study, uploaded Nov. 8 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers proposed a new way that an alien civilization could communicate — by flashing to one another like fireflies. These flashing signals could be used for specific and complex communications. However, the researchers argue that they are more likely being widely broadcast to other civilizations, like a luminous repeating beacon. (This paper has not yet been peer reviewed, but is now under consideration for publication in the journal PNAS.)

On Earth, fireflies communicate via a series of regularly repeating flashes caused by internal chemical reactions. These flashes are mainly used to find mates. But while these signals are simple, they do allow distinct firefly species to tell each other apart.

The researchers argue that similar flashing could be used as "here we are" signals by an alien civilization. And space is plentiful with repetitive bursts of light.

In the new paper, researchers analyzed the flashes of more than 150 pulsars — rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron stars that shoot out regular beams of electromagnetic radiation — as a proxy for what these signals may look like. And while they found no evidence of any artificial signals, they did note some similarities between the pulsars and firefly signals, and proposed ways of being able to detect future firefly-like flashes from other natural objects, like pulsars.

The study team argues that these signals could be more likely to evolve in long-lasting alien civilizations that progress past the need for widespread use of radio waves. A similar progression is already happening on Earth, where the use of communications satellites with more specific and concentrated radio signals is making our planet appear more "radio quiet" from afar, the researchers wrote.

And just because we may not naturally think to communicate in this way, it doesn't mean that other civilizations wouldn't, they added.

"Communication is a fundamental feature of life across lineages and manifests in a wonderful diversity of forms and strategies," study co-author Estelle Janin, a doctoral candidate at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, recently told Universe Today. "Taking non-human communication into account is essential if we want to broaden our intuition and understanding about what alien communication could look like, and what a theory of life ought to explain."

This is just one example of what non-human signals may look like, and the researchers encourage others to think outside of the anthropocentric box to come up with other ways that a non-human-like civilization could communicate.

"Our study is meant as a provoking thought-experiment and an invitation for SETI and animal communication research to engage more directly and to draw more systematically on each other's insights," Janin said.

The findings upend a 20-year-old theory about how certain charged particles, known as ions, ended up on the lunar surface, and could have big implications for upcoming moon missions, researchers say.

Ever since NASA's Apollo missions first returned lunar samples to Earth in the early 1970s, scientists have been puzzled by traces of volatiles — substances that vaporize at relatively low temperatures, including water, carbon dioxide, helium, argon, and nitrogen — that they found within the moon's soil, or regolith. It soon became clear that some of these substances, particularly nitrogen ions, had originated from Earth's upper atmosphere and were most likely blown onto the moon by gusts of solar wind. (Recent research has also shown that some volatiles on the moon, such as water, may be created directly by the solar wind and have no terrestrial ties.)

Since 2005, the leading theory suggests that this material transfer could have only happened before Earth developed its magnetic field, or magnetosphere, because this invisible forcefield would have likely trapped any atmospheric ions being blown away from our planet.

However, in the new study, published Dec. 11 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, scientists combined data from the Apollo samples with computer models simulating the evolution of Earth's magnetosphere, and found that the transfer of atmospheric ions was greatest whenever the moon passes through our planet's magnetic tail — the largest section of the magnetosphere that always points away from the sun. (This alignment occurs when Earth gets between the moon and sun, near the full moon phase each month).

The models revealed that, rather than blocking atmospheric ions from being blown from our planet, the magnetic field lines within Earth's tail act as invisible highways for charged particles, guiding them toward the moon, where they are then settled into the lunar regolith.

This means that the transfer of atmospheric ions likely began shortly after the magnetosphere took shape around 3.7 billion years ago — and is likely still occurring today.

Until now, scientists had assumed that the lunar regolith would only contain traces of Earth's earliest atmosphere. However, the new study suggests that these samples could actually act as a time capsule for our atmosphere and magnetosphere.

"By combining data from particles preserved in lunar soil with computational modeling of how solar wind interacts with Earth’s atmosphere, we can trace the history of Earth's atmosphere and its magnetic field," study co-author Eric Blackman, a theoretical astrophysicist and plasma physicist at the University of Rochester, said in a statement.

As a result, regolith collected during upcoming lunar missions — such as NASA's Artemis program, which aims to put boots on the moon by 2028, and China's moon missions, which have already returned lunar samples to Earth — could help researchers fill in gaps in our planet's geological history.

Earth is not the only solar system object to lose tiny bits of itself to the solar wind. Mercury is often seen with a long comet-like tail of dust that is blown off its surface, while the moon also has a tail of ablated sodium ions that Earth repeatedly passes through.

By further studying how Earth loses its atmosphere to the moon, the researchers are hopeful of learning more about how this may have happened elsewhere in our cosmic neighborhood.

"Our study may also have broader implications for understanding early atmospheric escape on planets like Mars, which lacks a global magnetic field today but had one similar to Earth in the past," study lead author Shubhonkar Paramanick, a planetary scientist at the University of Rochester, said in the statement. Future research could help scientists "gain insight into how these processes shape planetary habitability," he added.

The Wolf Moon's name has both Native American and Anglo-Saxon origins, and likely comes from the belief that hungry wolves are more likely to be heard howling close to the middle of the winter.

This year's January full moon was also a supermoon, meaning it appeared brighter and larger than usual. In fact, there won't be another chance to see a moon as big and bright as this one until November. Photographers across the Northern Hemisphere whipped out their cameras to capture our neighbor in its full glory, and you can see some of the best snaps below.

Moon quiz: What do you know about our nearest celestial neighbor?

According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, January's full moon gets its name because wolves were more likely to be heard howling at this time of year. Other Native American names for this full moon include the Cold Moon, the Frost Exploding Moon, the Freeze-Up Moon, the Severe Moon, the Hard Moon, the Center Moon, and the Canada Goose Moon. In Europe, it's often called the Moon After Yule, after the ancient festival that stretches from the winter solstice on Dec. 21 through Jan. 1.

The best time to see the Wolf Moon will be at moonrise on Jan. 3, when it will appear at dusk between a star and a very bright planet. On its left will be Pollux, a bright star in the constellation Gemini, and Jupiter will be on its right. The "king of planets" will be just a week away from its bright opposition — the most luminous it will get from our perspective in 2026.

Because it's the full moon closest to the winter solstice on Dec. 21, the Wolf Moon will also make the highest arc through the night sky of any full moon, as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. That happens because a full moon is always opposite the sun, so the winter sun mimics the summer sun.

The Wolf Moon is also the fourth consecutive supermoon, though it will not be particularly large. It is also the last one until November. It's called a supermoon because it turns full close to perigee, the closest the moon gets to Earth. As it turns full on Jan. 3, the full moon will be 225,130 miles (362,312 kilometers) from our planet.

By chance, that will happen as Earth reaches perihelion — its closest point to the sun — when it will be 91.4 million miles (147.1 million km) from our star, compared with the average distance of 93 million miles (150 million km).

After the Wolf Moon, the next full moon will be the Snow Moon, on Feb. 1.

January's full moon, nicknamed the Wolf Moon, rises on Saturday, Jan. 3, as the second-highest full moon of the year. The moon turns full at precisely 5:03 a.m. EST and will also appear bright and full on Friday (Jan. 2) and Sunday (Jan. 4).

The full Wolf Moon is the last of four consecutive supermoons, after October's Harvest Moon, November's Beaver Moon and December's Cold Moon.

Supermoons occur when the full moon rises near perigee, its closest point to Earth in its elliptical orbit, making it appear bigger and brighter than a typical full moon. (By contrast, a micromoon occurs when the full moon coincides with apogee, its farthest point from Earth, making it appear smaller from our perspective.)

Here's how to photograph the moon when it's at its best.

Full moons of 2026: An overview

In 2026, you'll have the chance to see 13 full moons, including three supermoons and two lunar eclipses (one of which is the last total lunar eclipse until New Year's Eve 2028). Although experienced moon gazers know that the night of the full moon is not the best for observing the lunar surface (even with a good pair of binoculars), the full moon rising as an orb at dusk is a celestial view that's hard to beat.

Full moon guide: When are the full moons of 2026?

Here are all of the full moon dates and times for 2026, according to timeanddate.com, including the most commonly used names in North America:

• Saturday, Jan. 3: Wolf Moon (10:02 UTC/5:02 a.m. EST) — also a supermoon
• Sunday, Feb. 1: Snow Moon (22:09 UTC/5:09 p.m. EST)
• Tuesday, March 3: Worm Moon (11:37 UTC/6:37 a.m. EST) — also a total lunar eclipse
• Wednesday, April 1: Pink Moon (02:11 UTC on April 2/10:11 p.m. EDT on April 1)
• Friday, May 1: Flower Moon (17:23 UTC/1:23 p.m. EDT)
• Sunday, May 31: Blue Moon (08:45 UTC/4:45 a.m. EDT)
• Monday, June 29: Strawberry Moon (23:56 UTC/7:56 p.m. EDT) — also a micromoon
• Wednesday, July 29: Buck Moon (14:35 UTC/10:35 a.m. EDT)
• Friday, Aug. 28: Sturgeon Moon (04:18 UTC/12:18 a.m. EDT) — also a partial lunar eclipse
• Saturday, Sept. 26: Harvest Moon (16:49 UTC/12:49 p.m. EDT)
• Monday, Oct. 26: Hunter's Moon (04:11 UTC/12:11 a.m. EDT)
• Tuesday, Nov. 24: Beaver Moon (14:53 UTC/9:53 a.m. EST) — also a supermoon
• Wednesday, Dec. 23: Cold Moon (01:28 UTC on Dec. 24/8:28 p.m. EST on Dec. 23) — also a supermoon

Lunar eclipses 2026

There will be two lunar eclipses in 2026, but only one will be total. The first, on March 2-3, will be a total lunar eclipse, during which the full Worm Moon will drift through Earth's inner umbral shadow and turn a reddish-orange color for 58 minutes, from 6:04 to 7:02 a.m. EDT on March 3, according to timeanddate.com. The best views of this event, nicknamed a "blood moon," will be from western North America and the Asia Pacific.

The second lunar eclipse, on Aug. 27-28, will be a partial lunar eclipse, during which 96% of the Sturgeon Moon will enter Earth's inner umbral shadow and may take on a reddish-orange hue near maximum eclipse at 12:12 a.m. EDT on Aug. 28, according to timeanddate.com. The best views will be from North and South America, Europe and Africa.

What are the moon's phases?

Scientists typically break the moon's 29.5-day cycle into eight phases, which are determined by the relative positions of the moon, Earth and the sun.

The start of the cycle is the new moon, which is when the moon is exactly between Earth and the sun. We cannot see the moon when it's in the new phase because no sunlight is reflected from its Earth-facing side. A new moon is the only time when a solar eclipse is possible. Two central solar eclipses will occur in 2026: an annular solar eclipse on Feb. 17 and a total solar eclipse on Aug. 12.

As more sunlight hits the moon's Earth-facing side, we say the moon is waxing. The next phase of the moon is called a waxing crescent, followed by the first-quarter phase. Half of the moon's visible surface appears illuminated during the first quarter.

Next comes the waxing gibbous moon, which is partway between a first-quarter moon and a full moon. Halfway through the lunar cycle, the full moon rises, and the moon shines bright and large in the sky. During this phase, the moon and the sun are on opposite sides of Earth, and the entire Earth-facing side of the moon is illuminated.

After the full moon, the waning cycle begins — first with the waning gibbous phase, then a last-quarter moon and, finally, a waning crescent. After almost 30 days, the moon becomes "new" again, and the cycle repeats.

Although it's not as famous as August's Perseids or December's Geminids, January's Quadrantids can be just as prolific. This year, they will be active from Dec. 28 through Jan. 12 and will peak on Jan. 3 starting around 4 p.m. EST (21:00 UTC).

During that peak, about 25 "shooting stars" are likely per hour. However, because this meteor shower coincides with the full moon this year, the sky will be relatively bright. That will make faint meteors harder to see, with around 10 per hour likely to be visible.

It's a narrow peak, lasting about six hours, so North American skywatchers should start looking as soon as it gets dark. Although shooting stars from the Quadrantids tend to be relatively faint, they can often produce bright "fireballs."

