Today’s biggest science news: NASA comet 3I/ATLAS images | U.S. measles status | Leaking spy satellites

The press conference has ended, but the work of deciphering and analyzing NASA’s long-awaited images of 3I/ATLAS has just begun.

We were expecting a few images from Mars; we received more than a dozen observations, taken by eight different missions over the course of three months.

It’s a treasure trove of data.

The NASA panelists likened the new observations to fans at a baseball game, each holding a camera and photographing the action from a different angle. Only by comparing and contrasting all these views will our most complete understanding of 3I/ATLAS emerge.

And the game’s not done yet. As the comet approaches its closest point to Earth (on Dec. 19), many more telescopes will take a bite at the cosmic apple. It won’t just be NASA and the world’s biggest observatories watching, but amateur astronomers, too.

Stay tuned to Live Science for more 3I/ATLAS news over the coming month — and keep your eyes on the skies.

— Brandon Specktor

• Hubble observations suggest the comet measures between 1,400 feet to 3.5 miles in diameter
• JWST observations revealed a high CO2 content, which could indicate 3I/ATLAS formed from a region of carbon dioxide ice that’s very different from our solar system
• There’s “circumstantial evidence,” based on its velocity, that 3I/ATLAS is very old, and may be significantly older than our sun
• These images have barely been processed, and are observations that “the science community will be digging into for years,” said Tom Statler, lead scientist for solar system small bodies at NASA
• Jets of gas erupting from the comet show that it was very active near perihelion — but doesn’t necessarily mean it exploded, as some researchers have speculated. But “we can’t tell for sure,” Statler noted.
• The non-gravitational acceleration of the comet is “very on par” with other comets we’ve seen, and is caused by jets of gas erupting from within

Here’s another one of the new images, taken from Mars with the HiRISE camera:

The conference is ongoing, but NASA has already updated its 3I/ATLAS image page with more than a DOZEN new observations from its fleet of machines.

These include images from the SOHO and PUNCH spacecraft watching the sun, the Perseverance Mars rover, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN orbiters at Mars, and the Lucy, Psyche, and STEREO missions.

Here is one of the new images, captured by PUNCH:

To start the conference, NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya tackled rumors about 3I/ATLAS’ origins right away, noting that all evidence points to the object being a natural comet from another star system.

He said he welcomes the international attention that’s been given to the comet, and hopes everyone remains interested in what it has to teach us.

NASA Shares Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Images – YouTube

Watch On

NASA’s live stream, sharing the first new images of comet 3I/ATLAS since August, is about to begin. Watch it live along with us here.

If you aren’t able to watch the event live (right here), you can still view the images after. NASA will post them all to this page, which catalogs every 3I/ATLAS image the agency has shared since the comet’s discovery in July.

The last image NASA shared before the shutdown was this view from the SPHEREx infrared telescope, taken between Aug. 7 to Aug. 15. You can see 3I/ATLAS brightening in the center of the frame.

Greetings, science fans. Live Science space and physics editor Brandon Specktor here to take you through NASA’s impending news conference, where agency officials will share the latest images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

The event is scheduled to start at 3 p.m. EST, and you can watch it live right here, as well as on NASA’s official website and YouTube page. This will be the first official NASA communication about the much-publicized comet since the U.S. government shutdown temporarily muted the agency more than a month ago.

What are we hoping to see? For starters, NASA’s closest-ever observations of the interstellar interloper. Snapped by the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) during the comet’s closest flyby of the Red Planet in early October, the images will show 3I/ATLAS from just 19 million miles away — close to ten times closer than the comet will ever get to Earth.

(We’ve already gotten a sneak peek of this view from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which clearly shows the comet’s cloudy coma glowing around its bright nucleus.)

NASA also plans to share observations of the comet from other ongoing missions, though the agency has not yet specified which ones. We do know from previous reporting that two NASA sun-watching missions — the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona Heliosphere (PUNCH) as well as the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) — had eyes on the comet during its close approach to the sun in late October, so those are both possibilities.

Stay tuned for more.

Brandon Specktor

Editors Nicoletta and Hannah here with a duo of stories to catch you up on the state of measles in the United States. (Spoiler: The situation is growing increasingly dire.)

In a news analysis from Live Science contributor Stephanie Pappas, experts explain why America could lose its “measles elimination status” within months. The country eliminated measles back in 2000, meaning the disease was no longer circulating at a sustained level as it does in endemic countries. But to keep that status, a region must not have any ongoing measles transmission lasting over a year. West Texas experienced a major measles outbreak this year that began in January and seeded additional outbreaks in other states, where transmission is still ongoing. If we hit January 2026 and those outbreaks haven’t been subdued, measles will once again be considered endemic to the U.S.

