Astronomers have detected the most distant burst of radio signals ever seen: an explosion that's emitting waves of energy from more than 10 billion light-years away.

The event, named FRB 20240304B, is known as a fast radio burst (FRB). Astronomers have detected thousands of FRBs before this. But because these events last only milliseconds, they are extremely difficult to study and their origin stories remain unclear.

In this case, however, astronomers managed to use a radio telescope array and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to chart the event, with JWST narrowing down the precise host galaxy that FRB 20240304B came from. The study, published Thursday (Oct. 8) in the journal Science , sheds more light on a time when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, showing that FRBs arose early in our cosmos' history. The detection more than doubles the previous distance record for FRBs.

The JWST played an instrumental role in the discovery, study co-author Themiya Nanayakkara, a senior lecturer at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, told Live Science in an email. The email was written in collaboration with study first author Manisha Caleb, a senior lecturer in astrophysics at the same university.

For example, JWST's observations showed that the host galaxy was smaller than expected, was "metal-poor" (had few elements besides hydrogen and helium), and was forming a lot of stars. These characteristics could offer new clues about the environments in which FRBs arise, giving more information about the mysterious events. Researchers suggest that this FRB may have been linked to a magnetar, a highly magnetic star core left after a supernova.

Zooming in with the James Webb telescope

The ancient FRB was initially detected with MeerKAT, an array of 64 radio telescopes in South Africa. Nanayakkara said MeerKAT revealed "both the detection of the fast radio burst and, importantly, a very precise position on the sky."

The researchers knew the FRB was far away because of the large dispersion of the radio signal, but initial searches with powerful ground-based telescopes, "saw essentially nothing; it looked like empty sky," the researchers told Live Science. "The most likely explanation was that the galaxy was simply too faint to be detected in those observations. That is where JWST became transformative."

The science team successfully got time on JWST with a program called Director’s Discretionary Time, which is aimed at time-sensitive observations. The researchers started by using JWST's Near Infrared Camera to trace the radio signal and take a very deep image of the target region.

"Suddenly, there it was: a very faint galaxy almost exactly where we expected the host of the FRB to be," Nanayakkara said. The researchers then used JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph to obtain a spectrum (wavelengths of light broken into different chemical signatures), which showed hydrogen and oxygen.

"These spectral features act like fingerprints: because we know the wavelengths at which they are produced in the laboratory, we can measure how much they have been shifted by the expansion of the universe," Nanayakkara explained. "That gave us a very precise redshift of about 2.15. We are therefore seeing this galaxy as it was when the universe was only around three billion years old, so roughly one-fifth of its current age."

Because the host galaxy is fairly young, it supports the idea that at least some FRBs are generated by magnetars, which are more likely to appear in spry galaxies where intense star formation is occurring, the team said.

The team plans to continue hunting for FRBs with JWST.

"We do not know what the sources will be yet," Nanayakkara said, as that depends on what pops up in the sky and is spotted by ground-based radio telescopes. "Once our radio telescopes find and localize a suitable new source, we can trigger the JWST observations. So it is quite exciting, because we really have no idea what we will find when we combine the power of these two types of telescopes."

Long before it became the luminous spiral galaxy we call home, the Milky Way was a sprawling, chaotic swarm of thousands of small galaxies, new research shows.

The findings suggest that in the first 2 billion years after the Big Bang, the region of the universe that would become our galaxy was littered with thousands of smaller galaxies of many sizes and shapes. Over time, these galaxies collided and merged into the single galaxy in which we reside today.

"Looking at these results, it's very clear that the physics happening right after the Big Bang has direct impact on what we see today in the local universe," study co-author Harley Katz, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, said in a statement.

To understand more about the early universe, astronomers build sophisticated computer models that encode the laws of nature to see how the cosmos may have evolved. The new work, which is the result of three years of supercomputer simulations, is the most detailed tracing yet of how a galaxy like ours came to be. It also arrives just as astronomers need a stronger yardstick for what they're seeing in the early universe.

Megatron, the cosmic transformer

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can peer farther into the early universe than any previous telescope, and its discoveries have often defied computer models. For instance, JWST found surprisingly bright early galaxies and a mysterious new class of compact galaxies dubbed "Little Red Dots." These anomalies demonstrate that current computer models need an update to handle the complex physics of the early universe, the researchers said.

To bridge that gap, the scientists built a new suite of supercomputer simulations they call Megatron. By tracing ancient gas, starlight and chemistry from 180 million years to 2 billion years after the Big Bang, Megatron predicts the distinct light signatures of its virtual galaxies, according to the statement. Because JWST collects the same type of spectral data across a similar span of cosmic time, scientists can directly cross-reference the simulation against real observations to pinpoint what the old models are missing, the team said.

