SPACE/COSMOS
Solar panels in space could cut Europe’s renewable energy needs by 80%
King's College London
Space-based solar power has the potential to reduce Europe’s need for land-based renewable energy by up to 80% - a potential game-changer for reaching net-zero by 2050.
For the first time, researchers from King’s College London have assessed the possible impact that generating solar energy in space could have for Europe. They found it could cut energy battery storage needs by more than two-thirds.
The study, published in Joule, analysed the potential of a design by NASA for solar generation, which is planned to be in use by 2050. The findings show the design could also save money by reducing the cost of the whole power system in Europe by up to 15%, including energy generation, storage and network infrastructure costs – an estimated saving of 35.9 billion euros per year.
This paper is the first to look at how useful this form of renewable energy generation could be when used for European energy grids. It is also the first to provide a cost estimation of using this technology in the European market.
Professor Wei He, lead author and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London, said: “For the first time we have shown the positive impact this technology could provide for Europe. Although the feasibility of this technology is still under review, our research highlights its vast economic and environmental potential if adopted.
“Reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 is going to require a significant shift to renewable energy, and this emerging technology could play a pivotal role in that transition.”
Widespread use of renewable energy is crucial for reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. However, there are significant challenges in the scale of the investment required and the pace of technological innovation.
Solar energy gathered in space is less likely to be affected by cloud cover and is safe from natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes, which infrastructure on earth is vulnerable to.
NASA's RD1, which was analysed for this study, is one of two designs for space-based solar power (SBSP) systems designed by NASA.
Space-based solar power generation involves in-space continuous collection of solar energy. This involves placing large solar panels on satellites in orbit, where they are exposed to much more sunlight and can continuously collect energy without being affected by clouds or the day-night cycle. This energy would then be transmitted to one or more stations on Earth. It is then converted to electricity and delivered to the energy grid or batteries for storage.
Journal
Joule
Article Title
Assess Space-Based Solar Power for European-Scale Power System Decarbonization
Article Publication Date
21-Aug-2025
Putting solar panels in space could aid Europe’s net-zero transition
image:
Illustration of space-based solar panels.
view moreCredit: Wei He
Space-based solar panels could enable solar power to be harvested continuously instead of only when sunlight reaches Earth, reducing Europe’s need for Earth-based wind and solar by 80%, finds a study publishing August 21 in the Cell Press journal Joule. Using energy models, researchers estimate that in 2050, space-based solar power could cut the total costs of Europe’s total grid system by 7%–15%. However, these numbers hinge upon the rapid development of two NASA-designed technologies in order to meet Europe’s goal to achieve net-zero by 2050.
“In space, you potentially have the ability to position solar panels to always face the sun, which means power generation can be nearly continuous compared to the daily pattern on Earth,” says senior author and engineer Wei He of King’s College London. “And, because it’s in space, the solar radiation is higher than on the Earth's surface.”
The idea of putting solar panels in space was originally proposed in 1968, but the concept was technologically and economically impossible until recently. Now, space-based solar power is being actively pursued by China, India, Japan, Russia, the US, and the UK.
Space-based solar panels would work much like communications satellites—the panels would orbit Earth, rotating to optimally catch the sun’s rays, and this energy would be beamed to receiving stations on Earth in the form of microwaves, which could then be converted to electricity and fed into the existing grid infrastructure.
“This is the first paper to put space-based solar power into the energy system transition framework,” says He. “We're currently at a stage to transfer this blue-sky idea into testing at a large scale, and to begin discussing regulation and policymaking.”
To examine whether space-based solar power could aid Europe’s net-zero goal, the team used models of Europe’s energy grid in 2050. First, they estimated the annual costs and energy-harvesting potential for two space-based solar power designs from NASA—the Innovative Heliostat Swarm and the Mature Planar Array. The heliostat design is in the early stages of development but has higher potential to continuously capture solar energy, whereas the simpler planar array is closer to being technologically ready but can only capture solar energy around 60% of the time, which is still a big step-up from the 15%–30% efficiency of standard Earth-based solar panels.
Then, the researchers compared scenarios with and without space-based solar power to test whether the technology could complement or outcompete other sources of renewable energy in Europe. They found that though the planar design was less economical than Earth-based renewable energy in all of the scenarios, the heliostat design would outperform wind and solar power by 2050, with performance and costs projected by NASA.
Overall, the model estimated that the heliostat design would reduce total system costs by 7%–15%, offset up to 80% of wind and solar, and reduce battery usage by over 70%, though hydrogen storage would still be vital in the winter months for some regions.
To be cost effective, the team estimated that the heliostat design’s annual costs would need to decrease to about 14 times the estimated cost for Earth-based solar panels in 2050, whereas the planar design would be cost effective at 9 times the estimated cost for Earth-based solar panels in 2050.
“At present, space-based solar power’s costs are 1–2 orders of magnitude above these break-even points,” says He.
Despite its relative inefficiency, the researchers say that it’s worth pursuing the planar design in addition to the more efficient heliostat because it has a higher technological readiness and thus could be used to demonstrate and further develop the concept on a shorter timescale.
“We recommend a coordinated development strategy that combines and leverages both technologies to achieve better performance,” says He. “By first focusing on the more mature planar design, we can demonstrate and refine space-based solar power technologies while concurrently accelerating R&D for designs with more continuous power generation.”
The researchers note that many technological breakthroughs are needed before space-based solar power can be implemented. In particular, large-scale testing of wireless transmission is essential, and advancements are needed to enable the devices to be robotically assembled while in orbit.
“In the future, I also want to explore potential risks to space-based solar power, such as orbital debris and system degradation, and how we can minimize those risks,” says He.
###
This research was supported by funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering and UKRI/EPSRC.
Joule, Che et al., “Assess space-based solar power for European-scale power system decarbonization” https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(25)00255-7
Joule (@Joule_CP), published monthly by Cell Press, is a home for outstanding and insightful research, analysis, and ideas addressing the need for more sustainable energy. A sister journal to Cell, Joule spans all scales of energy research, from fundamental laboratory research into energy conversion and storage to impactful analysis at the global level. Visit http://www.cell.com/joule. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
Journal
Joule
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Assess space-based solar power for European-scale power system decarbonization
Article Publication Date
21-Aug-2025
Close-up views of NASA's DART impact to inform planetary defense
image:
Photos taken by the Italian LICIACube, short for the LICIA CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids. These offer the closest, most detailed observations of NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) impact aftermath to date. The photo on the left was taken roughly 2 minutes and 40 seconds after impact, as the satellite flew past the Didymos system. The photo on the right was taken 20 seconds later, as LICIACube was leaving the scene. The larger body, near the top of each image is Didymos. The smaller body in the lower half of each image is Dimorphos, enveloped by the cloud of rocky debris created by DART’s impact.
view moreCredit: NASA/ASI/University of Maryland
On Sept. 11, 2022, engineers at a flight control center in Turin, Italy, sent a radio signal into deep space. Its destination was NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft flying toward an asteroid more than 5 million miles away.
The message prompted the spacecraft to execute a series of pre-programmed commands that caused a small, shoebox-sized satellite contributed by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), called LICIACube, to detach from DART.
Fifteen days later, when DART’s journey ended in an intentional head-on collision with near-Earth asteroid Dimorphos, LICIACube flew past the asteroid to snap a series of photos, providing researchers with the only on-site observations of the world’s first demonstration of an asteroid deflection.
After analyzing LICIACube’s images, NASA and ASI scientists report on Aug. 21 in the Planetary Science Journal that an estimated 35.3 million pounds (16 million kilograms) of dust and rocks spewed from the asteroid as a result of the crash, refining previous estimates that were based on data from ground and space-based observations.
While the debris shed from the asteroid amounted to less than 0.5% of its total mass, it was still 30,000 times greater than the mass of the spacecraft. The impact of the debris on Dimorphos’ trajectory was dramatic: shortly after the collision, the DART team determined that the flying rubble gave Dimorphos a shove several times stronger than the hit from the spacecraft itself.
“The plume of material released from the asteroid was like a short burst from a rocket engine,” said Ramin Lolachi, a research scientist who led the study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The important takeaway from the DART mission is that a small, lightweight spacecraft can dramatically alter the path of an asteroid of similar size and composition to Dimorphos, which is a “rubble-pile” asteroid — or a loose, porous collection of rocky material bound together weakly by gravity.
“We expect that a lot of near-Earth asteroids have a similar structure to Dimorphos,” said Dave Glenar, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who participated in the study. “So, this extra push from the debris plume is critical to consider when building future spacecraft to deflect asteroids from Earth.”
DART’s Star Witness
NASA chose Dimorphos, which poses no threat to Earth, as the mission target due to its relationship with another, larger asteroid named Didymos. Dimorphos orbits Didymos in a binary asteroid system, much like the Moon orbits Earth. Critically, the pair’s position relative to Earth allowed astronomers to measure the duration of the moonlet’s orbit before and after the collision.
Ground and space-based observations revealed that DART shortened Dimorphos’ orbit by 33 minutes. But these long-range observations, made from 6.8 million miles (10.9 million kilometers) away, were too distant to support a detailed study of the impact debris. That was LICIACube’s job.
After DART’s impact, LICIACube had just 60 seconds to make its most critical observations. Barreling past the asteroid at 15,000 miles (21,140 kilometers) per hour, the spacecraft took a snapshot of the debris roughly once every three seconds. Its closest image was taken just 53 miles (85.3 km) from Dimorphos’ surface.
