Launched in 2023, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope observes some of the most distant regions of the visible universe for signs of dark matter and dark energy. But even while focused on the “big picture,” Euclid’s onboard equipment is surprising astronomers by capturing tiny photobombers like errant comets.
Its recent portraits of one specific dusty space rock are especially impressive, however. Euclid spotted a never-before-seen comet sailing through space more than 807.7 million miles from Earth. The telescope isn’t designed to automatically flag an image interloper. Instead, the bright blemish seen in multiple images was spotted by a moving object detection program designed by Mikko Pöntinen, an astronomer at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
“I was excited to see my software flag a ‘streak’ smeared across several images—the result of a fast-moving object,” said Pöntinen. “Further inspection revealed that it had a fuzzy cloud around it, indicative of an active object like a comet that is shedding dust and gas.”
Pöntinen quickly relayed his findings to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), which then passed the news along to researchers around the world. On October 8, the MPC confirmed the newly discovered comet, which is now classified C/2026 S1 (Euclid).
C/2026 S1 was seen from five different fields of view over multiple days in the Euclid Deep Field North region of the telescope’s scans. Astronomers now know the comet’s trajectory isn’t located on the same horizontal plane as the planets. Instead, its path is technically taking it over the solar system along a multi-thousand-year orbit.
Euclid’s discovery is particularly striking because the telescope’s six-year mission is specifically mapped to avoid areas of the sky that are laden with comets and asteroids.
“Very few comets are expected to be discovered by Euclid, so it was a happy coincidence,” added Euclid archive scientist Bruno Altieri.
Os investimentos da Apple em pequenas empresas ao redor do mundo continuam. A bola da vez é a Samplab, uma empresa de ferramentas de áudio com inteligência artificial.
De acordo com a Comissão Europeia, não se trata de uma aquisição completa, mas de um investimento mais contido da Apple, que terá o direito de adquirir certos ativos da Samplab GmbH e de oferecer emprego a alguns dos funcionários da startup.
Esse, vale lembrar, foi o mesmo modelo de investimento adotado pela fabricante do iPhone com a Huxe, startup focada em IA que encerrou suas operações há alguns meses.
Baseada em Zurique, na Suíça, a Samplab foi fundada em 2020 por Manuel Fritsche e Gian-Marco Hutter e, segundo sua página no LinkedIn, conta com no máximo dez funcionários.
A Samplab desenvolve software capaz de “mudar uma nota no seu áudio” e “detectar e editar acordes”, de acordo com suas próprias descrições, além de fazer a separação granular de stems (arquivos de áudio que representam partes separadas de uma trilha completa, como bateria, baixo e vocais — algo que o Logic Pro, da Apple, já pode fazer). Os plugins da companhia também já podiam ser utilizados no próprio software de produção musical da Maçã.
Ainda segundo a Comissão Europeia, esse investimento foi concluído em 17 de junho. Desde então, o site da Samplab foi retirado do ar e seus perfis nas redes sociais, apagados/restringidos.
Hi All,
I have a MacBook Air M4 using Sequoia 15.8.1. Recently, if the charger is plugged in, after the set amount of time in System Settings - Lock Screen the computer will require a password to enable Touch ID. That's fine.
But, if on Battery (charger not plugged in), I can leave the computer alone for hours or days- lid open or closed. It never requires a password to enable Touch ID. Sometimes it wants Touch ID & that works. Other times, even after a day, it won't ask for anything. The...
My wife's 2011 iMac's hard drive has crashed. I have an external SSD and have tried to erase it formatting to MacOS Extended (Journaled) and set Scheme to GUID Partition Map as recommended by Apple but it comes up with a message to say that erase has failed.
My current MacBook Pro has a M3 chip, 8GB memory, 512GB drive and Tahoe V. 26.7.1. There's a popup message every times when the system starts and during running the system periodically. The message along the line of, loosely quoted:
This Mac cannot connect to to iCloud, because of a problem with "cr00zng@personal-email.com". Open Apple Account setting to fix this problem...