Quadrantids can be seen anywhere in the night sky, but they appear to come from the northern sky — specifically, the constellation Boötes, part of which was formerly called Quadrans Muralis (hence the name of this meteor shower). The best way to visualize this radiant origin point for the Quadrantids is to look at the night sky around the handle of the famous Big Dipper asterism.

The Quadrantid meteor shower happens when, each January, Earth travels through a narrow stream of dust and debris orbiting the sun. The stream is thought to come from an object called 2003 EH, which may be an asteroid or an extinct comet and takes 5.5 years to orbit the sun from around the same distance as Earth (but safely beyond it), according to EarthSky.

The next notable meteor shower wil be the Lyrids in April. When the Lyrid meteor shower peaks on the night of April 21-22 during a crescent moon, the sky conditions will be ideal for seeing about 18 shooting stars per hour.

To maximize the number of meteors you'll see during either event, find a location with a clear view of as much of the night sky as possible. The bright moon during the Quadrantids will make it pointless to attempt escaping to dark skies, but try to keep the moon behind you to maximize your chances of spotting shooting stars.

Supporters of planetary colonization argue that becoming a multi-planet species could safeguard us from potentially Earth-ending events. However, it will require an enormous effort to colonize another planet or moon. And if we look beyond Mars, potentially habitable planets may take thousands of years to reach.

But as technology advances and space agencies consider long-term human settlements on other planets, a more fundamental issue now beckons — not whether we can expand to other worlds, but whether we should.

What's your take? Answer our poll below and share the reasoning behind your choice in the comments.

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Scientists are developing a real-life tractor beam, dubbed an electrostatic tractor. This tractor beam wouldn't suck in helpless starship pilots, however. Instead, it would use electrostatic attraction to nudge hazardous space junk safely out of Earth orbit.

The stakes are high: With the commercial space industry booming, the number of satellites in Earth's orbit is forecast to rise sharply. This bonanza of new satellites will eventually wear out and turn the space around Earth into a giant junkyard of debris that could smash into working spacecraft, plummet to Earth, pollute our atmosphere with metals and obscure our view of the cosmos. And, if left unchecked, the growing space junk problem could hobble the booming space exploration industry, experts warn.

The electrostatic tractor beam could potentially alleviate that problem by safely moving dead satellites far out of Earth orbit, where they would drift harmlessly for eternity.

While the tractor beam wouldn't completely solve the space junk problem, the concept has several advantages over other proposed space debris removal methods, which could make it a valuable tool for tackling the issue, experts told Live Science.

Related: 11 sci-fi concepts that are possible (in theory)

A prototype could cost millions, and an operational, full-scale version even more. But if the financial hurdles can be overcome, the tractor beam could be operational within a decade, its builders say.

"The science is pretty much there, but the funding is not," project researcher Kaylee Champion, a doctoral student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), told Live Science.

Avoiding Disaster

The tractor beams depicted in "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" suck up spacecraft via artificial gravity or an ambiguous "energy field." Such technology is likely beyond anything humans will ever achieve. But the concept inspired Hanspeter Schaub, an aerospace engineering professor at CU Boulder, to conceptualize a more realistic version.

Schaub first got the idea after the first major satellite collision in 2009, when an active communications satellite, Iridium 33, smashed into a defunct Russian military spacecraft, Kosmos 2251, scattering more than 1,800 pieces of debris into Earth's orbit.

Related: How many satellites orbit Earth?

In the wake of this disaster, Schaub wanted to be able to prevent this from happening again. To do this, he realized you could pull spacecraft out of harm's way by using the attraction between positively and negatively charged objects to make them "stick" together.

Over the next decade, Schaub and colleagues refined the concept. Now, they hope it can someday be used to move dead satellites out of geostationary orbit (GEO) — an orbit around Earth's equator where an object's speed matches the planet's rotation, making it seem like the object is fixed in place above a certain point on Earth. This would then free up space for other objects in GEO, which is considered "prime real estate" for satellites, Schaub said.

How does it work?

The electrostatic tractor would use a servicer spacecraft equipped with an electron gun that would fire negatively charged electrons at a dead target satellite, Champion told Live Science. The electrons would give the target a negative charge while leaving the servicer with a positive charge. The electrostatic attraction between the two would keep them locked together despite being separated by 65 to 100 feet (20 to 30 meters) of empty space, she said.

Once the servicer and target are "stuck together," the servicer would be able to pull the target out of orbit without touching it. Ideally, the defunct satellite would be pulled into a "graveyard orbit" more distant from Earth, where it could safely drift forever, Champion said.

Related: 15 of the weirdest things we have launched into space

The electrostatic attraction between the two spacecraft would be extremely weak, due to limitations in electron gun technology and the distance by which the two would need to be separated to prevent collisions, project researcher Julian Hammerl, a doctoral student at CU Boulder, told Live Science. So the servicer would have to move very slowly, and it could take more than a month to fully move a single satellite out of GEO, he added.

That's a far cry from movie tractor beams, which are inescapable and rapidly reel in their prey. This is the "main difference between sci-fi and reality," Hammerl said.

Advantages and limitations

The electrostatic tractor would have one big advantage over other proposed space junk removal methods, such as harpoons, giant nets and physical docking systems: It would be completely touchless.

"You have these large, dead spacecraft about the size of a school bus rotating really fast," Hammerl said. "If you shoot a harpoon, use a big net or try to dock with them, then the physical contact can damage the spacecraft and then you are only making the [space junk] problem worse."

Scientists have proposed other touchless methods, such as using powerful magnets, but enormous magnets are both expensive to produce and would likely interfere with a servicer's controls, Champion said.

Related: How do tiny pieces of space junk cause incredible damage?

The main limitation of the electrostatic tractor is how slowly it would work. More than 550 satellites currently orbit Earth in GEO, but that number is expected to rise sharply in the coming decades.

If satellites were moved one at a time, then a single electrostatic tractor wouldn't keep pace with the number of satellites winking out of operation. Another limitation of the electrostatic tractor is that it would work too slowly to be practical for clearing smaller pieces of space junk, so it wouldn't be able to keep GEO completely free of debris.

Cost is the other big obstacle. The team has not yet done a full cost analysis for the electrostatic tractor, Schaub said, but it would likely cost tens of millions of dollars. However, once the servicer were in space, it would be relatively cost-effective to operate it, he added.

Next steps

The researchers are currently working on a series of experiments in their Electrostatic Charging Laboratory for Interactions between Plasma and Spacecraft (ECLIPS) machine at CU Boulder. The bathtub-sized, metallic vacuum chamber, which is equipped with an electron gun, allows the team to "do unique experiments that almost no one else can currently do" in order to simulate the effects of an electrostatic tractor on a smaller scale, Hammerl said.

Once the team is ready, the final and most challenging hurdle will be to secure funding for the first mission, which is a process they have not yet started.

Most of the mission cost would come from building and launching the servicer. However, the researchers would ideally like to launch two satellites for the first tests, a servicer and a target that they can maneuver, which would give them more control over their experiments but also double the cost.

Related: 10 stunning shots of Earth from space in 2022

If they can somehow wrangle that funding, a prototype tractor beam could be operational in around 10 years, the team previously estimated.

Is it viable?

While tractor beams may sound like a pipe dream, experts are optimistic about the technology.

"Their technology is still in the infancy stage," John Crassidis, an aerospace scientist at the University at Buffalo in New York, who is not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. "But I am fairly confident it will work."

Removing space junk without touching it would also be much safer than any current alternative method, Crassidis added.

The electrostatic tractor "should be able to produce the forces necessary to move a defunct satellite" and "certainly has a high potential to work in practice," Carolin Frueh, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University in Indiana, told Live Science in an email. "But there are still several engineering challenges to be solved along the way to make it real-world-ready."

Scientists should continue to research other possible solutions, Crassidis said. Even if the CU Boulder team doesn't create a "final product" to remove nonfunctional satellites, their research will provide a stepping stone for other scientists, he added.

If they are successful, it wouldn't be the first time scientists turned fiction into fact.

"What is today's science fiction could be tomorrow's reality," Crassidis said.

The idea, dubbed "Project Suncatcher" and outlined in a study uploaded Nov. 22 to the preprint arXiv database, explores whether future AI workloads could be run on constellations of satellites equipped with specialized accelerators and powered primarily by solar energy.

In certain low Earth or sun-synchronous orbits, the argument goes, solar panels can operate for much of the time, avoiding many of the night-day cycles, atmospheric losses and grid constraints that limit terrestrial data centers. Heat, meanwhile, would be rejected into space via radiative cooling rather than relying on water-intensive cooling systems on Earth.

The push to look beyond Earth for AI infrastructure isn’t coming out of nowhere. Data centers already consume a non-trivial slice of the world’s power supply: recent estimates put global data-center electricity use at roughly 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, or about 1.5% of total global electricity consumption, with projections suggesting this could more than double by 2030 as AI workloads surge.

Utilities in the U.S. are already planning for data centers, driven largely by AI workloads, to account for between 6.7-12% of total electricity demand in some regions by 2028, prompting some executives to warn that there simply “isn’t enough energy on the grid” to support unchecked AI growth without significant new generation capacity.

In that context, proposals like space-based data centers start to read less like sci-fi indulgence and more like a symptom of an industry confronting the physical limits of Earth-bound energy and cooling. On paper, space-based data centers sound like an elegant solution. In practice, some experts are unconvinced.

Reaching for the stars

Joe Morgan, COO of data center infrastructure firm Patmos, is blunt about the near-term prospects. "What won’t happen in 2026 is the whole ‘data centers in space’ thing," he told Live Science. "One of the tech billionaires might actually get close to doing it, but aside from bragging rights, why?"

Morgan points out that the industry has repeatedly flirted with extreme cooling concepts, from mineral-oil immersion to subsea facilities, only to abandon them once operational realities bite. "There is still hype about building data centers under the ocean, but any thermal benefits are far outweighed by the problem of replacing components," he said, noting that hardware churn is fundamental to modern computing.

That churn is central to the skepticism around orbital AI. GPUs and specialized accelerators depreciate quickly as new architectures deliver step-change improvements every few years. On Earth, racks can be swapped, boards replaced and systems upgraded continuously. In orbit, every repair requires launches, docking or robotic servicing — none of which scale easily or cheaply.

"Who wants to take a spaceship to update the orbital infrastructure every year or two?" Morgan asks. "What if a vital component breaks? Actually, forget that, what about the latency?"

Latency is not a footnote. Most AI workloads depend on tightly coupled systems with extremely fast interconnects, both within data centers and between them. Google’s proposal leans heavily on laser-based inter-satellite links to mimic those connections, but the physics remains unforgiving. Even at low Earth orbit, round-trip latency to ground stations is unavoidable.

"Putting the servers in orbit is a stupid idea, unless your customers are also in orbit," Morgan said. But not everyone agrees it should be dismissed so quickly. Paul Kostek, a senior member of IEEE and systems engineer at Air Direct Solutions, said the interest reflects genuine physical pressures on terrestrial infrastructure.

"The interest in placing data centers in space has grown as the cost of building centers on earth keeps increasing," Kostek said. "There are several advantages to space-based or Moon-based centers. First, access to 24 hours a day of solar power… and second, the ability to cool the centers by radiating excess heat into space versus using water."

From a purely thermodynamic standpoint, those arguments are sound. Heat rejection is one of the hardest limits on computation, and Earth-based data centers are increasingly constrained by water availability, grid capacity and local environmental opposition.

The backlash against terrestrial AI infrastructure isn’t limited to energy and water issues; health fears are increasingly part of the narrative. In Memphis, residents near xAI’s massive Colossus data center have voiced concern about air quality and long-term respiratory impacts, with community members reporting worsened symptoms and fear of pollution-linked illnesses since the facility began operating. In other states, opponents of proposed hyperscale data center projects have framed their resistance around potential health and environmental harms, arguing that large facilities could degrade local air and water quality and exacerbate existing public health burdens.

Putting data centers into orbit would remove some constraints, but replace them with others.

