Neutral mesons, the fleeting particles that endlessly oscillate between matter and antimatter forms, have just acquired a strikingly new mathematical lens. In a theoretical study published in The European Physical Journal C, physicist Swarup Sangiri of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur has constructed a fresh class of geometric objects, called connected sequential Bargmann invariants, that encode how two different decay channels of an entangled meson pair relate to one another inside the projective geometry of quantum states. The work extends an earlier framework and shows that when decay-projected states are wired directly into a cyclic chain of quantum overlaps, the resulting quantities behave in a fundamentally different way near the boundary where CP violation switches off.
To appreciate why this matters, it helps to recall what makes neutral meson systems so special. Particles such as the neutral kaon, the D meson, and the two neutral B mesons are produced as flavor eigenstates but propagate as mixtures of heavy and light eigenstates, conventionally written as combinations of the meson and its antiparticle with coefficients p and q. When the magnitudes of p and q differ, the two propagation eigenstates are no longer orthogonal, and this nonorthogonality is the hallmark of indirect CP violation, the subtle asymmetry between matter and antimatter that was famously discovered in kaons in 1964. Because any physical observable must be independent of arbitrary phase conventions attached to quantum states, the natural language for describing interference in these systems is one of rephasing-invariant quantities.
Bargmann invariants provide exactly that language. For a closed sequence of quantum states, the nth-order Bargmann invariant is the product of overlaps taken around the cycle, and it remains unchanged under independent phase redefinitions of each state. Its phase is a geometric phase, the kind of holonomy familiar from the Berry phase, accumulated along a closed loop in the space of rays. Earlier work had applied this machinery to correlated neutral meson decays, constructing third-order invariants that probe single-channel interference and fourth-order invariants that correlate two decay channels through the heavy and light propagation eigenstates. Those constructions linked the geometric picture to conventional flavor observables, including Jarlskog-type structures, without introducing any new phenomenological parameters.
The new study asks a deceptively simple question: what happens if the two decay-projected states themselves are connected directly inside the cyclic overlap chain? When one meson of an entangled pair, produced for example in the decay of a phi or Upsilon resonance, decays into a channel f, its partner is projected into a conditional state determined by the decay amplitudes. A second channel g prepares a different conditional state. The connected sequential fourth-order Bargmann invariant follows the loop from the heavy eigenstate to the f-conditioned state, then directly to the g-conditioned state through their mutual overlap, then to the light eigenstate, and finally back to the heavy one. The crucial new ingredient is the overlap between the two conditional states, a quantity built purely from the decay amplitudes that measures how similar the two post-selected meson states are in projective Hilbert space.
This change in connectivity has dramatic consequences for how the geometric quantities scale as CP violation becomes small. The previously studied disconnected fourth-order invariant, when normalized by the product of two third-order invariants, produced a ratio that blows up quadratically, scaling as the inverse square of the mixing asymmetry, the difference between the squared magnitudes of p and q. The connected sequential ratio, by contrast, carries only a single factor of that asymmetry in its denominator, so its enhancement near the CP-conserving limit is merely linear. Physically, replacing one propagation-mediated link with a direct overlap between the projected states removes one power of the heavy-light suppression, placing the two classes of geometric correlation in distinct scaling classes.
A second new ratio compares the sequential invariant directly with the disconnected one. This comparison ratio behaves in the opposite manner: it is proportional to the mixing asymmetry itself, vanishing in the exact CP-symmetric limit. Its behavior is governed by a competition between two effects, the shrinking of the heavy-light overlap on one side and the possible alignment of interference phases between the two decay channels on the other. When the conditional states prepared by the two channels become geometrically aligned, the suppression can be weakened, revealing that the connected structure is sensitive not only to mixing asymmetry but also to the relative coherence of the decay projections.
To make these statements precise, the analysis is carried out in terms of the standard rephasing-invariant interference parameters lambda, the products of the mixing ratio q over p and the ratios of decay amplitudes to their CP-conjugates. A systematic small-asymmetry expansion, with the squared magnitudes of p and q written as one half plus or minus a small parameter, shows that the sequential ratio depends explicitly on the phase difference between the two channels through the numerator structure. This dependence has no analogue in the disconnected construction, where the channels communicate only through the propagation eigenstates. It means the connected sequential geometry probes the relative orientation of the decay-conditioned rays themselves, a piece of interference information that conventional observables do not isolate on their own.
The geometric interpretation is perhaps the most elegant part of the story. Both the disconnected and the sequential fourth-order invariants involve the same four rays, the heavy and light propagation eigenstates and the two decay-projected states, yet they define different closed paths through projective Hilbert space. A Bargmann invariant depends not just on which states participate but on how they are stitched together, so rewiring the cycle produces a genuinely different geometric correlation. In the CP-conserving limit the heavy and light eigenstates become orthogonal, one link of every cycle collapses, and the entire cyclic structure degenerates, which is why the invariants vanish there. The formalism thus ties the very existence of these CP-sensitive geometric objects to the nonorthogonality of the propagation eigenstates.
Crucially for experiment, none of this requires new physics inputs. The sequential invariant and both ratios can be written entirely in terms of the mixing parameters and decay amplitudes already extracted from time-dependent flavor analyses at flavor factories such as the KLOE experiment with entangled kaons and the BABAR and Belle measurements with entangled B mesons. The framework simply reorganizes the same accessible information into cyclic geometric quantities. The neutral kaon system, with its small indirect CP violation and long-lived interference phenomena, is flagged as a particularly natural arena where the linear enhancement of the sequential ratio could be pronounced, with candidate channels including two-pion, semileptonic, and multi-pion final states. The B meson systems, including channels like B decays to J/psi kaons and to pion pairs, offer rich phase-dependent interference structures, while the D system, where both mixing and CP violation remain tiny in the Standard Model, could serve as a sensitive testing ground for small deviations from exact symmetry.
The study stops short of claiming a new dynamical observable. The author is careful to note that the sequential construction does not add an extra propagation stage in the manner of conventional cascade CP analyses; it is a reorganization of overlap geometry within a single meson system. Even so, the result establishes a hierarchy of Bargmann invariant structures, from single-channel triangles through disconnected quadrilaterals to directly connected sequential cycles, each capturing a different layer of CP-sensitive interference. As precision flavor physics continues to squeeze ever tighter constraints on the origins of matter-antimatter asymmetry, geometric tools of this kind may reveal correlation patterns hiding in plain sight within data that experiments already collect.
Subject of Research: Geometric Bargmann invariant structures and CP-sensitive interference in correlated neutral meson systems
Article Title: Connected sequential Bargmann invariants and (\mathcal CP~)-sensitive geometric correlation structures in neutral meson systems
Article References: Sangiri, S. (2026). Connected sequential Bargmann invariants and $$\mathcal CP~$$-sensitive geometric correlation structures in neutral meson systems. The European Physical Journal C, 86(9), Article 1056. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-026-16308-5
NASA is advancing American leadership in space by taking the next step toward a future where commercial space stations lead the way in low Earth orbit. On Friday, the agency released its final Request for Proposals inviting industry to submit plans for the next generation of commercial space stations.
“In alignment with the President’s National Space Policy, NASA is committed to maintaining a sustained American presence in low Earth orbit long after the International Space Station retires,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We will continue to need a place to conduct research, develop technologies, train crews, and prepare for missions to the Moon and Mars. Commercial space stations may provide that capability while creating new opportunities for American industry and allowing NASA to concentrate more of our resources on the near-impossible missions ahead.”