The simulation also tracks how the universe's first stars formed, died and forged the essential elements that make life as we know it possible. By comparing the simulation with JWST observations of early galaxies and with the chemical traces left in ancient stars, scientists can better understand how those first stars enriched their surroundings, the researchers said.

"Together, these complementary observations allow us to test competing models of the first stars in ways that weren't previously possible," study co-author Martin Rey, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Bath in the U.K., said in a separate statement.

The scientists detailed their findings in one of the six papers the Megatron collaboration published Sept. 30 in The Open Journal of Astrophysics.

Assembling the Milky Way

The team's simulation begins 180 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe is devoid of stars and galaxies and holds only pristine gas. As the next 2 billion years pass,, the model captures how the very first stars light up the dark universe and kick off "cosmic dawn," eventually culminating in those stars' violent deaths. As they die, the stars spread newly forged heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron into the surrounding gas, laying the building blocks for future stars and planets.

The simulation ends 2 billion years after the Big Bang, but the Milky Way's mergers continued long after this point, and scientists are still discovering traces of the small galaxies that have joined it. The most recent massive merger, with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, began more than 6 billion years ago and is still unfolding.

The simulation results help scientists understand how certain physics parameters impact the early universe, and better match up JWST's observations with computer models. But it also highlights areas that need further study.

"But there are also things we're not getting right, which is interesting too — what are the parts we're still missing?" Katz said in the statement. "That can lead you into new directions and new questions."

Megatron team members in the U.K. are now developing the next generation of simulations, backed by dedicated time on the country's supercomputers. Those simulations will include more complex physics, such as active black holes, which JWST has revealed to be surprisingly common in the early universe, the researchers said.

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

A 1,000-mile-long (1,600 kilometers) Martian cloud that emerges and then quickly disappears from the Red Planet's sky nearly every day is even weirder than scientists realized. New simulations suggest that the eerie apparition can only be explained using "exotic physics" that have been theorized but never seen on Earth or anywhere else in the solar system.

The mysterious floating mass, dubbed the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC), frequently emerges above Arsia Mons, a 12-mile-tall (20 km) extinct volcano located in the Tharsis region, just south of the Red Planet's equator. The water vapor cloud was first spotted in 2018 by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and has since appeared nearly every morning throughout Mars' spring and summer, when increased solar radiation triggers strong surface winds. But it lasts only a few hours each day, before fully evaporating.

The AMEC can stretch up to 1,100 miles (1,800 km) long, around one-twelfth of Mars' circumference. For context, that is roughly twice the length of the U.K. or the distance between New York City and Miami.

Although the Red Planet is no stranger to giant dust clouds and occasional "iridescent streaks" of carbon dioxide, it is almost completely devoid of atmospheric water vapor. That makes it extremely rare for puffy, Earth-like clouds to form there, let alone ones so vast. As a result, scientists have struggled to explain this whacky weather.

But in a new study published Wednesday (Oct. 7) in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers used Mars Express data to create new simulations in an effort to finally explain the AMEC. Initially, the team struggled to recreate the puzzling phenomenon. But when they abandoned traditional meteorological principles in favor of a more out-of-the-box explanation, they were eventually successful.

"To create the AMEC in our modelling, we found that we needed to include some exotic physics … physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature," study first author Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who was affiliated with Sorbonne University in Paris at the time of the study, said in a statement. "Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped."

"Wholly unexpected"

The AMEC is an orographic cloud, meaning it forms as strong winds push water vapor up and over a raised structure, such as a mountain. Similar clouds also exist on Earth, including the "Levanter" cloud, which occasionally forms above the Rock of Gibraltar in southern Europe. However, the Martian equivalent cannot be explained by the same processes that occur on our planet.

On Earth, clouds form via a process called heterogeneous nucleation, in which moist air cools and condenses into ice crystals that form around tiny atmospheric particles, such as dust, salt, pollen or soot. But while Mars has plenty of atmospheric dust, that's not what's happening there.

"For the AMEC, it seems that cloud formation takes place without needing any of this 'stuff' [in the air]," said Hernández-Bernal, who has been studying the AMEC for the past six years. "Water vapour turns directly into icy cloud particles without any middle step. It's akin to droplets of condensation appearing in the middle of a room, rather than on a window."

The researchers call this "homogeneous nucleation" and say it has never been seen before in a planetary atmosphere. "It's wholly unexpected," Hernández-Bernal added.

Other scientists previously predicted that homogeneous nucleation could occur in Earth's upper atmosphere or in the skies above Venus. However, this has been deemed highly unlikely because it requires humidity levels roughly 100,000 times greater than those on our planet's surface.

Given that modern-day Mars is almost completely devoid of water, it may seem unlikely that its humidity levels could reach such lofty heights. However, the Mars Express data tells a different story.