The short distance between LICIACube and Dimorphos provided a unique advantage, allowing the cubesat to capture detailed images of the dusty debris from multiple angles.
The research team studied a series of 18 LICIAcube images. The first images in the sequence showed LICIACube’s head-on approach. From this angle, the plume was brightly illuminated by direct sunlight. As the spacecraft glided past the asteroid, its camera pivoted to keep the plume in view.
As LICIACube looked back at the asteroid, sunlight filtered through the dense cloud of debris, and the plume’s brightness faded. This suggested the plume was made of mostly large particles — about a millimeter or more across — which reflect less light than tiny dust grains.
Since the innermost parts of the plume were so thick with debris that they were completely opaque, the scientists used models to estimate the number of particles that were hidden from view. Data from other rubble-pile asteroids, including pieces of Bennu delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, and laboratory experiments helped refine the estimate.
“We estimated that this hidden material accounted for almost 45% of the plume’s total mass,” said Timothy Stubbs, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard who was involved with the study.
While DART showed that a high-speed collision with a spacecraft can change an asteroid’s trajectory, Stubbs and his colleagues note that different asteroid types, such as those made of stronger, more tightly packed material, might respond differently to a DART-like impact. “Every time we interact with an asteroid, we find something that surprises us, so there’s a lot more work to do,” said Stubbs. “But DART is a big step forward for planetary defense.”
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, managed the DART mission and operated the spacecraft for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency’s Planetary Missions Program Office.
Journal
The Planetary Science Journal
NASA’s Artemis II lunar science operations to inform future missions
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
image:
An image of the eastern hemisphere of the Moon as the Artemis II astronauts would see it from an altitude of about 7,000 kilometers. The Moon’s far side is mostly dark in this image, which is based on a simulated trajectory. The dark patches near the center of the sunlit portion are plains of ancient lava: Mare Marginis to the north and Mare Smythii to the south.
view moreCredit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Ernie Wright
NASA’s Artemis II mission, set to send four astronauts on a nearly 10-day mission around the Moon and back, will advance the agency’s goal to land astronauts at the Moon’s south polar region and will help set the stage for future crewed Mars missions.
While the Artemis II crew will be the first humans to test NASA’s Orion spacecraft in space, they will also conduct science investigations that will inform future deep space missions, including a lunar science investigation as Orion flies about 4,000 to 6,000 miles from the Moon’s surface. From this distance, the Moon will appear to be the size of a basketball held at arm’s length and will provide a unique opportunity for scientific observations.
As Orion passes on the far side of the Moon — the side that always faces away from Earth — the crew will analyze and photograph geologic features on the surface, such as impact craters and ancient lava flows, relying on their extensive geology training in the classroom and in Moon-like places on Earth. The astronauts will also practice describing nuances in shapes, textures, and colors of surface features. This type of information reveals the geologic history of an area and will be critical to collect when Artemis III astronauts explore the surface.
“Artemis II is a chance for astronauts to implement the lunar science skills they've developed in training,” said Kelsey Young, Artemis II lunar science lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s also an opportunity for scientists and the engineers in mission control to collaborate during real-time operations, building on the years of testing and simulations that our teams have done together.”
The four Artemis II astronauts, NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA’s (Canadian Space Agency) Jeremy Hansen, could be the first humans to see some parts of the Moon’s far side with the naked eye, depending on the spacecraft’s final trajectory as determined upon launch. During the nine Apollo missions that left Earth’s orbit, astronauts saw parts of the Moon’s far side, but not all of it, as they were limited by which sections were lit during their orbits.
One previously unlit region they may see is the Orientale Basin, a 600-mile-wide crater that serves as a transition point between the near and far side and is sometimes partly visible along the Moon’s western edge.
The astronauts may also get to observe flashes of light from space rocks striking the surface—clues that help reveal how often the Moon gets hit—or dust floating above the edge of the Moon, a mysterious phenomenon scientists want to understand.
The crew’s observations will help pave the way for lunar science activities on future Artemis missions to the Moon’s surface, including Artemis III. Artemis III astronauts will investigate the land forms, rocks, and other features around their landing site. They will also collect rock samples for generations of analyses in Earth labs and set up several instruments to investigate lunar properties and resources — information critical to future human exploration efforts.
“Whether they’re looking out the spacecraft’s windows or walking the surface, Artemis astronauts will be working on behalf of all scientists to collect clues to the ancient geologic processes that shaped the Moon and our solar system,” said Cindy Evans, NASA’s Artemis geology training and strategic integration lead, based at NASA Johnson.
In addition to lunar science observations, the crew will gather data on the effects of the space environment on the crew’s health and performance. These experiments will be managed through the Payload Mission Operations Directorate at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, in tight coordination with mission control. This data could inform long-term lunar exploration and future human missions to Mars.
For more information on Artemis II, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/
Fresh twist to mystery of Jupiter's core
image:
An impacting planet collides with Jupiter's core in the simulations, triggering shock waves and turbulent mixing.
view moreCredit: Thomas Sandnes
The mystery at Jupiter's heart has taken a fresh twist – as new research suggests a giant impact may not have been responsible for the formation of its core.
It had been thought that a colossal collision with an early planet containing half of Jupiter's core material could have mixed up the central region of the gas giant, enough to explain its interior today.
But a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests its make-up is actually down to how the growing planet absorbed heavy and light materials as it formed and evolved.
Unlike what scientists once expected, the core of the largest planet in our solar system doesn't have a sharp boundary but instead gradually blends into the surrounding layers of mostly hydrogen – a structure known as a dilute core.
How this dilute core formed has been a key question among scientists and astronomers ever since NASA's Juno spacecraft first revealed its existence.
Using cutting-edge supercomputer simulations of planetary impacts, with a new method to improve the simulation's treatment of mixing between materials, researchers from Durham University, in collaboration with scientists from NASA, SETI, and CENSSS, University of Oslo, tested whether a massive collision could have created Jupiter's dilute core.
The simulations were run on the DiRAC COSMA supercomputer hosted at Durham University using the state-of-the-art SWIFT open-source software.
The study found that a stable dilute core structure was not produced in any of the simulations conducted, even in those involving impacts under extreme conditions.
Instead, the simulations demonstrate that the dense rock and ice core material displaced by an impact would quickly re-settle, leaving a distinct boundary with the outer layers of hydrogen and helium, rather than forming a smooth transition zone between the two regions.
Reflecting on the findings, lead author of the study Dr Thomas Sandnes, of Durham University, said: "It's fascinating to explore how a giant planet like Jupiter would respond to one of the most violent events a growing planet can experience.
"We see in our simulations that this kind of impact literally shakes the planet to its core – just not in the right way to explain the interior of Jupiter that we see today."
Jupiter isn't the only planet with a dilute core, as scientists have recently found evidence that Saturn has one too.
Dr Luis Teodoro, of the University of Oslo, said: "The fact that Saturn also has a dilute core strengthens the idea that these structures are not the result of rare, extremely high-energy impacts but instead form gradually during the long process of planetary growth and evolution."
The findings of this study could also help inform scientists' understanding and interpretation of the many Jupiter- and Saturn-sized exoplanets that have been observed around distant stars. If dilute cores aren't made by rare and extreme impacts, then perhaps most or all of these planets have comparably complex interiors.
Co-author of the study Dr Jacob Kegerreis said: "Giant impacts are a key part of many planets' histories, but they can't explain everything!
"This project also accelerated another step in our development of new ways to simulate these cataclysmic events in ever greater detail, helping us to continue narrowing down how the amazing diversity of worlds we see in the Solar System and beyond came to be."
ENDS
Images & video
Caption: A high-resolution simulation of a planet colliding with Jupiter, used to study whether this process could be responsible for forming the planet's dilute core. The impact generates striking shock waves and stirs material in Jupiter's interior through turbulent mixing. However, the core material rapidly re-settles, and no dilute core is produced in the simulations.
Credit: Jacob Kegerries/Thomas Sandnes
Caption: An impacting planet collides with Jupiter's core in the simulations, triggering shock waves and turbulent mixing.
Credit: Thomas Sandnes
Caption: This image from the simulations shows how the collision of the impactor with Jupiter's core produces striking patterns of fluid instabilities as materials mix.
Credit: Jacob Kegerries/Thomas Sandnes
Caption: The core material rapidly re-settles in the simulations to form a core with a sharp boundary.
Credit: Jacob Kegerries/Thomas Sandnes
Further information
The paper ‘No dilute core produced in simulations of giant impacts on to Jupiter’ by T. D. Sandnes, V. R. Eke, J. A. Kegerreis, R. J. Massey and L. F. A. Teodoro, has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf1105.
Notes for editors
About the Royal Astronomical Society
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), founded in 1820, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science.
The RAS organises scientific meetings, publishes international research and review journals, recognises outstanding achievements by the award of medals and prizes, maintains an extensive library, supports education through grants and outreach activities and represents UK astronomy nationally and internationally. Its more than 4,000 members (Fellows), a third based overseas, include scientific researchers in universities, observatories and laboratories as well as historians of astronomy and others.
The RAS accepts papers for its journals based on the principle of peer review, in which fellow experts on the editorial boards accept the paper as worth considering. The Society issues press releases based on a similar principle, but the organisations and scientists concerned have overall responsibility for their content.
Keep up with the RAS on Instagram, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.
About Durham University
Durham University is a globally outstanding centre of teaching and research based in historic Durham City in the UK.