Building on the agency’s Ignition event earlier this year, NASA regularly has engaged with private industry to shape the agency’s future direction in low Earth orbit. This included publishing two Requests for Information in March to gather industry’s perspective on low Earth orbit destinations and transportation. The agency also published a draft Request for Proposals in July, followed by an industry day and one-on-one meetings that allowed interested companies to review and comment on the planned acquisition approach.
“We’ve made it clear that NASA will never give up its presence in low Earth orbit,” said Isaacman. “Since Ignition, we have spent a lot of time listening to industry and working through what it will take to make this transition successful. The opportunity is significant, but the economics ultimately have to work. We want to see credible plans, strong technical execution, and companies prepared to invest in destinations that can serve NASA while developing additional customers and markets of their own.”
Proposals are due Tuesday, Dec. 8, with contract awards expected in spring 2027.
Under the solicitation, NASA outlines requirements for companies interested in designing, building, testing, certifying, and operating commercial low Earth orbit destinations capable of providing end-to-end destination and transportation services for human spaceflight use.
NASA intends to award firm-fixed-price, multi-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts supporting development, certification, and services for continued low Earth orbit research and exploration. This will allow NASA to select two or more contractors through early development, followed by a competitive task order for final design, test, and evaluation, as well as certification and services from one or more contractors.
Learn more about NASA’s missions on the agency’s website:
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."
An illustration of a fast radio burst (FRB) being detected by the MeerKAT radio telescope array. (Image credit: Carl Knox - OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology Background Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Themiya Nanayakkara (USYD) Background Image Processing Credit: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
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.
A simulated view of what the Milky Way may have looked like 12 billion years ago. The bands of light are remnants of a galaxy collision, one of the thousands of mergers that the new study says built our galaxy. (Image credit: Harley Katz/MEGATRON Collaboration)
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.
The AMEC forms when summer winds push water vapor up and over the 12-mile-high slopes of Arsia Mons. But it only lasts for a couple of hours at a time. (Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin)
"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.
Arsia Mons is the second-tallest volcano on Mars behind Olympus Mons, but is twice as tall as Mount Everest. This image, captured by NASA's Odyssey orbiter, helps give a scale of how huge the Martian mountain really is. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)
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.
Mars Express has been closely monitoring the AMEC since 2018. These photos show the cloud appearing over consecutive days in July 2020. (Image credit: ESA/GCP/UPV/EHU Bilbao)
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.
HS 0209+0832 was once a main-sequence star like the sun (top left) that ballooned into a red giant after it ran out of fuel (top right). Eventually, it collapsed into a white dwarf (bottom left), before an exoplanet emerged from the ashes of the red giant (bottom right). (Image credit: NASA, ESA, L. Hustak (STScI))
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."
The elements in HS 0209+0832's visible spectra, strongly suggested that it was accreting material from a second-generation exoplanet. The transit data later confirmed this theory. (Image credit: Illustration: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))
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.
HS 0209+0832's exoplanet likely has very little to no atmosphere left due to strong gusts of stellar wind stripping it away. (Image credit: Dr Snehalata Sahu/University of Warwick)
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.
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.
Comparison between the astronomical images of IRAS 18293-0941 (left) and the artist's impression (right). (Image credit: B. Marcote (JIVE/ASTRON).)
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).
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.
Earth glows like a half moon while a giant aurora writhes over the North Pole in this ultraviolet image from the new Smile spacecraft. (Image credit: ESA & CAS/Smile/UVI CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
Quick facts
What it is: An aurora on the sunlit side of Earth
Where it is: Over the North Pole, as seen from about 75,000 miles away
When it was shared: Sept. 30
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.
Smile tested its soft X-ray imager on the light of the distant supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (center), located 11,000 light-years from Earth. (Image credit: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO )
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.
Among the many risks astronauts face during long-haul spaceflight, an extended stay in microgravity is one of the most consequential for long-term health, with effects on vision, bones, muscles and many other aspects of the body.
One solution might be artificial gravity — some way to create forces similar to Earth's gravity on a spaceship, akin to the giant rotating ring from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey."
But is that technology ever coming, or will it remain science fiction?
"There's really no reason it couldn't happen," Torin Clark, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Live Science. "From a technical perspective, this is something that could happen in the very near future."
In fact, artificial gravity has almost made its way to space before. The Centrifuge Accommodation Module was a planned 8.2-foot-wide (2.5 meters) centrifuge for the International Space Station (ISS), but the project was canceled in 2005 for budgetary reasons.
"[Artificial gravity] is one of those things — like all of a sudden, it's super popular, and then all of the scientists at NASA and everybody … have a lot of funding to understand how to actually implement this, and then it just dies," Ana Diaz Artiles, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University, told Live Science. "And then it comes back, and dies, and comes back. I've been going through a couple of these cycles in the time that I've been doing this."
Besides budgetary concerns, there are questions about how such a solution would be implemented.
"Everybody agrees it's a good thing to do. The problem is that we don't know how to implement it," Diaz Artiles said. "How much gravity do you need? How big does [the device] have to be? How long do you need it to be? And how long do you have to use this? Should we use continuous gravity or a short-radius centrifuge, something where you go in and out?"
Researchers have three main approaches for creating artificial gravity. One is the classic sci-fi idea: a giant ring that rotates passengers' entire living quarters so they live and work under forces similar to Earth's gravity.
"You have a relatively long radius, which means you don't have to spin very fast to create gravity," Diaz Artiles said. "But this is massive. You can't get all the parts up there in the same spacecraft — you need multiple spacecraft and to assemble everything. So, of course, you can see what a big endeavor this is."
A short-radius centrifuge is a more feasible option. It's essentially a tube with a radius of 6 to 10 feet (1.8 to 3 m) that spins to simulate gravity. A passenger sits or stands inside, with their head closest to the center of rotation, so the spin generates the strongest pull down toward their feet.
Astronaut Sunita Williams, equipped with a bungee harness, exercises on the Treadmill Vibration Isolation System (TVIS) in the Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station in 2006. (Image credit: NASA/Crew of Expedition 14, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Instead of allowing passengers to live in artificial gravity, this smaller device would be used in short daily sessions. "It's kind of like an exercise device," Diaz Artiles said. "In the ISS, you have a treadmill, you have this resistive exercise machine, so you go there for 30 minutes to do your exercise, and then you get out."
The final option is for spacecraft to create gravity via linear acceleration. This works in the same way that an accelerating car pushes passengers back into their seats, except the spacecraft would be oriented to push an astronaut's feet into the floor. To slow down, the spacecraft would turn around, firing its thrusters in the opposite direction to decelerate smoothly while maintaining a roughly similar gravity for its occupants.
"But then you need something like an engine that is able to accelerate all the time," Diaz Artiles said. "And propulsion-wise, I think we're not there yet."
Although a short-radius centrifuge is the most feasible approach in terms of both cost and engineering, it does have some drawbacks. For one, its fast spin can induce the Coriolis cross-coupled illusion — a sensation of tilting or tumbling that happens when you tilt your head off-axis while rotating.
This is the effect that causes motion sickness, Clark said.
However, Clark and his team have found that people can build a tolerance to the sensation with training, simply by being in a slowly spinning centrifuge and gradually increasing the speed when they no longer feel the sensation.
"If you very slowly, incrementally increase the spin rate … and do that not just over one session but over multiple sessions across multiple days, as far as we could tell, anyone can be made to incrementally acclimate to the rotating environment [of] up to 20 to 30 rotations per minute," Clark said.
Would artificial gravity prevent harmful effects on the body?