Before you decide to upgrade to Golden Gate on your Mac, you should know that many folks have reported that their printers have stopped working and that their printer's manufactuers isn't yet offering updated drivers.
It seems as if all menu bar managers don't work under GG.
Wife needed a new laptop so was finally able to convince her to move on from her 6yr old windows/dell pc. Purchased a MacBook Air 13-inch laptop with M5 chip: Built for AI, 13.6-inch Liquid Display, 16GB Unified Memory, 512GB SSD, 10 CORE, 12MP Center Stage Camera, Touch ID, WiFi 7 ; in MIDNIGHT.
So, now what is the best way to try to migrate her info from the Dell to the new macbook air.
Japan launches a ground-breaking mission to the Mars moon Phobos today, and you can watch live.
The JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission aims to collect samples from Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, and deliver it back to Earth for analysis. If successful, the samples could help solve long-standing mysteries about Mars’ moons, including their origin.
In 1877, US astronomer Asaph Hall discovered Phobos and its smaller sibling, Deimos. The moons have arguably the most bad-ass names in our solar system: Phobos comes from the ancient Greek word φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear,” and Deimos originates with the ancient Greek word Δεῖμος, which translates to “dread.”
Despite increased attention on Mars in recent decades, astronomers don’t know exactly how the celestial bodies formed. Theories include asteroids or debris leftovers from way back when the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
“The samples from MMX will bring forth paradigm-shifting science on the Mars system for generations to come, especially as NASA prepares to send the first humans to Mars,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator and Science Mission Directorate at NASA, said in a statement. While a JAXA mission, NASA worked with the agency to provide instruments and technologies to assist.
The MMX spacecraft launches on top of an H3 rocket at Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:41 p.m. EDT (4:41 a.m. Japan Standard Time on October 20). You can watch it live on JAXA’s YouTube page. The mission will get to Phobos in August 2027 and spend at least 16 months surveying the surface before collecting samples. The samples will not return to Earth until at least 2031.
Despite the name, the universe’s white dwarfs can glow in a wide range of colors—even green. For the first time, astronomers have spotted a star that appears green to the human eye, and the reddest ever recorded. These outlier stars help explain how certain white dwarf stars would shine in green, pink, cyan, yellow, and purple if we actually saw them up close in space. These colorful findings are described in a study recently published in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments.
Looking for the ‘perfect radiator’
White dwarf stars are the dense remnants left behind after stars like our sun reach the end of their lifespan. For most stars, their color gives a hint to their temperature. Cooler stars appear orange, warm stars like our sun look white. The hottest glow pale blue, similar to how a blacksmith’s iron will go from red to orange to white hot. Astronomers believed that white dwarfs followed this same rule. They even earned their name after the earliest examples were surprisingly hot and glowed in a white/pale blue.
“Most stars, including most white dwarfs, behave like ‘perfect radiators,’ so their colour is set almost entirely by temperature. But nobody had really looked into what else might be possible for white dwarfs,” Mark Hollands, a study co-author and astronomer at the University of Warwick in England, said in a statement. “It turns out these incredibly dense stars can produce colours nobody expected, and some of them genuinely surprised me.”
According to the team, the key to these colors is density. The atmospheres surrounding the coolest white dwarfs can reach about the same density as water (roughly 1 gram per cubic centimeter). They are also millions of times denser than the sun’s photosphere, the lowest layer of its atmosphere. Under these higher density conditions, any trace elements present (carbon, calcium, sodium, etc.) interact with the surrounding dense helium plasma. As they interact with the plasma, they can absorb light across a wider spectrum of colors than they would at lower densities. This then shifts the star’s color away from the more typical orange, white, and blue.
Unfortunately, no white dwarf sky is close enough for its color to be seen directly. Instead, the team calculated their color from data astronomers routinely collect—a star’s spectrum. The spectrum is a “fingerprint” that’s produced when starlight splits apart by wavelength, similar to how a prism splits sunlight into a rainbow. Astronomers ran these spectra through a computer model of what colors human vision can see to check what color a star’s light would appear to our eyes.