As wind rises up the slopes of Arsia Mons, which is more than twice as tall as Mount Everest, it creates a powerful wave that shoots air into the upper atmosphere at tremendous speed. The researchers calculated that the temperature of this air can drop by up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in just 10 minutes. This not only makes it easy to freeze but also greatly increases the humidity within the wave, allowing homogeneous nucleation to take place, the simulations show.

So where does all this water come from? Some of it is already in the atmosphere, but some likely originates at the summit of Arsia Mons, which is covered with a thick layer of frost, the researchers suggested.

"A big success"

The new simulations mark a big step forward in our understanding of the AMEC and wider Martian meteorology.

"We don't have nearly as much information about Mars' atmosphere as we do about Earth's, so reproducing the AMEC to this degree is a big success for the model," Hernández-Bernal said.

The findings would not have been possible without the Mars Express orbiter, which used three instruments — the Visual Monitoring Camera, the High Resolution Stereo Camera and the OMEGA instrument — to map out how the AMEC takes shape and evolves every day. It is also one of the only Mars spacecraft that can see Arsia Mons in daylight.

"Mars Express discovered the AMEC, has followed up and monitored it for years, and is now helping reveal the secrets of its formation," Colin Wilson, the project scientist for Mars Express, who was not involved in the new study, said in the statement.

The discovery is also a reminder that, despite sharing the same basic principles, weather systems do not behave the same on other worlds as they do on Earth, which could have big implications for solar system exploration and the hunt for extraterrestrial life on distant exoplanets.

"While clouds on Earth and Mars seem to be governed by the same 'rules', understanding this exotic Martian cloud required exotic physics — and this may be true elsewhere in the cosmos," Wilson said.

Astronomers have spotted a never-before-seen type of "phoenix planet" rising from the ashes of a dying alien sun. The discovery, which the scientists say was "completely unexpected," raises hopes that more of these reborn alien worlds could be lurking throughout the cosmos — and may offer a glimpse of our own solar system's fate.

The unnamed exoplanet was spotted circling the white dwarf HS 0209+0832, which is located roughly 270 light-years from Earth. White dwarfs are stellar remnants, sometimes dubbed "zombie stars," that form from the leftovers of massive red giants that run out of fuel before eventually collapsing into shriveled husks. HS 0209+0832 is a particularly young white dwarf, still burning at around 63,000 degrees Fahrenheit (35,000 degrees Celsius), which suggests it made this transition within the past few million years.

Scientists previously discovered some surprising heavy elements within the visible spectrum of HS 0209+0832, which was first captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in the late 1990s. These elements ‪—‬ which included aluminium, titanium and nickel ‪—‬ are not normally found inside white dwarfs, so their presence suggested that something unusual was going on. But until now, there was not enough data to figure out what.

In the new study, published Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers took a closer look at HS 0209+0832. Using some of Hubble's updated instruments and data from other observatories, the team captured a more detailed spectrum of the stellar zombie. This revealed a high concentration of additional heavy elements, including zinc and copper, as well as niobium, which has never been seen in a white dwarf before.

The researchers think these out-of-place elements were created during the death throes of the former red giant and later coalesced into a "second-generation" planet around the newly forged white dwarf. They suspect the atmosphere of this hypothetical planet is being stripped by the white dwarf's stellar winds, causing the rare elements to fall back onto the zombie star.

Follow-up observations then revealed a recurring dip in the brightness of HS 0209+0832, suggesting that an exoplanet was repeatedly passing in front of the undead star. Based on the alien world's orbit, which lasts approximately 4.4 Earth days, and the duration of its transits in front of the star, the team predicted that the planet is roughly the size of Jupiter. (Its close proximity to the white dwarf also supports the hypothesis that its atmosphere is being stripped away.)

"Second-generation planets are worlds that form out of the material a star casts off as it dies," study first author Jamie Williams, a doctoral candidate in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Warwick in the U.K., said in a statement. "They're incredibly rare, and finding one around a white dwarf was completely unexpected. It's a bit like finding a planet that has risen from the ashes of the very star it once orbited."

"Completely unexpected"

This is not the first time astronomers have spotted an exoplanet around a white dwarf. For example, in 2019, some of the authors of the new study previously spotted an alien world surrounding the white dwarf WDJ0914+1914. However, in that case, they were confident that it was a first-generation world that somehow survived its star's fiery end.

But the heavy elements that seem to be falling onto HS 0209+0832 — and the relative lack of other elements common in first-generation planets, such as silicon and iron — suggest that's not what's happened for this recently detected world.

"This pattern of elements is a telltale sign of the 's-process,' a nuclear reaction that builds heavy elements inside dying stars during their bloated red giant phase," study co-author Nicholas Stone, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in the statement. "It's a chemical signature no ordinary, 'first-generation' planet should carry, which told us that this new planet was something different."

Instead, the newly detected exoplanet likely formed directly from the material that was shed by the dying red giant after it expanded and before it collapsed in on itself.