But researchers still don't know how fast the centrifuge would need to rotate, or how long someone needs to spend inside it, to benefit. Long periods in microgravity can lead to bone and muscle loss, loss of aerobic fitness, blood clots, and visual issues from fluid shifts in the eyes. The hope is that artificial gravity could prevent those effects, but exactly how much gravity is necessary remains an open question.
Studies of people on head-down tilt bed rest — the standard research method for simulating spaceflight deconditioning — have found that 30 minutes a day in a centrifuge did prevent some loss of muscle function.
"Thirty minutes a day … maybe is not enough," Clark said. "Maybe an hour or even two hours a day, and maybe at higher G levels, would be beneficial."
But these studies are expensive and time-consuming. "It's very difficult," Diaz Artiles said. "I think people are interested in this concept, but we just don't have a good answer."
In the end, it's not a technological challenge that's keeping artificial gravity from being used in space; it's knowing the best way to employ it and securing the budget for it.
"We know how to do this. As humans, we have done more difficult things," Diaz Artiles said. "We need the money, but we also need to better understand the need."
See how much you know about human exploration into space with our spaceflight quiz!
Chinese scientists have developed a new kind of “living cement” that could, in theory, be used to build structures on far-away planets like Mars. According to reports, it works using just a few ingredients, including “domestic” soil/regolith, gelatin, and genetically engineered yeast.
If able to scale, this technique could be used to build shelters and other structures for future long-term human missions to the planet. What’s more, the process is relatively cheap and could be combined with on-site 3D printers.
The researchers managed to engineer a special strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast that produces extremely adhesive proteins. One of these proteins is similar to those produced by mussels that enable them to stick to surfaces like rocks.
The idea is that these proteins could be used as a kind of cement to bind soil or regolith, effectively making a kind of biological cement. The yeast cells therefore behave a bit like millions of microscopic sticky particles inside the binder.
Building Martian structures using yeast
The gelatin component forms a hydrogel around everything, while the soil/regolith provides the bulk of the material. Initially gloopy in texture, this paste can be extruded through 3D-printer nozzles to form complex structures.
As for “curing” the mixture, the researchers believe it is best to work with the conditions on Mars rather than fight them. Mars has a very thin atmosphere (about 0.6 percent of that on Earth) and is much colder on average than Earth (about -63.4°F/−53°C).
Under these conditions, liquid water will freeze and sublimate, meaning it never really stays in liquid form for very long. That is essentially freeze-drying. What’s left behind is a lightweight porous network in which the gelatin, yeast-derived adhesive proteins, and mineral grains are locked together.
You can liken that to something akin to a mixture of freeze-dried sponge and concrete. What’s more, this new material is actually pretty strong, with 12 MPa compressive strength and 6 MPa flexural strength.
That’s about on par with low-strength and lightweight concrete here on Earth. Promising indeed, and if it can save shipping thousands of tons of material for construction, that would clearly be enormously beneficial.
Instead, in theory, you’d just need to send the biological starter material, some processing equipment, and a big robot printer. Interestingly, the material is also recyclable, meaning its constituent parts can be broken down and reused.
All well and good, but before this could be seriously considered for applications outside the lab, some important things need to be refined.
More work to do
The first is that the tested material used sand as a substitute for Martian regolith. Actual Martian regolith has different particle characteristics and contains things such as perchlorates. How the gelatin-yeast mix reacts to this is yet to be tested.
Another issue is that the gelatin is porcine, meaning that it would need to be “shipped in” to a building site. The team also tested a gelatin-free formulation, although its performance was lower, and the researchers say stronger fully biological binders will be needed.
Yet another major issue is enabling the material to build pressurized structures to protect people from Mars’s harsh environment. The team proposes a ready-made pressure-retaining membrane enveloped by a shell and shielding built using this new living concrete.
Overall, it is a promising proof-of-concept showing that Martian regolith might one day be turned into printable construction material using engineered biology, while exploiting Mars’s cold and near-vacuum conditions as part of the manufacturing process rather than treating them purely as obstacles.
Spaceflight Now reports:
"A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launched from Florida Thursday night on a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, America's spy satellite agency... The NRO has previously flown payloads on 22 Falcon 9 rockets but this is the first time it has used the heavy-lift Falcon Heavy, which consists of three Falcon 9 boosters and an upper stage, topped by a payload fairing.
The powerful rocket, which lifts off under the power of 27 Merlin 1D engines, was introduced to great fanfare in 2018 and made its 14th flight Thursday night... NROL-97 was SpaceX's third Falcon launch of the day. In addition to the Crew 13 mission, the company launched 130 payloads on the Transporter 13 rideshare mission from its West Coast pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It was the first time the company has landed four boosters in a single day.
CNN reports:
As Starship flights ramp up, SpaceX has made clear that the company will phase out the use of two of its most iconic creations: the Dragon spacecraft, which ferries astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station, and the Falcon 9 rocket, which for a decade has dominated the global launch market.
These vehicles not only revolutionized the space industry in their own way, they're also still very much essential to ongoing work in Earth orbit, without clear backup options in place. The prospect of this loss is already spurring panic among some satellite operators, said Caleb Henry, director of research at analytics firm Quilty Space... Henry said he expects that most of the remaining space on board Falcon 9 rockets has already been sold and — beyond early 2029 — such flights may be reserved solely for the US government. Even NASA, which currently counts the Dragon capsule as the only US-made spacecraft capable of getting its astronauts to and from the ISS, has also acknowledged the looming retirement of SpaceX's workhorse vehicles....
Despite the success of Falcon and Dragon, a peek at SpaceX's business book may hint at financial reasons for retiring the vehicles. In its first quarterly earnings report, SpaceX revealed its space segment — which includes Falcon, Dragon and Starship — lost $542 million. By comparison, its Starlink internet and connectivity business made nearly $1.7 billion. Starship is expected to continue to cost SpaceX untold millions as it moves out of the prototyping phase. But one reason SpaceX is willing to bet big on Starship is that it's simply "much better" for achieving the company's own long-term goals, said SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell at a recent conference. So it makes sense to shift resources toward the megarocket's future....
This rocket supply crunch has been looming since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine — which immediately removed Russia's Soyuz and Proton rockets from the commercial market, Henry noted. On top of that, Amazon — which is deploying a space-based internet constellation to rival SpaceX's Starlink — stepped in to buy more than 100 launches from various rocket makers.... Though some satellite manufacturers are hopeful that space onboard future Starship launches will be offered to satellite operators, it's not clear when or if that will happen.... It is possible that a launch supply crunch could be averted, noted Micah Walter-Range, a space analyst and contributor to the VettaFi Space Index. But satellite operators may be wary because newer rockets that have for years promised to step up to compete with the Falcon 9 have not yet begun flying with any regularity.
"The space industry hates uncertainty, particularly when it comes to planning of launches," Walter-Range said.
The article notes that Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, United Launch Alliance, and the Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin "have not yet reached the scale or launch cadence that the industry is demanding."
Most galaxies have a massive black hole near their center. But some black holes may be far from the middle, drifting through the galaxy for billions of years. Astronomers say these wanderers could help answer a question about the early universe: how did the first black holes form? A black hole can begin to wander […]
SpaceX s’apprête à envoyer en orbite une drôle de « boîte » qui pourrait annoncer quelque chose de bien plus grand : des usines capables de fabriquer directement dans l’espace. Pourquoi produire là-haut ce que l’on fait déjà sur Terre ?
It’s always a good idea to carefully consider the company you keep — especially if you happen to work for one of Elon Musk’s massive companies.
According to local channel FOX7, SpaceX manager Kyle Gonzalez has been arrested over the alleged stabbing of a Tesla contractor during a team-building exercise gone horribly wrong.