We are a collegiate university committed to inspiring our people to do outstanding things at Durham and in the world.
We conduct research that improves lives globally and we are ranked as a world top 100 university with an international reputation in research and education (QS World University overwritten to this Rankings 2025).
We are a member of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive UK universities and we are consistently ranked as a top 10 university in national league tables (Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, Guardian University Guide and The Complete University Guide).
For more information about Durham University visit: www.durham.ac.uk/about/
Journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
No dilute core produced in simulations of giant impacts on to Jupiter
Article Publication Date
22-Aug-2025
New Durham University study counters idea that Jupiter’s mysterious core was formed by a giant impact
Durham University
-With images and video-
A new Durham University study has found that a giant impact may not be responsible for the formation of Jupiter's remarkable ‘dilute’ core, challenging a theory about the planet's history.
Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has a mystery at its heart. Unlike what scientists once expected, its core doesn’t have a sharp boundary but instead gradually blends into the surrounding layers of mostly hydrogen (a structure known as a dilute core).
How this dilute core formed has been a key question among scientists and astronomers ever since NASA’s Juno spacecraft first revealed its existence.
A previous study suggested that a colossal collision with an early planet containing half of Jupiter’s core material could have thoroughly mixed up the central region of Jupiter, enough to explain the planet’s interior today.
Using cutting-edge supercomputer simulations of planetary impacts, with a new method to improve the simulation’s treatment of mixing between materials, researchers from Durham University, in collaboration with scientists from NASA, SETI, and CENSSS, University of Oslo, tested whether such a massive collision could have created Jupiter’s dilute core.
The simulations were run on the DiRAC COSMA supercomputer hosted at Durham University using the state-of-the-art SWIFT open-source software.
The study found that a stable dilute core structure was not produced in any of the simulations conducted, even in those involving impacts under extreme conditions.
Instead, the simulations demonstrate that the dense rock and ice core material displaced by an impact would quickly re-settle, leaving a distinct boundary with the outer layers of hydrogen and helium, rather than forming a smooth transition zone between the two regions.
The study findings, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, therefore do not support the hypothesis that Jupiter’s dilute core was produced by a single dramatic impact, but instead suggest that it is the result of how the growing planet absorbed heavy and light materials as it formed and evolved.
Reflecting on the findings, lead author of the study Dr Thomas Sandnes of Durham University said: “It’s fascinating to explore how a giant planet like Jupiter would respond to one of the most violent events a growing planet can experience.
“We see in our simulations that this kind of impact literally shakes the planet to its core – just not in the right way to explain the interior of Jupiter that we see today.”
Jupiter isn’t the only planet with a dilute core, as scientists have recently found evidence that Saturn has one too.
Dr Luis Teodoro of the University of Oslo said: “The fact that Saturn also has a dilute core strengthens the idea that these structures are not the result of rare, extremely high-energy impacts but instead form gradually during the long process of planetary growth and evolution.”
The findings of this study could also help inform scientists’ understanding and interpretation of the many Jupiter- and Saturn-sized exoplanets that have been observed around distant stars.
If dilute cores aren’t made by rare and extreme impacts, then perhaps most or all of these planets have comparably complex interiors.
Co-author of the study Dr Jacob Kegerreis said: “Giant impacts are a key part of many planets’ histories, but they can’t explain everything!
“This project also accelerated another step in our development of new ways to simulate these cataclysmic events in ever greater detail, helping us to continue narrowing down how the amazing diversity of worlds we see in the Solar System and beyond came to be.”
ENDS
Media Information
Thomas Sandnes from Durham University is available for interview and can be contacted on thomas.d.sandnes@durham.ac.uk.
Alternatively, please contact Durham University Communications Office for interview requests on communications.team@durham.ac.uk or +44 (0)191 334 8623.
Source
‘No dilute core produced in simulations of giant impacts on to Jupiter’, (2025), T. D. Sandnes, V. R. Eke, J. A. Kegerreis, R. J. Massey and L. F. A. Teodoro, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
An embargoed copy of the paper is available from Durham University Communications Office. Please email communications.team@durham.ac.uk.
Graphics
Associated images are available via the following link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/irm0xr3l3xtczod0hqt1x/AErkyMcWI88z7_XO3rjStuo?rlkey=63xfaibsvfohst6a6gqwfygwb&st=xka95bwq&dl=0
Animation of the impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkpZSNlrWTg
About Durham University
Durham University is a globally outstanding centre of teaching and research based in historic Durham City in the UK.
We are a collegiate university committed to inspiring our people to do outstanding things at Durham and in the world.
We conduct research that improves lives globally and we are ranked as a world top 100 university with an international reputation in research and education (QS World University Rankings 2025).
We are a member of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive UK universities and we are consistently ranked as a top 10 university in national league tables (Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, Guardian University Guide and The Complete University Guide).
For more information about Durham University visit: www.durham.ac.uk/about/
END OF MEDIA RELEASE – issued by Durham University Communications Office.
Journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
If aliens explore space like us, we should look for their calls to other planets
New analysis of human deep space communications suggests the most likely places to detect signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence
Penn State
image:
In a new study, researchers from Penn State and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory analyzed human deep space communications and found that human transmissions are frequently directed toward our own spacecrafts near Mars (lower left), the Sun, and other planets. Because planets like Mars do not block the entire signal, an extraterrestrial intelligence positioned along the path of interplanetary communications—when the planets align form their perspective—could potentially detect the spillover. This suggests that humans should look to planetary alignments outside of the solar system when searching for signatures of extraterrestrial communications.
view moreCredit: Zayna Sheikh
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — If an extraterrestrial intelligence were looking for signs of human communications, when and where should they look? In a new study, researchers at Penn State and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California analyzed when and where human deep space transmissions would be most detectable by an observer outside our solar system and suggest that the patterns they see could be used to guide our own search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
“Humans are predominantly communicating with the spacecraft and probes we have sent to study other planets like Mars,” said Pinchen Fan, graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science, science principal investigator of the NASA grant supporting this research and first author of the paper. “But a planet like Mars does not block the entire transmission, so a distant spacecraft or planet positioned along the path of these interplanetary communications could potentially detect the spillover; that would occur when Earth and another solar system planet align from their perspective. This suggests that we should look for alignment of planets outside of our solar system when searching for extraterrestrial communications.”
A paper describing the research appears today (Aug 21) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and the authors present their findings today at the 2025 Penn State SETI Symposium, hosted by the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center.
“SETI researchers often search the universe for signs of past or present technology, called technosignatures, as evidence of intelligent life,” Fan said. “Considering the direction and frequency of our most common signals gives insights into where we should be looking to improve our chances of detecting alien technosignatures.”
The researchers analyzed logs from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a system of ground-based facilities that permits two-way radio communications with human-made objects in space, acting as a relay to send commands to spacecraft and receive information they send back. The research team carefully matched up DSN logs with information about spacecraft locations to determine the timing and directionality of radio communications from Earth. Although several countries have their own deep-space networks, the researchers said that the NASA-run DSN should be representative of the types of communications coming from Earth, in part because NASA has led most deep-space missions to date.
“NASA's Deep Space Network provides the crucial link between Earth and its interplanetary missions like the New Horizons spacecraft, which is now outbound from the Solar System, and the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Joseph Lazio, project scientist at JPL and an author of the paper. “It sends some of humanity's strongest and most persistent radio signals into space, and the public logs of its transmissions allowed our team to establish the temporal and spatial patterns of those transmissions for the past 20 years.”
For this study, the researchers focused on transmissions to deep space, including transmissions to telescopes in space as well as interplanetary spacecraft, instead of transmissions intended for spacecraft or satellites in low-Earth orbit, which are relatively low power and would be difficult to detect from a distance.
The researchers found that deep space radio signals were predominantly directed toward spacecraft near Mars. Other common transmissions were directed toward other planets and to telescopes at Sun-Earth Lagrange points — points in space where the gravity of the Sun and Earth keep the telescopes in a relatively fixed position as viewed from Earth.
”Based on data from the last 20 years, we found that if an extraterrestrial intelligence were in a location that could observe the alignment of Earth and Mars, there’s a 77% chance that they would be in the path of one of our transmissions — orders of magnitude more likely than being in a random position at a random time, Fan said. “If they could view an alignment with another solar-system planet, there is a 12% chance they would be in the path of our transmissions. When not observing a planet alignment, however, these chances are minuscule.”
To improve our own search for technosignatures, the researchers said, humans should look for alignment of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — or at least when exoplanets align with their host star.
Astronomers frequently study exoplanets during alignment with their host star. In fact, most of the currently known exoplanets were detected by looking for the darkening of a star when a planet crosses in front of, or transits, its host star from Earth’s line of sight.
“However, because we are only starting to detect a lot of exoplanets in the last decade or two, we do not know many systems with two or more transiting exoplanets,” Fan said. “With the upcoming launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we expect to detect a hundred thousand previously undetected exoplanets, so our potential search area should increase greatly.”
Because our solar system is fairly flat with most planets orbiting on the same plane, the majority of DSN transmissions occurred within 5 degrees of Earth’s orbital plane, the researchers explained. If the solar system were a dinner plate with all the planets and objects sitting on that plate, human transmissions tended to follow along the plate’s surface, rather than shooting out into space at a stark angle.
The research team also calculated that an average DSN transmission could be detected about 23 light-years away using telescopes like ours. Focusing efforts, they said, on solar systems that are within 23 light-years and especially whose plane is oriented with its edge toward Earth could improve our search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The team now plans to identify these systems and quantify how frequently they could have received signals coming from Earth.