Color-accurate simulated images of white dwarfs. Top Left panels: Sirius B is the nearest white dwarf to the Solar System, with a hot hydrogen atmosphere, resulting in a pale blue colour. WDJ1147-7449 is instead among the coolest nearby white dwarfs, giving it a featureless spectrum and an orange appearance. Top Right panels: Convective envelopes in these cool white dwarfs have dredged up carbon from their cores into their dense helium-dominated atmospheres, forming diatomic carbon molecules that lead to various pink hues. Bottom panels: Accretion of rocky debris from the white dwarf planetary systems enriches their cool helium atmospheres with elements such as calcium, magnesium, and sodium. The varying amounts/compositions of accreted material and white dwarf temperatures allow for a diverse array of colours, including green. In reality all stars would be many millions of times brighter than what can be shown on-screen. Image: Mark Hollands/University of Warwick
The first green and the reddest red
The team applied this method to several white dwarfs across the cosmos. They found that their colors fall into distinct groups linked to what makes up a star’s atmosphere. Carbon-rich white dwarfs generally appear pink or purple. Stars enriched with debris from busted asteroids and comets, the remains of old planetary systems, tend to be more yellow. Cooler white dwarfs with atmospheres of mixed hydrogen and helium show a more cyan or pale blue tinge. This cyan-pale blue is caused by hydrogen molecules colliding with helium atoms inside their ultra-dense atmospheres.
The most striking example is WD J1330+6435. This star is about 7,232 degrees Fahrenheit (4,000 degrees Celsius) and around 284 light-years away from Earth. Over time, it has gathered rocky material from its planetary system. All of this extra material enriched its atmosphere with calcium, lithium, and sodium. The result—a chartreuse green appearance in the team’s models. As far as the researchers are aware, no other star (living or dead) has ever been credibly reported as green.
Enriched from above: The cool white dwarf WDJ1330+6435 has accreted sodium-rich rocky material from its planetary system into its atmosphere. The immense atmospheric density causes the sodium to absorb light over broad range of yellow, orange, and red wavelengths, giving the WDJ1330+6435 a ghostly green appearance. Image: Mark A Garlick/University of Warwick.
“The traces of sodium in the atmosphere of this white dwarf absorb the orange part of the spectrum, leaving behind a ghostly green glow,” added Hollands. “Imagine standing on a planet and looking up at a green star. It feels like something out of science fiction.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the team identified what could be the reddest star ever recorded—WD J1011+2845. This white dwarf is only 48 light-years away from Earth, and has a deep convection zone. This zone is full of carbon that’s been lifted up from the star’s core to its surface. The carbon molecules then distort the star’s light so much that almost all of it is squeezed into wavelengths beyond 600 nanometres. This wavelength produces an unusual deep salmon-pink glow.
Enriched from below: The cool white dwarf WDJ0902+2010 has a deep convection zone within its helium dominated outer envelope. The convection zone has reached the white dwarf core, lifting interior carbon to the surface, and forming carbon molecules. These C2 molecules strongly absorb light across the optical range, including blue, green, and yellow wavelengths, resulting in WDJ0902+2010 appearing pink to the human eye. Image: Mark A. Garlick/University of Warwick.
What are the odds?
The team also studied 151 white dwarfs located within about 65 light-years (20 parsecs) from Earth. Only five of these showed unusual colors, two yellow and three pink. This suggests that about 1 in 30 of the universe’s white dwarfs shine with an unusually colored light.
The team then measured the color temperature of the remaining 146 white dwarfs. Color temperature is commonly used to describe light bulbs using degrees Kelvin—warm white at 3,000K, cool white at 6,000 K, etc. The median color temperature of the sample was approximately 6,800K, which our eyes perceive as white. This measurement corrects a common misconception that white dwarfs are typically blue. The hotter and bluer white dwarfs are mostly brighter, so they can be seen from further away and are over-represented in surveys that only look at a star’s brightness.