During the night out with a group of co-workers and friends, Gonzalez reportedly got into a heated argument with the Tesla worker over a game of pool at the Waterhole Saloon, a roadside honky-tonk just outside of Austin, Texas.
Court documents viewed by the Austin American-Statesmanclaim that the SpaceX manager became irate after one of the women he had entered the bar with went to compliment the Tesla contractor’s performance on a karaoke song. When the Tesla worker asked the woman to join him for a game of pool, Gonzalez allegedly became angry, saying he was “going to kill” the contractor.
That’s when Gonzalez allegedly pulled out his pocket knife and stabbed the man in the neck, leaving him with a one-inch puncture wound, the Statesmen recounts.
The unnamed contractor was then rushed to the hospital for life-saving surgery, and is expected to pull through.
Gonzales was reportedly found hiding out in a nearby parking lot, still holding the bloody knife. Court documents note that the SpaceX manager said he hid “for his safety,” though he later apologized for the attack three separate times. He was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, with a bond set at $25,000.
In September 2024, an entrepreneur named Justin Brown uploaded a YouTube video in which he argued that writers should be “scared right now” about the rise of AI.
“I think that one of the big dangers is that AI is going to take many people’s jobs,” Brown muses to the camera as he hikes through a national park in Australia. “This includes writers, by the way.”
What Justin didn’t mention in the video is that, along with his brothers Lachlan Brown and Brendan Brown, he runs a company called Brown Brothers Media — which, former insiders assure us, had just months earlier fired a stunning proportion of its own writers as it embraced generative AI.
Over the past few years, BBM has pioneered a remarkably cynical business model. First it buys online publications that have established themselves as offering a distinctive type of journalism, like coverage of space travel, parenting advice, or business news. Then it floods their websites with dizzying torrents of AI-generated content — many thousands of articles per month, by our count — in a bid to soak up as many readers as possible via Google and other platforms.
There are signs that this strategy has been extraordinarily successful, with BBM boasting in 2025 that its network of sites had surpassed 50 million page views per month. It’s difficult to verify a site’s traffic without access to its internal data, but the analytics service Similarweb corroborates the claim that BBM is pulling in vast audiences, estimating that over the past year its network of publications has attracted an average of 64.7 million visitors per month. According to a recent ranking, that would make it one of the 30 most trafficked English-language media enterprises on the web, with a total digital readership substantially higher than that of NPR, narrowly besting CBS News and Forbes, and just slightly behind the Washington Post.
A media organization like NPR or WaPo, though, employs hundreds or even thousands of journalists to gather and report news. BBM, as far as we can tell, has cut itself down to a skeleton crew of about a dozen employees, including its three founding brothers. To operate such a sprawling empire with such a tiny staff, former insiders told us, BBM uses AI to crank out content at a scale so immense that it’s difficult to comprehend.
Along the way, BBM has indulged in breathtaking acts of dishonesty — often in ways that seem specifically devised to manipulate platforms owned by Google, where Ahrefs data suggests that it sources the preponderance of its traffic. (Last year, BBM wrote in a press release that its enormous audience was “driven by organic reach through Google Discover and search.”)
One of BBM’s many unscrupulous practices, insiders confirmed to us, is that it has often invented entire fake personas for nonexistent writers — we found more than 50 spread across its dozens of sites — and published content under their names without revealing to readers that they weren’t real people.
In many cases, BBM has even outfitted these fictional writers with impressive-sounding bogus credentials as it uses their bylines to churn out AI-generated material.
The space news site Space Daily, for instance— one of BBM’smost successful publications, according to Similarweb data we reviewed, with an estimated average of 10 million page views per month over the past year — has published many articles under bylines it identified as scientists with distinguished résumés. There was “Dr. Katherine Chen,” for example, a supposed former “systems engineer” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory whose bio claimed she’d “spent fifteen years designing autonomous systems for deep space missions.” Publishing alongside Chen was “Dr. James Whitfield,” who was said to be an “aerospace medicine researcher at the European Space Agency.”
Yet beyond Space Daily, neither Chen nor Whitfield actually exist — not on social media, nor in press releases, nor as coauthors on research they would have conducted at two of the world’s premier space agencies. NASA’s site doesn’t make a single mention of Chen, and the ESA’s site has never once referred to Whitfield. And though NASA declined to comment on grounds that it “does not verify past employment or affiliations with the agency,” the ESA confirmed that “Mr. James Whitfield is not currently employed by the European Space Agency, nor do our records indicate that he has ever worked here in the past.”
BBM’s fraudulent experts aren’t limited to space. A tech site owned by BBM, Direct Message News, has run many articles under the byline of “Rachel Vaughn” that provided intimate advice about mental health concerns. According to her bio on the site, Vaughn is a Dublin-based psychologist with an “MA in Applied Positive Psychology from Trinity College Dublin” who is a “Certified Mental-Health First Aider” and an “associate member of the British Psychological Society.” The bio adds that Vaughn “regularly delivers evidence-based resilience workshops for Irish mental-health NGOs.”
But there’s no trace of a practicing psychologist in Dublin by Vaughn’s name. When we reached out to the British Psychological Society, it confirmed that it had no record of a member named Rachel Vaughn. What’s more, “Applied Positive Psychology” isn’t a degree — or even a course — that exists at Trinity College Dublin, the university told us. A reverse-image search further found that Vaughn’s headshot is a stock photo.
BBM has also created fake journalists, using them to commit bold acts of plagiarism and fabulism.
Consider an “investigation” about the recycling system in Los Angeles, attributed to another fake author named “Jordan Cooper” — depicted as a tattooed “pop-culture writer and vegan-snack reviewer with roots in music blogging” — and published this past February by VegOut, a vegan news and recipes site owned by BBM that pulls in an estimated 13.3 million page views per month.
In the piece, the Cooper persona claimed to have “bought a four-pack of Apple AirTags, super-glued them inside plastic containers, and sent them on their journey through America’s recycling system,” writing that “what I discovered over the next month made me question everything I thought I knew about those little triangular arrows.”
But the story included a purported photo of a plastic bottle containing an AirTag that featured a suspiciously garbled Apple logo — and numerous AI detectors flagged an overwhelming probability that the image was AI-generated.
As it turns out, the piece was a blatant ripoff of a 2024 story by a local San Diego TV station, CBS8. In that story, the station’s journalists describe a near-identical investigation in which they glued AirTags to four pieces of recyclable trash: a “water bottle, a yogurt container, an orange juice bottle, and a wipes container” — a list that Cooper’s piece seems to have lightly rephrased as a “water bottle, an orange juice jug, a yogurt container, and a cleaning product bottle.” (The Cooper piece never mentioned CBS8‘s work, instead framing the investigation as VegOut‘s original effort. An AI detector flagged BBM’s text as 100 percent AI-generated, with no sign of human involvement whatsoever.)
In another article, the Cooper character claimed to have “voted for Trump’s ‘America First’ promise,” but later regretted it because “that promise has been broken in just about every way imaginable.”
In addition to the fake domain matter experts and journalists, BBM provided many of its phony writers with elaborate backstories that made them seem like ordinary people, with identities that seem crafted to exploit the insecurities of readers struggling with loneliness and other life difficulties. It then used these relatable everyday personas to publish colossal numbers of emotionally manipulative personal essays in which the fake writers shared AI-generated anecdotes framed as deeply personal life experiences.
On VegOut, for instance, a fake writer that BBM called “Marlene Martin” was identified as a “retired high school English teacher and longtime writer who draws on decades of lived experience to explore personal development, relationships, resilience, and finding purpose in life’s second act.”