In an opinion piece, epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs and virologist James Alwine argue that the measles outbreaks in Canada and the U.S. are a bellwether of the erosion of public health, and that these countries are failing their citizens. “Kennedy must be removed from office,” they write, referencing the U.S. health secretary RFK Jr. “There can be no improvements in public health or vaccination rates as long as he continues his destructive reign.”

To learn more, read Stephanie’s story here and the op-ed here.

Nicoletta Lanese

Hannah Osborne

Here’s a new image taken by astronomer Gianluca Masi, an astronomer and founder of The Virtual Telescope Project. The image was captured by Masi in Manciano, Italy, and shows the comet’s coma, its tail and anti-tail.

So machine-learning trailblazer Yoshua Bengio could be pleased to have made a major record this week, becoming the first person to be cited more than a million times on Google Scholar for his contributions to artificial intelligence research, Scientific American reports.

But Bengio has far more on his mind than academic achievement. What keeps him up at night is curtailing the dangerous uses of AI made possible by his own research.

You can read the interview I had with him last year for more.

In 2023, scientists detected a gravitational wave signal they thought was impossible — a sequence of space-time ripple coming from two black holes deemed too massive to form by the direct collapse of stars.

And yet form, and later merge, these black holes did. Now, by teasing apart the signals and simulating how the space-time singularities came to be, physicists may finally have an answer for how the black holes managed it. The solution just happens to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity at its most extreme limits.

Read the full story by Live Science contributor Andrey Feldman here.

With all that said, it’s far from clear how much our human ancestors smooched across the centuries — even in modern humans only about half of cultures engage in it.

Check out the full story by Live Science contributor Clarissa Brincat here.

Good morning, science boys and girls. We’re back with yet another day of science news as NASA prepares to release some of the best-quality images yet of comet 3I/ATLAS.

The comet has been capturing an enormous amount of attention recently. Some of it is likely unearned (you know it’s almost definitely not aliens, right?) and some definitely a big deal (the more than 7 billion-year-old space snowball is a fascinating window across cosmic time and space).

We’ll be covering the event live as it happens, so if we’re wrong and little green men really are hopping around on it, we’ll be the first to tell you.

Ben Turner

Geologists using an AI model say they have found chemical traces of life in 3.3-billion-year-old rocks from around the world.

That isn’t quite the oldest evidence of life. There are stromatolites, or microbial mats, found in Australia that date to 3.48 billion years ago. Other traces of ancient life have been more controversial: In 2017, scientists argued that chemical traces in 3.95-billion-year-old rocks from Labrador, Canada may constitute Earth’s earliest evidence of life.

But many very ancient samples are hotly contested, in part because what’s left behind is not the organism itself, but the chemical equivalent of a “life was here” sign. But because the biological molecules themselves break down over billions of years, these signatures of life are open to interpretation.

In the new study, the AI model looked at more than 400 samples of ancient rocks and sediments, modern-day plants and animals and ancient meteorites to pinpoint a “signature of life” that is left behind in rocks even after the most obvious biomolecules break down.

The team says they can distinguish rocks that once harbored life from those that did not with greater than 90% accuracy.

Tia here with an update on the state of clinical trials in the U.S.: Funding cuts by the Trump administration have halted 383 clinical trials, or about 1 in 30 funded by the National Institutes of Health, a new study in JAMA Internal Medicine has found.

Most of the terminated trials were in early phases, according to a summary of the new study in American Journal of Managed Care. But that still resulted in 74,000 enrolled patients being removed from trials.

The biggest funding cuts came from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), due in large part to $500 million in mRNA vaccine research being halted in August.

That won’t be a surprise to those who have followed public health news. Vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now heads the Department of Health and Human Services, and has taken several steps to discredit and hamper vaccine uptake and development.

While the administration has said only mRNA vaccines are in the crosshairs and that other uses of mRNA technology are unaffected by the funding cuts, “the industry doesn’t trust that,” Jeff Coller, the Bloomberg distinguished professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, told health editor Nicoletta Lanese in an interview in August.

That’s a real pity, because mRNA technology has enormous potential, from attacking hard-to-treat, deadly cancers to curing genetic diseases, Nicoletta reported in October.

Tia Ghose

For many amateur astronomers, just taking a picture of a comet or a planet is a great find. But when Scott Tilley clocked off from his day job this year, he uncovered a vast network of puzzling radio signals being shot into space by U.S. government-run Starlink satellites.

It sounds like the setup for a Pynchon novel, but as Harry outlines, it’s all very much true.

Here’s what he had to say about the strange signals:

“Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley discovered the new signals while accidentally monitoring the wrong radio wavelengths. What’s really weird is that the signals seem to be deliberately using frequencies normally reserved for “uplinking” by satellite operators. But they are actually being used for “downlinking,” or sending messages back down to Earth, which not only goes against international regulations but could also potentially disrupt other spacecraft around them.