Staying grounded

"The technology questions that need to be answered include: Can the current processors used in data centers on Earth survive in space?” Kostek said. "Will the processors be able to survive solar storms or exposure to higher radiation on the Moon?"

Google researchers have already begun probing some of those questions through early work on Project Suncatcher. The team describes radiation testing of its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and modeling of how tightly clustered satellite formations could support the high-bandwidth inter-satellite links needed for distributed computing. Even so, Kostek stresses that the work remains exploratory.

"Initial testing is being done to determine the viability of space-based data centers," he said. "While significant technical hurdles remain and implementation is still several years away, this approach could eventually offer an effective way to achieve expansion."

That word — expansion — may be the real clue. For some researchers, the most compelling rationale for off-world computing has little to do with serving Earth-based users at all. Christophe Bosquillon, co-chair of the Moon Village Association’s working group for Disruptive Technology & Lunar Governance, argues that space-based data centers make more sense as infrastructure for space itself.

"With humanity on track to soon establish a permanent lunar presence, an infrastructure backbone for a future data-driven lunar industry and the cis-lunar economy is warranted," he told Live Science.

From this perspective, space-based data centers aren’t substitutes for Earth’s infrastructure so much as tools for enabling space activity, handling everything from lunar sensor data to autonomous systems and navigation.

"Affordable energy is a key issue for all activities and will include a nuclear component next to solar power and arrays of fuel cells and batteries," Bosquillon said, adding that the challenges extend well beyond engineering to governance, law and international coordination.

Crucially, space-based computing could offload non-latency-sensitive workloads from Earth altogether. "Solving the energy problem in space and taking that burden off the Earth to process Earth-related non-latency-sensitive data… has merit," Bosquillon said, even extending to the idea of space and the Moon as a secure vault for "civilisational" data.

Seen this way, Google’s proposal looks less like a solution to today’s data center shortages and more like a probe into the long-term physics of computation. As AI approaches planetary-scale energy consumption, the question may not be whether Earth has enough capacity, but whether researchers can afford to ignore environments where energy is abundant but everything else is hard.

For now, space-based AI remains strictly experimental. Whether it ever escapes Earth’s gravity may depend less on solar panels and lasers than on how desperate the energy race becomes.

Go outside after dark this winter and look to the southeast, and you'll see some of the brightest stars in the night sky — Orion's Belt, Betelgeuse, Sirius, Aldabaran and Capella. Just above this melee is the quieter constellation Perseus, which lacks bright stars but hosts something extraordinary that the naked eye can't see — the explosive birth of new stars.

Lurking within the Perseus Molecular Cloud is NGC 1333, nicknamed the Embryo Nebula because it contains many young, hot stars that are teaching astronomers just what goes on when a star is born. NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula, meaning a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the intense light coming from newly forged stars, some of which appear to be regularly spewing jets of matter. It's one of the closest star-forming regions to our solar system. On Dec. 16. astronomers published the most detailed images ever of a jet launched by a newborn star, called SVS 13, which revealed a sequence of nested, ring-like structures. The finding is evidence that the star has been undergoing an outburst — releasing an immense amount of energy — for decades.

The discovery, which the researchers described in the journal Nature Astronomy, marks the first direct observational confirmation of a long-standing theoretical model of how young stars feed on, and then explosively expel, surrounding material.

The researchers captured the high-resolution, 3D view of a fast-moving jet emitted from one of SVS 13's young stars using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope array in Chile. Within the image, they identified more than 400 ultra-thin, bow-shaped molecular rings. Like tree rings that mark the passage of time, each ring marks the aftermath of an energetic outburst from the young star's early history. Remarkably, the youngest ring matches a bright outburst seen in the SVS 13 system in the early 1990s, allowing researchers to directly connect a specific burst of activity in a forming star with a change in the speed of its jet. It's thought that sudden bursts in jet activity are caused by large amounts of gas falling onto a young star.

"These images give us a completely new way of reading a young star's history," said study co-author Gary Fuller, a professor at the University of Manchester. "Each group of rings is effectively a time-stamp of a past eruption. It gives us an important new insight into how young stars grow and how their developing planetary systems are shaped."

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Stars form in molecular clouds — molecular clouds — regions that are cold, dense, rich in molecules and filled with dust. One enormous cloud responsible for forming half of the stars in the Milky Way's central region is the Sagittarius B2 (Sgr B2) molecular cloud, located a few hundred light-years from our central supermassive black hole.

Boasting a total mass between 3 million and 10 million times that of the sun and stretching 150 light-years across, it is one of the largest molecular clouds in the galaxy. It lies roughly 26,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius. It is also chemically rich, with several complex molecules discovered so far.

But this giant star-forming region is shrouded in a mystery: how it has managed to produce 50% of the stars in the region, despite containing just 10% of the galactic center's gas.

Astronomers observed this super-efficient stellar factory using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), in the hope of finding some clues about its unusual productivity. This spectacular image is the telescope's mid-infrared view, captured by JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

In the image, the clumps of dust and gas in the molecular complex glow in shades of pink, purple and red. These clumps are seen surrounded by dark areas. Dark does not mean that these regions are empty or emit nothing; instead, light in these areas is blocked by dense dust that the instrument cannot detect.

In star-forming regions like this one, warm dust and gas and only the brightest stars emit in the mid-infrared. This contrasts with the near-infrared image captured simultaneously by JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which reveals an abundance of stars because stars emit more strongly in the near-infrared light.

In this MIRI image, the clumps on the right that appear redder than the rest of the cloud complex correspond to one of the most chemically complex areas known, as revealed by previous observations using other telescopes. Astronomers think this unique region may hold clues to why Sgr B2 is more efficient at star formation than the rest of the galactic center.

Additionally, an in-depth analysis of the masses and ages of the stars in this stellar factory could reveal further insight into the star-forming mechanisms in the Milky Way's center.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Technically, the sun is a G-type main-sequence star — specifically, a G2V star. The "V" indicates that it is a dwarf, Tony Wong, a professor of astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science.

Dwarf stars got their name when Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung noticed that the reddest stars he observed were either much brighter or much fainter than the sun. He called the brighter ones "giants" and the dimmer ones "dwarfs," according to Michael Richmond, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. The sun is currently more similar in size and brightness to smaller, dimmer stars called red dwarfs than to giant stars, so the sun and its brethren also became classified as dwarf stars.

"G" is astronomer code for yellow — that is, stars of a temperature range of around 9,260 to 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit (5,125 to 5,725 degrees Celsius), Lucas Guliano, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Live Science.

Wong noted that G2 means it's somewhat hotter than a typical G-type star. "They range from G0 to G9 in order of decreasing temperature," he said. At its surface, the sun is about 9,980 F (5,525 C), Guliano added.

Calling the sun yellow is a bit of a misnomer, however, as the sun's visible output is greatest in the green wavelengths, Guliano explained. But the sun emits all visible colors, so "the actual color of sunlight is white," Wong said.

(On Earth, the sun appears yellow because of the way molecules in the atmosphere can scatter the different colors that make up the sun's white light, according to Stanford University's Solar Center. This is the same reason the sky appears blue.)

G-type stars also range from G0 to G9 in order of decreasing size, Guliano said. Wong explained that class G stars "range in size from somewhere around 90% the mass of the sun up to around 110% the mass of the sun."

The sun is what astronomers call a main-sequence star, a class that includes most stars. Nuclear reactions within these stars fuse hydrogen to become helium, unleashing extraordinary amounts of energy. Among the main-sequence stars, the color is determined by the star's mass.

"The sun is yellow, but less-massive main sequence stars are orange or red, and more massive main sequence stars are blue," Carles Badenes, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science.

The sun is slowly changing as it ages. "It has gotten about 10% larger since it started on the main sequence, and it will get much larger," Wong said. Even as it grows, however, the sun will still be considered a dwarf until its last stage of life.

In about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and begin to swell to become a red giant, leaving its dwarf days behind. "It will engulf the orbit of Venus, and maybe Earth as well," Badenes said, "and its surface temperature will get colder, making it red in color."

Sun quiz: How well do you know our home star?

The new study, published Dec. 10 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, may also help to explain the planets' puzzling magnetic fields.

Uranus and Neptune are relatively large planets at the edge of the solar system; Neptune is the most distant planet, orbiting at 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers) from the sun, on average. The extremely cold temperatures at these distances cause gases such as hydrogen, helium and water to condense into compressed ice slurries that form the planets' cores. As such, these planets have become known as ice giants.

"The ice giant classification is oversimplified as Uranus and Neptune are still poorly understood," lead study author Luca Morf, a doctoral student at the University of Zurich, said in a statement.

Far out planets

Morf and his supervisor, Ravit Helled, developed a new hybrid model in an attempt to better understand the interior of these cold planets. Models based on physics alone rely heavily on assumptions made by the modeler, while observational models can be too simplistic, Morf explained. "We combined both approaches to get interior models that are both unbiased and physically consistent," he said.

The pair started by considering how the density of each planet's core could vary with distance from the center of the planets and then adjusted the model to account for the planets' gravities. From this, they inferred the temperature and composition of the core and generated a new density profile. The team inputted the new density parameters back into the model and iterated this process until the model core fully matched current observational data.

This method generated eight total possible cores for both Uranus and Neptune, three of which had high rock-to-water ratios. This shows that the interiors of Uranus and Neptune are not limited to ice, as previously thought, the researchers said.

All of the modeled cores had convective regions where pure water exists in its ionic phase. This is where extreme temperatures and pressures cause water molecules to break apart into charged protons (H⁺) and hydroxide ions (OH^-). The team thinks such layers may be the source of the planets' multiple magnetic fields, which cause Uranus and Neptune to have more than two poles. The model also suggests that Uranus' magnetic field is generated closer to its center than Neptune's is.

"One of the main issues is that physicists still barely understand how materials behave under the exotic conditions of [high] pressure and temperature found at the heart of a planet [and] this could impact our results," Morf said. The team aims to improve their model by including other molecules, like methane and ammonia, which also may be found in the cores.

"Both Uranus and Neptune could be rock giants or ice giants depending on the model assumptions," Helled said. She noted that much of our understanding of these planets may be incomplete, as it's based largely on data collected by the Voyager 2 space probe in the 1980s.

"Current data is insufficient to distinguish the two, and we therefore need dedicated missions to Uranus and Neptune that can reveal their true nature," Helled added

The team hopes the model may act as an unbiased tool for any new data from future space missions to these planets.

December is the ideal time to start stargazing in the Northern Hemisphere. Yes, it’s cold, but the long nights allow you to start early and give you hours of darkness, while the northern winter sky is packed with bright, easy patterns. Orion dominates in the southeast, with Taurus above and Gemini following behind, while together they form the vast Winter Circle of bright stars. High above, Cassiopeia’s crooked W and the Great Square of Pegasus mark the route to the Andromeda galaxy and the rich Milky Way fields of Perseus and Auriga.

You don’t need any equipment to get started — just patience, warm clothes and a willingness to look up for more than a few seconds. However, a pair of the best binoculars for stargazing, one of the best telescopes, or a smart telescope adds depth. They turn faint smudges into clusters, clouds and galaxies, and give you a reason to keep coming back.

With a few winter constellations under your belt, the Universe stops being abstract and becomes somewhere you can actually learn your way around. Here are the easiest constellations for beginners to spot in the Northern Hemisphere’s winter night sky.

1. Orion, the Hunter

Hidden target: M42 (Orion Nebula)

On December and January evenings, Orion rises early and dominates the southern sky by mid-evening, making him the easiest winter landmark. Look southeast for three bright stars in a short, straight line — Orion’s Belt, made from the three equidistant stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka.

Above is reddish Betelgeuse, and below is blue-white Rigel. On the Rigel side of the belt stars, there's a fuzzy patch that appears brighter when viewed slightly to its side. This is Orion’s Sword; binoculars or a small telescope aimed at its middle will reveal the Orion Nebula (M42) as a glowing cloud lit by newborn stars.