The DSN transmission patterns found also could be applied to searches for laser transmissions from exoplanets, the researchers said, though they noted that lasers would have much less spillover than radio transmission. NASA is testing its interplanetary laser communication system, and extraterrestrial civilizations may opt to use lasers instead of radio waves.
“Humans are pretty early in our spacefaring journey, and as we reach further into our solar system, our transmissions to other planets will only increase,” said Jason Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science, director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, and an author of the paper. “Using our own deep space communications as a baseline, we quantified how future searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence could be improved by focusing on systems with particular orientations and planet alignments.”
Funding from the NASA Exoplanets Research Grant Program and the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center supported this work. Computations for this research were performed on the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences Roar supercomputer.
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Method of Research
Data/statistical analysis
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Detecting Extraterrestrial Civilizations That Employ an Earth-level Deep Space Network
Article Publication Date
21-Aug-2025
Astronomers detect the brightest fast radio burst of all time
The dazzling “RBFLOAT” radio burst, originating in a nearby galaxy, offers the clearest view yet of the environment around these mysterious flashes
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
image:
The dazzling “RBFLOAT” radio burst, originating nearby in the Ursa Major constellation, offers the clearest view yet of the environment around these mysterious flashes.
view moreCredit: Danielle Futselaar
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- A fast radio burst is an immense flash of radio emission that lasts for just a few milliseconds, during which it can momentarily outshine every other radio source in its galaxy. These flares can be so bright that their light can be seen from halfway across the universe, several billion light years away.
The sources of these brief and dazzling signals are unknown. But scientists now have a chance to study a fast radio burst (FRB) in unprecedented detail. An international team of scientists including physicists at MIT have detected a near and ultrabright fast radio burst some 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. It is one of the closest FRBs detected to date. It is also the brightest — so bright that the signal has garnered the informal moniker, RBFLOAT, for “radio brightest flash of all time.”
The burst’s brightness, paired with its proximity, is giving scientists the closest look yet at FRBs and the environments from which they emerge.
“Cosmically speaking, this fast radio burst is just in our neighborhood,” says Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics and affiliate of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “This means we get this chance to study a pretty normal FRB in exquisite detail.”
Masui and his colleagues report their findings today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Diverse bursts
The clarity of the new detection is thanks to a significant upgrade to The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a large array of halfpipe-shaped antennae based in British Columbia. CHIME was originally designed to detect and map the distribution of hydrogen across the universe. The telescope is also sensitive to ultrafast and bright radio emissions. Since it started observations in 2018, CHIME has detected about 4,000 fast radio bursts, from all parts of the sky. But the telescope had not been able to precisely pinpoint the location of each fast radio burst, until now.
CHIME recently got a significant boost in precision, in the form of CHIME Outriggers — three miniature versions of CHIME, each sited in different parts of North America. Together, the telescopes work as one continent-sized system that can focus in on any bright flash that CHIME detects, to pin down its location in the sky with extreme precision.
“Imagine we are in New York and there’s a firefly in Florida that is bright for a thousandth of a second, which is usually how quick FRBs are,” says MIT Kavli graduate student Shion Andrew. “Localizing an FRB to a specific part of its host galaxy is analogous to figuring out not just what tree the firefly came from, but which branch it’s sitting on.”
The new fast radio burst is the first detection made using the combination of CHIME and the completed CHIME Outriggers. Together, the telescope array identified the FRB and determined not only the specific galaxy, but also the region of the galaxy from where the burst originated. It appears that the burst arose from the edge of the galaxy, just outside of a star-forming region. The precise localization of the FRB is allowing scientists to study the environment around the signal for clues to what brews up such bursts.
“As we’re getting these much more precise looks at FRBs, we’re better able to see the diversity of environments they’re coming from,” says MIT physics postdoc Adam Lanman.
Lanman, Andrew, and Masui are members of the CHIME Collaboration — which includes scientists from multiple institutions around the world — and are authors of the new paper detailing the discovery of the new FRB detection.
An older edge
Each of CHIME’s Outrigger stations continuously monitors the same swath of sky as the parent CHIME array. Both CHIME and the Outriggers “listen” for radio flashes, at incredibly short, millisecond timescales. Even over several minutes, such precision monitoring can amount to a huge amount of data. If CHIME detects no FRB signal, the Outriggers automatically delete the last 40 seconds of data to make room for the next span of measurements.
On March 16, 2025, CHIME detected an ultrabright flash of radio emissions, which automatically triggered the CHIME Outriggers to record the data. Initially, the flash was so bright that astronomers were unsure whether it was an FRB or simply a terrestrial event caused, for instance, by a burst of cellular communications.
That notion was put to rest as the CHIME Outrigger telescopes focused in on the flash and pinned down its location to NGC4141 — a spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 130 million light years away, which happens to be surprisingly close to our own Milky Way. The detection is one of the closest and brightest fast radio bursts detected to date.
Follow-up observations in the same region revealed that the burst came from the very edge of an active region of star formation. While it’s still a mystery as to what source could produce FRBs, scientists’ leading hypothesis points to magnetars — young neutron stars with extremely powerful magnetic fields that can spin out high-energy flares across the electromagnetic spectrum, including in the radio band. Physicists suspect that magnetars are found in the center of star formation regions, where the youngest, most active stars are forged. The location of the new FRB, just outside a star-forming region in its galaxy, may suggest that the source of the burst is a slightly older magnetar.
“These are mostly hints,” Masui says. “But the precise localization of this burst is letting us dive into the details of how old an FRB source could be. If it were right in the middle, it would only be thousands of years old — very young for a star. This one, being on the edge, may have had a little more time to bake.”
No repeats
In addition to pinpointing where the new FRB was in the sky, the scientists also looked back through CHIME data to see whether any similar flares occurred in the same region in the past. Since the first FRB was discovered in 2007, astronomers have detected over 4,000 radio flares. Most of these bursts are one-offs. But a few percent have been observed to repeat, flashing every so often. And an even smaller fraction of these repeaters flash in a pattern, like a rhythmic heartbeat, before flaring out. A central question surrounding fast radio bursts is whether repeaters and nonrepeaters come from different origins.
The scientists looked through CHIME’s six years of data and came up empty: This new FRB appears to be a one-off, at least in the last six years. The findings are particularly exciting, given the burst’s proximity. Because it is so close and so bright, scientists can probe the environment in and around the burst for clues to what might produce a nonrepeating FRB.
“Right now we’re in the middle of this story of whether repeating and nonrepeating FRBs are different. These observations are putting together bits and pieces of the puzzle,” Masui says.
“There’s evidence to suggest that not all FRB progenitors are the same,” Andrew adds. “We’re on track to localize hundreds of FRBs every year. The hope is that a larger sample of FRBs localized to their host environments can help reveal the full diversity of these populations.”
###
The construction of the CHIME Outriggers was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation. The construction of CHIME was funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia.
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Article Publication Date
21-Aug-2025
SwRI-led Webb Telescope survey discovers new moon orbiting Uranus
Previously unknown satellite joins ranks of 28 other satellites around the ice giant
Southwest Research Institute
image:
Southwest Research Institute led a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey, discovering a previously unknown moon (circled) orbiting Uranus between its satellites Bianca and Ophelia. This image shows the tiny moon, designated S/2025 U1, as well as 13 of the 28 other known moons orbiting the planet. (The small moon Cordelia orbiting just inside the outermost ring is not visible here due to glare from the rings.) Due to the drastic differences in brightness levels, the image is a composite of three different treatments of the data, showing details about the planetary atmosphere, the surrounding rings and the orbiting moons.
view moreCredit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. El Moutamid (SwRI), M. Hedman (University of Idaho)
SAN ANTONIO — August 19, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute led a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey, discovering a previously unknown tiny moon orbiting Uranus. A team led by SwRI’s Dr. Maryame El Moutamid discovered the small object in a series of images taken on Feb. 2, 2025, bringing Uranus’ total moon count to 29.
“As part of JWST’s guest observer program, we found a previously unknown satellite of the ice giant, which has been provisionally designated S/2025 U 1,” said El Moutamid, a lead scientist in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. “This object, by far the smallest object discovered to date, was detected in a series of 10 long exposures obtained by the Near-Infrared Camera.”
Located in the outer solar system, Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. Known as “the sideways planet” for its extreme axial tilt, the cyan-colored ice giant has a deep atmosphere composed of hydrogen, helium and methane. Scientists think Uranus' larger moons are roughly equal parts water ice and silicate rock.
“Assuming that the new moon has an albedo comparable to other nearby satellites, this object is probably around six miles (10 km) in diameter,” El Moutamid said. “It is well below the detection threshold for the Voyager 2 cameras.”
Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to visit Uranus so far, coming within 50,000 miles of its cloud tops on Jan. 24, 1986. The spacecraft collected thousands of images, discovering rings and small satellites, including 10 of its named moons.
Uranus’ 28 moons include five major moons — Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel and Miranda — discovered between 1787 and 1948. Known as “the literary moons,” Uranus satellites are named for characters in Shakespeare and the works of Alexander Pope.
The new moon is at the edge of Uranus’ inner rings. It is located about 35,000 miles (56,250 km) from its center in the planet's equatorial plane, between the orbits of Ophelia and Bianca. Ophelia is about 13 miles (43 km) in diameter, while Bianca is an elongated object around 40 by 29 miles (64 by 46 km) in dimension.