Similar phoenix planets have been spotted alongside other stellar remnants, such as pulsars, which form when stars explode as supernovas. However, until now, such worlds have never been seen around a white dwarf.

Rising from the ashes

"What's remarkable about the planet around HS 0209+0832 is that this isn't a planet from somewhere else, or a survivor from the system's birth, it looks like it was built from the very material its own star cast off as it died," study co-author Boris Gänsicke, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick who also helped to discover the exoplanet around WDJ0914+1914 in 2019, said in the statement. "In a sense, this system has given birth to a new world using the foundations of the old one."

HS 0209+0832 may have once harbored other exoplanets when it was a red giant. But if they existed, these alien worlds likely perished in flames as the dying star ballooned — similar to what experts think will happen to Earth when the sun runs out of fuel and transitions into a red giant in around 5 billion years.

Once the sun has finished bulging, it will turn into a white dwarf too. The new discovery hints that our star could also host brand-new worlds after it has transformed, creating a sort of solar system 2.0.

"Finding this one example raises the question of how many more might be out there and might our own solar system host a second-generation planet formed from the ashes of our sun," Gänsicke said.

However, more work is required to figure out exactly how the newfound exoplanet formed and, as a result, how likely this scenario is. The researchers suspect that another object, such as a lost stellar sibling, may have been required to create the new world.

"Forming the protoplanetary disc in this situation is not easy and helps explain why these planets are so rare," Williams said. "To form a disc of material necessary to birth a planet, HS 0209+0832 likely required a companion star that pulled the ejected material back into orbit, rather than letting it escape."

The Draconids, one of the year's most unpredictable meteor showers, will peak this week. Although only a few "shooting stars" are expected, the shower has a history of producing spectacular meteor storms with little warning.

The Draconid meteor shower takes place Oct. 6-10 each year, peaking on Oct. 8-9, when around 10 "shooting stars" per hour are expected. Whereas most meteor showers are best seen after midnight or during the dark hours before dawn, the best time to view the Draconids is in the evening, according to Timeanddate.com, making it one of the more convenient meteor showers of the year. Just after dark Thursday (Oct. 8) will be the best time to look.

The Draconids are different from most other showers because their radiant — the point from which their meteors appear to originate — is in the constellation Draco, the Dragon, which is highest in the sky in the evening. It's also circumpolar in much of the Northern Hemisphere, so it never sets below the horizon. However, there's no need to stare directly at Draco, because meteors can appear anywhere in the sky.

This year, the Draconid meteor shower peaks at the perfect time of the month for dark skies. Because the new moon occurs Saturday (Oct. 10), there will be no significant moonlight when the Draconids reach maximum activity.

However, the Draconids are notoriously unpredictable; while just a handful of meteors per hour are expected, the shower can sometimes produce huge meteor storms. For example, during the Draconids' peak in 1933, Europe saw 500 meteors per minute, according to NASA, and during the 1946 peak, 50 to 100 meteors were seen per minute in the U.S.

The source of the Draconids is Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, which was discovered in 1900 and orbits the sun every 6.6 years. It was last in the inner solar system in 2025 and will return in 2031.

Each October, Earth passes through streams of dust and debris left along the comet's orbit. When those tiny particles strike Earth's atmosphere, they heat up and vaporize, creating streaks of light in the night sky.

Most observers will probably see only a few Draconids this year, but with a meteor shower this unpredictable, it's always worth looking up. The best way to see the Draconids is with the naked eye, but a good pair of stargazing binoculars or a nice backyard telescope will help you enjoy the feast of fall skywatching events on the horizon. Amazon has great deals on skywatching gear this week, so it's a perfect time to get involved.

Researchers have observed the strongest candidate yet for a "microblazar" — a dazzling object that has long been predicted to exist but never spotted.

Observations of microblazars would give astronomers closer views of black holes emitting powerful jets of energy and help them understand how these extreme objects behave.

Blazars are some of the most energetic objects in the universe. They are a type of quasar — a brightly glowing object fueled by a supermassive black hole stripping material from its host galaxy and then ejecting some of it in powerful, opposing jets of particles and radiation. To qualify as a blazar, one of those near-light-speed jets needs to point directly at Earth. Astronomers have previously discovered smaller versions of quasars, dubbed microquasars, and long theorized that there must be smaller versions of blazars as well.

Now, an international team led by astronomers in Spain, the Netherlands and Argentina has described a microblazar in a study accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"It is the first time that we have a serious candidate," Josep Martí, an astronomer at the University of Jaén in Spain and first author of the study, told Live Science.

The object, called IRAS 18293-0941, is located in our galaxy, about 12,000 light-years from Earth, and it's hidden behind a veil of dust. It is a binary system that includes a black hole that orbits a hot, gigantic star every 11 days. Matter from the star falls into the black hole, and some of this material is jettisoned into the surrounding environment in two opposing jets. One of those jets flares toward Earth.