“When she’s not at her laptop,” the bio continues, “she’s usually in the garden at dawn, baking Sunday bread, taking watercolor classes, playing piano, or volunteering at a local women’s shelter teaching life skills.”
BBM has used personas like Martin to pump out thousands of heartfelt personal essays that purport to draw on decades of memories and wisdom, often ruminating on topics like loneliness and lost feelings of purpose.
“When I retired at sixty-six after thirty-two years of teaching high school English, a colleague pulled me aside at my farewell party,” read an essay published under the Martin persona. “‘It must be bittersweet,’ she said, touching my arm gently. ‘All those years you could have been writing, traveling, pursuing your real passions. But you had to raise your kids instead.’ I smiled and nodded, not having the heart to correct her. The truth was more complicated, more beautiful, and took me decades to fully understand.”
In a bit of unintentional comedy, these AI-generated essayists have often bungled their own biographical details, resulting in bizarre continuity errors.
Remember that essay above, where Martin claimed she’d retired at age 66? In a different piece, she wrote that she’d stopped working at 64. In another, she said it was 61.
Martin’s age is similarly inconsistent. In January of this year, she wrote that she was 68 years old. By February, she claimed she was “69 with two bad knees” — which would be possible if she’d had a birthday, except that by March she’d turned 71. By April, Martin was aging backwards, stating in a depressive essay about her loss of identity after the death of her beloved spouse — “my husband died and the caregiving that had consumed seven years ended overnight,” she lamented — that she was only 70.
These incoherent claims about writers’ life stories can be jarring. A fake “lead editor” and “clinical psychologist” identified as “Sarah Mitchell” at Silicon Canals — another BBM tech site, this one drawing an estimated 3.3 million page views per month, according to Similarweb data — published a sentimental essay earlier this year about how her baby’s first word was “Max,” the name of the family dog. Weeks later, she wrote in a piece about the psychology of dog owners that “I don’t have a dog.”
“I should probably admit that upfront,” the Mitchell persona conceded.
Martin wasn’t the only fake BBM writer whose confused narratives extended to deeply sensitive topics like grief and death.
This past February, for instance, a VegOut author identified as “Adam Kelton” — his bio claimed he was a “writer and culinary professional with deep experience in luxury food and beverage” — published an essay complaining about his mother’s passive aggressive behavior regarding his vegan diet when they eat out at restaurants. In it, he writes about his mom in the present tense, describing a lunch with her as recently as the previous week.
Then, just two days later, Kelton bylined a piece about joining a “grief support group” to help him talk about his mother — who by then, he wrote, had been dead for nearly a year.
“My mother died eleven months ago. Pancreatic cancer. The last year and a half was a slow unraveling — her energy going first, then her independence, then her,” Kelton mourned. Later in the essay, Kelton adds: “I am thirty-six years old. I am a son who lost his mother. I am a former hospitality professional. I am a minimalist living in a bungalow in Austin who hosts dinner parties and reads novels and is still — somehow, after everything — the guy who once stood in front of a painting and forgot to check the time.”
Longtime readers of sites acquired by BBM have been appalled by the severe decline in quality after the transition.
“RIP Silicon Canals,” wrote a former fan of the BBM tech site in a LinkedIn post. “Never seen a brand destroyed this quickly. For years it was part of my morning routine… then Brown Brothers Media took over at the end of November 2025, and literally overnight the entire feed turned into pure AI slop.”
When BBM eviscerates a publication like this, it can be shocking to the community its human staff had built. After it bought VegOut last year, the site went from publishing reviews and food journalism to churning out formulaic pop psychology listicles and personal essays that often had no connection to plant-based eating. Readers quickly picked up on the shift, with one commenter fuming in a Reddit thread — titled “Anyone else tired of VegOut?” — that the site’s articles under BBM “reek of AI” being used to “pump out meaningless milquetoast garbage.”
“VegOut is clearly nothing more than [an] insipid content farm,” another angry reader chimed in, “that’s CLEARLY LOST ITS WAY!”
The VegOut transformation was so controversial that in May 2026, the magazine’s original founder, Maggie Ortlieb, took to social media to address it.
“If you’ve been in the vegan community for a while, you’ve probably heard of VegOut Magazine. It’s the company I founded when I was 24 years old. I ran it for about ten years and then sold it last summer,” Ortlieb said in a video, explaining that a combination of burnout and economic factors led to the sale. “Unfortunately, the new owners turned it into just another AI-written content website, so not really the direction I had in mind.”
What BBM has accomplished would be impressive if it wasn’t so dark. At a moment when legitimate news organizations are struggling to survive, it has raked in untold hundreds of millions of eyeballs — and likely formidable amounts of revenue via its advertisement-laden sites — by polluting the media ecosystem with noxious AI clickbait designed to do little else but trick Google’s algorithms. Every reader it steals in this way is prevented from supporting a real publication, and many may become turned off from engaging with the media in the future due to the abysmal quality of BBM’s work.
To help analyze BBM’s empire of spam, we reached out to Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of review site HouseFresh and an SEO specialist who has written extensively about the impacts that AI and changes made by Google have had on independent publishers.
Navarro told us that she was “shocked to see the growing number of websites in the network and the huge variety of the sites themselves — from cooking and space blogs, to small business and war news.” What surprised her the most, though, was how so many of the sites under BBM’s umbrella are effectively “indistinguishable from one another, publishing the same kind of first-person AI-generated stories around self-help topics aimed at people who are lonely.”
“Being an independent publisher in 2026 feels like an impossible task,” said Navarro, who helped us dissect BBM’s network and tactics. “We’re competing against our own content regurgitated by Google’s AI Overviews, having our information scraped without compensation by AI chatbots, battling with algorithms to reach our subscribers on social media platforms, and trying to build a relationship with an audience that is less likely to click and visit our websites.”
After we started reaching out to people connected to BBM this past May, the network abruptly deleted more than 50 fake writer profiles — and untold thousands of articles attributed to them — from across its many sites.
After months of ignoring our requests for comment, Justin Brown finally sent us a statement shortly before we published this story in September.
“Before May 2026, our publications used contributor bylines that did not identify real people, and some of those biographies included credentials that were not real,” the statement conceded. “That was wrong. In May, we stopped publishing under those bylines, began removing or correcting the older articles involved, and published network-wide and per-site editorial standards. That review is ongoing.”
What Brown’s statement didn’t mention: we kept digging after BBM’s massive deletion spree — and found that what it’s replaced the fake writers with has been, somehow, an even bleaker and more dishonest vision of the future of journalism than what it had been doing before.
***
The Brown brothers are Australian originally, but all three now live and work in Southeast Asia.
In a 2024 YouTube video, two of the brothers — Justin and Lachlan — enthuse about the region in a way that sounds strikingly extractive.
Vietnam was so “cheap” that it had been “essential while I was rebuilding the businesses,” Justin explained, adding that “there are a lot of economic opportunities in an emerging economy like Vietnam.”
“Saigon is an awesome place to come and reinvent yourself,” Lachlan cuts in, saying he had married a local woman after moving to Vietnam in the 2010s.
“There’s lots of opportunity here, especially if you want to make money, because of the developing economy,” Lachlan continues, encouraging others to set up shop in the area and “reap the rewards.” He adds that he’s been purchasing investment properties there that have “already risen in value.”
Southeast Asia may have been fertile ground for the Brown brothers, but for workers they’ve hired in the region, their entrepreneurial activities have been a wrecking ball.
