Tag: astronomy

Before Sputnik: The Mystery Lights That Refuse to Die

In the first week of June 2026, a retired NASA software engineer quietly published a paper that removes the last easy escape from one of the strangest claims in modern astronomy.

The claim, advanced over the past six years by the astrophysicist Beatriz Villarroel and her VASCO collaborators, is that photographic plates exposed in the 1950s, before any human object reached orbit, contain brief points of light that behave like reflections from objects that should not have been there. Skeptics have always had a ready answer: old photographic plates are riddled with defects, and a dust speck or chemical stain can counterfeit a star. The new paper, by Ivo Busko (arXiv:2606.08319), shows that a specific class of these transients carries the optical signature of coma, a lawful distortion that a telescope mirror imposes on light entering off-axis. A plate defect knows nothing of the telescope’s optics. Light that passed through them cannot help confessing that it did.

In plain terms: for eleven of these mystery lights, Busko has demonstrated that they are images of light from the sky, not blemishes on the film. That does not prove what the light was. It does demolish the single most durable objection to the whole VASCO program, and it does so with object-level evidence, one image at a time, rather than the population statistics that skeptics have spent the past year contesting. This is why it matters, and why Villarroel’s critics now have a much harder problem than they had in January.

Light Through the Telescope

Busko spent decades at the Space Telescope Science Institute writing data-reduction pipelines for Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, instruments calibrated to fractions of a pixel. In retirement he turned to the VASCO results as an outside examiner, choosing his own data, his own telescope, and his own method, and posting his entire pipeline as open source so that anyone with a laptop can repeat it.

His earlier paper, from March, found the transients in plates from Hamburg Observatory’s 1.2-meter Schmidt camera, and rested on their image profiles being too narrow to be stars. That argument is sound but contestable, because a Schmidt camera produces such clean images that some genuine plate defects are also sharp and round, and the two can be hard to separate. The June paper turns the problem inside out. Instead of a telescope whose images are clean, Busko chose one whose images are informatively flawed: Hamburg’s 0.6-meter Doppel-Reflektor, whose parabolic mirror imposes significant coma on any light entering at an angle to its axis.

Coma smears a point of light into a small comet-like figure with a bright head and two symmetric wings trailing into a tail. The figure is lawful in every respect. It points toward the center of the plate, it grows in proportion to its distance from that center, and its shape and brightness stand in a fixed relationship to the genuine stars around it. For a defect to counterfeit this, it would have to fake the orientation, the scaling with field position, and the wing structure all at once, and a whole population of defects would have to fake all of it coherently across the plate. The odds against that are what the paper is built on.

From the APPLAUSE archive of digitized European plates, Busko assembled 407 usable plate pairs spanning 1934 to 1957, cut off at October 1957 so that no glint can be blamed on Sputnik or anything launched after it. Pairs share field, exposure, and emulsion; an object on one plate of a pair and absent from its twin, taken minutes later, is a candidate. After filtering against standard software, cross-checking the USNO and Gaia catalogs and the later POSS-II survey, and ruling out asteroids through the Minor Planet Center, eleven transients survived, each judged by eye against the coma physics and against neighboring stars of the same brightness.

Their star-equivalent magnitudes run from 11.9 up to 7.1, but those figures assume the source shone for the whole exposure, as a star does. If the events were brief, the true brightness was far greater. Busko’s own arithmetic: a tenth-magnitude transient lasting one second on a fifteen-minute plate was, for that instant, near magnitude 2.6, rivaling the brighter stars of the night sky. Three such events, the brightest in the sample, appear on a single plate from 4 March 1951, and the brightest of those shows saturation and halation, the halo of light scattered within the emulsion. Those are signatures of real light acting on film, and no envelope stain produces them.

One analysis shows the method doing work no profile statistic could. On the plate in question, every cataloged star sits at the apex of its own comatic wing, the point of peak intensity, exactly where the optics place it. When Busko overlays the catalog positions on the brightest transient, the two faint stars nearest it sit off-center, away from that apex. The transient is therefore not a misbehaving image of either star. The aberration becomes a coordinate system internal to the plate, and the transient declines to occupy the seat reserved for any known occupant.

The strangest feature is the clustering, which Busko handles with notable care. All eleven transients fall in just two small regions of sky, and all eleven fall between 1949 and 1953, even though half the plate pairs lie outside that window and show nothing. The tightest sequences are remarkable: on 8 February 1951 a vanishing transient is followed twenty minutes later by an appearing one in the same field; in April 1953 three transients appear within 45 arcseconds of one another, in the same field where a single transient had appeared four years earlier. The 1953 triple is narrower than nearby stars, which a critic could hold against it, but Busko notes that a sub-second flash escapes most of the atmospheric blur that broadens a long stellar exposure and so prints sharper, while still carrying the coma signature, which all three do, in the same orientation as their neighbors. Three independent defects conspiring in that orientation is far less likely than three brief flashes.