“One in thirty might not sound like a huge fraction, but across the entire population of white dwarfs in the Universe, that is still a lot of oddly coloured stars out there,” added study co-author and University of Warwick astronomer Boris Gänsicke. “Yet if we take the median across a representative population of white dwarfs, we found that the average white dwarf really is white.”
It’s true, the moon is shrinking. And astronomers now know how fast it’s contracting. While only satellite observations and the most delicate instruments can detect these shifts, the consequences of this shrinkage means moonquakes can occur anywhere on the lunar surface at a moment’s notice.
A team led by Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planetary geologist Thomas Watters detailed their findings in a study recently published in The Planetary Science Journal. Researchers used data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), which has spent over 17 years generating millions of images of the moon’s surface. A shriveling lunar landscape may sound dramatic, but it’s occurring at a glacial pace. Based on these new calculations, the moon’s overall radius has decreased nearly 148 feet over the last 400–800 million years as it continues to cool. That’s about 2.4 to 4.3 inches per million years, or just 0.1 micrometer annually.
Although slow, the incremental activity’s effects are visible everywhere. On Earth, about 90 percent of all seismic activity occurs near the boundaries between lithospheric plates. But unlike its host planet, our moon is encased by a single, shell-like plate. This means interior cooling can generate slips and faults anywhere at any given time. After reviewing images taken by the LROC, the study’s authors tallied over 10,000 visible lunar faults.
“The number of these young faults revealed in LROC images is much greater than I ever imagined,” said Watters. “As the interior of the moon continues to cool and contract, it is expected that the growth of existing faults and formation of new faults continues today.”
While the faults can happen anywhere, some lunar regions are more likely than others to feature them. Areas with the thickest crust have fewer faults, which indicates they may be more stable than other, thinner sections. In addition to better understanding lunar history, the distribution and frequency of moonquakes may also help NASA better plan for a long-term human presence on the moon.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has officially traveled 28.10 miles—farther across another planet’s surface than any other vehicle in history. Not only that, but the six-wheeled science lab accomplished this impressive feat almost entirely autonomously and in barely a third the time it took the previous recordholder.
“The original mission called for no more than 12.4 miles of driving. We’ve blown well past that,” Steven Lee, Perseverance and Curiosity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
Perseverance began operations on Mars on February 18, 2021, after landing in an ancient river delta selected for potential past microbial life called Jezero Crater. Since then, the rover has slowly but steadily made its way across the region, while conducting multiple sediment drilling surveys. These samples are then chemically analyzed using onboard laboratory equipment before the results are sent back to mission specialists at NASA.
Perseverance surpassed the previous travel record of 28.06 miles set by NASA’s Opportunity rover, before its communications with NASA ended on June 10, 2018. However, it took Opportunity nearly 15 years to accrue its distance while Perseverance exceeded the same mileage in less than six years, and on the 2,006th Martian day (sol) of its mission. Perseverance is currently traveling towards an area named Idubi through an expanse nicknamed “Lac de Charmes.” The region near Jezero Crater’s western rim hosts what may be the oldest landscape ever investigated in the solar system. Mars does not feature tectonic plates like Earth, which means its terrain is never eroded and subsumed into the planet’s substrates.
Mission engineers have not spent the last six years remotely steering Perseverance, either. The rover arrived on Mars equipped with a self-piloting system called AutoNav, which constructs 3D maps of the immediate surroundings to flag any potential hazards. AutoNav then charts a route between specific waypoints chosen by NASA specialists back home. Perseverance has completed 90 percent of its total excursion with AutoNav. Opportunity and its sibling rover, Spirit, only relied on a first version of the piloting system about five percent of the time.
Perseverance has a long road ahead of it, if all goes according to plan. In October, NASA approved the first mission extension that will continue the rover’s operations through about the end of 2028.
“With all mobility systems fully operational and favorable extended-ground-life test results, we expect Perseverance to keep adding to this record for many years to come,” added Lee.