“With so many of Uranus’ moons named for Shakespearean characters, our team is getting a lot of culture trying to figure out what to name our new discovery,” El Moutamid said.
For more information, visit https://www.swri.org/markets/earth-space/space-research-technology/space-science/planetary-science.
A new SwRI-led JWST survey discovered S/2025 U 1 (approximate location indicated in yellow), a tiny moon orbiting Uranus between the satellites Bianca and Ophelia. If it has an albedo comparable to other nearby moons, this object is probably around six miles in diameter, by far the smallest moon in the Uranus system to date. The solid ellipses indicate rings, while the dotted lines show the orbits of many of the inner moons.
Credit
Public Domain
Alien aurora: Researchers discover new plasma wave in Jupiter’s aurora
Research can provide new clues about how to protect Earth from harmful solar radiation
University of Minnesota
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (08/19/2025) — Researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have made a groundbreaking discovery by observing and analyzing the first new type of plasma wave in Jupiter’s aurora. This research helps us understand “alien aurora” on other planets, which in turn teaches us more about how Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the sun’s harmful radiation.
The research is published in Physical Review Letters, a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, high-impact scientific journal.
The observation is based on data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which made a historic low orbit flight over Jupiter’s north pole, where the team was able to use their expertise in data analysis to study data from the northern polar regions of Jupiter for the first time.
“The James Webb Space Telescope has given us some infrared images of the aurora, but Juno is the first spacecraft in a polar orbit around Jupiter,” said Ali Sulaiman, an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy.
The space around magnetized planets like Jupiter is filled with plasma, a superheated state of matter where atoms break into electrons and ions. These particles are accelerated toward the planet's atmosphere, causing the gases to light up as an aurora. On Earth, this is visible as familiar green and blue lights. However, Jupiter's aurora is typically invisible to the naked eye and can only be observed using UV and infrared instruments.
The team’s analysis revealed that due to the extremely low density of Jupiter’s polar plasma combined with its powerful magnetic field, the plasma waves have a very low frequency, unlike anything previously observed around Earth.
“While plasma can behave like a fluid, it is also influenced by its own magnetic fields and external fields,” said Robert Lysak, a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy and an expert on plasma dynamics.
The study also sheds light on how Jupiter's complex magnetic field allows particles to flood into the polar cap, unlike Earth where the aurora forms a donut pattern of auroral activity around the polar cap. The researchers hope to gather more data as Juno continues its mission to support further research into this new phenomenon.
In addition to Lysak and Sulaiman, the research team included Sadie Elliott, a researcher with the School of Physics and Astronomy, along with researchers from the University of Iowa and the Southwest Research Institute.
The research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Read more about this research on the School of Physics and Astronomy’s website.
Read the full paper entitled, “New Plasma Regime in Jupiter’s Auroral Zones” on the Physical Review Letters website.
Journal
Physical Review
Article Title
New Plasma Regime in Jupiter’s Auroral Zones
High-accuracy numerical prediction method for radiative heat transfer of reusable methalox rocket exhaust plumes
Tsinghua University Press
image:
Exhaust plumes development of liquid oxygen/methane rocket Zhuque-2 at liftoff
view moreCredit: Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
Accurate prediction of radiative heating during rocket descent poses a fundamental challenge for reusable launch vehicle design. Traditional methods struggle to balance computational cost with physical fidelity, particularly for clustered multi-engine configurations where complex plume interactions create extreme thermal environments. In response to this challenge, LandSpace Technology's research team has developed an innovative numerical framework detailed in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics on May 22, 2025. The methodology synergistically combines the DTM for radiative path tracking with a newly constructed wide-band k-distribution model based on the HITEMP2010 high-temperature spectroscopic database.
The core innovation lies in establishing an efficient computational pipeline that translates CFD flow-field data into precise radiative heat flux predictions. By implementing pressure correction to account for altitude-dependent molecular density effects and developing automated data-coupling protocols, the team created a robust 3D simulation tool. Validation against high-resolution Statistical Narrow Band benchmarks demonstrated remarkable accuracy with maximum relative errors below 6.0% – all achieved at less than 20% computational cost of conventional line-by-line methods. This breakthrough resolves the longstanding conflict between precision and practicality in reusable launch vehicle thermal analysis.
Applying this method to LandSpace's nine-engine LOX/CH4 rocket revealed critical flight-environment insights. During ascent, base radiative heating peaks at 50 kW/m² at liftoff before diminishing by 80% above 20 km altitude. The return phase exhibits distinct thermal behavior: sidewall heating reaches 29.1 kW/m² at 40 km – 30% higher than concurrent base heating – while three-engine operation generates 186% greater base heat flux than single-engine mode. Most notably, the study quantifies previously undocumented thermal transitions during landing, where sidewall heating attenuates 83% below 4 km and base heat flux plummets to 7.8 kW/m² during final descent.
These findings deliver unprecedented engineering value for reusable rocket development. "Our methodology provides the first systematic quantification of radiative heating distribution across all flight phases," explains corresponding author Dr. Qian Wan. "It offers direct design inputs for optimizing thermal protection materials and informing cryogenic propellant management strategies – particularly crucial for China's new generation of methane-fueled reusable launchers." The framework's adaptability to various vehicle configurations further extends its impact across the aerospace sector.
Looking ahead, the team plans experimental validation using ground test and flight data to enhance model robustness. As reusable launch vehicle technology advances globally, this research establishes a vital computational foundation for mastering the complex thermal environments that define the next frontier of space access.
Original Source
Zhenhua ZHOU, Qian WAN, Lei SHI, Guang ZUO, Yuhong CUI. Numerical approach for radiative-heat-transfer of a reusable liquid-propellant launch vehicle [J] Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2025.103581.
About Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (CJA) is an open access, peer-reviewed international journal covering all aspects of aerospace engineering, monthly published by Elsevier. The Journal reports the scientific and technological achievements and frontiers in aeronautic engineering and astronautic engineering, in both theory and practice. CJA is indexed in SCI (IF = 5.7, Q1), EI, IAA, AJ, CSA, Scopus.
Journal
Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
Article Title
Numerical approach for radiative-heat-transfer of a reusable liquid-propellant launch vehicle
Rare quadruple star system could unlock mystery of brown dwarfs
image:
An artist's impression of the UPM J1040−3551 system against the backdrop of the Milky Way as observed by Gaia. On the left, UPM J1040−3551 Aa & Ab appears as a distant bright orange dot, with an inset revealing these two M-type stars in orbit. On the right, in the foreground, a pair of cold brown dwarfs – UPM J1040−3551 Ba & Bb – orbit each other for a period of decades while collectively circling UPM J1040−3551 Aab in a vast orbit that takes over 100,000 years to complete.
view moreCredit: Jiaxin Zhong/Zenghua Zhang
The "exciting" discovery of an extremely rare quadruple star system could significantly advance our understanding of brown dwarfs, astronomers say.
These mysterious objects are too big to be considered a planet but also too small to be a star because they lack the mass to keep fusing atoms and blossom into fully-fledged suns.
In a new breakthrough published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), astronomers have now identified an extremely rare hierarchical quadruple star system consisting of a pair of cold brown dwarfs orbiting a pair of young red dwarf stars, located 82 light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia.
The system, named UPM J1040−3551 AabBab, was identified by an international research team led by Professor Zenghua Zhang, of Nanjing University.
The researchers made their discovery using common angular velocity measured by the European Space Agency’s Gaia astrometric satellite and NASA\s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), followed by comprehensive spectroscopic observations and analysis.
That’s because this wide binary pair need more than 100,000 years to complete one orbit around each other, so their orbital motion cannot be seen in years. Researchers therefore had to analyse how they are moving towards the same direction with the same angular velocity.
In this system, Aab refers to the brighter stellar pair Aa and Ab, while Bab refers to the fainter substellar pair Ba and Bb.
"What makes this discovery particularly exciting is the hierarchical nature of the system, which is required for its orbit to remain stable over a long time period," said Professor Zhang.
"These two pairs of objects are orbiting each other separately for periods of decades, while the pairs are also orbiting a common centre of mass over a period of more than 100,000 years."
The two pairs are separated by 1,656 astronomical units (au), where 1 au equals the Earth-Sun distance. The brighter pair, UPM J1040−3551 Aab, consists of two nearly equal-mass red dwarf stars, which appear orange in colour when observed in visible wavelengths.
With a visual magnitude of 14.6, this pair is approximately 100,000 times fainter than Polaris (the North Star) in visible wavelengths. In fact, no red dwarf star is bright enough to be seen with the naked eye – not even Proxima Centauri, our closest stellar neighbour at 4.2 light-years away. To make UPM J1040−3551 Aab visible without optical aid, this binary pair would need to be brought to within 1.5 light-years of Earth, placing it closer than any star in our current cosmic neighbourhood.
The fainter pair, UPM J1040−3551 Bab, comprises two much cooler brown dwarfs that emit virtually no visible light and appear roughly 1,000 times dimmer than the Aab pair when observed in near-infrared wavelengths, where they are most easily detected.
The close binary nature of UPM J1040−3551 Aab was initially suspected due to its wobbling photocentre during Gaia's observations and confirmed by its unusual brightness – approximately 0.7 magnitude brighter than a single star with the same temperature at the same distance, as the combined light from the nearly equal-mass pair effectively doubles the output.
Similarly, UPM J1040−3551 Bab was identified as another close binary through its abnormally bright infrared measurements compared to typical brown dwarfs of its spectral type. Spectral fitting analysis strongly supported this conclusion, with binary templates providing a significantly better match than single-object templates.