The caveats belong here in full, because Busko states them in full, and his candor is the reason to trust the rest. The identifications are visual; a quantitative, automated version is promised in a later paper. The sample of eleven is too small for the clustering to be assigned statistical significance. And the nuclear-test associations in this particular sample are genuinely mixed: three groupings fall close to atmospheric tests, but 1950 saw no tests anywhere on earth and produced two transients, and the lone 1949 transient precedes the first Soviet test by four months. A weaker author would have reported the hits and dropped the misses. The misses are in the paper, which is why the hits are worth weighing.

So the paper’s claim is narrow and, within its limits, very strong. These eleven images were made by light that went through the telescope. Busko says plainly that this does not by itself establish what the light was, and the honest reader holds the line where he draws it. What it secures is the premise on which everything else depends, the one the skeptics denied: that at least some of the transients are real images of the sky. Whether the sky held machines is the next question.

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Massive underground structure discovered beneath the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin

The Moon’s biggest scar may be hiding something even stranger than the impact that made it. Deep beneath the South Pole-Aitken basin on the lunar far side, scientists have identified a huge mass of unusually dense material, preserved far below the surface and still weighing down the basin floor.

That finding points to a violent chapter from the solar system’s early history, and to a lunar interior that may have stayed more stable than many researchers expected.

The South Pole-Aitken basin is enormous, the largest preserved impact basin on the Moon and one of the oldest. It stretches roughly 2,000 kilometers across, sits on the far side, and records a collision from about 3.9 to 4.3 billion years ago, when impacts were still reshaping the inner solar system. Unlike Earth, whose surface has been reworked by plate tectonics, erosion, and volcanism, the Moon has kept many of those ancient scars intact.

Now one of those scars appears to hold a clue buried in the mantle below.

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Researchers: The Universe Is Expanding ‘Too Fast’ And Nothing We Know Can Explain It

New ultra-precise measurements have confirmed the cosmos is expanding faster than models based on the early universe predict, while a separate study has dramatically shortened estimates of how long the universe itself will last.

Astronomers have long observed a mismatch in the universe’s expansion rate depending on how it is measured. Local observations of nearby galaxies point to a faster rate, while data from the early universe, such as the cosmic microwave background, suggest a slower pace. This longstanding puzzle is known as the Hubble tension.

A major international collaboration, the H0 Distance Network (H0DN), has now produced one of the most accurate local measurements yet. The team combined decades of independent distance measurements—including observations of red giant stars, Type Ia supernovae, and different galaxy types—into a unified “Local Distance Network.” Their result: the Hubble constant stands at 73.50 ± 0.81 kilometers per second per megaparsec, with precision just over 1 percent.

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New Theory Suggests We’ve Been Wrong About Black Holes for 60 Years

How confusing inevitability with reality built decades of paradox.

What if general relativity never actually tells us that black holes already exist, but only that their formation is inevitable in an infinite future we can never observe? In a new theory, Daryl Janzen, a physicist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, questions whether we’ve mistaken mathematical inevitability for physical reality, and shows how much of our black hole story rests on that quiet leap.

Black holes are among the most captivating and scientifically intriguing phenomena in modern physics, inspiring both scientists and the public alike.

But do they really exist? What if they are only ever forming, never formed?

Just imagine — what if the whole edifice of black hole physics is built on an invalid logical inference that’s gone unnoticed (or unacknowledged?) for the better part of a century?

Inevitability is not actuality — that’s obvious enough. Yet for sixty years physicists have ignored relativity’s most basic rule, and we’ve taken for granted that the latter is implied by the former. Like fools walking around imagining we’re all dead because someday we’ll die, they look at the evidence that nothing can stop black holes from collapsing toward their horizons and imagine that a process which remains forever incomplete has already come to its end.

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Astronomers Say They Just Detected Radio Signals Coming from This Comet

Evidently, it’s a big week for news involving comets, as a team of astronomers now reports the detection of an intriguing series of radio signals emanating from one of the speeding objects (no, not that comet) currently making its way through our solar system.

The surprising news comes to us courtesy of a research team led by the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was reportedly made possible with the Tianma Radio Telescope.