These objects, as well as microquasars in general, are tricky to observe, Martí said. "Because of stellar evolution, you need to catch the system at the right time," he added. "The microquasar phase of evolution is very short, and so it is difficult to find one in that phase."

Theorists predicted that microblazars would have special characteristics that should help define them. These features include powerful emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum, rapid changes in brightness (variability), and a hotspot behind them where its opposing jet heats up the interstellar medium in the opposite direction of Earth.

To observe IRAS 18293-0941, the study authors used a variety of instruments ‪—‬ including the Calar Alto Astronomical Observatory in Spain, a network of radio astronomy telescopes called the European VLBI Network, and the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa ‪—‬ as well as archival data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

They found that IRAS 18293-0941 has all of the expected microblazar characteristics, except one ‪—‬ variability. Microblazars have rapid variability, which means their brightness changes a lot in a short period, because one of the jets is facing Earth and small changes in brightness are amplified by an effect called Doppler boosting.

Martí said IRAS 18293−0941's lack of rapid variability could be explained by the dense cloud of gas surrounding it, which could smooth out quick fluctuations in brightness.

The researchers are currently investigating whether the observed area behind the microblazar is in fact a hotspot, study co-author Pedro Luque-Escamilla, an astronomer at the University of Jaén, told Live Science.

Even with one of the expected features missing, this object is a promising candidate for the first known microblazar. "The claims and the results of the paper are sensible and there are no questionable hidden assumptions," Kinwah Wu, a theoretical astrophysicist at University College London who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. "The source in this paper had shown signatures of interactions between the jets and the ambient material, which naturally leads to [particle] interaction."

Svetlana Jorstad, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Astrophysical Research at Boston University who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email that the new study was "very interesting, important and comprehensive."

Itumeleng Monageng, an astronomer at the University of Cape Town who was also not involved in the research, added that the team's observations "presents a previously overlooked mechanism for generating some of the highest energy emissions observed."

Microblazars "may power some of the universe's most energetic processes," Monageng told Live Science in an email.

Martí, J., Luque-Escamilla, P. L., Marcote, B., Abaroa, L., Aguasca-Cabot, A., Combi, J. A., Romero, G. E., Paredes, J. M., García, F., Fogantini, F., Saavedra, E. A., Del Ser, D., & Van Den Eijnden, J. (2026). A Galactic microblazar as a potential accelerator of ultra-high-energy particles. Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202661105

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

You may have watched the moon block out the sun during a solar eclipse, but have you ever seen it do that to a planet? Early Tuesday (Oct. 6) morning, skywatchers across much of eastern North America will have an opportunity to watch a crescent moon pass directly in front of Jupiter. The rare alignment won't happen again for 11 years.

During the event, known as a lunar occultation, Jupiter will disappear behind the moon for up to about an hour before suddenly reappearing. The occultation will be visible before dawn from much of the eastern and central U.S., Canada and the Caribbean, while parts of Africa will experience the event during daylight, according to In-The-Sky.org.

The moon will be a beautiful waning crescent, just 20% illuminated, and Jupiter will shine brightly alongside it. The pair will rise together in the east early Tuesday morning and gradually appear to move closer as the moon travels eastward against the background stars.

When the occultation begins, Jupiter will remain hidden behind the moon for roughly an hour. No telescope will be needed to watch Jupiter disappear and reappear. However, a pair of binoculars or a small telescope will make the event much more dramatic.

Through a telescope, Jupiter will look like a tiny disc rather than a point of light and will take about a minute to disappear completely behind the moon. An easy way to photograph the event is to use a smart telescope to image the moon. (Here's everything you need to know about lunar photography).

Below are the times when Jupiter will disappear and reappear in 10 major cities Tuesday morning, according to the International Occultation Timing Association.

• Chicago: 3:22-4:17 a.m. CDT
• Atlanta: 4:15-5:17 a.m. EDT
• Detroit: 4:16-5:20 a.m. EDT
• Miami: 4:20-5:09 a.m. EDT
• Washington, D.C.: 4:20-5:24 a.m. EDT
• Philadelphia: 4:22-5:26 a.m. EDT
• New York: 4:23-5:27 a.m. EDT
• Toronto: 4:25-5:22 a.m. EDT
• Boston: 4:26-5:30 a.m. EDT
• Montreal: 4:30-5:26 a.m. EDT

Outside the occultation path, Jupiter won't disappear at all. Instead, it will appear to be skimmed by the crescent moon — still a potentially spectacular sight that could produce some amazing photos. From across much of the world, the crescent moon and Jupiter will appear exceptionally close together.

The next lunar occultation of Jupiter visible from North America will occur on Nov. 27, 2037, according to When The Curves Line Up.

The debut images from a new Earth-observing satellite have just given us a view of the impossible: giant auroras rippling over the North Pole in broad daylight.