Dr Felipe Navarete, of the Brazilian National Astrophysics Laboratory, led the critical spectroscopic observations that helped characterise the system components.
Using the Goodman spectrograph on the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab, Dr Navarete obtained optical spectra of the brighter pair, while also capturing near-infrared spectra of the fainter pair with SOAR's TripleSpec instrument.
"These observations were challenging due to the faintness of the brown dwarfs," said Dr Navarete, "but the capabilities of SOAR allowed us to collect the crucial spectroscopic data needed to understand the nature of these objects."
Their analysis revealed that both components of the brighter pair are M-type red dwarfs with temperatures of approximately 3,200 Kelvin (about 2,900°C) and masses of about 17 per cent that of the Sun.
The fainter pair are more exotic objects: two T-type brown dwarfs with temperatures of 820 Kelvin (550°C) and 690 Kelvin (420°C), respectively.
Brown dwarfs are small and dense low-mass objects, with the brown dwarfs in this system having sizes similar to the planet Jupiter but masses estimated to be 10-30 times greater. Indeed, at the low end of this range these objects could be considered "planetary mass" objects.
"This is the first quadruple system ever discovered with a pair of T-type brown dwarfs orbiting two stars," said Dr MariCruz Gálvez-Ortiz of the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, a co-author of the research paper.
"The discovery provides a unique cosmic laboratory for studying these mysterious objects."
Unlike stars, brown dwarfs continuously cool throughout their lifetime, which changes their observable properties such as temperature, luminosity, and spectral features.
This cooling process creates a fundamental challenge in brown dwarf research known as the "age-mass degeneracy problem".
An isolated brown dwarf with a certain temperature could be a younger, less massive object or an older, more massive one – astronomers cannot distinguish between these possibilities without additional information.
"Brown dwarfs with wide stellar companions whose ages can be determined independently are invaluable at breaking this degeneracy as age benchmarks," explained Professor Hugh Jones, of the University of Hertfordshire, a co-author of the research paper.
"UPM J1040−3551 is particularly valuable because H-alpha emission from the brighter pair indicates the system is relatively young, between 300 million and 2 billion years old."
The team believes the brown dwarf pair (UPM J1040−3551 Bab) could potentially be resolved with high-resolution imaging techniques in the future, enabling precise measurements of their orbital motion and dynamical masses.
"This system offers a dual benefit for brown dwarf science," said co-researcher Professor Adam Burgasser, of the University of California San Diego.
"It can serve as an age benchmark to calibrate low-temperature atmosphere models, and as a mass benchmark to test evolutionary models if we can resolve the brown dwarf binary and track its orbit."
The discovery of the UPM J1040−3551 system represents a significant advancement in the understanding of these elusive objects and the diverse formation paths for stellar systems in the neighbourhood of the Sun.
ENDS
Images & captions
Caption: An artist's impression of the UPM J1040−3551 system against the backdrop of the Milky Way as observed by Gaia. On the left, UPM J1040−3551 Aa & Ab appears as a distant bright orange dot, with an inset revealing these two M-type stars in orbit. On the right, in the foreground, a pair of cold brown dwarfs – UPM J1040−3551 Ba & Bb – orbit each other for a period of decades while collectively circling UPM J1040−3551 Aab in a vast orbit that takes over 100,000 years to complete.
Credit: Jiaxin Zhong/Zenghua Zhang
Further information
The paper ‘Benchmark brown dwarfs – I. A blue M2 + T5 wide binary and a probable young M4 + [T7 + T8] hierarchical triple’ by Zenghua Zhang et al. has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. DOI:10.1093/mnras/staf895.
Notes for editors
About the Royal Astronomical Society
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), founded in 1820, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science.
The RAS organises scientific meetings, publishes international research and review journals, recognises outstanding achievements by the award of medals and prizes, maintains an extensive library, supports education through grants and outreach activities and represents UK astronomy nationally and internationally. Its more than 4,000 members (Fellows), a third based overseas, include scientific researchers in universities, observatories and laboratories as well as historians of astronomy and others.
The RAS accepts papers for its journals based on the principle of peer review, in which fellow experts on the editorial boards accept the paper as worth considering. The Society issues press releases based on a similar principle, but the organisations and scientists concerned have overall responsibility for their content.
Keep up with the RAS on Instagram, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.
Journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Article Title
Benchmark brown dwarfs – I. A blue M2 + T5 wide binary and a probable young [M4 + M4] + [T7 + T8] hierarchical quadruple
Article Publication Date
19-Aug-2025
A comprehensive survey of orbital edge computing: Systems, applications, and algorithms
Tsinghua University Pres
image:
(1) ''GEO satellite constellation'' plays the role of ''Space-based Cloud,'' offering functionalities such as resource scheduling, network management, and maintaining orbit information, but only managing a limited range of satellite clusters and networking them. LEO satellites can offload computing tasks to these GEO satellites. (2) ''LEO satellite constellation'' is the ''Edge'', which can offer edge computing service to ``End''. They periodically report their status, e.g., available resources, health condition, and network to the ''Cloud'' for task scheduling. (3) GS serve as ''Ground-based Clouds'' and have abundant computational and storage resources. They routinely synchronize information with GEO satellites to ascertain the global status of all satellites. (4) The user end, such as airplane, UAV, ship, and mobile phone, which is the originator of the service. Computational tasks and data are generated here.
view moreCredit: Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
Recently, a team from the Space-based Intelligence Laboratory at the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of Chinese Academy of Sciences, reviewed the recent development trends in orbital edge computing. They conducts a comprehensive survey and analysis of OEC's system architecture, applications, algorithms, and simulation tools, providing a solid background for researchers in the field. By discussing OEC use cases and the challenges faced, potential research directions for future OEC research are proposed.
The team published their work in Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (Vol. 38, Issue 7, 2025).
Orbital Edge Computing (OEC) is an emerging paradigm that involves performing computational tasks directly on satellites in orbit instead of sending all the data back to Earth for processing. Satellites are equipped with powerful computing resources and connect and collaborate to construct OEC networks, which can provide computation offloading services for ground and airborne users. Satellites and IoT devices (such as smartphones, tablets, monitors, etc.) can offload computing tasks to OEC networks to achieve high-speed, low-latency, and low-cost computing.
OEC holds significant promise for enabling next-generation applications such as AR/VR experiences and ultra-high-definition video transmission in remote or mobile environments, where terrestrial infrastructure is unavailable or limited. By processing data directly on satellites, it reduces latency and alleviates bandwidth constraints, enabling real-time or near-real-time services. In Earth observation, satellite edge computing allows for efficient on-orbit data processing and intelligent target detection, minimizing the need to transmit raw data back to Earth. Furthermore, it supports federated learning across distributed satellites, enabling collaborative AI model training while preserving data privacy and reducing inter-satellite communication overhead. These capabilities position satellite edge computing as a key enabler of intelligent, autonomous, and responsive space systems.
However, the research and development of OEC face numerous challenges. Satellites primarily rely on solar energy for power. During their orbit, they spend roughly half the time in Earth’s shadow, during which they must depend on stored energy reserves. The trend toward satellite miniaturization imposes strict physical constraints such as limited weight and volume, which restrict energy storage capacity and computational power consumption. These limitations make it challenging to sustain continuous and high-performance edge computing onboard.
High-performance computing hardware is more susceptible to space radiation and tends to consume more power and generate substantial heat. Unlike on Earth, where heat can be dissipated via convection, satellites can only dissipate heat through conduction to their surfaces followed by radiation. To protect sensitive components and manage thermal loads, satellites require additional radiation shielding, cooling systems, and larger energy storage—each adding size and weight. This increase directly raises launch costs, which are already significant. For example, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch costs about $62 million to send a 22,800 kg satellite to low Earth orbit, equating to roughly $2,720 per kilogram.
The authors drew on the development experience of terrestrial edge computing to propose some ideas and reflections on the development and research trends of OEC.
“The development of satellite edge computing (OEC) is driven by key trends focusing on resource optimization, infrastructure innovation, and system adaptability. Efficient utilization of limited bandwidth and onboard processing power requires sophisticated routing and node selection strategies that account for dynamic satellite resources, network topology changes, and fault tolerance. The emergence of space data centers aims to localize data storage closer to users, reducing latency and communication costs while enhancing resilience to natural disasters. Satellite caching strategies, enabled by SDN and NFV technologies, are evolving to address the challenges posed by dynamic satellite coverage through collaborative caching and edge-enhanced content delivery. On the hardware front, the growing demand for OEC services is pushing the design of energy-efficient, reliable computing hardware tailored for space environments, often leveraging commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Virtualization technologies, including lightweight microservices and containerization, promise rapid and flexible service deployment despite constrained satellite resources. Finally, the complexity and scale of satellite constellations necessitate the development of advanced testing platforms to simulate diverse application scenarios and validate new algorithms, facilitating the transition of OEC from concept to practical implementation.”
Original Source
Zengshan YIN, Changhao WU, Chongbin GUO, Yuanchun LI, Mengwei XU, Weiwei GAO, Chuanxiu CHI. A comprehensive survey of orbital edge computing: Systems, applications, and algorithms [J]. Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2024.11.026.
About Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (CJA) is an open access, peer-reviewed international journal covering all aspects of aerospace engineering, monthly published by Elsevier. The Journal reports the scientific and technological achievements and frontiers in aeronautic engineering and astronautic engineering, in both theory and practice. CJA is indexed in SCI (IF = 5.7, Q1), EI, IAA, AJ, CSA, Scopus.