Back before the advent of generative AI,BBM relied largely on human writers in the Philippines and other lower-income countries to produce content for its network. One former contractor told us that she had always dreamed of being a writer, so she was delighted to get a gig at the company in 2022 — before the global AI explosion that would later consume BBM — because it was an opportunity to be paid for doing what she loved.
“I think a part of me always felt a sense of instability when I was working for [BBM], because the writers who were working for them, I think most of us were Filipinos and were not under a formal contract,” recalled the writer, who like others in this story spoke under condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation by the Brown brothers. “I was aware that they could let go of us any time they wanted.”
At first, it wasn’t clear what effect AI would have on the operation. After the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, former workers told us, BBM prohibited them from using the tech, warning that it was employing tools to detect AI and plagiarism.
That soon changed. Internal records obtained by Futurism show that in 2023, BBM started testing what the company called “robot” content. The same writer eventually found herself assigned to BBM’s “robot team,” where she was instructed to “generate articles using AI, and then… edit it so it sounds human-written.”
“More and more writers became robot writers,” the former contractor said, “until it came to a point where everyone’s just a robot writer, essentially.”
At first, she told us, the robot writers were scrambling to “create our own prompts” to feed into ChatGPT, or were provided with prompts that the writer understood to have been created by the Brown brothers. By 2024, BBM was so invested in the tech that it rolled out its own internal AI tool. It was built into the company’s WordPress backend, the former writer told us, where it could generate entire articles straight into the content management system — with a series of options that let staff quickly specify what type of piece the AI should spit out.
“They started developing this AI tool that generates articles in a couple of minutes,” the former writer explained. “You just select the topic it belongs under (like zodiac, love and relationship advice, etc) and then you’d select the tone (friendly, informative, etc) and it generates an article for you.”
The Brown brothers, particularly Justin and Lachlan, have personally bylined prodigious numbers of articles for their publishing empire, where they typically strike a tone of chin-stroking wisdom about topics ranging from life and spirituality to psychology and society. But according to another former contractor and internal documentation obtained by Futurism,their articles are AI-generated as well, and the company’s AI tool includes a dropdown menu that lets users select the voice of the author in which to generate a piece — including the Brown brothers themselves. (AI detectors corroborate the claim that prior to BBM’s embrace of AI, articles attributed to the brothers were human-written, but are now entirely AI-generated.)
After embracing AI, BBM conducted a series of sweeping layoffs. Some staff were explicitly told they were being let go because of AI, while others were simply informed that the company was changing “strategy.” (We obtained multiple emails in which Justin terminated workers personally, but are opting not to quote them directly out of concern that doing so could allow BBM to identify which former workers shared them.)
An internal BBM spreadsheet obtained by Futurism charts the cullings in granular detail. As of December 2023, it shows that BBM had upwards of 60 active writers. By May 2024, that number was down to around 40 — and by August, it was cut to about 20. By December 2024, the document only listed 12 writers, all of whom it said were using AI to generate content. Only three of the 60 writers once listed on the sheet, in addition to one person it identified as an editor, are still involved with BBM, according to publicly-available information.
As she described her experience with BBM, one former writer began to choke up. “It’s just really difficult… I still really love writing,” she said through tears. “With the current economy, it’s just been really difficult.”
“People need to know that writers and artists are being replaced with AI,” she added.
Asked about the ethical implications of firing writers in the developing world and replacing them with a cornucopia of AI-generated personas that were overwhelmingly presented as white and living in Western countries, BBM didn’t respond.
“I mean, I’m from Southeast Asia,” said a former BBM writer in the Philippines. “I think them hiring from here was always a cost-cutting effort.”
But the firings were “still shocking,” a different Filipino writer added. “And of course, it felt a little dystopian, honestly, to have your writing used to train AI, and then to have that AI replace you.”
***
As BBM leaned full-throttle into AI while slashing its staff, its publishing empire grew dramatically. Records show that its portfolio mushroomed from fewer than a dozen sites in 2023, to around 17 in 2024, to at least 24 in 2025 as it acquired properties including VegOut, Silicon Canals, and Direct Message News.
BBM has continued to purchase new sites throughout 2026, adding titles including The Law Dictionary, Science Blog,and the sprawling Space Media Network, through which it acquired Space Daily and more than 20 sister sites including Mars Daily, Solar Daily, and Nuclear Power Daily. (In yet another dubious editorial move, BBM republished many thousands of extremely old Space Media Network articles as if they were current events that had just happened, resulting in surreal headlines like “iPhone 5 Rollout Draws Big Crowds Worldwide,” posted in June of this past summer about an Apple product released in 2012.)
The Brown brothers also appear to be involved with several AI companies that have marketed AI “scaling” techniques as a service, using language suggesting that they may produce similar content for other media ventures.
Two of these startups, Mosquito Fleet and Tippa Fleet, have United Arab Emirates business addresses and claim on nearly–identical sites to “specialize in using artificial intelligence to improve and scale content production for our partner websites.”
Another company linked to the Brown brothers, Cognitive AI Systems Limited, is registered in the British Virgin Islands. A version of its site archived in February 2025 marketed “state-of-the-art AI technologies to scale content responsibly,” emphasizing that potential partners could “tailor AI capabilities to fit your content production needs, whether you publish daily or by the minute.” By earlier this year, however, that language was gone, with the site’s homepage instead declaring that “Cognitive AI Systems Limited owns a portfolio of digital publications operated by Brown Brothers Media.”
Currently, Cognitive AI Systems’ site seems to mainly serve as an enticement for people in the media business looking to sell a struggling news site.
“We buy specialist digital publications and hold them,” it reads. “If you are considering a sale, we are interested in sites with a defined audience, an editorial identity that still means something, and economics we can underwrite.”
“After close we favour continuity,” it continues. “The brand keeps its name and character. We invest in the next chapter rather than stripping the thing that made it valuable.”
Do you know anything about the Brown brothers’ business activities, including partnerships with other media companies? Reach out: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.
***
In early May, shortly after we started reaching out to people connected to BBM to report this story, the company abruptly embarked on an awe-inspiring deletion spree, in what seemed like a clear effort to cover up evidence and avoid penalties from Google.
We watched as it suddenly scrubbed what appeared to be many thousands of articles, as well as the fake authors that had bylined them — including Katherine Chen, James Whitfield, Rachel Vaughn, Marlene Martin, Sarah Mitchell, and Adam Kelton.
In some cases, it even pulled down entire publications. Bible Scriptures, a site where BBM had published content attributed to a roster of fake Christian theologians, hosted an AI-powered Jesus, and sold a $97 e-book supposedly penned by a made-up Franciscan scholar clad in a traditional robe — a curious choice, given that Franciscans famously take vows of poverty — has been locked behind a password since May. (BBM sold several other e-books attributed to fake writers on its site Hack Spirit; those volumes are still being sold, but they’ve now been altered so that the author is listed as Lachlan.)
Even Justin’s YouTube video in which he discussed AI replacing the jobs of writers was delisted during the rushed erasure.
Any remotely credible media company would feel immediately compelled to explain such a titanic expunging of content and entire authors, but BBM issued no such justification as the material vanished.
It did make some changes to the editorial guidelines listed on its various sites, we noticed. In the new guidelines, the company claimed that while it does use AI to “assist with research, drafting, source discovery, and editorial review,” it doesn’t use the tech to “fabricate quotes, invent sources, or present AI-generated content as first-hand reporting from real individuals” — which is confusing, since it sounds exactly like what BBM was doing with its battalion of fake writers.
BBM also published an exceptionally strange blog post in the wake of the mass deletion, bylined by Justin and titled “How Brown Brothers Media works: our editorial framework.”