Earth's auroras are one of our planet's signature wonders — a sight worth advertising in interstellar travel guides, alongside our perfect total solar eclipses, bright shooting stars and majestic blobfish. They are the beautiful result of electrical storms in the atmosphere, appearing when charged solar particles skate along Earth's magnetic-field lines and collide with light-emitting molecules near the poles. (Auroras do exist on other planets, but they are usually not in bright visible colors like ours.)

To human eyes, auroras come out only at night and rarely stray from the poles. That's what makes these first observations from the joint European-Chinese Smile mission, which officially began science operations this week, so special.

Captured in ultraviolet light, the stunning images show a huge, serpent-like ring of charged particles coiling around the North Pole in July 2026. In the foreground, Earth appears ghostly and featureless, glowing like a half moon. The aurora writhes around our planet's sunlit side, covering about a third of it, while Earth's dark nightside bleeds into the background sky. Far behind, bright stars fall like raindrops as Smile shifts subtly in its orbit.

The view alone is worth smiling about, but the new images also promise exciting science to come. Taken just two weeks after scientists first turned Smile's Ultraviolet Aurora Imager on, the observations show that the satellite's instruments are working as they should and that the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and Chinese Academy of Sciences mission can officially begin.

Launched on May 19, Smile will spend the next three years watching Earth from a highly elliptical orbit that takes it about 75,000 miles (121,000 kilometers) over the North Pole — about a third of the way to the moon. From there, Smile can observe the North Pole for a record-breaking 45 hours at a time, offering an unprecedented view of solar activity there.

In addition to the Ultraviolet Aurora Imager, Smile carries three more science instruments to detect X-rays, magnetic fields and light ions over Earth.

This week, scientists also tested the spacecraft's soft X-ray imager by pointing it at the distant supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, located about 11,000 light-years from Earth (image above). Although the camera is working fine, the detector is still picking up a bit too much light when aimed at Earth, so it will require a bit more calibration from scientists on the ground.

Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later.

From it being too hot or too wet to leaves on the track or cows on the line, there's a fine tradition of what the British public consider to be flimsy excuses for delays on the trains. Yet an 1871 edition of the journal Nature describes a very different event that caused a train departing Exeter, in Devon on the south-west coast of the U.K., to be delayed by 16 minutes: a solar storm that flooded the railway signals' electrical telegraph network with current.

"The Exeter train delay is a fascinating story because it sits right at the point where emerging technologies first began to encounter the realities of the space environment," said Jim Wild, who is a professor of space physics at Lancaster University and also the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a statement.

The event has frequently been cited as the first example of a solar storm disrupting technology on Earth, but when a team led by Wild went back through historical records to investigate further, they found that things didn't add up.

The original report in Nature stated that the electrical disturbance occurred at 10:05pm local time on Oct. 18, 1841. However, Wild's team found that particular train line didn't open until 1846.

So, they delved deeper into the history books to figure out the truth.

"Our research has a hint of a detective story — piecing together a wide range of archived records to better understand a historically severe space-weather event," said team-member Mike Hapgood, a space weather expert at RAL Space, which is the UK's National Space Laboratory, in Oxfordshire.

Combining data from railway timetables, old newspapers, plus historic reports of solar observations and the northern lights and digitized geomagnetic data, Wild and Hapgood's team were able to conclude that the most likely date for the train delay was Oct. 18, 1848, which coincided with a strong solar storm that hit Earth.

This revised date knocks it off top spot in the chronological list of such events. The first recorded disruption to electrical technologies is now a disturbance on the Midland railway network, which had lines covering much of the U.K., in March 1847.

"Although this means it is not the earliest recorded space weather impact, it remains one of the first clear examples of solar activity disrupting critical infrastructure," Wild said. "It also demonstrates the value of combining scientific records with contemporary newspaper reports and archival documents when reconstructing historic space weather events."

The case reminds us that space weather has been a hazard to technology and modern systems for a long time, and isn't just a recent problem.

"Society has been experiencing the effects of space weather on technology for almost as long as electrical technologies have existed," said Wild.

The most dramatic example is the aforementioned Carrington event of 1859, representing the most significant solar storm on record as it caused telegraph poles to spark and battery power supplies to be disrupted. By this point, telegraph operators had grown used to electrical disturbances associated with auroral activity, but even the Carrington storm shocked them — quite literally in some cases, as extra current ran down the telegraph lines — with its ferocity. Should a similar event occur today, it would cause huge black outs, knock out power grids, disrupt communications and fry satellites.

"While today's space weather [monitoring] capabilities are far more advanced than anything available in the 1800s, the modern technologies we depend on are also much more vulnerable to solar storms," said Hapgood.

The current solar cycle 25 peaked in Oct. 2024 and we are just beginning to come out of an extended period of maximum activity. However, it remains to be seen how the rest of this cycle will play out before reaching solar minimum in about 2030. We've already seen severe geomagnetic storms caused by space weather in May 2024 — will we experience another powerful storm before the decade is out?