Not much is known about why they might be doing this or how widespread it is, and we may never know the full story due to the secretive nature of these satellites. Earlier in the year, I also wrote an in-depth report on how private satellites, like Starlink, are emitting radio pollution that overlaps with frequencies used by radio astronomers. If this problem gets worse, it could majorly impact our ability to study the cosmos, experts say.”

You can read the full story here.

We can’t let even half a day go by without a fresh update on 3I/ATLAS at the moment. Senior staff writer Harry has published a write-up on this breathtaking shot of the comet, which was captured over the weekend by astrophotographer Satoru Murata as it photobombed a distant galaxy.

Some of the comet’s now iconic features, such as its green glow and its tail and anti-tail, are clearly visible in the photo, and it should be more than enough to whet our appetites ahead of NASA’s big reveal of its 3I/ATLAS images tomorrow.

You can read the full story here.

Ben Turner

New climate modelling suggests that global warming-fueled heatwaves will continue for 1,000 years after we hit net zero (if we hit net zero), the Guardian reports.

Researchers in Australia simulated heatwaves in a hypothetical net zero world, in which the amount of greenhouse gases humans emit are offset by the amount absorbed from the atmosphere — something many scientists hope for and many countries, in theory, support.

The team found that heatwaves will be more severe and more frequent the longer it takes us to reach net zero. This isn’t really a surprise, given that we know greenhouse gas emissions trap heat in the atmosphere and warm up the planet.

However, the fact that it could take at least 1,000 years for heatwaves to return to preindustrial levels, even after we get our emissions in check, is a tad ominous for future generations.

“The thing with net zero and heat waves is: we’re damned if we do, but we’re completely stuffed if we don’t,” study lead author Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate science professor at the Australian National University, told the Guardian. “We’re already locked into a certain amount of warming.”

A team led by scientists at the University of Oxford recently explored timekeeping at the quantum level and its thermodynamic cost. In their findings, published last week and announced yesterday, the scientists describe creating the clock from single electrons that jump between two regions in the nanoscale realm — with each leap acting as the ‘tick’ of a traditional clock.

In a classic quantum quirk, the researchers found that the energy needed to read the clock far exceeded the energy required to run the thing, suggesting measurement costs in quantum physics are more significant than previously thought.

Patrick Pester

Company staff are still investigating what caused the crash.

“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company wrote in an emailed statement. “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

Once they’ve addressed the errors, Cloudflare staff will turn to investigating the cause of the “unusual spike in traffic.” Could it be yet another AI-driven cyberattack? Cloudflare writes that it will post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis to blog.cloudflare.com.

Until then, Live Science is still online, so where else do you need to go?

You can read all the gory details in the full story here.

Ben Turner

Yesterday, we wrote (at length) about the potential release of NASA’s long-awaited comet 3I/ATLAS images. Well, just a reminder that these are coming tomorrow.

NASA will host a live news teleconference on Wednesday (Nov. 19) at 3 p.m. EST. The images are expected to be the clearest yet of comet 3I/ATLAS, and should help scientists learn more about the interstellar visitor.

Good morning, science fans! Patrick here to kick off another day of our science news blog coverage. I want to start with a story about Neanderthal noses, which Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove reported on yesterday evening. Researchers re-examined perfectly preserved Neanderthal nose bones, and discovered their sizeable schnozzes weren’t evolved for the cold.

The new study involved taking a fresh look at the “Altamura Man,” which is an exceptionally well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton covered in a thick layer of calcite, sometimes called “cave popcorn.” The researchers’ findings suggest that the size of Neanderthal noses might not have had anything to do with living in cold temperatures.

You can read the full story here.

Patrick Pester

Space and physics editor Brandon Specktor shared the details on how to watch, and why it matters, in his full story here.

A 12,000-year-old clay figurine unearthed in Israel may depict a goose attempting to mate with a squatting woman, archaeologists say.

Staff writer Kristina Killgrove reported on the unusual figurine, which may be the oldest representation of an animal and a human interacting.

But why did the sculptor depict this event, and what does it say about the Natufians, the ancient culture that crafted the object? You can read the full story here.

Dementia is now more deadly than heart disease — at least in Australia. The new trend reflects dramatic improvements in health care which mean people live longer in general, Lauren Moran, the head of mortality statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“People are now more likely to live to an age where they have a higher risk of developing dementia,” Moran said.

Whether Australia is a harbinger for the rest of the world remains to be seen. In the U.S., for instance, heart disease remains the top killer, closely followed by cancer. Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth-leading cause of death, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tia here with news of dueling climate change impacts. A key Atlantic Ocean current system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), could be collapsing, due in large part to climate change.

Meanwhile, climate change is also fueling the rapid melt of Antarctic ice.

Yet the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which some climate scientists say is “all but inevitable” could have a surprising side effect — staving off the AMOC collapse, New Scientist reports.