Successfully sending Artemis II astronauts on their historic lunar flyby earlier this year required some of the latest and most precise technologies, but not everything in this mission needed the same intense equipment. As crewmates gazed through Orion’s capsule window at the moon’s eclipse of the sun on April 6, 2026, three of the travelers needed a way to easily sketch some of their preliminary observations. They took turns writing their notes on a shared tablet PC—and NASA has recently highlighted their work with a screenshot of their efforts.
Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen had a lengthy list of tasks during their 10-day, 700,000-mile roundtrip. One of the most visually dramatic jobs involved carefully assessing lunar activity while passing across the moon’s dark side from a distance of about 46,000 miles away. The roughly hour-long observation period provided astronauts with an unprecedented opportunity to record meteorite activity.
A visualization of a dark Moon eclipsing the Sun is marked with handwritten notes in this April 6, 2026, screenshot from an Artemis II crew member’s tablet. Credit: NASA
The tablet screenshot includes notes taken by Wisemen (in blue), Hansen (in red), and Glover (in green) during the moon’s eclipse of the sun. The crew collectively spotted at least five faint flashes of light caused by impacts. According to Wiseman, the first three impacts occurred within about 10 minutes into their observations, while another two happened later during the flyby. Impacts two and four were likely also corroborated by Hansen and Glover.
Since the moon does not have an atmosphere like Earth’s, the lunar surface is regularly bombarded by space rocks. Most of them are comparatively small, but they will still pose a problem for future crewed trips to the surface,especially those stationed in a planned permanent lunar base. The data gathered by Artemis II on April 6 will help NASA better understand these dynamics, and plan for the safest environments possible for their astronauts.
Artemis II’s astronauts safely returned to Earth during a splashdown off the coast of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 11. If all goes as planned, Artemis III’s crew will launch on their mission no earlier than June 2027.
If a train leaves the station in Exeter, England, headed south toward Newton Abbot five years before the railway line opens, how long until anyone figures out that it didn’t happen? Well, evidently about 155 years. A report on magnetic storms, published in Nature in 1871, described an incident thought to be the earliest recordedContinue reading "Case closed on long-standing space weather mystery"
Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter could miss its planned 2027 start date because the transmission infrastructure needed to power it is awaiting regulatory approval. Research company Aterio warns that Project Lighthouse, being developed by Vantage in Port Washington with Oracle as tenant, faces a real risk of slipping beyond Big Red's target of delivering capacity to customers in the second half of next year. Separately, Oracle reportedly sent a force majeure notice to a Blue Owl Capital subsidiary developing Project Jupiter in New Mexico. Bloomberg reported that Oracle was seeking to defer payments if the campus failed to come online as planned, rather than withdraw from the project. Oracle says the development remains on schedule. Aterio said of this and the Wisconsin facility: "The regulatory record points to the potential for dates later than company guidance, and Oracle's stretched finances, together with its force majeure notice on Project Jupiter in New Mexico this week, raise the potential for slippage on its largest campuses." Oracle has been offered the opportunity to comment. The Register has already reported that Oracle could face more than $100 million a year in financing costs to guarantee the power commitments behind the Wisconsin datacenter campus, which is rated at 902 MW of computing load and 1.3 GW of total electricity demand. The immediate obstacle is American Transmission Company's (ATC) application to the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) for approval to build the campus's grid connection. ATC is planning more than $2 billion in transmission infrastructure projects tied to datacenter developments across Wisconsin, ranging from high-voltage power lines and substations to upgrades to existing facilities. Construction of the transmission infrastructure requires PSC approval. "The problem is power. The campus cannot run until ATC connects it to the grid, and ATC cannot start building until the PSC approves its application," Aterio said. The PSC closed the original case after withdrawing its finding that ATC's application was complete. ATC refiled in September, restarting the approval process. Aterio's earliest scenario puts partial power in October 2027 and full supply in August 2028, although it considers that timetable highly unlikely. Its base case puts partial power in December 2027 and full supply in October 2028. An extended regulatory review could push those dates to June 2028 and April 2029. Even December 2027 power delivery would leave little room for testing and commissioning before Oracle's deadline. "In practice, a datacenter does not enter service as soon as first grid power arrives. Each building's electrical and cooling systems have to be energized, tested and commissioned before it can carry customer load. That will take time. We therefore expect the campus's load to ramp up mainly from the first quarter of 2028," Aterio said. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that Tencent had signed a $7 billion deal to lease around 100,000 AI processors from Oracle. For context, Oracle reported $55.7 billion in total capital expenditures for its fiscal 2026, which closed at the end of May. Its total revenue was $67.4 billion. Capex guidance for the 2027 financial year is up to $95 billion. ®