As the newest heavy hitter in orbital observatories continues the journey to its final destination, NASA has begun the process of switching the spacecraft on.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on Aug. 30, and is on a three-month long trek to Lagrange point two (L2). L2 is a relatively idle orbital sweet spot almost a million miles from Earth that will allow Roman to remain on the planet's night side and keep the bright sun to its back. It's an optimal location for the telescope to operate its two primary instruments, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and its Coronagraph Instrument.

Neither are ready to begin collecting science, and will undergo another month or so of calibrations and tests before Roman can begin its mission, but initial downlinks from the telescope indicate nominal readings on its components as NASA teams continue its commissioning. "This is a huge milestone for the team at Goddard, our industry teams at BAE Systems, Inc. and Teledyne, and our science centers," said Josh Schlieder, the Wide Field Instrument scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement.

The WFI is a 300-megapixel infrared camera designed to survey enormous swaths of the sky. Scientists plan to use the imager to take fast snapshots of the cosmos, study dark energy, and map the distribution of matter throughout the universe. It uses 18 infrared detectors that NASA says combine for a sensing area about the size of a laptop; by comparison, a typical digital camera imaging sensor covers about the size of a postage stamp.

Before engineers could switch on the WFI, they spent about 10 days allowing the instrument to dry out and shed contaminants that may have accumulated prior to launch. The WFI was kept at a relatively warm (for space) -85 degrees Fahrenheit (-65 Celsius). On Friday (Sept. 11), Roman teams turned off the instrument's heater to allow it to cool to around -225 Fahrenheit (-143 Celsius), at which point it was cold enough to activate its infrared detectors. The detectors continued cooling afterward toward their eventual operating temperature of about -300 F (-183 C).

Following the successful activation of its infrared sensors, engineers moved on to calibrate the WFI's element wheel, which filters individual wavelengths for detection using a system of prisms and other optic mechanisms. And, on the morning of Sept. 13, Roman teams confirmed the focus components were functioning nominally.

Roman's coronagraph also completed its first major steps toward operation. The instrument is controlled by the Coronagraph Commanding Center at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, where operators were able to verify that they could remotely operate the instrument’s electronic and mechanical systems. The coronagraph functions using a series of mirrors, masks and sensors to block the light of a distant star in order to detect the much fainter light of planets in that star’s orbit.

Tests on the coronagraph also included warming the device to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius) — nominal for operating conditions in controlled environments on Earth, but quite warm compared to the WFI’s -300 F (-183 C) operating temperature. The extra heat allows the Coronagraph to maintain conditions similar to those inside NASA test chambers so engineers can more easily simulate tests on Roman's deformable mirrors.

"Now that this test is complete, we've been decontaminating: sitting idle with our detectors warm so anything that’s stuck to the surface, such as water or trace chemicals, will tend to leave it,” said Eric Cady, an optical engineer leading commissioning efforts for the Roman Coronagraph at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Decontamination procedures on Roman's coronagraph will continue for 30 days, along with periodic checks and other minor calibrations. That will occupy a portion of the observatory's remaining journey to L2, which is expected to last about 12 more weeks. NASA says Roman remains on track to release its first science images in early 2027. And, thanks to the precision of Roman's SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle and fuel savings during Roman's early trajectory corrections, the telescope is expected to have enough propellant to operate for the next 22 years.

When stars the size of our sun die, they leave behind powerful stellar remnants called white dwarfs — and these white dwarfs can transform into even more extreme objects called neutron stars, composed of the densest material in the universe. However, scientists have found that conditions must be "just right" for the major makeover to occur. You can think of it like a cosmic "Goldilocks" situation.

As it turns out, the white dwarf has to be feeding on a companion star like some kind of cosmic vampire.

Neutron stars and white dwarfs are both born when stars run out of the fuel supplies needed for nuclear fusion happening in their cores, but the difference between the two lies with their masses.

Stars with masses similar to that of the sun end their lives when they run out of hydrogen in their cores. This halts the nuclear fusion process — which involves converting that hydrogen to helium — leading to the stars collapsing and shedding their outer layers to become a white dwarf with around the mass of the sun crammed into the width of Earth.

When stars with masses around eight times that of the sun collapse after running out of hydrogen in their cores, they generate enough pressure and heat in these cores to fuse the produced helium into even heavier elements. This process only ends when the star attains a core of iron. The final collapse results in a supernova explosion and creates a neutron star with a mass between one and two times that of the sun. That's the usual way neutron stars form.

However, what if there's a bridge between the white dwarf scenario and neutron star scenario? Scientists have long suspected there is indeed a pathway for a white dwarf to become a neutron star. This new work maps out that pathway, calling it accretion-induced collapse (AIC).