2. Taurus, the Bull

Hidden target: M45 (Pleiades)

After dark, look east, above the constellation Orion, for orange Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus. It’s set in a V-shaped cluster — the Hyades open cluster — marking the Bull’s face. Below are its horns, stretching to the stars Elnath and Tianguan.

Above Taurus is a tiny misty patch that looks like a miniature dipper — the Pleiades, also known as the “Seven Sisters” and M45. One of the easiest star clusters to see with the naked eye, through binoculars the Pleiades appear as many skywatchers see them — the night sky’s most beautiful object.

3. Gemini, the Twins

Hidden target: M35 (open cluster)

Close to Taurus and Orion, find two bright stars standing side by side — Castor and Pollux, the heads of the Twins. In December 2025 and January 2026, they are easy to find because a very bright Jupiter shines close by. From them, fainter stars form stick-figure bodies.

Aim binoculars or a small telescope near the foot of the northern twin to uncover M35, a young open cluster of gravitationally bound stars that also has the name the Shoe Buckle Cluster, according to NASA.

4. Auriga, the Charioteer

Hidden targets: M36, M37, M38 (open clusters)

High in the northeast to overhead, bright Capella blazes like a lantern in the winter sky as soon as it gets dark. The “Goat Star” marks one corner of Auriga, a roughly pentagonal constellation whose constituent stars are easy to see even from a city.

Sweep the southern area below Capella with binoculars or a small telescope, and you’ll come across M36, M37 and M38: three bright, open clusters that turn an apparently empty sky into anything but.

5. Winter Triangle asterism

Hidden target: The colors of Sirius

Constellations are a great way to learn the night sky, but so are asterisms — easily recognizable patterns of stars. Look to the southeast after dark during winter for three bright stars — reddish Betelgeuse in Orion, Procyon in Canis Minor and dazzlingly bright Sirius in Canis Major. Together, they form the large Winter Triangle.

Point binoculars or a small telescope at Sirius, and you’ll notice it flashes in a rainbow of colors. Why? It's so very bright and so very close — just 8.6 light-years distant — that its intense starlight gets twisted by turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere, which bends starlight and makes stars twinkle. Sirius is the ultimate example.

6. Winter Hexagon

Hidden target: Jupiter

Step back and join the dazzling stars of the southern sky — Rigel in Orion, Aldebaran in Taurus, Capella in Auriga, Pollux in Gemini, Procyon in Canis Minor and Sirius in Canis Major. Together they form the huge Winter Hexagon (or Winter Circle). It’s a vast shape that takes a while to find, so take your time and repeat your star-hops again and again until you’ve memorized it. It will stay with you forever and make you look forward to winter.

As a bonus this winter, put a pair of binoculars on bright Jupiter, shining brightly near Pollux in Gemini, to see four points of light — its giant moons Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io.

7. Cassiopeia, the Queen

Hidden target: M31 (Andromeda Galaxy)

Look high in the north for a crooked “W” or “M” of five stars — the constellation Cassiopeia. It circles the North Star all night — more or less opposite the Big Dipper — and stays prominent through winter, making it a handy signpost from any site.

From the central V of the W, sweep outward toward the south with binoculars or a small telescope to find M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. This spiral galaxy, 2.5 million light-years distant, appears as a soft, elongated glow, though the darker the site you stargaze from, the brighter it will look.

8. Ursa Major, the Great Bear

Hidden target: Mizar and Alcor (double star)

In late December evenings, the Big Dipper portion of Ursa Major sits low in the north-northeast, climbing higher after midnight. Look for a bright saucepan shape — three stars in the handle and four in the bowl. Mizar, the middle star in the handle, looks slightly fuzzy to the naked eye.

If you have great eyesight, you may even notice that there are actually two stars. To check that your eyes don’t deceive you, aim any pair of binoculars or a small telescope and you’ll split Mizar and Alcor cleanly into two distinct points of light. Called the “Horse and Rider” by stargazers, splitting Mizar and Alcor with the naked eye was a test of eyesight used by the ancient Arabs, according to Space.com.

9. Great Square of Pegasus

Hidden target: Saturn

On early winter evenings, look west for a large, almost empty square of four medium-bright stars — Markab, Scheat, Algenib and Alpheratz — which form the vast Great Square of Pegasus. It’s sinking by late December, but still visible in the first half of the night.

In December 2025 and January 2026, it’s above something else that’s worth your attention — Saturn. Its pale golden light isn't much to look at with the naked eye, but its fabulous rings can be seen with a small 3-inch telescope at 50x magnification.

10. Perseus, the Hero

Hidden target: Double Cluster (NGC 869 and NGC 884)

Look between Cassiopeia in the north and Capella in the northeast for a ragged, curved chain of stars — the constellation Perseus. It runs through the pale band of the winter Milky Way at this time of year and contains many riches.

One of these is the Double Cluster, NGC 869 and NGC 884, a faint, fuzzy patch halfway between Perseus and Cassiopeia that’s just about visible to the naked eye in a very dark sky. These two overlapping swarms of stars look terrific in binoculars or a small telescope.

On a cloudy winter's day, in the Amazon jungle, a shuttle blasted off into space — and changed our view of the universe forever.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) left Earth aboard an Ariane 5 rocket at 25,000 mph (40,000 km/h) "from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself," according to a live broadcast from NASA.

About a month later, it reached its orbiting parking place in space, a gravitationally-stable Lagrange point 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, in perfect equilibrium between Earth and the sun's gravity. The telescope would beam back its first, spectacular pictures in July 2022. And the firehose of data it has sent back since has transformed our understanding of the cosmos.

JWST has been so pivotal in part because it can peer back to the "cosmic dawn," a period a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars were winking on.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has proven itself capable of seeing 98% of the way back to the Big Bang," Peter Jakobsen, an affiliate professor of astrophysics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, previously told Live Science in an email.

Yet Webb, which was first conceived at Lockheed Martin in the late 1990s, almost didn't launch at all. The now-iconic, $10 billion project was catastrophically over budget, plagued by years' worth of delays and snarled by "stupid mistakes."

That was in part because, when it launched, it was by far the most complex telescope ever built.

It took more than 20,000 engineers and hundreds of scientists to design, build and launch the eye in the sky. That 21.3 feet (6.5 meter) mirror had to be folded into a honeycomb shape to be lofted on a rocket, then unfolded once in space. Yet despite being foldable, it also had to be so smooth that if it were as big as a continent, "it would feature no hill or valley greater than ankle height," according to Quanta Magazine.

To see the earliest epochs of cosmic history, Webb needed infrared vision. That's because ancient light has been stretched, or red-shifted, into infrared wavelengths as it travels across space-time. On Earth, humans and every other living thing give off heat in the form of infrared radiation, and that would drown out the faint infrared signals from the most distant, ancient starlight. So JWST needed to be lofted into the cold dark of outer space to use its infrared instruments.

Once JWST started imaging the cosmos, it promptly began breaking our existing models of the universe. It rapidly confirmed the Hubble tension — the discrepancy between the universe's expansion rates depending on where and what astronomers measure. It has found hints of potentially life-sustaining atmospheres shrouding distant exoplanets. And it has spotted shockingly bright galaxies and seemingly "impossible" black holes at the dawn of time. All these clues are pointing to new understandings of the universe.

Some of the questions JWST is raising, such as whether other planets harbor life, it will probably not be able to answer in its planned 10-year lifespan. But future telescopes — such as the currently operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, meant to create a real-time "movie of the universe"; the recently completed Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, set to launch in 2027 and resolve questions about dark matter and energy; the Extremely Large Telescope, set to turn on in 2029; or the recently announced Habitable Worlds Observatory, which may come online in the 2030s — could start to answer the questions that Webb is raising.

The Jupiter-size world, detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), doesn't have the familiar helium-hydrogen combination we are used to in atmospheres from our solar system, nor other common molecules, like water, methane or carbon dioxide.

Rather, the planet seems to have soot clouds near the top of the atmosphere that condense into diamonds deeper in the atmosphere. This kind of overall atmosphere, which is made of helium and carbon, has never been spotted on another planet. What's even weirder is that its host star is not even a normal star.

"This was an absolute surprise," study co-author Peter Gao, a staff scientist at the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory, said in a statement. "I remember after we got the data down, our collective reaction was, 'What the heck is this?' It's extremely different from what we expected."

Neutron sun

Researchers probed the bizarre environment of the planet, known as PSR J2322-2650b, in a paper published Tuesday (Dec. 16) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Although the planet was detected by a radio telescope survey in 2017, it took the sharper vision of JWST (which launched in 2021) to examine PSR J2322-2650b's environment from 750 light-years away.

PSR J2322-2650b orbits a pulsar. Pulsars are fast-spinning neutron stars — the ultradense cores of stars that have exploded as supernovas — that emit radiation in brief, regular pulses that are visible only when their lighthouse-like beams of electromagnetic radiation aim squarely at Earth. (That's bizarre on its own, as no other pulsar is known to have a gas-giant planet, and few pulsars have planets at all, the science team stated.)

The infrared instruments on JWST can't actually see this particular pulsar because it is sending out high-energy gamma-rays. However, JWST's "blindness" to the pulsar is actually a boon to scientists because they can easily probe the companion planet, PSR J2322-2650b, to see what the planet's environment is like.

"This system is unique because we are able to view the planet illuminated by its host star, but not see the host star at all," co-author Maya Beleznay, a doctoral candidate in physics at Stanford University, said in the statement. "We can study this system in more detail than normal exoplanets."

Formation mystery

PSR J2322-2650b's origin story is an enigma. It is only a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from its star — nearly 100 times closer than Earth is to the sun. That's even stranger when you consider that the gas giant planets of our solar system are much farther out — Jupiter is 484 million miles (778 million km) from the sun, for example.

The planet whips around its star in only 7.8 hours, and it's shaped like a lemon because the gravitational forces of the pulsar are pulling extremely strongly on the planet. At first glance, it appears PSR J2322-2650b could have a similar formation scenario as "black widow" systems, where a sunlike star is next to a small pulsar.

In black-widow systems, the pulsar "consumes" or erodes the nearby star, much like the myth of the black widow spider’s feasting behavior after which the phenomena is named. That happens because the star is so close to the pulsar that its material falls onto the pulsar. The extra stellar material causes the pulsar to gradually spin faster and to generate a strong "wind" of radiation that erodes the nearby star.

But lead author Michael Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow in exoplanet atmospheres at the University of Chicago, said this pathway made it difficult to understand how PSR J2322-2650b came to be. In fact, the planet's formation appears to be unexplainable at this point.

"Did this thing form like a normal planet? No, because the composition is entirely different," Zhang said in the statement. "It's very hard to imagine how you get this extremely carbon-enriched composition. It seems to rule out every known formation mechanism."

Diamonds in the air

Scientists still can't explain how the soot or diamonds are present in the exoplanet's atmosphere. Usually, molecular carbon doesn't appear in planets that are very close to their stars, due to the extreme heat.

One possibility for what happened comes from study co-author Roger Romani, a professor of physics at Stanford University and the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. After the planet cooled down from its formation, he suggested, carbon and oxygen in its interior crystallized.

But even that doesn't account for all of the odd properties. "Pure carbon crystals float to the top and get mixed into the helium … but then something has to happen to keep the oxygen and nitrogen away," Romani explained in the same statement. "And that's where the mystery [comes] in."

Scientists hope to continue studying PSR J2322-2650b. "It's nice to not know everything," Romani said. "I'm looking forward to learning more about the weirdness of this atmosphere. It's great to have a puzzle to go after."

Most massive stars reach the ends of their lives by collapsing and exploding as supernovas, seeding the cosmos with elements such as carbon and iron. A different kind of cataclysm, known as a kilonova, occurs when the ultradense remnants of dead stars, called neutron stars, collide, forging even heavier elements like gold.

The newly identified event, named AT2025ulz, appears to combine these two types of cosmic explosions in a way that scientists have long hypothesized but never before observed.

If confirmed, it could represent the first example of a "superkilonova," a rare hybrid blast in which a single object produces two distinct but equally dramatic explosions.

"We do not know with certainty that we found a superkilonova, but the event nevertheless is eye opening," study lead author Mansi Kasliwal, a professor of astronomy at Caltech, said in a statement.

