Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 30, 2019

See the Full Hunter's Moon Shine Bright Tonight

October's full moon, called the Hunter's Moon, will rise tonight (Oct. 13), reaching its peak fullness at 5:08 p.m. ET. The Hunter's Moon, which is the full moon following the Harvest Moon and the closest full moon to the fall equinox, is reportedly the best time for hunting deer and...

Sep 30, 2019

Fireball That Flew Over Japan in 2017 Was Tiny Piece of Giant Asteroid that Might One Day Threaten Earth

In the early morning of April 28, 2017, a small fireball crept across the sky over Kyoto, Japan. And now, thanks to data collected by the SonotaCo meteor survey, researchers have determined that the fiery space rock was a shard of a much larger asteroid that might (far down the...

Aug 31, 2019

Why Is It So Hard to Land on the Moon?

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 12:30 p.m. E.D.T. on Monday, Sept. 16 Space is hard. That was the takeaway on Sept. 7, when the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost contact with its Vikram lunar lander during an attempt to touch down at the moon's south pole. India...

Aug 31, 2019

Get 5 Issues of 'All About Space' or 'How It Works' for $5 in Our Fall 2019 Sale!

With the autumnal equinox of 2019, the fall season has officially landed in the Northern Hemisphere, and with it comes an amazing deal from Live Science's partner magazines All About Space and How It Works. For a limited time only (through Oct. 13), you can get FIVE issues for just...

Aug 31, 2019

India's Lost Moon Lander Is Somewhere in This Photo

An image taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on Sept. 17, 2019, shows the Vikram lander's attempted touchdown site. (Image credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University/Space.com)It looks like just a barren moonscape of craters, but somewhere in this image is a hunk of metal and electronics that carried a country's hopes of...

Jul 31, 2019

An Asteroid Bigger Than the Empire State Building Will Pass Earth Soon. But Don't Worry.

On Aug. 10, Asteroid 2006 QQ23 will fly within 0.049 astronomical units (4.6 million miles) of Earth at about 10,400 mph (16,740 km/h). This might not seem close, but it is close enough to classify the object as a near-Earth asteroid. Additionally, because it is within 0.05 astronomical units (4.65...

Jul 31, 2019

Bits of Corpse from One of the Universe's Oldest Stars Found Inside Its 'Child'

Astronomers have detected evidence of one of the first stars to emerge after the Big Bang birthed the universe 13.8 billion years ago. They found traces of an exploded, ancient star tucked inside a star that's nearly as old. Located about 35,000 light-years from Earth on the other side of...

Jul 31, 2019

There Are Thousands of Tardigrades on the Moon. Now What?

Tardigrades, which live on every continent on Earth, are also (maybe) living on the moon, following the crash of a lunar lander carrying thousands of the microscopic water bears. Did any of them survive the impact? If they did, what happens to them now? When the tardigrades were placed on...

Jul 31, 2019

'UFOs' Are Flying Out from Supermassive Black Holes and Reshaping Galaxies

Hot ionized gas is streaming out of the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole and slamming into its surroundings at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And this kind of ultra-fast outflow (UFO) might explain the nearly empty darkness that surrounds the center of many galaxies, astronomers...

Jun 30, 2019

Does the Universe Rotate?

If you look around space, you'll notice a lot of things — the planets, stars, moons, even the galaxy itself — have one thing in common: they're spinning. So, is the universe spinning, too? This mystery is one that cosmologists have been acutely studying, because it's one that can tell...

Jun 30, 2019

What Happens in Intergalactic Space?

The vast voids between galaxies can stretch millions of light-years across and may appear empty. But these spaces actually contain more matter than the galaxies themselves. If you took a cubic meter, there would be less than one atom in it, Michael Shull, an astronomer at the University of Colorado...

Jun 30, 2019

How Astronomers Missed the Massive Asteroid That Just Whizzed Past Earth

A large asteroid just whizzed past our planet — and astronomers weren't expecting it. Ranging in size from 187 to 427 feet (57 to 130 meters) wide, the space rock named 2019 OK snuck up on us Thursday morning (July 25). It swung as close as 45,000 miles (73,000 kilometers)...

May 31, 2019

Why Does the Moon Keep Flashing Us?

There's something flashing us on the moon, and we don't know what it is. But that might be about to change. We have known about the mysterious flashes since at least the late 1960s, when the astronomers Barbara Middlehurst and Patrick Moore reviewed the scientific literature and found nearly 400...

May 31, 2019

Mysterious 'Bathtub Rings' of Titan Replicated on Earth

Something dark is spreading across the surface of Titan, and we may finally have some idea what it is. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is the only other object in our solar system (besides Earth) known to have liquid on its surface. Frigid seas of methane and ethane fill depressions on...

May 31, 2019

How Did the Universe Begin?

How did the universe come to be? It is perhaps the greatest Great Mystery, and the root of all the others. Humanity's grandest questions — How did life begin? What is consciousness? What is dark matter, dark energy, gravity? — stem from it. All other mysteries lie downstream of this...