Still, the ice sheet melting would be catastrophic for sea levels, and the AMOC would still decline by 60% and take 3,000 years to bounce back to its previous strength, according to new research.

Tia Ghose

Three more astronauts are stranded in China’s Tiangong station following the return of their previously stuck colleagues, Senior Staff Writer Harry reports.

The latest trio — Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang — are the crew of the Shenzhou-21 mission, whose return capsule was taken home by the Shenzhou-20 crew following a potential space debris collision that rendered their original capsule inoperable.

The development could highlight a potential flaw in China’s space protocols that could put astronauts needlessly at risk.

You can read the full story here.

Since its initial discovery in July, astronomers have answered many questions about what 3I/ATLAS is made of and where it could have come from in our galaxy. Yet, due to insufficient observations, where it’s heading hasn’t been entirely clear.

Now, thanks to data collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter during the comet’s flyby of the Red Planet, scientists have improved their estimates of 3I/ATLAS’s trajectory ten-fold.

The ESA is hoping to repeat the trick with its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which will get a good look at 3I/ATLAS later this month.

You can read Harry’s full story here.

Well, normal in the sense that it’s natural. 3I/ATLAS is actually pretty amazing as comets go, being the oldest ever seen and the most massive of its kind, not to mention only the third interstellar object ever recorded.

This means that researchers will carefully study new images of the comet for clues to its makeup, origins, and a better understanding of the journey it took to arrive at our cosmic backyard.

Comets heat up as they fly closer to stars, causing ice on their surface to sublimate into gas, which researchers can then detect and study. Previous observations have already revealed that comet 3I/ATLAS appears to be unusually rich in carbon dioxide, with potentially a thick irradiated crust from billions of years of exposure to cosmic rays.

The comet’s irradiated nature could make it more difficult to decipher the properties of its material that would otherwise reveal more about the conditions of its home star system. Still, researchers still have a lot to learn about interstellar comets, and just having more data on this one is as good a start as any.

HiRise has imaged vast areas of the Martian landscape in unprecedented detail, according to NASA. Check out the HiRise website, hosted by The University of Arizona, to scroll through hundreds of previous HiRise images.

The as-of-yet unreleased comet 3I/ATLAS images were taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter has been flying around Mars since 2006, searching for signs of water on the Red Planet. The HiRISE camera managed to get images of comet 3I/ATLAS as it zoomed past Mars in early October.

The images are expected to be the highest-resolution images of comet 3I/ATLAS yet, and even clearer than the Hubble Space Telescope’s comet snaps taken in July, the New York Post has reported.

We don’t know when NASA will release new images of comet 3I/ATLAS, but we’re seeing reports that it could be early this week.

The U.S. government shutdown delayed the release of the images, but that’s now over, so they should be on their way. These images are expected to be some of the best yet, and will help researchers further understand the comets makeup and origins.

Here’s a selection of some of our 3I/ATLAS stories so far

Patrick Pester

So what is 3I/ATLAS? And why do people care?

3I/ATLAS, which was first discovered in early July, is the third interstellar object ever found in our solar system. That means it doesn’t come from our cosmic neighbourhood, but from somewhere else in our Milky Way galaxy.

Where exactly in our galaxy the comet came from is unclear — scientists aren’t sure whether it came from the Milky Way’s ‘thin’ disk or its ‘thick’ disk — but depending on its origins it could be more than 7 billion years old, making it more than 3 billion years older than our sun. Tracing 3I/ATLAS’s origins is made even more challenging by its material, which has been transformed by billions of years of exposure to cosmic rays.

Telescope observations suggest the comet is roughly 7-mile-wide (11 kilometers) and zooming at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). Having passed perihelion, or the closest point to our sun, roughly two weeks ago, 3I/ATLAS is now zipping toward its closest point to Earth on Dec. 19.

The exotic comet has many peculiar properties, from its chemical composition to its large size. This, alongside radio signals coming from it that are typical of all comets, has fuelled a frenzy of speculation that the 3I/ATLAS is an alien probe.

That’s almost certainly not the case, but it doesn’t mean that astronomers aren’t excited to study it. Investigating the comet could yield fresh insights into the conditions around other stars, our early galaxy, and the vast frontier of interstellar space.

Good morning, science fans. We’re back with more updates on the comet 3I/ATLAS. Following the end of the U.S. government shutdown, we’re seeing reports that NASA is set to release some of the best-quality images yet of the comet.

The images were taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and could have significantly better resolution than those by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21, 2025.

We’re getting to work on what all of this could mean for the rapidly-brightened comet, which is roughly 7-miles (11 kilometers) wide, more than 7 billion years old, and traveling at 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) as it sheds its highly-irradiated coma across our solar system.

In the meantime, check out this breathtaking shot of the 3I/ATLAS snapped by astrophotographer Satoru Murata over the weekend.

Ben Turner