The findings are detailed in a study published Dec. 15 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A two-in-one combo

AT2025ulz first caught astronomers' attention on Aug. 18, 2025, when gravitational wave detectors operated by the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its European partner, Virgo, registered a subtle signal consistent with the merger of two compact objects.

Soon after, the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California spotted a rapidly fading red point of light in the same region of the sky, according to the statement. The event's behavior closely resembled that of GW170817 — the only confirmed kilonova, which was observed in 2017 — with its red glow consistent with freshly forged heavy elements such as gold and platinum.

Instead of fading as astronomers typically expect, AT2025ulz began to brighten again, the study reported. Follow-up observations from a dozen observatories around the world, including Hawaii's Keck Observatory, showed the light shifting toward bluer wavelengths and revealing fingerprints of hydrogen, a hallmark of a supernova rather than a kilonova.

That data helped researchers confirm the presence of hydrogen and helium, indicating that the massive star had shed most of its hydrogen-rich outer layers before detonating, the paper noted.

To explain the baffling sequence, the team proposed that a massive, rapidly spinning star collapsed and exploded as a supernova. But instead of forming a single neutron star, its core split into two smaller neutron stars. Those newborn remnants then spiraled together and collided within hours, triggering a kilonova inside of the expanding debris of the supernova.

The combined effect is a hybrid explosion in which the supernova initially masks the kilonova's signature, accounting for the unusual observations, the researchers wrote in the paper.

Clues from the gravitational-wave data bolster this idea. While the signal cannot precisely determine the individual masses of the two merging neutron stars, it does rule out scenarios in which both were heavier than the sun, the new paper noted.

The researchers find a 99% chance that at least one of the objects was less massive than the sun— an outcome that challenges conventional stellar physics, which predicts neutron stars should not weigh less than about 1.2 solar masses. Such lightweight neutron stars can form only when a very rapidly spinning star collapses, matching the scenario proposed for AT2025ulz, according to the statement.

However, the study noted that the complexity of the overlapping signals makes it difficult to rule out the possibility that the signals came from unrelated events that happened to occur close together. Ultimately, the only way to test the theory will be to find more such events using next-generation sky surveys such as those from Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the researchers said.

"If superkilonovae are real, we'll eventually see more of them," study co-author Antonella Palmese, an assistant professor of astrophysics and cosmology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, said in a different statement. "And if we keep finding associations like this, then maybe this was the first."

Naked-eye stargazing in winter is a joy, but lift a pair of binoculars to your eyes and the whole experience changes. The sky stops being a flat backdrop and suddenly has depth. It’s layered with stars, open clusters and nebulas that you never knew were there. Galactic immersion is yours.

That’s the magic of binocular astronomy. Sweeping the sky with both eyes open, holding a pair of binoculars up to the night sky, feels natural and relaxed, yet you’re seeing so much more than with the unaided eye. It’s also easy and affordable to do — all you need is a warm coat, a dark corner and a steady pair of hands.

Choose a good pair of the best stargazing binoculars — something like 7x50, 8x42 or 10x50 — and you’ll unlock a second layer of the winter night sky with almost no effort. Here’s what to look at in a pair of binoculars from the Northern Hemisphere this season.

If you want to get even closer to the night sky, the best telescopes will give you that extra bit of power.

1. Sirius, the kaleidoscope star

It's the brightest star in the night sky, but Sirius in the constellation Canis Major also appears to be one of the most colorful. Although it’s a blue-white star, Sirius shows a rainbow of colors as it twinkles.

Its high brightness and the fact that it is low in the sky during the Northern Hemisphere winter make Sirius shimmer in multiple colors as its starlight is refracted by Earth’s atmosphere. Put your binoculars on Sirius and you will see a kaleidoscope of colors.

2. Jupiter at opposition

The best time to look at an outer planet is when it is at opposition. At that moment, the Earth is between the planet and the sun, making the planet both closest to Earth and fully illuminated by the sun.

On Jan. 10, 2026, Jupiter will come to opposition, something that happens once every 13 months. For a few weeks either side of this date, put a pair of 8x42, 10x42 or 10x50 binoculars on Jupiter and you will see its four Galilean moons — Europa, Callisto, Ganymede and Io — as dots either side of the giant planet.

3. First quarter moon

Ask someone when the best time to look at the moon is, and they will almost always say when it's a full moon — but that’s bad advice. Through binoculars, the moon looks better at almost any other time of month, with perhaps the most intriguing (and convenient) coming at first quarter moon, when dramatic shadows can be seen along the terminator — the line between lunar night and day.

Use any pair of 10x binoculars and you'll get a spectacular close-up of shadows cast by the craters, valleys and mountains on the moon. As a bonus, a first-quarter moon is up from dusk until midnight.

4. The Owl Cluster

A particularly bright open star cluster in the constellation Cassiopeia, the Owl Cluster (or NGC 457 , if you prefer) is over 9,000 light-years from the solar system and contains almost 100 stars.

Its name comes from its yellow and blue stars, which are said to resemble the eyes of an owl. If you see Cassiopeia as a ‘W’ shape, NGC 457 is just beneath the first ‘V’.

5. A supermoon rising

As we've already said, the full moon phase is not the best time to look at the moon through binoculars — with one very specific exception.

If you can catch the full moon as it rises in the east during dusk, there are a few better sights than the lunar surface cast in an orange light. It looks that way because the sunlight being reflected into your eyes is traveling through the thickest part of Earth's atmosphere, which scatters away short-wavelength blue light, while the longer wavelengths of red and orange light pass through easily.

See the full moon rise on Dec. 4 (Cold Supermoon), Jan. 3 (Wolf Supermoon) and Feb. 1 (Snow Moon), researching the exact time of moonrise for your location and looking east a few minutes after.

6. Auriga’s star clusters

The constellation of Auriga dominates the autumn and winter sky, but tends to get overshadowed by the rising stars in the constellation Orion below. Auriga’s brightest star is Capella, the goat star — the brightest in a rough pentagon of five stars.

However, within the constellation, there are some deep sky delights in the form of three star clusters — M36, M37 and M38. Find M36, and all three will be in the field of view of a pair of most 10x50 binoculars.

7. Winter Milky Way

Stargazers and astrophotographers rave about capturing the Milky Way during the Northern Hemisphere summer months, but the dense star fields of our galaxy's spiral arms can easily be seen in winter. All you need to do is scan your binoculars between the constellations of Orion in the south and Cassiopeia high in the north, and you will see many thousands of bright stars.

Looking its best between December and February, it's not as bright as the summer Milky Way, but the crisp and cold nights can give it a gorgeous, glittering look.

8. Caroline’s Rose

In the constellation Cassiopeia there is an open cluster, NGC 7789, whose stars and the dark lanes between them are said to resemble a rose. A great target for binoculars, the name comes from its discoverer in 1783, Caroline Herschel — a noted comet-hunter and the younger sister of astronomer William Herschel, who discovered Uranus.

If you see Cassiopeia as a ‘W’ shape, NGC 7789 is close to the final point, marked by the star Caph.

9. Earthshine on the moon

It is one of the easiest and most spectacular sights of all to see through a pair of binoculars, but Earthshine doesn't get the attention it deserves. When the moon is a slim crescent, put your binoculars on the night side of the moon, and you will see detail on the lunar surface. This is Earthshine, sunlight reflected from Earth's icecaps, oceans and clouds, gently illuminating the dark side of the moon.

You'll see it for two or three nights, either side of the new moon phase, initially during a waning crescent moon visible in the east just before dawn, and later during a waxing crescent moon in the west just after dusk. New moons occur on Dec. 19, 2025, and Jan. 18, 2026.

According to NASA, MRO has just taken its 100,000th photo of the Martian surface using its HiRISE camera. Put another way, that's an average of 5,000 photos a year, 417 photos a month, or about 14 a day every day since March 2006.

The new milestone image, snapped on Oct. 7, shows a shadowy wasteland of mesas, craters and dunes known as Syrtis Major. This region is just southeast of Jezero Crater, the ancient lakebed where NASA's Perseverance rover is hunting for evidence of life, and appears as an enormous dark spot when seen from afar by space telescopes like Hubble.

MRO has observed the region many times before, and has previously turned up evidence that the sand dunes there are slowly migrating across the planet's surface.

"HiRISE hasn't just discovered how different the Martian surface is from Earth, it's also shown us how that surface changes over time," Leslie Tamppari MRO's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "We've seen dune fields marching along with the wind and avalanches careening down steep slopes."

Studying how the Red Planet changes over time will help demystify the forces that govern it, and help reveal whether it was ever a lush waterworld like Earth. Launched from Florida on Aug. 12, 2005, and inserted into Mars orbit on March 10, 2006, the MRO will continue its mission to photograph the planet as long as it's able.

Occasionally, MRO does take a break from its primary mission to gaze off into space. In October, the satellite looked skyward to snap a shot of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed about 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) from the spacecraft — significantly closer that the comet got to Earth at its closest point on Dec. 19.

While MRO wasn't designed to observe small, fast-moving objects at such great distances, it nevertheless provided early confirmation that 3I/ATLAS showed the telltale characteristics of a natural comet, including a small nucleus enshrouded in a bright coma of gas and dust.

This year, we covered a range of stunning space images, from an eye-catching alien comet and a planetary parade portrait to the first Vera C. Rubin photos and otherworldly animal lookalikes. Here are 10 of our absolute favorites.

Alien visitor transforms into a "cosmic rainbow"

The biggest space news story this year was undoubtedly the arrival of the third-ever interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which has dominated headlines and astronomers' attention ever since it was first spotted speeding through the solar system in early July. As a result, there has been no shortage of stunning shots of the alien comet.

Our favorite is this timelapse image captured by the Gemini North telescope on the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. The image was created by combining 16 different photos using multiple colored filters to create a giant cosmic rainbow.

Read more: Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS transforms into a giant 'cosmic rainbow' in trippy new telescope image

"The Fall of Icarus"

One of the most unbelievable photos of 2025 was this solar spectacle, dubbed The Fall of Icarus, which perfectly captured the moment a skydiver fell directly in front of the sun.

Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured this shot in early November, at a distance of around 8,000 feet (2,440 meters) from the skydiver, YouTuber Gabriel C. Brown. It took six attempts to properly line up Brown with the solar surface before the thrill-seeker leapt from a small propeller-powered craft at an altitude of around 3,500 feet (1,070 m).

"It was a narrow field of view, so it took several attempts to line up the shot," McCarthy told Live Science. "Capturing the sun is something I'm quite familiar with, but this added new challenges."

Read more: Astrophotographer snaps 'absolutely preposterous' photo of skydiver 'falling' past the sun's surface

Vera C. Rubin's stream of stars

In June, the most powerful digital camera on Earth winked on. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile's Atacama desert revealed its first-ever images in June. These debut photos were chock-full of cosmic treasures, including the spiral galaxy M61 (shown here), which researchers noticed was being trailed by a massive stellar tail around the same size as the Milky Way.

We can look forward to many more spellbinding shots from Rubin in the coming years as it begins its decade-long survey of the night sky.

Read more: First Vera Rubin Observatory image reveals hidden structure as long as the Milky Way trailing behind a nearby galaxy

Perfect planetary parade portrait

In late January and early February, up to six of the solar system's planets were simultaneously visible in the night sky in what astronomers refer to as a "planetary parade." This particular parade was one of the best in recent years, allowing astrophotographers to snap several stunning pics of the event.

Our favorite pick of the bunch is this planetary portrait from French astrophotographer Gwenaël Blanck, which he digitally edited to show each planet alongside the sun in the order of distance from Earth. Blanck snapped each of the individual worlds within 80 minutes of one another.

Read more: Parisian photographer produces phenomenal, perfectly-proportioned 'planetary parade' portrait

Giant "diamond ring" shines in X-ray

All that glitters is not gold, and in this scintillating starscape, released in November, it is high-energy X-rays that sparkle like a giant ring.