The document is full of head-scratching claims, and feels as though it was sculpted in an unconvincing attempt to explain away the exact types of concerns we’d been asking around about.
In it, Justin describes BBM’s AI process as supplemental, writing that “AI tools assist” with its editorial process and that “editors are responsible for final publication decisions.”
Seemingly in reference to the many fake writers, Justin claimed that BBM “sometimes” uses “pen names for contributor bylines,” which “might be a real member of our editorial team or a freelance contributor writing under a chosen name.” Or, he continues, a “pen name” might “be an editorial device for personal-essay format content where a consistent voice serves the piece. Where a pen name is used as an editorial device, the byline page says so plainly. We don’t present fabricated personas or attach false professional credentials to bylines.”
Those claims felt stridently dishonest, especially because of the fabricated personas we found that had clearly been outfitted with fraudulent credentials. We also couldn’t find a single instance in which BBM provided readers with a disclaimer explaining that a writer was using a pen name.
And even more fundamentally, inventing an entire artificial character — whether it be a NASA scientist or a senior citizen dealing with loneliness in retirement — isn’t a “pen name.” It’s manipulative fabulism, deployed in a tactical attempt to scale the production of inauthentic content, in what seems to have been a highly successful strategy to exploit Google and other online platforms for profit.
In the statement it provided as we were preparing to publish this story — the same one that admitted it had used fake writers, further contradicting Brown’s “editorial framework” — BBM told Futurism that “today, AI tools assist with research and drafting” and “human editors are responsible for reviewing and approving articles before publication.”
“Collective editorial work is published under the publication’s editorial-team byline,” the statement continued. “Named bylines identify real contributors who take responsibility for that work. We disclose our use of AI in our editorial policies and investigate and correct errors when they are identified.”
***
But the reality is that nothing substantive has changed about BBM’s operation after its deletion bender.
Since the purge, it’s continued to post massive amounts of material that’s still clearly being produced by AI with minimal to no human oversight. Though AI detection technology isn’t perfect, we ran 30 recent BBM articles through Pangram, and every single one came back as 100 percent AI-generated, with zero signs of human editing — a near statistical guarantee that BBM’s publishing apparatus is still automated. As a reality check, we also tested ten stories bylined by Justin and Lachlan that were published between 2020 and 2021, before the release of ChatGPT; every single one came back as 100 percent human-written.
The only real change is that now, instead of publishing all this AI sludge under the names of fake writers, BBM’s strategy has shifted to be more dishonest and evasive than ever.
A lot of the dreck now appears under generalized bylines like “VegOut Editorial Team” and “Space Daily Editorial Team.” This can lead to BBM articles that read in a perplexing way, since these unspecified bylines have often been used to publish personal essays that were clearly written from the point of view of a fictional character.
“It happened at a dinner party,” reads a gloomy piece published under the “Space Daily Editorial Team” byline, which provides no hint as to who the person attending the supper was actually supposed to be. “Someone I’d just met asked me, the way people do when you’re a woman in your fifties without children, whether I’d ever wanted them.”
“For thirty-eight years I had been three things,” reads another somber authorless essay, this one run under the “VegOut Editorial Team” account. “A reliable employee. A dependable parent. A dutiful spouse. Each of those roles had a job description. Each one had clear expectations. Each one came with a set of tasks I was good at and that other people thanked me for.”
Even more egregiously than the general bylines, BBM has also started publishing large numbers of articles under the names of contributors who, as far as we can tell, are actual living humans. As with the general bylines, Pangram indicates that this material is entirely AI-generated. The implication is bleak: BBM appears to now be using these real people as the publishing version of “meat proxies” — affixing their names to fully AI-spun pieces not because they actually wrote them, but instead as a deceitful attempt at plausible deniability, presumably intended to bamboozle Google and other online platforms that discourage the scaled production of inauthentic content.
One such person who now publishes across multiple BBM sites does so under the name “Daniel Moran,” though a LinkedIn account previously linked in his BBM bio suggests that his actual name is Daniel Mabanta.
Regardless of his real name, Daniel is spectacularly prolific, grinding out articles for BBM publications ranging from Space News to the Scandinavian Standard, a publication formerly dedicated to news and culture in Northern Europe. In a single week, we counted, his name appeared on at least 85 separate articles published on BBM sites — a total of more than 90,000 words, which is longer than George Orwell’s “1984,” and nearly twice the length of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” (The actual amount of material Daniel published that week was likely even higher, because large amounts of his work were inexplicably deleted from several BBM publications including VegOut before we could tally it.)
This isn’t just an inhuman number of words to produce, needless to say, but an impossible amount to effectively quality-control given BBM’s skeletal remaining staff.
Further undermining the notion that BBM is now conducting any type of meaningful scrutiny of its work, its “real” employees like Daniel have continued to publish articles with the same baffling continuity errors that the fake ones did. Back in May, Daniel claimed in aSilicon Canals piece that he was 11 years old in 1995, which would make him about 42 years old today. Yet he’s consistently claimed inother articles published this year that he’s currently 38. In another piece, he inexplicably referred to himself as a “daughter.”
Another writer whose name has frequently appeared on BBM articles since the mass deletion is Graeme Brown, the father of the Brown brothers. (Graeme is currently listed as the editor-in-chief of multiple BBM publications.)
Content bearing Graeme’s name has also contained BBM’s hallmark continuity flubs. On May 8, for example, Graeme bylined an article for Expert Editor — a BBM site pulling in an estimated 5.8 million page views per month —in which he declared that he was 77 years old. By May 11, however, he’d aged in reverse, repeatedly stating in another piece for the same site that he was 75. (These have since been deleted.)
Sometimes it appears that BBM has been so sloppy that it’s affixed the wrong name to a piece generated for a different author. Though Lachlan has written extensively about being married to a woman and having a young daughter, for example, the BBM cofounder recently bylined a May Expert Editor article — titled “10 Signs a Man Is Trustworthy and Has Good Intentions” — in which he mused that “in my personal experience, I knew my now-husband was a keeper when he bravely voiced his insecurities and fears about his career early into our relationship.”
At times, it’s difficult to believe that any human at BBM is taking a single look at drafts before they’re published, or even afterward. Another BBM property, Eluxe Magazine, seems to have accidentally published a pair of articles attributed to Lachlan this summer which consist of nothing more than a few lines of garbled computer code — where they remain pinned to the top of the publication’s home page at the time of this story’s publication.
In another piece, BBM appears to have accidentally left AI copy in the final version that was written from the point of view of a chatbot generating the article.
“Now I have all the verified sources I need,” reads the first sentence of a Space Daily article attributed to Lachlan Brown, who is listed as that publication’s editor-in-chief. “Let me write the article with exactly 4-5 inline hyperlinks to real, verified URLs.”
***
BBM often uses its armada of staff bylines and meat proxies to pump out ceaseless variations on a single idea that are essentially copies of each other, drawn from no original reporting and with no time peg to a current event or any explanation of why the ancient news is now relevant again.
The strategy is clear: flood the zone with regurgitations of the same piece — and when something hits, just keep churning out more.
BBM didn’t respond to specific questions about this tactic. But after we asked about the practice, it quietly altered the headlines of many of these stories.
The implications for the health of the media ecosystem are grim. Navarro, the SEO expert and managing editor of HouseFresh, pointed out that BBM has often purchased older publications with “domains registered in the 90s or the early 00s” — properties that already have a strong, established foothold with Google, in other words — before replacing their handcrafted human content with page after page of AI-generated dross.