Journal
Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
Article Title
A comprehensive survey of orbital edge computing: Systems, applications, and algorithms
Using exoplanets to study dark matter
Scientists’ model suggests dark matter in gas giants could collapse into detectable black holes
University of California - Riverside
image:
Mehrdad Phoroutan-Mehr is a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Riverside.
view moreCredit: Mehrdad Phoroutan-Mehr.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- More than 5,000 planets have been discovered beyond our solar system, allowing scientists to explore planetary evolution and consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Now, a UC Riverside study published in Physical Review D suggests that these "exoplanets" could also serve as tools to investigate dark matter.
The researchers examined how dark matter, which makes up 85% of the universe’s matter, might affect Jupiter-sized exoplanets over long periods of time. Their theoretical calculations suggest dark matter particles could gradually collect in the cores of these planets. Although dark matter has never been detected in laboratories, physicists are confident it exists.
“If the dark matter particles are heavy enough and don’t annihilate, they may eventually collapse into a tiny black hole,” said paper first author Mehrdad Phoroutan-Mehr, a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy who works with Hai-Bo Yu, a professor of physics and astronomy. “This black hole could then grow and consume the entire planet, turning it into a black hole with the same mass as the original planet. This outcome is only possible under the superheavy non-annihilating dark matter model.”
According to the superheavy non-annihilating dark matter model, dark matter particles are extremely massive and do not destroy each other when they interact. The researchers focused on this model to show how superheavy dark matter particles are captured by exoplanets, lose energy, and drift toward their cores. There, they accumulate and collapse into black holes.
“In gaseous exoplanets of various sizes, temperatures, and densities, black holes could form on observable timescales, potentially even generating multiple black holes in a single exoplanet’s lifetime,” Phoroutan-Mehr said. “These results show how exoplanet surveys could be used to hunt for superheavy dark matter particles, especially in regions hypothesized to be rich in dark matter like our Milky Way’s galactic center.”
Phoroutan-Mehr was joined in the study by Tara Fetherolf, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Phoroutan-Mehr explained that, so far, astronomers have only detected black holes with masses greater than our sun. He said most existing theories suggest that black holes must be at least that massive.
“Discovering a black hole with the mass of a planet would be a major breakthrough,” he added. “It would support the thesis of our paper and offer an alternative to the commonly accepted theory that planet-sized black holes could only form in the early universe.”
According to Phoroutan-Mehr, exoplanets have not been used much in dark matter research largely because scientists did not have enough data about them.
“But in recent years, our knowledge of exoplanets has expanded dramatically, and several upcoming space missions will provide even more detailed observations,” he said. “With this growing body of data, exoplanets can be used to test and challenge different dark matter models.”
Phoroutan-Mehr said in the past scientists investigated dark matter by observing objects like the sun, neutron stars, and white dwarfs, since different models of dark matter can affect these objects in different ways. For example, some models suggest that dark matter can heat up neutron stars.
“So, if we were to observe an old and cold neutron star, it could rule out certain properties of dark matter, since dark matter is theoretically expected to heat them up,” he said.
He added that many exoplanets (and Jupiter in our solar system) not having collapsed into black holes can help scientists rule out or refine dark matter models such as the superheavy non-annihilating dark matter model.
“If astronomers were to discover a population of planet-sized black holes, it could offer strong evidence in favor of the superheavy non-annihilating dark matter model,” Phoroutan-Mehr said. “As we continue to collect more data and examine individual planets in more detail, exoplanets may offer crucial insights into the nature of dark matter.”
Phoroutan-Mehr noted that another possible effect of dark matter on exoplanets — and possibly on planets in our solar system — is that it could heat them or cause them to emit high-energy radiation.
“Today’s instruments aren’t sensitive enough to detect these signals,” he said. “Future telescopes and space missions may be able to pick them up.”
The title of the paper is “Probing Superheavy Dark Matter With Exoplanets.”
The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.
Journal
Physical Review D
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Probing superheavy dark matter with exoplanets
Article Publication Date
20-Aug-2025
Dark energy filled black holes plus DESI data give neutrino masses that make sense
image:
Left: A key figure from the report, exploring what the cosmologically coupled black holes, or CCBH, hypothesis implies about the mass of neutrinos, or "ghost particles." Right: An annotation of this figure simplifying its main ideas.
view moreCredit: Graph: SA Ahlen at al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2025 DOI:10.1103/yb2k-kn7h Annotation: Claire Lamman/DESI Collaboration
These are exciting times to explore the largest unanswered questions in physics thanks to high-tech experiments and very precise data. That's particularly true of dark energy, the name given to the mysterious driver of the universe's accelerating expansion.
In a report published in the Physical Review Letters, a collaboration of researchers has released new data strengthening the case that dark energy's influence on the universe—long believed to be constant—is actually changing over cosmic time. The team and external collaborators show how the data can be understood as a signal of matter being converted into dark energy.
The new findings stem from an isolated mountain in southern Arizona called Iolkam Du'ag. Here, the Tohono O'odham Nation stewards Kitt Peak National Observatory, where the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, peers deep into the universe's past using 5,000 robotic eyes—each focused on a different galaxy every 15 minutes.
Working every hour of nearly every night, DESI has already mapped millions of galaxies and other types of ancient, luminous objects, many from when the universe was less than half its current size.
In the current study, the researchers focused on an interpretation of black holes as tiny bubbles of dark energy. Because black holes are made when massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and collapse, this cosmologically coupled black hole, or CCBH, hypothesis requires the conversion of stellar matter into dark energy.
This conveniently links the rate of dark energy production, and matter consumption, to something that has been measured for decades by the Hubble Space Telescope and now the James Webb Space Telescope: the rate of star formation.
"This paper is fitting the data to a particular physical model for the first time and it works well," said DESI collaboration member Gregory Tarlé, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Michigan and corresponding author of the new report.
A major focus of the study is the mass of ghost-like particles called neutrinos, the second most abundant particle in the universe. Scientists know these particles have masses that are greater than zero, and so contribute to the matter budget in the universe, but their exact values have yet to be measured.
Interpreting the new DESI data with the CCBH model gives a measurement greater than zero, in agreement with what scientists already know about these ghost particles and an improvement over other interpretations that prefer zero, or even negative, masses.
"It's intriguing at the very least," Tarlé said. "I'd say compelling would be a more accurate word, but we really try to reserve that in our field."
DESI is an international experiment that brings together more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions. The project is led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the instrument was constructed and is operated with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. DESI is mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory—a program of NSF NOIRLab—in Arizona.
Exorcising the ghost particles
The CCBH hypothesis was introduced about five years ago by study co-authors Kevin Croker, assistant research scientist at Arizona State University, and University of Hawaii professor Duncan Farrah. Mathematical descriptions of black holes as tiny droplets of dark energy, instead of "spaghettifying" monsters wrapped in one-way layers, have been explored by researchers for over half a century.
Yet, the idea that the dark energy within such black holes could be influencing the universe at large was unorthodox. It made enough sense mathematically, however, to attract a small nucleus of curious researchers who started examining how well the hypothesis accounted for observations and cosmological data.
"Historically, this is the way physics is done. You come up with as many ideas as you can and you shoot them down as fast as you can," said DESI researcher Steve Ahlen, emeritus professor of physics at Boston University and an early collaborator on the CCBH development.
"You don't shy away from ideas that are new and different, which is clearly what we need to come up with these days when there are so many mysteries."
The first data to bolster the CCBH hypothesis came from the unexpected growth of supermassive black holes at the centers of dormant elliptical galaxies, relative to the growth of those galaxies' stellar populations. But it was data from the first year of DESI, which showed the dark energy density tracking the rate of star formation, that convinced Croker and Farrah to join forces with the DESI Collaboration.
"Working with DESI on the three-year data, it's been a game-changer," Croker said of working as a DESI external collaborator on this project. "You've got some of the sharpest and most creative researchers in the field lending their hands and hearts. It's an absolute privilege."
Other than packets of light called photons, neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, hundreds of trillions of neutrinos will pass through your body. But neutrinos rarely interact with their surroundings, meaning they're constantly zipping through other matter, completely undetected, which is why they're sometimes referred to as ghost particles.
Scientists know neutrinos have mass, but precisely how much is challenging to measure on account of their ethereal nature. While enormous experiments currently running on Earth work to pin down these numbers, the night sky offers a powerful and complementary avenue for answers.
DESI's galactic maps contain information on how fast the universe has grown over the past 10 billion years, in turn providing a cosmic inventory of matter and dark energy. But matter comes in three types: cold dark matter, baryons and neutrinos. Early universe measurements from the afterglow of the Big Bang measure the amount of dark matter and baryons long ago. But according to DESI, it seems like there is less matter today when compared to the ancient past. This leaves little room for the neutrinos.
"The data would suggest that the neutrino mass is negative and that, of course, is likely unphysical," said Rogier Windhorst, Regents' Professor at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and co-author of the new study.
Interpreted with the CCBH hypothesis, however, that unphysical issue disappears. Because stars are made of baryons, and black holes convert dead star matter into dark energy, the amount of baryons today has decreased relative to the Big Bang measurements. This allows neutrinos to contribute to the matter budget in the way expected from other measurements.
"You find that the neutrino mass probability distribution points to not only a positive number, but a number that's entirely in line with ground-based experiments," Windhorst said. "I find this very exciting."