"In AIC, the progenitor is already a stellar remnant, and the trigger is not its own evolution but material handed to it by a companion," team leader Laurenz Thümmler of ETH Zurich told Space.com.

The researcher added that an AIC begins with a stellar remnant in the form of a white dwarf, while the traditional route to birthing a neutron star begins with a massive "living" star. Yet, in the AIC, the collapse of an overfeeding white dwarf continues in a broadly similar way to the collapse of a massive star that creates a neutron star.

As Thümmler explains, in both cases, the neutron star creation process involves the massive star's core imploding and zippy particles called "neutrinos" carrying away energy from the event. However, an important difference is in the "standard" massive star collapse scenario, the subsequent core-collapse supernova and neutron star birth happens inside a thick envelope of material that has been ejected during the massive star's death throes. In AICs, however, this thick envelope of matter is absent.

"AIC is expected to be faint and fast, and why so little matter is ejected compared with an ordinary supernova. Not all white dwarfs could undergo an AIC, and that is the essential point."

Though AICs have been theorized about for years, Thümmler and team wanted to know what characteristics a white dwarf would need in order to undergo this transformation. They set about investigating this using 3-dimesional simulations.

It's what is inside that counts

Most white dwarfs consist of carbon and oxygen. However, some stars collapse to form a white dwarf composed of oxygen, neon and magnesium. That only happens for a narrow range of stellar masses, meaning this composition represents a minority population of white dwarfs.

When carbon and oxygen white dwarfs overfeed on stellar material from a companion or donor star, they eventually reach the so-called Chandrasekhar limit, usually around 1.4 stellar masses. Above this limit, they can go supernova. They don't become neutron stars as a result of these "Type 1a" supernovas, however, but are rather completely destroyed. Oxygen, neon and magnesium white dwarfs can avoid that destruction thanks to their high densities.

"They are typically born more massive and denser than carbon-oxygen white dwarfs and therefore require less additional mass to approach the Chandrasekhar limit," Thümmler said.

However, Thümmler and colleagues discovered this isn't the only condition needed to provoke an AIC. The white dwarf can't be too greedy either.

The team found that the accretion rate, or rate at which material from the donor star falls onto the white dwarf, has to fall within a fairly narrow window to allow an AIC to occur.

"If it is too low, nova eruptions can expel much of the accumulated material again; if it is too high, winds, envelope expansion, or binary interaction can prevent the white dwarf from reaching the conditions required for collapse," Thümmler said. "The accretion has to be fast enough, and steady enough, to get it there without triggering explosive burning along the way.

"When those conditions hold, electrons are captured onto neon and magnesium nuclei. This removes the pressure supporting the star, and the collapse follows."

All this means that AICs are expected to be rare events, although the rate at which they occur remains highly uncertain.

The team also found the environment around AICs is somewhat surprising.

"We expected the most neutron-rich material, which produces the heaviest elements, to emerge along the rotation axis, since that is where the magnetically driven outflow is strongest," Thümmler said. "It does not."

Instead, the team's models revealed neutron-rich material emerging at the mid-latitudes of white dwarfs as they transform into neutron stars. This is region where the outflows of matter driven by intense magnetic fields collide with winds heated by energy-carrying neutrinos.

Thümmler explained that this is significant because it means that these events would appear different based upon the angle at which they are observed.

How to spot white dwarf transformations

Laurenz said these AICs could be identified by Vera C. Rubin Observatory and other telescopes as a bright ultraviolet and optical event lasting two to three days, potentially accompanied by X-ray emissions and longer-lasting radio emissions.

However, the neutron stars created by such events may be difficult to distinguish from stellar remnants birthed in the traditional way.

"They are expected to populate the lower end of the neutron-star mass distribution because the collapsing white dwarf has a mass close to the Chandrasekhar limit and ejects relatively little material," Thümmler said. "However, ordinary stellar-collapse channels, particularly those involving low-mass progenitors, can also produce neutron stars with masses of approximately 1.1 to 1.4 solar masses, so a low mass alone would not uniquely indicate an AIC origin."

The team isn't done investigating AICs, with Thümmler explaining there are two main approaches to take next.

"The first is to make the predicted light curves more reliable by following both the radioactive heating and energy injection in substantially greater detail," Thümmler said. "This requires distinguishing energy carried by gamma rays, which can escape relatively early from the low-mass ejecta, from that deposited more efficiently by charged particles, while also modelling how the neutron star wind heats and accelerates the heavy-element-rich material."

The team's simulations can then be used to follow the expansion of the ejecta from the AIC and calculate how the observed light curve and spectra depend on viewing angle.

"This work is currently underway," Thümmler said. "The second direction is to test the robustness of the explosion geometry, since our present models begin with a relatively simple magnetic-field configuration and more complex or tilted fields may produce different angular ejecta patterns."

The team's research is available to view as a pre-print on the paper repository site arXiv.