During multi-band radio observations of comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, the team detected an interesting series of radio signals coming from the returning comet, which is also one of the brightest comets astronomers have ever seen.

At a glance, this all sounds pretty tantalizing… but what does the detection of radio signals from a comet in our solar system actually mean?

A Returning Comet Stops In

First discovered in 1812, 12P/Pons-Brooks possesses an orbital period of around 71 years, meaning that this is actually the fourth time astronomers have had an opportunity to watch it during its journeys through the solar system.

During their recent observations of the Halley-type comet, the Chinese team says they measured the rate at which water was being produced by 12P/Pons-Brooks, which revealed the most distant known detection of ammonia molecules known to astronomers from such observations.

Since comets are known to contain a variety of icy components—many of which are as old as the solar system itself—they are ideal for observations by astronomers, particularly when these materials begin to bake off as the speeding objects make their way toward the Sun.

In the case of comets like 12P/Pons-Brooks, the presence of volatile ices shows that they haven’t been subjected to large amounts of thermal evolution since they were born in our solar system eons ago. Because of this, the study of the ices they carry and their composition offers a way for astronomers to look back in time at the chemical and thermal conditions that were present in our planetary neighborhood around 4.6 billion years ago.

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Interstellar Object Is Spraying Something Weird, Scientists Find

A new analysis of our solar system’s interstellar interloper, 3I/ATLAS, reveals that it’s spewing huge amounts of water — and astronomers can’t immediately explain why.

The object, which is widely believed to be comet, showed strong ultraviolet emissions that are unmistakable telltales of hydroxyl gas (OH), a byproduct of water, when astronomers imaged it with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift space telescope before it disappeared behind the Sun. The emissions could only be spotted from space because the ultraviolet light would get absorbed in the atmosphere.

Their findings, detailed in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, argue that the presence of all this OH indicates the comet is ejecting water vapor at a torrential rate of about 88 pounds per second — around the same rate as a fire hose running at full blast, according to a press release about the findings.

The most extraordinary thing is that this was spotted happening pretty far from the Sun, at a heliocentric distance of about three astronomical units (AU) away, or three times the distance between the Earth and our star. Typically, comets stray much closer to the Sun before the water ice in their core, called a nucleus, begins to sublimate, or instantly transform from a solid to a gas. Something else must be driving all the water dumping from 3I/ATLAS — which also implies, tantalizingly, that the comet must harbor considerable stores of water for this process to keep going.

“When we detect water — or even its faint ultraviolet echo, OH, — from an interstellar comet, we’re reading a note from another planetary system,” coauthor Dennis Bodewits, a professor of physics at Auburn University, said in the release. “It tells us that the ingredients for life’s chemistry are not unique to our own.”

It’s another example of the fascinating strangeness of interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS. Think of it as a sample of somewhere very far away, perhaps tens of millions of light years, careening straight past our doorstep. That it’s in many ways bizarre compared to local comets hints at just how unique these unimaginable alien realms must be, and how we have so much more to understand of how star systems form and how their structures may evolve.

Typically, a comet’s coma, a huge halo of gas and dust that give comets their glowing appearance, begin to form as the object nears the Sun — or another star, presumably — and heats up. The heat either sublimates or vaporizes the material in its nucleus, which is many times smaller than the tail that catches our eyes from the ground, stretching behind the comet.

3I/ATLAS’s coma has already surprised us in many ways. Its chemistry is strange compared to our own comets, and it appears to have an astonishingly high ratio of carbon dioxide to water.

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Was the “Wow! Signal” Emitted from 3I/ATLAS?

The “Wow! Signal” was detected on August 15, 1977 as a strong narrowband radio signal by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. Its origin was inferred to be extraterrestrial. The latest natural explanation (accessible here) hypothesized that the “Wow! Signal” was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line emitted from an interstellar cloud, triggered by a strong transient radio source, such as a flare from a highly magnetized neutron star (magnetar).

The “Wow! Signal” originated from the sky coordinates of Right Ascension (RA)=19h25m=291 degrees and Declination (Dec)=-27 degrees.

On August 12, 1977, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was at a distance of about 600 times the Earth-Sun separation (AU) — corresponding to a light-travel time of about 3 days. It had the sky coordinates of RA=19h40m=295 degrees and Dec=-19 degrees. These parameters can be inferred accurately given the lack of non-gravitational acceleration for 3I/ATLAS, as inferred in my latest paper (accessible here).

Hence, the “Wow! Signal” was separated by approximately 4 degrees in RA and 8 degrees in Dec from the direction of 3I/ATLAS. The chance of two random directions in the sky being aligned to that level is about 0.6 percent. If the “Wow! Signal” originated from 3I/ATLAS, how powerful was the transmitter?