CCBH: More bang for the buck
While this result gets top billing, the work also highlights other helpful features of the CCBH model.
"The CCBH hypothesis quantifiably links phenomena you would not initially expect to be related," Farrah said. "It is the mixing of scales, large and small, that runs so counter to our trained linear intuition."
Matter slows down the growth of the universe, whereas dark energy speeds it up. Because matter is converted to dark energy in the CCBH hypothesis, accelerated expansion happens earlier and so the expansion rate today, the Hubble rate, is a bit larger. This extra boost brings the cosmological measurement of the Hubble rate closer to other measurements, like those from distant exploding stars called supernovae.
The CCBH hypothesis also explains the observed amount of dark energy: It's not just some magical number set when the universe was born. Dark energy comes from dead stars, so there isn't any until you have stars, and stars do not form until the universe has grown sufficiently large and cool. Once stars are produced, the amount of dark energy made is directly related to how many stars are made.
"Working on this project has been both challenging and incredibly fun," said study co-author Gustavo Niz, a researcher at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. "This is just another milestone in establishing CCBH as a viable theory. It will take more data, rigorous analysis and broader scrutiny to determine whether it can become a new paradigm for explaining our universe. Of course, it could also be ruled out as new data emerges."
Croker said the hypothesis performs well when looking at the universe in the rough, "but data from other experiments that study individual black holes isn't as compelling. That's why the hypothesis is interesting. Many different observers can actually test it, hammer it out in real time."
According to Ahlen, that's the way science goes. But for scientists who have been working on DESI from the beginning, it's exciting to see that data coming in is enabling researchers to test new and different hypotheses.
"This is so cool, to be at this point after working on an experiment for so long, to be coming up with exciting results," said Tarlé, who led the team that built DESI's robotic eye system. "It's just wonderful."
In addition to its primary support from the DOE Office of Science, DESI is also supported by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the NSF; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies 2 and Atomic Energy Commission; the National Council of Humanities, Sciences, and Technologies of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions.
The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on Iolkam Du'ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O'odham Nation.
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Article Title
Positive neutrino masses with DESI DR2 via matter conversion to dark energy
Article Publication Date
21-Aug-2025
‘Root beer FLOAT’ burst’s home is located with extraordinary precision
New Outrigger system traces the cosmic flash to a nearby galaxy’s single spiral arm
image:
Artistic interpretation of CHIME's Outrigger array over North America localizing RBFLOAT to its host galaxy.
view moreCredit: Daniëlle Futselaar/MMT Observatory
An international team of scientists, including Northwestern University astrophysicists, has spotted one of the brightest fast radio bursts (FRBs) ever recorded — and pinpointed its location with unprecedented precision.
The millisecond-long blast — nicknamed RBFLOAT (short for “radio-brightest flash of all time” and, yes, a nod to “root beer float”) — was discovered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and its newly completed “Outrigger” array. By combining observations from sites in British Columbia, West Virginia and California, scientists traced the burst to a single spiral arm of a galaxy 130 million light-years away — accurate within just 42 light-years.
Because they occur so far away and vanish within the blink of an eye, FRBs are notoriously difficult to study. If scientists can pinpoint an FRB’s exact location, however, they can explore its environment, including characteristics of its home galaxy, distance from Earth and potentially even its cause. Eventually, this information could help shed light on the nature and origins of these mysterious, fleeting bursts.
The study will be published on Thursday (Aug. 21) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It marks the first time the full Outrigger array was used to localize an FRB.
“It is remarkable that only a couple of months after the full Outrigger array went online, we discovered an extremely bright FRB in a galaxy in our own cosmic neighborhood,” said Northwestern’s Wen-fai Fong, a senior author on the study. “This bodes very well for the future. An increase in event rates always provides the opportunity for discovering more rare events. The CHIME/FRB collaboration worked for many years toward this technical achievement, and the universe rewarded us with an absolute gift.”
“This result marks a turning point,” said corresponding author Amanda Cook, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University. “Instead of just detecting these mysterious flashes, we can now see exactly where they are coming from. It opens the door for discovering whether they are caused by dying stars, exotic magnetic objects or something we haven’t even thought of yet.”
An expert on cosmic explosions, Fong is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She also is a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI Institute).
Four days of solar energy packed into a single blink
Flaring up and disappearing within milliseconds, FRBs are brief, powerful radio blasts that generate more energy in one quick burst than our sun emits in an entire year. While most pass unnoticed, every once in a while, an FRB is bright enough to detect. FRB20250316A, or RBFLOAT, was one of these rare events. Detected in March 2025, RBFLOAT released as much energy in a few milliseconds as the sun produces in four days.
“It was so bright that our pipeline initially flagged it as radio frequency interference, signals often caused by cell phones or airplanes that are much closer to home,” Fong said. “It took some sleuthing by members of our collaboration to uncover that it was a real astrophysical signal.”
And while many FRBs repeat — pulsing multiple times across several months — RBFLOAT emitted all its energy in just one burst. Even in the hundreds of hours after it was first observed, astronomers did not detect repeat bursts from the source. That means astrophysicists couldn’t wait for another flare to gather more data. Instead, they only had one shot at pinpointing its location.
“RBFLOAT was the first non-repeating source localized to such precision,” said Northwestern’s Sunil Simha, a postdoctoral scholar at CIERA and study co-author. “These are much harder to locate. Thus, even detecting RBFLOAT is proof of concept that CHIME is indeed capable of detecting such events and building a statistically interesting sample of FRBs.”
FRB forensics hint at a magnetar
To investigate RBFLOAT’s origin, the scientists relied on CHIME, a large radio telescope in British Columbia and the world’s most prolific FRB hunter. Smaller versions of CHIME, the Outriggers enable astronomers to triangulate signals to precisely confine the specific locations of FRBs on the sky.
With this array of vantage points, the team traced the burst to the Big Dipper constellation in the outskirts of a galaxy about 130 million light-years away from Earth. The team precisely pinpointed it to a region just 45 light-years across, which is smaller than an average star cluster.
Follow-up observations from the 6.5-meter MMT telescope in Arizona and the Keck Cosmic Web Imager on the 10-meter Keck II Telescope in Hawai‘i provided the most detailed view yet of a non-repeating FRB’s surroundings. Simha analyzed the optical data obtained from Keck, and Northwestern graduate student Yuxin “Vic” Dong used the MMT to obtain deep optical images of the FRB’s host galaxy.
Their investigations revealed the burst occurred along a spiral arm of the galaxy, which is dotted with many star-forming regions. The RBFLOAT occurred near, but not inside, one of these star-forming regions. Although astrophysicists still don’t know exactly what causes FRBs, this evidence bolsters one leading hypothesis. At least some appear to come from magnetars, ultra-magnetized neutron stars born from the deaths of massive stars. Star-forming regions often host young magnetars, which are energetic enough to produce quick, powerful bursts.
“We found the FRB lies at the outskirts of a star-forming region that hosts massive stars,” Simha said. “For the first time, we could even estimate how deeply it’s embedded in surrounding gas, and it’s relatively shallow.”
Keck’s rich dataset and FRB’s precise location enabled the team to perform first-of-its-kind analysis of the galaxy’s properties at the FRB’s location. These uncovered characteristics include the density of the galaxy’s gas, star-formation rate and presence of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
“The FRB lies on a spiral arm of its host galaxy,” added Dong, who is the principal investigator of the MMT program. “Spiral arms are typically sites of ongoing star formation, which supports the idea that it came from a magnetar. Using our extremely sensitive MMT image, we were able to zoom in further and found that the FRB is actually outside the nearest star-forming clump. This location is intriguing because we would expect it to be located within the clump, where star formation is happening. This could suggest that the progenitor magnetar was kicked from its birth site or that it was born right at the FRB site and away from the clump’s center.”
The start of something spectacular
With the CHIME Outriggers now fully running, astronomers expect to pin down hundreds more FRBs each year — bringing them closer than ever to solving the mystery of what causes these spectacular flashes. The localization power of the Outriggers, combined with CHIME’s wide field of view, marks a turning point for the FRB search.
“For years, we’ve known FRBs occur all over the sky, but pinning them down has been painstakingly slow,” Dong said. “Now, we can routinely tie them to specific galaxies, even down to neighborhoods within those galaxies.”
“The entire FRB community has only published about 100 well-localized events in the past eight years,” Simha said. “Now, we expect more than 200 precise detections per year from CHIME alone. RBFLOAT was a spectacular source to begin building such a sample.”
"Thanks to the CHIME Outriggers, we're now entering a new era of FRB science,” said study co-author Tarraneh Eftekhari, who is CIERA’s assistant director. “With hundreds of precisely localized events expected in the next few years, we can start to understand the full breadth of environments from which these mysterious signals emanate, bringing us one step closer to unlocking their secrets. RBFLOAT is just the beginning."
The study, “FRB 20250316A: A Brilliant and Nearby One-Off Fast Radio Burst Localized to 13 parsec Precision,” was supported by the National Science Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Research Corporation of Science Advancement, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Trottier Space Institute at McGill. The CHIME collaboration includes astrophysicists from Northwestern, McGill University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and several other institutions.
CaLocation of RBFLOAT next to its host galaxy.
Credit
Yuxin "Vic" Dong/MMT
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Method of Research
Observational study
Article Title
FRB 20250316A: A Brilliant and Nearby One-Off Fast Radio Burst Localized to 13 parsec Precision
Article Publication Date
21-Aug-2025
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