This object, dubbed a "diamond ring," is an expanding bubble of gas in a star-forming region of the Cygnus constellation. The glowing bubble is around 20 light-years across and is around 400,000 years old. It was photographed by NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which previously scanned the night sky from a telescope onboard a Boeing 747SP aircraft, at an altitude of more than 45,000 feet (13,700 m).

The cosmic ring is not to be confused with Einstein rings, which are rings of light created by gravitational lensing.

Read more: Giant 'diamond ring' sparkles 4,500 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation

A cosmic butterfly spreads its wings

JWST has, yet again, captured some stunning photos in 2025, including the fiery Cigar Galaxy, a tantruming stellar toddler and a "starlit mountaintop" nebula. However, our favorite is this striking portrait of the "Butterfly Star," IRAS 04302+2247.

The insect imposter's shining wings are made from a mini nebula of stellar material leftover from a supernova. This nebula is bisected by a protoplanetary disk that surrounds the baby star like a cosmic cocoon, and just happens to be aligned with Earth so that the two halves of the nebula are seen from side-on. It is located around 525 light-years away, in a star-forming region, known as the Taurus Molecular Cloud.

Read more: James Webb telescope finds a warped 'Butterfly Star' shedding its chrysalis

Arsia Mons rises

Speaking of Mars, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter also captured this stunning shot of a giant dead volcano peeking above the clouds on the Red Planet, as eerie green lights dance above the Martian horizon.

The mountain in the image is Arsia Mons, which stands at more than 12 miles (19 kilometers) above the surface of the previously volcanic Tharsis plateau. The extinct volcano is more than twice as tall as Mount Everest, but around 4 miles (6 km) shorter than Mars' tallest peak, Olympus Mons.

The green lights look like auroras. But they are actually just an effect of the image being partially captured using infrared light, which emanates from the planet's wispy atmosphere.

Read more: NASA spots Martian volcano twice the height of Mount Everest bursting through the morning clouds

Seen by the "Eye of Sauron"

There is no escaping the dark lord of Mordor's malevolent gaze, even from halfway across the universe. That's the impression given by this photo, dubbed the "Eye of Sauron," which playfully references J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings."

The "eye" is actually the magnetic field of a supercharged energy jet being shot into space by a quasar — a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. This quasar, dubbed PKS 1424+240, is billions of light-years from Earth and has one of its jets pointed almost directly at our planet, allowing researchers to peer directly through its "jet cone" and map out the magnetic swirls within.

Read more: Giant, cosmic 'Eye of Sauron' snapped staring directly at us in stunning 15-year time-lapse photo

New "heavenly" pillars emerge

This ethereal image shows a set of stellar structures reminiscent of the famous "Pillars of Creation," first seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. The structure is named Ua 'Ōhi'a Lani, which means the "heavenly rains" in Hawaiin, and this image of it was taken by the Gemini North telescope.

What you are seeing is two distinct regions: the twinkling blue stars of a star cluster, named NGC 6823, overlapping the veil of red gas that comprises a more distant emission nebula, dubbed NGC 6820. The ethereal pillars are made from additional gas and dust that have been sculpted by the foreground stars' intense radiation.

The original pillars of creation were also recently given a glow-up by JWST, which captured the iconic cosmic structures using infrared light.

Read more: 'Heavenly rains': Ethereal structure in the sky rivals 'Pillars of Creation'

Astronaut snaps a giant "jellyfish" over Earth

As incredible as it is to point our cameras out into the universe, space also provides a unique angle of our own planet. And that's exactly the case in our final photo, which shows off a giant, electrifying "jellyfish" hovering above Earth.

The luminous branching structure was snapped by NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers in July, while onboard the ISS. It shows a type of transient luminous event that researchers commonly call sprites. In this case, the red jellyfish-like sprite formed at the summit of a rare upward-shooting "gigantic jet" of lightning, up to 50 miles (80 km) above the U.S.-Mexico border.

If you liked this photo, then be sure to check out Live Science's weekly Earth from space series for more incredible images of our planet from above.

Read more: Astronaut snaps giant red 'jellyfish' sprite over North America during upward-shooting lightning event

Want to see more amazing images of the cosmos?Be sure to check out Live Science's Space Photo of the Week series, or peep our favorite space shots from 2024 or this gallery of stunning James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images.

A stark new portrait of two colliding spiral galaxies combines different kinds of light to evoke the colors, shapes and moods of autumn. The image, which shows the galaxies NGC 2207 (lower right) and IC 2163 (upper left), was created by combining infrared light captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with X-ray light from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are locked in a slow gravitational merge that, by chance, is seen face-on from the solar system. The larger galaxy, NGC 2207, dominates the field, while the smaller IC 2163 overlaps its outer regions. The gravitational pull of each galaxy distorts the other's spiral arms, stretching out streams of stars and gas and compressing gas and dust in ways that can ignite new stars. The result is an intricate web of chaos.

One of JWST's core tasks, according to NASA, is to provide scientists with a clear view of the centers of merging galaxies and thereby inform a new generation of models that will describe how galaxies interact and merge. NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are the perfect targets.

In the image, JWST's midinfrared data appear in white, gray and red, primarily showing the dust and cooler material within the galaxies' cores and spiral arms. Chandra's X-ray data are shown in blue, highlighting high-energy regions of the two galaxies — binary stars, the remnants of dead stars, and regions where supernovas have occurred.

The spectacular layered image of NGC 2207 and IC 2163 is one of four Chandra-based composites that were published at the same time. The other three include NGC 6334, a star-forming region known for its arcs of glowing gas and dust; supernova remnant G272.2-0.3, where hot X-ray-emitting gas fills an expanding shell; and a star system called R Aquarii, where a white dwarf star sucks material from a red giant star.

Each image merges Chandra's view of the high-energy universe with data from JWST (launched in 2021), the Hubble Space Telescope (launched in 1990) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (active between 2003 and 2020), as well as from ground-based telescopes.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

"The planet is about 100 times brighter than a first magnitude star," Anthony Mallama, a researcher at the IAU's Centre for Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky, told Live Science in an email. First magnitude stars are the brightest stars visible in the night sky. For example, when looking at average brightness, the first magnitude star Sirius is at -1.47, and Venus is at -4.14 (on the scale astronomers use, dimmer objects have a more positive magnitude).

But what makes Venus super-bright? Astronomical research suggests several factors can change how luminous Venus appears from Earth.

Reflective cloud cover

Venus' shininess is largely due to the planet's high albedo, or the amount of light reflected off its surface. Venus has an albedo of 0.76, meaning it scatters about 76% of the sunlight it receives back into space, according to Sanjay Limaye, a distinguished scientist in the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In contrast, a perfect mirror would bounce off 100%, Earth bounces 30% and the moon has a low albedo, reflecting just 7% of the light that hits it.

Venus' high albedo arises from a thick, all-swaddling cloak of clouds. Extending from 30 miles to 43.5 miles (48 to 70 kilometers) above the Venusian surface, these decks of clouds are cushioned between haze layers, and are mostly suspended droplets of sulfuric acid, according to a 2018 review of data from 1970s and 1980s space missions to Venus. Limaye noted that such droplets are tiny, mostly about the size of a bacterium. Together, the droplets and haze layers scatter sunlight extremely efficiently.

But Venus isn't the solar system's shiniest object. Saturn's ice-covered moon Enceladus has a high albedo of around 0.8, a 2010 study noted. From Earth, though, this cosmic object appears much dimmer than Venus. That's because it's much farther from the sun. While Earth's "morning star" is 67 million miles (108 million km) from the sun, Enceladus is at least 13 times as distant. The inverse square law shows that Venus consequently receives 176 times more intense light compared to Enceladus, giving it a significant edge.

Distance from Earth

Being close to Earth also influences Venus' brightness. The average Venus-Earth distance is 105.6 million miles (170 million km). Sometimes, Mercury is the closest planet to Earth at an average distance of 96.6 million miles (155.5 million km), but Venus' larger size (of 7,521 miles (12,104 km) compared to Mercury causes it to look brighter.

But Venus' distance from our planet — and consequently, its apparent luminosity — aren't fixed. At its closest, when Venus lies directly between Earth and the sun, it's a mere 24 million miles (about 38 million km) away, according to NASA. Yet at this point — called the inferior conjunction — it's actually extremely dim, according to the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

This arises because the inner planets show moon-like phases when viewed from Earth, Limaye said. At inferior conjunction, Venus' illuminated surface is completely invisible from Earth. In contrast, most of Venus' illuminated surface can be seen only when Earth and Venus are on opposite sides of the sun, a position called the superior conjunction. At this point, though, Venus is at its smallest and is very dim because it is extremely far from Earth.

A rainbow-like phenomenon

Venus is at its brightest when only a crescent-like sliver of its sunlit surface can be seen. Termed the point of greatest brilliancy, this typically occurs a month before and after the inferior conjunction. A 2006 study co-authored by Mallama suggested that, at this phase, Venus' suspended sulfuric acid droplets scatter sunlight toward Earth. "This phenomenon is called a glory and it is in the same family of optical effects that includes rainbows," Mallama explained.

Together, variations in the albedo, its distance from the Earth and sun, and its phases seen from Earth can all cause the brightness of Venus to swing from -4.92 to -2.98, according to a 2018 study. However this is still luminous enough to make Venus viewable most of the year, even from urban areas.

Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood?

Over the past two decades, astronomers witnessed two separate catastrophic collisions around the star Fomalhaut, located just 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. The detections occurred after planetesimals (rocky pieces of unformed planets) measuring much larger than the dinosaur-killing asteroid smashed each other into massive clouds of glittering debris.

The Fomalhaut system is no stranger to such crashes. It's famously known as the "Eye of Sauron" due to its resemblance to the fiery, all-seeing eye from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of The Rings franchise. The likeness comes from the spectacular dust belt that surrounds Fomalhaut at a distance of 133 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being equal to 93 million miles (150 million km) — the average distance between the sun and Earth.

Formed from countless rocky, icy collisions, this belt of dust and debris provides a dustier analog of our early solar system as it appeared more than 4 billion years ago, the team said — offering a glimpse of our neighborhood's chaotic infancy, when planets were being created, destroyed, and reassembled.

False planet syndrome

A new study, conducted by an international team of researchers and led by Paul Kalas, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, described these two collision events in destructive detail to help solve a planetary mystery.

In the early 2000s, astronomers observing the Fomalhaut system spotted a large, luminous object that many assumed to be a dust-covered exoplanet reflecting light. They designated this exoplanet candidate Fomalhaut b.

Yet when this supposed planet blinked out of existence and another bright point of light appeared nearby, all in the span of approximately 20 years, researchers realized they weren't viewing planets, but the shining debris clouds formed by what they call a "cosmic fender bender."

Fomalhaut forensics: a history of catastrophic crashes

The two collision events, now known as Fomalhaut cs1 and Fomalhaut cs2, appear to be incredibly serendipitous. Theory suggests that collisions of this size should only happen once every 100,000 years or so, but the Fomalhaut system surprised scientists with two such smash-ups in just 20 years.

Indeed, based on this timeline, the study infers that 22 million similar events may have occurred during the Fomalhaut system's relatively young, 440-million-year-old life so far. Even if one could rewind only the past 3,000 years or so, "Fomalhaut's planetary system would be sparkling with these collisions," Kalas explained in a statement.

Reverse engineering the collisions based on factors like the mass of the debris clouds and the size of the dust grains suggests that Fomalhaut cs1 and cs2 were the result of colliding planetesimals around 37 miles (60 km) in diameter, or around four to six times the size of the asteroid that devastated the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

It's an alien event with a relatable twist: "These larger bodies are like the larger bodies that comprise our own asteroid and Kuiper belts," study co-author Jason Wang, an astronomer at Northwestern University, told Live Science via email.

And there are a lot of these bodies. Based on their reconstruction of the event, the researchers suggest that the Fomalhaut system may host 1.8 Earth masses of these primordial planetesimals. This may amount to about 300 million such bodies, according to a separate statement.

Furthermore, the system holds another 1.8 Earth masses in smaller bodies measuring less than 0.186 miles (0.3 kilometers) across. These relative runts constantly replenish the tiny dust grains, many just a few 10,000ths of an inch in size, that swirl and shimmer in Fomalhaut's dust belt. Without this rocky reservoir, the dust belt would disappear as its grains are blown out of the system by stellar wind or engulfed by its star.