BBM buys “old, established websites with real audiences only to replace most (or all) of their content with AI slop before plastering the sites with ads,” Navarro said. “The same articles are republished across websites, moving through cycles where hundreds of pages are taken down from one site only to appear in another soon after.”
“This makes it all the more disheartening to see content farms luring millions of readers with AI slop,” she added. “How many people will be put off from clicking on new stories surfaced by Google Discover or Google News after landing on ad-ridden slop sites like these?”
***
Google’s response to BBM’s empire of schlock doesn’t inspire confidence for its future as a steward of the media ecosystem.
In theory, the tech giant prohibits site owners from engaging in what it calls “scaled content abuse,” which it describes as “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.”
Examples of scaled content abuse, according to Google’s guidelines, include “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users,” as well as “creating multiple sites with the intent of hiding the scaled nature of the content” and “creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords.”
In other words, if what BBM is doing — using the corpses of reliable publications to create a twisted, AI-powered imitation of a conventional media company, built on fake writers and redundant or incoherent content that appears to be garnering more traffic than many actual journalism enterprises — doesn’t count as scaled content abuse, it’s hard to imagine what would.
“Based on what I’ve seen, many of the websites acquired by Brown Brothers Media can rank on Google Discover and Google News,” Navarro told us. “This, combined with their capacity to quickly generate and publish dozens of pages about trendy topics, has allowed them to drive thousands of people to their AI-generated, ad-packed articles. They have now scaled this operation across multiple websites, some of which have been seen to publish hundreds of articles per week.”
“If this isn’t scaled content abuse,” she added, “I don’t know what is.”
But Google hasn’t taken any lasting action against BBM. After we sent detailed questions about this story, the tech giant initially deindexed several BBM sites, including VegOut and Silicon Canals. Weeks later, they appeared back in its search results.
“Our policies for Google Search and News are clear: we prohibit producing low-value content at scale to game ranking,” Google told us in a statement back in May. “While we generally don’t comment on individual sites, we act on policy violations to keep 99 percent of Search visits spam-free.”
As of when we published this story, articles by BBM are still appearing prominently on Google’s platforms. Reached with multiple followup questions about BBM’s vast scale, its presence in Google News and Discover, and the manipulative tactics it continues to employ, Google didn’t respond.
***
Earlier this week, we pressed BBM on its editorial practices in a detailed followup message, including specific questions about its failure to inform readers about the nature of its mass deletion.
“We use AI tools in our editorial work, and disclose that use in our published editorial standards. Under our current process, members of our editorial staff review and approve articles before publication, and Brown Brothers Media retains editorial responsibility for what we publish,” the company said in an additional statement. “When we identify errors or work that falls short of our guidelines, we correct it or withdraw it from publication. We believe AI tools can be used responsibly under human editorial judgment. We stand behind the editorial standards now in place and the work published under them.” (The company also updated the “editorial framework” it had first issued amid the mass deletion to echo that language.)
“DMNews has withdrawn this article,” it reads. “Published in April 2025 under Justin Brown’s byline, it presented interview anecdotes and quotations as original reporting that could not be substantiated. A correction on 15 September 2026 removed that material; on further review we concluded the article should be withdrawn rather than corrected, consistent with how we treat unsupported first-person reporting elsewhere in the network. The article text has been removed. We regret that it did not meet our editorial standards, which are set out in our editorial policy.”
At any normal publication, the implications would be stupifying. Imagine if the chief editor of Business Insider or Axios — both publications, according to data we reviewed, that draw far less traffic than BBM — had published an article under their own byline in which they claimed to have conducted extensive interviews, and then subsequently retracted the piece while admitting that its first-person descriptions of conversations with sources “could not be substantiated.” If the reaction to Stephen Glass at the New Republic or Jayson Blair at the New York Times is any indication, it would be one of the most explosive journalism scandals of all time.
But BBM isn’t the New Republic or the New York Times. Justin’s brain-melting retraction notice doesn’t seem to have drawn any attention online, both because BBM didn’t publicize it and, more fundamentally, because BBM is a media organization that’s carefully designed to look robust and trustworthy, but is only a façade — a reality that quickly becomes apparent the more time you spent digging through its vast archives of meaninglessness.
***
It’s hard to know what to make of the Brown brothers. We asked if they’d be willing to sit for an interview, but Justin repeatedly declined the offer when he sent the company’s statements.
Perhaps the brothers have been operating their blundering AI empire for years without even reading what they publish, ignorantly believing in their own vacuous promises about their company’s “commitment to high editorial standards” and “honest information.”
But the more likely explanation — especially after watching their machinations to hide their journalistic sins and remain in Google’s good graces by deleting content and employing human shields to byline AI-generated content — is that they know exactly what they’re doing and just don’t care.
Their trainwreck-laden funhouse mirror of a respectable media company has masqueraded as a purveyor of genuine news and information, enjoying enormous success at capturing reader eyes and attention through platforms that actual journalism relies on — while publishing oceans of trash that would get a real journalist fired immediately, and responding to questions with empty and contradictory platitudes about transparency, accountability, and responsible AI use.
In any case, BBM’s zombie content mill flounders onward. It recently started promoting a new site called Sentient Blogs, which positions itself as a publication dedicated to human authorship in an era of shoddy AI content.
“A platform dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of human bloggers that create human generated content, not AI,” reads its about page, with its FAQ further promising that “we are confident that between our amazing authors who are writing on this platform because they share the same initiative and our [quality assurance] measures, the likelihood of AI content is very very low.”
To kick it off, Lachlan bylined a piece about his touchingly human experiences with fatherhood, writing that a “thousand dinners become a family culture. Repeated school runs become the background of a child’s childhood. Years of quiet effort become a marriage, a friendship, a body of work or a sense of being useful to other people.”
A disclaimer at the bottom, dissonantly, says it was “produced with AI assistance.” According to Pangram, it was 100 percent AI-generated.
Since the debut of Garrett P Serviss’ 1898 novel “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” space-based warfare was relegated to the imagination — but no longer.
In an address on the “State of the Space Force” on Tuesday, reported by Space.com, chief of space operations for the US Space Force General Douglas Schiess informed the public that the Pentagon has definitively deployed active space-based weapons platforms.
“Let me be crystal clear: today, Guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks,” Schiess said. “Space is both a battlefield and the backbone of our joint force.”
Schiess stopped short of providing any details about the weapons, instead sharing a war story of one Space Force operator named “Specialist Gray.”
“Even as alarm red sirens were blaring and incoming missiles targeted her site, she courageously held the line, protecting forces, denying adversary capability, and delivering space effects until her commander had to literally pull her from the console to safety,” Schiess recounted with a dramatic flair. “She locked onto the target, optimized her weapon system and waged electromagnetic warfare against a determined adversary.”
As Space.com notes, those descriptive elements may point to a kind of non-physical platform, like a signal jammer or a microwave emitter, though it’s anyone’s guess what weapon “Specialist Gray” was supposed to be operating.
The news came just ahead of the Space Force’s request for over $71 billion in additional funding for 2027, adding to the over $100 billion it’s already been allocated, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported.
Evidently, the orbital-weapons announcement was meant to give that absurd request some extra oomph — which, if granted, it would represent the single highest one-year budget adjustment received by any US military branch since 1952.
The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack.
“We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.”
“I am very sad to see the site down”
In the meantime, the IMO said it’s prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, which can be reported here. The organization is also providing some information on its Facebook page.
The Defense Department issued a legal waiver authorizing current and former personnel to share unidentified anomalous phenomena–related classified information, but it doesn’t extend to other agencies.
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