Amazon Web Services has debuted an agent that it says will evaluate your cloudy environment “as an experienced cloud architect would” and recommend useful changes. The cloud colossus named its bot the “AWS Well-Architected Agent,” a nod to the Well-Architected Framework that outlines best practices for using the Amazonian cloud. Amazon’s announcement says the agentic incarnation of the Framework analyzes AWS environments “against Well-Architected best practices across 65+ AWS services” and then delivers “targeted, contextual recommendations for improving your applications’ cost, security, performance, and resilience.” “It generates recommendations aligned to your declared business goals, delivers implementation packages with every finding, and surfaces cross-pillar trade-offs making it simpler to remediate the findings,” we’re told. The agent also delivers “ready-to-implement fixes” and “provides individual resource findings with specific dollar impact (where applicable) and step-by-step remediation, consolidated findings across multiple resources scoped to your application, and broad architectural patterns and designs with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) code changes needed to align with Well-Architected best practices.” AWS offers myriad services — some of them with overlapping features and functions. Customers often find themselves using more services than they intended, or using services that aren’t quite right for their intended use. AWS is generally happy if customers change to more appropriate services, even when that sees them spend less, and offers assistance from its own staff or channel partners to make it happen. This agent may make some of that human assistance less necessary. AWS is far from alone in suggesting agents should take on some of the chores that human IT professionals perform today - an approach that’s come to be known as AIOps. When your correspondent chats to IT pros about AIOps, they express distrust on grounds that they cannot be sure agents make valid suggestions and feel following bad advice offered by a machine would indefensible if things go pear-shaped. Vendors I’ve spoken to believe IT pros will first cautiously verify recommendations from AIOps systems, and if they see good results allow agents to take more actions without human oversight - but always with the ability to quickly roll back changes. AWS seems to recognize that users won’t go all-in immediately and therefore offers several manual means to apply recommendations the agent suggests, including the command line interface. For now, the agent is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) regions, but can handle workloads from any AWS commercial Region. It’s only available for users with an AWS support plan. ®
Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft’s status page says it has “paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event.” The event started at 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026. ExpressRoute Gateway is a service that connects on-prem networks to virtual networks in Azure, making it an important element of a hybrid cloud. Azure VPN Gateway creates a secure tunnel between on-prem infrastructure and Azure. Microsoft pitches its Azure VMware Service as an ideal way to build a hybrid cloud on VMware. This incident is therefore likely to make life hard for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud customers. At the time of writing, the incident impacts 18 Azure regions: West US, West US 3, North Europe, West Europe, France Central, UK West, UK South, Switzerland North, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Japan West, Korea Central, South Africa North, UAE North, Mexico Central, Germany North, South India, and Jio India Central. The Azure VMware service isn’t impacted in the last four of those regions. As of 23:13 UTC, Microsoft says it is “seeing continued recovery across impacted ExpressRoute gateways and are monitoring this recovery to confirm that it remains durable.” The company also advised that some affected VPN Gateways have experienced reduced redundancy rather than a complete loss of connectivity. “Some supporting network management components have not recovered automatically and are contributing to management operation failures in a subset of affected regions,” the update adds. “Engineering teams are actively restoring these components using alternate healthy instances where available.” Microsoft doesn’t know what happened, or why, but says its investigation “continues to show a correlation between this event and infrastructure operating system servicing activity.” The Register will update this story as Microsoft releases more information. ® UPDATED AT O3:30 UTC, OCTOBER 1 To add that Microsoft says it has mitigatged the incident, in a status update which also mentions more products – the Azure Firewall, Application Gateways, and Web Application Firewall – as being impacted. Redmond has promised to release more info, too.
