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The Latest in NASA Science News

The latest news briefs from NASA science.

  • NASA’s New Horizons Finds Evidence of Recent Liquid on Pluto’s Surface

    A yellow and orange view of northern Pluto showing a plain turning into higher elevation features. A red box around dark wet spots indicates liquid nitrogen flows.

    A new analysis of imagery collected during NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s 2015 encounter with Pluto provides evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to Pluto’s surface through cracks in the northern edge of the Sputnik Planitia, part of the massive heart-shaped glacier on the dwarf planet’s surface. This is the first evidence of recently flowing liquid […]

  • New NASA Study Says Possibly No Limit to Solar Storm Effects

    An educational diagram illustrating how measurement uncertainty can distort data regarding Earth's magnetosphere, featuring a detailed space visualization alongside two comparative line graphs. Top Right: Earth is shown surrounded by a complex network of blue magnetic field lines.Far Right: A bright blue, curved line denotes the "Bow shock," which transitions into an orange-red turbulent region labeled the "Magnetosheath." Spacecraft Locations: The "WIND" spacecraft is positioned far to the left in the "Solar wind" stream, connected to a label reading "Measured solar wind strength." The "THEMIS" spacecraft sits closer to Earth inside the magnetosheath, labeled "Corrected solar wind strength. Left Graph: Plots "Earth's response [mV/m]" against "Measured solar wind strength [mV/m]." A blue line initially follows a linear path but then flattens out, marked with the text "illusion of saturation due to measurement uncertainty."Right Graph: Plots "Earth's response [mV/m]" against "Corrected solar wind strength [mV/m]." A pink line continues steadily upward diagonally, labeled as the "True linear response."

    For decades, scientists have thought that there is a ceiling to how intensely Earth responds to solar storms. However, a NASA-led paper published Wednesday in Nature suggests this upper limit is an illusion. If so, it means solar storms could have far worse effects on our technology than previously thought. Observations have suggested that electric […]

  • NASA’s COFFIES Science Center Makes Breakthrough on Solar Enigma

    A round, colorful cutaway of the Sun identifying different elements: Differential Rotation, Tachocline, Near Surface Shear Layer, Convection, Flux Emergence, Acoustic Waves, Active Region, Surface Velocity, Meridional Circulation

    Editor’s note: This post was updated on July 10,2026, to clarify details on the scientific data visualization, and on July 21, 2026, to correct the description of the illustrated graphic. Researchers working with one of NASA’s DRIVE (Diversify, Realize, Integrate, Venture, Educate) Science Centers are closer to unraveling a long-standing solar mystery surrounding the extreme […]

  • ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope Finds Universe’s Most Ancient Quasars

    Artist’s concept of a quasar with a brilliant white center surrounded by a glowing orange and yellow spiral disk of gas, a narrow jet of light extending upward, and a dark, star-filled background.

    Led by ESA (European Space Agency) with contributions from NASA, the Euclid space telescope has discovered 31 of the oldest quasars ever documented. In fact, two are the oldest ever observed, dating back to the universe’s infancy, when it was just 5% of its current age. A new study details the results in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. A quasar occurs when immense amounts of gas and dust […]

  • NASA Flights Map Tropical Ecosystems, Water, Ice

    A man uses a flashlight to inspect an aircraft’s wing as part of the preflight checks.

    Data from a NASA campaign in Panama and Peru will help communities prepare for tropical floods in cloud-covered areas, improve scientific understanding of forest health, and support planning for spaceborne missions. NASA’s C-20A aircraft from Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, flew the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) instrument, developed at NASA’s […]

  • NASA-Funded Research Follows Bird Flight; Birds Follow Their Noses

    A mall black bird rests on a person's palm.

    You might think birds skimming over the ocean wouldn’t seek wind unless it was pushing them in the right direction, but NASA-funded researchers have learned that storm petrels find stiff crosswinds worth the slowdown, in return for the clues and cues the gusts carry. In a paper published by the Royal Society’s Biology Letters May 13, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Italian Institute for […]

  • NASA Satellites Reveal Aquifer Decline in Brazilian Breadbasket

    Illustration of the twin spacecraft of the NASA/German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) GRACE-FO mission. GRACE-FO will continue tracking the evolution of Earth's water cycle by monitoring changes in the distribution of mass on Earth.

    A collaboration of scientists from NASA and Brazilian research institutions has produced a detailed picture of groundwater change across Brazil. The images reveal significant declines in some of the aquifers that are critical to one of the world’s largest agricultural producers. In the study, published June 3 in Science Advances, researchers used artificial intelligence to […]