The planet that never was, still may be

Even though Fomalhaut b no longer exists — as a planet, at least — this "planet that never was" may actually still be hiding within the system.

Researchers calculated that, given the specific conditions, there's about a 10% chance that Fomalhaut cs1 and cs2 are not random collisions. Their similar timing and location may point to a hidden influence, such as the ghostly gravitational pull of an unseen exoplanet.

"For example, something — like planets — should be responsible for carving out the planetesimals into a dust belt that we see," Wang told LiveScience. "Additionally, we speculate that the proximity in location of the cs1 and cs2 impact sites may be driven by a planet that preferentially causes planetesimals to collide there."

Playing planetary peek-a-boo

This exoplanetary confusion highlights an important consideration for planet-hunters, and for next-generation facilities like NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory that are designed to directly image habitable-zone exoplanets in the nearby universe: "Fomalhaut cs2 looks exactly like an extrasolar planet reflecting starlight," explained Kalas.

As a result, this unique study not only informs our ideas about planetary formation, such as collision rates and debris belt mechanics, but can also help astronomers more precisely identify planetary bodies from among all the other shining celestial objects with which the universe continually dazzles us.

Since its discovery in early July, 3I/ATLAS has been studied more enthusiastically than practically any other celestial object in recent memory. Still, for all its fame, much remains unknown about it. The comet’s origins, from somewhere far across our galaxy, may never be known. Its true age, size, composition, and shape are also poorly constrained.

But how can we learn more about this alien interloper — or indeed, the next one — when we’re already studying it with everything we’ve got?

Some scientists are proposing a bold solution: We have to "intercept" it with a spacecraft.

Doing so would not only help us to better understand its key characteristics but also photograph its surface and potentially collect our first-ever interstellar samples, which could help reveal how alien exoplanets form, how common our type of solar system is and maybe even help answer the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe.

"We only have one shot at this object and then it's gone forever," Darryl Seligman, an astronomer at Michigan State University and the lead author of the first paper published about 3I/ATLAS, previously told Live Science. "So we want as much information from all of our observatories as we can possibly get."

Alien interlopers

On July 1, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) revealed they had spotted a mysterious object traveling toward us from beyond Jupiter, at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). ATLAS, which automatically scans the skies using telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa, was hunting for potential threats to Earth. It found something else entirely.

Less than 24 hours later, NASA confirmed that the speeding blur of light was an interstellar object — an alien asteroid or comet that originated outside the solar system — and named it 3I/ATLAS. It was only the third-ever detection of an interstellar object in our solar system, after the anomalous space rock 'Oumuamua in 2017 and Comet 2I/Borisov in 2019.

Despite the rapid spread of unfounded theories that the object could be an alien probe, early observations confirmed that 3I/ATLAS is a comet — potentially the oldest of its kind ever seen — that likely originated from the Milky Way's "frontier" region.

Interstellar visitors like this are exciting to astronomers because they are one of the few opportunities we have to explore neighboring star systems, which would take generations and the invention of sci-fi technology to reach aboard a spacecraft.

"ISOs are relics from planetary formation, so studying these objects and comparing them to what we have closer to us [could] lead to an interesting view of how other planetary systems in the galaxy formed," Pedro Bernardinelli, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Live Science in an email.

But our Earth-based observatories, and even orbiting spacecraft such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), can only tell us very rough information like general size, shape and composition. To really reveal ISO secrets, we will need to get much, much closer — possibly even close enough to grab a fragment.

Doing so won't be easy, but given the valuable insights it could reveal about the star systems beyond our own, it would be well worth the effort, experts say.

"Each one of these ISOs is a little piece of low-hanging fruit from a tree that can tell us a great deal about the trees growing in some other neighborhood," Wesley Fraser, an astronomer with the National Research Council Canada, previously told Live Science.

Giving chase

But the time to catch this speeding comet is fast approaching. 3I/ATLAS is now reaching its closest point to Earth, around 168 million miles (270 million km) miles away. From there it will move quickly away from us and will likely be beyond Neptune within another year.

Because it is now too late to intercept 3I/ATLAS within the inner solar system, most researchers agree that there is now only one viable option to study this object: to chase it down as it leaves the solar system.

This would require the spacecraft to carry out what researchers call "Oberth maneuvers," where a probe is gravitationally slingshotted around massive objects, such as the sun, to pick up enough speed to allow it to catch up to and intercept an ISO at a specific point along its predicted trajectory.

This idea was first proposed in 2022 to catch up with the first known interstellar object, 'Oumuamua. The plan, dubbed Project Lyra, was to launch a probe in 2028 that would intercept and investigate that object, after completing an Oberth maneuver around Jupiter.

But this chaser method has a huge limitation: Scientists would need to wait decades for data to come back. For example, if Project Lyra launched a spacecraft in 2030, it would not intercept 'Oumuamua until 2052 at the earliest, Adam Hibberd, a researcher with the U.K.-based nonprofit Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS) who worked on Project Lyra, told Live Science.

So far, Project Lyra has not moved past the planning stage — making a 2028 launch highly unlikely — but the project could still reach 'Oumuamua if launched in 2030 or 2033, Hibberd said. This means we would likely still have plenty of time to chase down 3I/ATLAS, if we want to.

Future propulsion methods, such as a solar sail, could drastically cut the travel time of missions like this from decades down to just a few years, he added. But these technologies are decades away from becoming a reality themselves.

Playing "hide-and-seek"

But given that 3I/ATLAS will be very hard to chase down, some astronomers argue that we shouldn't bother hunting it. Rather we should prepare to intercept the next interesting ISO.

By launching an interceptor spacecraft and parking it in a gravitationally stable position around Earth, known as a Lagrange point, we could, in theory, be ready to quickly intercept a passing object, they argue.

This idea, also first proposed in 2022, has been dubbed the "hide-and-seek" approach. However, unlike Project Lyra, it is much closer to becoming a reality.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing the Comet Interceptor mission, which is currently scheduled to launch in 2029, on board the same rocket as ESA's Ariel space telescope, said Colin Snodgrass, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who specializes in comets and was the deputy project investigator on the proposal for this mission.

The Comet Interceptor probe isn't specifically aimed at interstellar visitors. Instead, it's designed to hunt nonperiodic comets like Comet Lemmon, which has been visible in the night sky, alongside 3I/ATLAS, in recent months. These comets drift toward the sun every few hundred or thousand years and have poorly defined orbital pathways around the sun.

When ESA researchers spot a comet they can reach, they will "fire the rockets, get to the right place in space to cross the path of the comet and have this fast flyby encounter, where we go shooting past the comet, getting as much data as we can," Snodgrass told Live Science.

And while the mission is not designed to study interstellar objects, the project will be perfectly placed to intercept them.

"The whole science team is very much in agreement that if an interstellar object was to pop up, we wouldn't let that opportunity go by," Snodgrass said.

The main advantage of the hide-and-seek approach is that we wouldn't have to wait decades for a probe to catch up to its target. Additionally, we'd be reaching it at the best time to study it. That's because interstellar comets, like 3I/ATLAS, soak up more solar radiation when in the inner solar system — which, in turn, means they give off more light, gas and dust, giving us a better chance to learn about their composition.

However, a hide-and-seek mission might not be able to catch all the objects we care about. For example, ESA's Comet Interceptor probe would have been unlikely to reach 3I/ATLAS, had it been in orbit when the ISO was first discovered, because the comet was too far away from us, a recent study from Snodgrass and others found.

Collision course

A major limitation of both the chaser and hide-and-seek missions is that ISOs travel too fast for their respective spacecraft to travel alongside, or rendezvous with, these objects.

This makes it "almost impossible" for the probes to directly obtain samples from the objects' surfaces as NASA did during its OSIRIS-REx mission, which successfully landed a probe on the asteroid Bennu in 2020 and collected samples that were later returned to Earth, Hibberd said. Due to fuel limitations, it is also unlikely that these samples could be easily returned to Earth, especially during a chaser mission, he added.

However, there is a third option that could yield valuable interstellar samples: the "impactor" method.

Similar to NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully deflected the asteroid Dimorphos after smashing into the space rock in 2022, an interceptor probe could also be sent to crash into an ISO, Hibberd suggested. While this probe would be destroyed, a second spacecraft could be deployed to analyze the debris field and potentially even collect leftover fragments of the alien object, he added.

But an impactor mission would need to overcome serious technical challenges. First, ISOs travel much faster than solar system objects, like Dimorphos, meaning it's more difficult to smash them apart. Second, this method would likely work only on an asteroid, not on comets, which have hard, icy shells. And third, a collision could accidentally send chunks of debris on a collision course with Earth, like DART did. As a result, most of the experts who talked to Live Science, including Hibberd, agreed that it is probably too risky to attempt an impactor mission until more research has been done on the subject.

The perfect mission

If money were no object, we could pursue all of these options. But if an agency like NASA has the budget for only one such mission, which one should be selected?

A chaser mission would allow astronomers to target a specific object they know they want to study, while a hide-and-seek mission would be limited to objects that happened to pass nearby. On the other hand, the hide-and-seek mission could reliably predict objects' locations in the inner solar system, whereas the chaser method would target objects in the dark, more chaotic outer solar system, where it would be harder to find and photograph them, Snodgrass said.

Another issue is that signals from a more distant chaser mission would take longer to send and receive, so mission operators would be unable to monitor and adjust an ISO flyby in real time or fix technical difficulties easily — a difficulty NASA faces with its distant Voyager probes, Snodgrass said.

There is also the matter of money. Project Lyra would likely cost the same as NASA's New Horizons mission, which flew by Pluto in 2015 and cost at least $700 million, Hibberd said. Meanwhile, ESA's Comet Interceptor mission has a budget of around $150 million, Snodgrass said.

As a result, most researchers who spoke to Live Science agreed that a hide-and-seek interceptor would likely be the best way of studying an ISO up close.

But if this is the method we end up using, how should we design the resulting spacecraft to maximize its chances of collecting useful data?

While ESA's Comet Interceptor is relatively inexpensive, a dedicated ISO interceptor mission — with a bigger budget — would allow us to launch a faster probe that could carry more fuel and thus travel farther. However, the craft doesn't need to be fancy.

A "fairly stripped-back" probe with a decent camera and a few spectrographs, capable of analyzing the light given off by the different gases, would be more than enough to collect sufficient data from any flyby, Snodgrass said.

If the probe were intercepting a comet, and not an asteroid, it could also be fitted with a device to catch specks of dust from the comet's coma or tail during a superclose approach, just as NASA's Stardust probe did with "Comet Wild 2" in 2004.

Assuming that the interceptor hasn't depleted its fuel reserves and can be returned to Earth, this may be the only reliable way of actually getting our hands on interstellar samples, Snodgrass said.

To intercept or not to intercept

Once the "perfect" interceptor is in position around Earth, researchers will have to choose which ISO to go after. And because any spacecraft is unlikely to be reusable, it may get only one shot at picking the right target.

We may soon be spoiled for choice. ISOs may be far more common than we realize. "There are likely thousands of other ISOs in the solar system right now," Fraser said. "We just can't see them because they are too faint, too far and too fast."

But thanks to the newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is designed to spot more small and dim objects in the outer solar system, we are likely to find many more ISOs in the coming decades and, more importantly, spot them much earlier on their journey toward us, which would give us a better chance of studying them.

The first thing to consider is whether to go after an asteroid or a comet. Because comets become more active near the sun and present the most likely route for collecting interstellar samples, they would likely take priority, Snodgrass said.

The next consideration would be the target's distance from Earth. As we have already seen, ESA's Comet Interceptor may have struggled to reach 3I/ATLAS on its journey through the inner solar system. Therefore, it might pay to wait for an ISO that is on a favorable trajectory relative to Earth.

The comet made its closest approach at around 1 a.m. EST on Friday (Dec. 19), coming within about 168 million miles (270 million kilometers) of our planet.