The continuation of AI chatbots arriving in CarPlay, Apple’s opt-in approach to using customer data for AI training, and turmoil surrounding WordPress leadership are the topics for this MacVoices Live! discussion. The conversation also examines Bending Spoons’ latest billion-dollar acquisition, Apple’s international iCloud+ bundles, the potential for services to expand Apple’s global ecosystem, and Michael Dell’s support for new youth investment accounts.
Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later.
From it being too hot or too wet to leaves on the track or cows on the line, there's a fine tradition of what the British public consider to be flimsy excuses for delays on the trains. Yet an 1871 edition of the journal Nature describes a very different event that caused a train departing Exeter, in Devon on the south-west coast of the U.K., to be delayed by 16 minutes: a solar storm that flooded the railway signals' electrical telegraph network with current.
"The Exeter train delay is a fascinating story because it sits right at the point where emerging technologies first began to encounter the realities of the space environment," said Jim Wild, who is a professor of space physics at Lancaster University and also the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a statement.
The event has frequently been cited as the first example of a solar storm disrupting technology on Earth, but when a team led by Wild went back through historical records to investigate further, they found that things didn't add up.
The original report in Nature stated that the electrical disturbance occurred at 10:05pm local time on Oct. 18, 1841. However, Wild's team found that particular train line didn't open until 1846.
So, they delved deeper into the history books to figure out the truth.
"Our research has a hint of a detective story — piecing together a wide range of archived records to better understand a historically severe space-weather event," said team-member Mike Hapgood, a space weather expert at RAL Space, which is the UK's National Space Laboratory, in Oxfordshire.
Combining data from railway timetables, old newspapers, plus historic reports of solar observations and the northern lights and digitized geomagnetic data, Wild and Hapgood's team were able to conclude that the most likely date for the train delay was Oct. 18, 1848, which coincided with a strong solar storm that hit Earth.
This revised date knocks it off top spot in the chronological list of such events. The first recorded disruption to electrical technologies is now a disturbance on the Midland railway network, which had lines covering much of the U.K., in March 1847.
"Although this means it is not the earliest recorded space weather impact, it remains one of the first clear examples of solar activity disrupting critical infrastructure," Wild said. "It also demonstrates the value of combining scientific records with contemporary newspaper reports and archival documents when reconstructing historic space weather events."
Solar storms have been playing havoc with electrical technology on Earth since the 1840s. (Image credit: NASA/SDO)
The case reminds us that space weather has been a hazard to technology and modern systems for a long time, and isn't just a recent problem.
"Society has been experiencing the effects of space weather on technology for almost as long as electrical technologies have existed," said Wild.
The most dramatic example is the aforementioned Carrington event of 1859, representing the most significant solar storm on record as it caused telegraph poles to spark and battery power supplies to be disrupted. By this point, telegraph operators had grown used to electrical disturbances associated with auroral activity, but even the Carrington storm shocked them — quite literally in some cases, as extra current ran down the telegraph lines — with its ferocity. Should a similar event occur today, it would cause huge black outs, knock out power grids, disrupt communications and fry satellites.
"While today's space weather [monitoring] capabilities are far more advanced than anything available in the 1800s, the modern technologies we depend on are also much more vulnerable to solar storms," said Hapgood.
The current solar cycle 25 peaked in Oct. 2024 and we are just beginning to come out of an extended period of maximum activity. However, it remains to be seen how the rest of this cycle will play out before reaching solar minimum in about 2030. We've already seen severe geomagnetic storms caused by space weather in May 2024 — will we experience another powerful storm before the decade is out?
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