The detected intensity of the “Wow! Signal” was in the range of 54–212 Jansky with a bandwidth of about 10 kilohertz. At the distance of 600 AU, this corresponds to a source power of 0.5–2 gigawatts, the output of a typical nuclear reactor on Earth.

The “Wow! Signal” was observed at a frequency of 1420.4556±0.005 megahertz, blue-shifted by about 10 kilometers per second towards Earth relative to the central frequency of the hydrogen line. This blueshift is of the same order of magnitude but smaller than expected from the approach velocity of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun, 60 kilometers per second.

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Astronomers uncover a hidden world on the solar system’s edge

A small team led by Sihao Cheng, Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Natural Sciences, has discovered an extraordinary trans-Neptunian object (TNO), named 2017 OF201, at the edge of our solar system.

The TNO is potentially large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet, the same category as the much more well-known Pluto. The new object is one of the most distant visible objects in our solar system and, significantly, suggests that the empty section of space thought to exist beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt is not, in fact, empty at all.

Cheng made the discovery alongside colleagues Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang from Princeton University, using advanced computational methods to identify the object’s distinctive trajectory pattern on the sky. The new object was officially announced by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center and in an arXiv pre-print.

Trans-Neptunian objects are minor planets that orbit the Sun at a greater average distance than the orbit of Neptune. The new TNO is special for two reasons: its extreme orbit and its large size.

“The object’s aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun — is more than 1600 times that of the Earth’s orbit,” explains Cheng. “Meanwhile, its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the Sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth’s orbit, similar to Pluto’s orbit.”

This extreme orbit, which takes the object approximately 25,000 years to complete, suggests a complex history of gravitational interactions. “It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit,” says Yang. “There may have been more than one step in its migration. It’s possible that this object was first ejected to the Oort cloud, the most distant region in our solar system, which is home to many comets, and then sent back,” Cheng adds.

“Many extreme TNOs have orbits that appear to cluster in specific orientations, but 2017 OF201 deviates from this,” says Li. This clustering has been interpreted as indirect evidence for the existence of another planet in the solar system, Planet X or Planet Nine, which could be gravitationally shepherding these objects into their observed patterns. The existence of 2017 OF201 as an outlier to such clustering could potentially challenge this hypothesis.

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Mysterious Object Hurtling Toward Us From Beyond Solar System Appears to Be Emitting Its Own Light, Scientists Find

Last month, astronomers made an exciting discovery, observing an interstellar object — only the third ever observed — hurtling toward the center of the solar system.

The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, has caught the attention of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has a long track record of making controversial predictions about previous interstellar objects being relics from an extraterrestrial civilization.

While there’s been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he’s far from backing down.

In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a “glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun.”

A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet.

However, there’s “no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction,” he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object’s Sun-facing side.

The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating “its own light?”

After deliberations with his colleague and Harvard astrophysicist Eric Keto, Loeb suggested that the “simplest interpretation” of 3I/ATLAS’ observed “steep brightness profile” is that its nucleus “produces most of the light.”

That would also mean that its actual size is much smaller than currently thought, roughly in line with the size of the first two interstellar objects we’ve observed, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

The Harvard astronomer suggested two possibilities: either 3I/ATLAS is naturally emitting radiation because its a “rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material” — or it’s a “spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel.”

Loeb deemed the former explanation “highly unlikely,” and the latter as requiring “better evidence to be viable.”

Loeb previously argued that the object’s unusual trajectory — which includes suspiciously close flybys of both Earth and Jupiter — and its lack of a visible tail both undermine the theory that it’s a comet.

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Astronomers say new interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS is ‘very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen’

The recently discovered interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS may be one of the oldest comets ever seen by humanity.

The object was already exciting to astronomers as only the third space object seen entering the solar system from beyond its limits, the other two being 1I/’Oumuamua seen in 2017 and 2I/Borisov detected in 2019.

However, new research has shown this potentially “water ice-rich” visitor could be even more extraordinary than initially believed. 3I/ATLAS could be around 3 billion years older than our 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and thus any comet ever before observed.

University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins is part of a team of scientists that think 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope, is around 7 billion years old.

“All non-interstellar comets, such as Halley’s comet, formed at the same time as our solar system, so they are up to 4.5 billion years old,” Hopkins said in a statement. “But interstellar visitors have the potential to be far older, and of those known about so far, our statistical method suggests that 3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen.”

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