When you consider the vastness of space, 168 million miles is a relatively short distance, but even at the comet's nearest point to us, 3I/ATLAS was still almost twice as far away as the sun.

Comet 3I/ATLAS is up to a few miles wide and didn't get close enough to be visible to the naked eye. However, skywatchers observed it using telescopes.

And last night was far from our last chance to see the comet. It will remain observable in the pre-dawn sky with a small telescope until spring, according to NASA. If you don't have a telescope, then the best way to see comet 3I/ATLAS is online.

The Virtual Telescope Project in Italy is hosting a livestream of the comet passing Earth at 11 p.m. EST on Friday. The livestream, which was scheduled for last night but postponed due to rain, will feature real-time images of the comet as it zooms toward Jupiter.

Comet 3I/ATLAS is worth checking out because it's a rare example of an interstellar object from outside of our solar system. This is only the third interstellar visitor ever detected and could be the oldest comet ever seen.

The comet's origins have been the subject of considerable speculation, most notoriously the repeated suggestions that it could be an alien spacecraft. However, nearly all astronomers are confident that 3I/ATLAS is a comet from another star system.

Researchers discovered comet 3I/ATLAS in July, when they spotted an unknown object racing along at around 137,000 mph (221,000 km/h) within the orbit of Jupiter. Having swung past the sun, reaching the closest point to our star (perihelion) at the end of October, the comet is now making its way out of our solar system.

What's next for comet 3I/ATLAS?

Comet 3I/ATLAS will pass Jupiter next, where it is expected to make its closest approach on March 15, 2026, according to NASA. The comet will get much closer to Jupiter than it did to Earth, coming within about 33 million miles (54 million km) of the gas giant. Spacecraft stationed at Jupiter, like Juno, might be able to observe the comet as it approaches.

The interstellar interloper will then cross Saturn's orbit in July 2026; Uranus' orbit in April 2027; and Neptune's orbit in March 2028. However, it won't get close to any of these planets. You can track comet 3I/ATLAS for yourself using NASA's Eyes on the Solar System simulation of the comet's trajectory.

Researchers will keep an eye on comet 3I/ATLAS while it remains in our cosmic neighborhood. After all, there's a lot they still don't know about its properties. For example, the size of the comet is uncertain. Hubble Space Telescope observations suggest that it's somewhere between 1,440 feet (440 meters) and 3.5 miles (5.6 km) wide.

Researchers also don't know which star system forged comet 3I/ATLAS, and they may never find out. The comet travelled a very long way and could have been hurtling through space for billions of years before visiting our solar system.

As seen from the Northern Hemisphere this year, a crescent moon will curl up in the western sky just before Christmas Day, before gliding past Saturn and the Pleiades. Meanwhile, Jupiter shines as a bright “Christmas Star” in the east right after dark.

Add two meteor showers and a full “Wolf Supermoon”, and ’tis the season to be outside looking up! Here’s how to follow the show night by night…

1. Jupiter shines as the ‘Christmas Star’

When to see: Dec. 25, 2025–Jan. 10, 2026

Head outside about 90 minutes after sunset and look east. The brightest “star” climbing into the sky is Jupiter, shining with a steady light. It will be your planetary companion for the rest of the year — a seasonal lantern that gets higher and more obvious each night.

If it looks like the “Star of Bethlehem” or “Christmas Star,” that’s because it’s closest to its opposition — the brightest it ever gets — on Jan. 10, 2026.

2. Ursids meteor shower

When to see: Dec. 21-22, 2025

Today marks the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere — the shortest day and the longest, darkest night of the year. After dusk, a 3%-lit waxing crescent moon hangs low in the southwest in twilight, sinking below the horizon soon after to leave the sky wonderfully dark for the peak of the Ursids.

It’s not a particularly strong meteor shower, but the chance of about 10 “shooting stars” per hour in moonless night skies makes it a good opportunity to go stargazing, or to head out with your astrophotography camera if the skies are clear. Wrap up well, head out after about 11 p.m., and stay for an hour or two if you can.

• Read more: How to photograph a meteor shower

3. ‘Earthshine’ on a crescent moon

When to see: After sunset, Dec. 22-24, 2025.

The highlight in the few evenings between the winter solstice and Christmas Day is a waxing crescent moon in the western sky shortly after sunset. On Dec. 22, a 7%-illuminated crescent moon will display “Earthshine,” sunlight reflecting off Earth’s clouds and oceans and gently lighting up the moon’s night side.

On Dec. 23, it will be 13%-illuminated and shine close to the star Fomalhaut, the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish. Christmas Eve brings a now 21%-illuminated waxing crescent moon forming a lopsided triangle with Fomalhaut to its lower-left and Saturn to its upper-left.

• Read more: Beginner's guide to astrophotography

4. ‘Santa’s sleigh’ on Christmas Eve

When to see: Dec. 24-25, 2025

Check NASA’s Spot The Station page or apps to see if a pass of the International Space Station is visible from your location. If you get lucky, it will appear in the west as a brilliant, steady point of light that glides across the sky in just a few minutes, brighter than almost any star. To younger observers, it makes a perfect “Santa’s sleigh”, racing around Earth every 90 minutes while stockings are being hung and presents wrapped.

• Read more: Best binoculars for kids

5. The Christmas Tree Cluster

When to see: After dark, any time in December and January

For those gifted a large telescope today, there’s a tempting festive target. Buried within the faint constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn — east of Orion — is the Christmas Tree Cluster (NGC 2264).

It’s not visible to the naked eye, but if you’re under dark skies and have binoculars or a small telescope, you can hunt for the small triangular patch of stars that give this region its festive nickname. This young star cluster is about 2,500 light-years from the solar system.

• Read more: What are the different types of telescope?

6. Saturn and the moon in conjunction

When to see: Dec. 26, 2025

Boxing Day brings a beautiful pairing of the moon and Saturn. As darkness falls, look high in the south to find the bright moon, which is now at first-quarter phase and so about half illuminated. Close by, within a few finger-widths at arm’s length, sits Saturn as a steady, golden point of light.

7. Orion

When to see: After dark, any time in December and January

It’s one of the most famous constellations in the night sky, but only in winter is Orion at its best. Best known for Orion’s Belt — also called the “Three Kings” — there’s more to find besides Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. Either side has four stars ranged in a loose rectangle around the belt stars — Saiph and reddish Betelgeuse on one side and Bellatrix and bluish Rigel on the other.

Use any pair of binoculars to find Orion’s “snake” — an S-shape curl of stars between Alnilam and Mintaka — then point them at the fuzzy patch close by. This is the Orion Nebula (M42), a stellar nursery where stars are being created.

• Read more: Best beginner telescopes

8. The Pleiades and the moon

When to see: Dec. 31, 2025–Jan. 1, 2026

New Year’s Eve brings a close encounter between the most beautiful cluster of stars in the night sky and an almost-full moon. As darkness falls, look east to see a nearly full Moon rising in Taurus, with the Pleiades — also known as the Seven Sisters — nestling just to one side.

From mid-northern latitudes, the moon may appear to skim past the cluster during the evening, its bright halo almost wrapping around the tiny glitter of stars, although moonlight will wash out the fainter members of the Pleiades.

9. A full Wolf Supermoon rising

When to see: Saturday, Jan. 3

Tonight’s full Wolf Moon is the fourth and final supermoon in a row. Best seen rising in the east around sunset, this full moon coincides with perigee, when the moon is at its closest point to Earth in its monthly orbit.

About 30% brighter than the average full moon, it will dominate the sky all night and appear slightly larger than normal, especially when it’s low on the horizon and framed by trees, rooftops or distant hills. The time to catch it is when the moon rises where you are.

While the best astrophotography lenses are ideal for wide-angle shots of the Milky Way, the best lenses for moon photography are actually big zoom telephoto lenses that are typically used more for wildlife photography.

• Read more: How to photograph the moon

10. Quadrantids meteor shower

When to see: overnight on Jan. 3-4, 2026

In the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 4, the Quadrantids meteor shower reaches its official peak. Conditions are not ideal this year because the moon will be very bright, but if you’re awake before dawn and the sky is clear, it’s worth giving the shower a short watch.

Find a place to observe where you can keep your back to the moon, or where it’s hidden behind a roofline or trees, then look overhead and toward the northeast. Even with the glare, a few bright meteors may slash across the sky every so often, appearing to radiate from a point near the constellation Boötes.

• Read more: Astrophotography settings 101

Although the Ursids are active from Dec. 13 through Dec. 26, the peak night coincides with the winter solstice, which occurs at 10:03 a.m. EST on Dec. 21. Though the two events are totally unrelated, the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere is a great time to look for meteors, and to photograph them if you're up for the challenge.

The Ursids are not one of the year's major meteor showers, and they are often overlooked in the run-up to Christmas — but there are good reasons to observe them this year.

This year, the Ursid meteor shower comes very soon after a new moon — when our natural satellite is between Earth and the sun and is absent from the night sky — meaning the shower should benefit from profound darkness. A new moon occurs at 8:43 p.m. EST on Dec. 19, and on Dec. 21, it will be barely visible after sunset as a 2%-illuminated crescent. Because "shooting stars" are fast and often faint, dark skies can boost the chances of seeing these meteors.

The Ursid meteor shower normally produces about five to 10 shooting stars per hour, according to the American Meteor Society. However, outbursts — when rates have exceeded 25 meteors per hour — have been recorded in the past. Bursts of about 100 meteors per hour happened in 1945 and 1986, according to EarthSky.

Although you can look for Ursids all night, the hours before dawn on Monday, Dec. 22 are likely the best time. That's because the shower's radiant point — from which they appear to originate — is the bright star Kochab in the constellation Ursa Minor, which will be highest in the northern sky around that time. The Ursids are not visible from most of the Southern Hemisphere.

The Ursid meteor shower is caused by dust and debris left in the inner solar system by Comet 8P/Tuttle, which orbits the sun every 13.5 years.

The next meteor shower will be the Quadrantids, another often-overlooked shower. It will peak overnight on Jan. 2-3, 2026, when around 120 meteors per hour will clash with the bright light of January's full "Wolf Moon."

Comet 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object ever detected by astronomers, will make its closest approach to Earth overnight between Thursday and Friday (Dec. 18 to 19), when it gets to just 168 million miles (270 million kilometers) from our planet. It poses no threat to Earth.

The precise moment will come at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) on Dec. 19, according to Space.com. Though still just under twice the distance from Earth as the sun — something that will preclude stunning photos from giant telescopes — it’s a unique opportunity to glimpse an object from another star system. Discovered in July 2025, it comes in the wake of 1I/'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019.

Comet 3I/ATLAS is now on its way away from the sun and out of the solar system, and by far the easiest way to see it before it departs will be online. Using its large telescopes in Manciano, Italy, the Virtual Telescope Project will host a free webcast on YouTube beginning at 11 p.m. EST on Dec. 18 (0400 GMT on Dec. 19). The webcast will also be available as a replay after the live event ends.

Another way to see comet 3I/ATLAS is with a GoTo or smart telescope. Any optical device with a motor can be trained on the object in the constellation Leo. The easiest method is via a smart telescope, such as the Seestar S50, Unistellar eVscope 2, Vaonis Vespera Pro or Celestron Origin; you should be able to find 3I/ATLAS in the app used to control any of these telescopes.

Any planetarium app — such as Sky Tonight, Sky Guide, Stellarium and SkySafari 7 Pro — will also have 3I/ATLAS in its database. That will be helpful to find it visually. Technically, it is visible in large astronomy binoculars, but at magnitude 11, it’s going to look “like a tiny, slightly out-of-focus star,” according to Sky at Night.

A better way to view the comet is with a medium-to-large telescope of about 12 inches, according to NASA, through which observers may spot a faint, fuzzy patch of greenish light close to the bright star Regulus in Leo and a fainter companion, called Rho Leonis.

In the meantime, astronomical telescopes on Earth and in space will continue to monitor it — some from much closer distances than we’ll get. Just today, NASA released new ultraviolet images of the comet taken with its Europa Clipper spacecraft from roughly 102 million miles (164 million km) away, closing the distance from Earth by about a third. Stay tuned for more NASA image releases after the close approach.