It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
SPACE/COSMOS
REGALADE, the most extensive catalogue of galaxies for modern astronomy
This unprecedented astronomical work, led by the UB’s Institute of Cosmos Sciences and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (ICCUB-IEEC), covers the entire sky and brings together nearly eighty million galaxies.
Credit: Credits: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA.
An international team of scientists led by the Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) has presented REGALADE, an unprecedented catalogue covering the entire sky and bringing together nearly eighty million galaxies. The work, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, marks a turning point for astronomy and opens up a new scenario that allows researchers to explore cosmic events with a degree of precision never before achieved.
The study was led by Hugo Tranin, a researcher at ICCUB, and included the participation of ICCUB-IEEC researchers Nadia Blagorodnova, Marco Antonio Gómez Muñoz and Maxime Wavasseur. The study combines expertise in time-domain astrophysics, binary star evolution, large astrophysical catalogues and multi-messenger astronomy, with the aim of developing comprehensive resources that enable the scientific exploitation of the new generation of time-based cartographies with observations from both the ground and space.
A catalogue with precise distances and measurements
When a telescope detects a sudden phenomenon, such as a supernova or the merger of two black holes or neutron stars, astronomers need to know where to look and how far away the event occurred. This requires identifying the galaxy where the event takes place. To date, catalogues were incomplete beyond about 300 million light-years, leaving large gaps in the map of the nearby universe.
REGALADE fills these gaps by combining data from large surveys and cleaning them using data from the Gaia mission to remove stars mistakenly classified as galaxies. The result is a catalogue of high purity and integrity that includes precise distance and size measurements for all galaxies, and stellar masses for most of them.
“REGALADE began as a challenge to improve the user experience: astronomers relied on many popular catalogues, but each one only covered part of the sky or lacked key information,” explains Hugo Tranin, lead author of the study.
“By merging data from 14 widely used catalogues and deep imaging surveys, we now have a single, unified place to look up distances and features of galaxies,” he adds. “This dramatically simplifies the daily work of astronomers and allows our team to obtain distances for more than 75% of the transient phenomena reported worldwide each day.”
The team has also launched an interactive sky viewer that allows the public to explore the REGALADE catalogue and navigate millions of galaxies with just a few clicks.
The scale and depth of REGALADE are extraordinary: it covers the entire sky to more than six billion light-years, and can map nearly 10% of the volume of the observable universe. This comprehensiveness allows astronomers to identify many more host galaxies for all types of cosmic events, from infrared to X-rays, and significantly improve strategies for tracking gravitational waves.
According to Nadia Blagorodnova, co-author of the article, “observatories such as Vera Rubin will detect millions of cosmic events every night.” “REGALADE,” she explains, “ensures that we can identify their host galaxies quickly and accurately, allowing us to rapidly classify rare transient phenomena, such as luminous red novae, which are stellar mergers that our team is actively studying. This will open the door to the discovery of completely new types of celestial phenomena.”
What happens when a solar superstorm hits Mars? Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Mars orbiters, we now know: glitching spacecraft and a supercharged upper atmosphere.
In May 2024, Earth was hit by the biggest solar storm recorded in over 20 years. It sent our planet’s atmosphere into overdrive, triggering shimmering auroras that were seen as far south as Mexico.
A new study to be published in Nature Communications on Thursday 5 March reveals in greater depth how this intense, stormy activity affected the Red Planet.
“The impact was remarkable: Mars’s upper atmosphere was flooded by electrons,” says ESA Research Fellow Jacob Parrott, lead author of the study. “It was the biggest response to a solar storm we’ve ever seen at Mars.”
The superstorm caused a dramatic increase in electrons in two distinct layers of Mars’s atmosphere at altitudes of around 110 and 130 km, with numbers rising by 45% and a whopping 278%, respectively. This is the most electrons we’ve ever seen in this layer of martian atmosphere.
“The storm also caused computer errors for both orbiters – a typical peril of space weather, as the particles involved are so energetic and hard to predict,” adds Jacob. “Luckily, the spacecraft were designed with this in mind, and built with radiation-resistant components and specific systems for detecting and fixing these errors. They recovered fast.”
Pioneering a new technique
To investigate the superstorm’s impact on Mars, Jacob and colleagues used a technique currently being pioneered by ESA known as radio occultation.
First, Mars Express beamed a radio signal to TGO at the very moment it was disappearing over the martian horizon. As TGO vanished, the radio signal was bent (‘refracted’) by the various layers of Mars’s atmosphere before being picked up by the orbiter, allowing scientists to glean more about each layer. The researchers also used observations from NASA’s MAVEN mission to confirm the electron densities.
“This technique has actually been used for decades to explore the Solar System, but using signals beamed from a spacecraft to Earth,” says Colin Wilson, ESA project scientist for Mars Express and TGO, and co-author of the study. “It’s only in the past five years or so that we’ve started using it at Mars between two spacecraft, such as Mars Express and TGO, which usually use those radios to beam data between orbiters and rovers. It’s great to see it in action.”
ESA uses orbiter-to-orbiter radio occultation routinely at Earth, and plans to use it more regularly in future planetary missions.
Different worlds, different weather
The superstorm was experienced very differently at Earth and Mars, highlighting the differences between the two worlds.
At Earth, the response of the upper atmosphere was more muted, thanks to the shielding effect of Earth’s magnetic field. As well as deflecting a lot of solar storm particles away from Earth, the magnetic field also diverted some towards Earth’s poles, where they caused the sky to light up with auroras.
While their differences can make it tricky to compare planets directly, understanding how solar activity impacts the residents of the Solar System – in other words, space weather forecasting – is hugely important. At Earth, solar storms can be dangerous and damaging for astronauts and equipment up in space, and can disrupt our satellites and systems (power, radio, navigation) further down.
However, studying space weather is difficult as the Sun throws out radiation and material erratically, making targeted measurements largely opportunistic. “Fortunately, we were able to use this new technique with Mars Express and TGO just 10 minutes after a large solar flare hit Mars. Currently we’re only performing two observations per week at Mars, so the timing was extremely lucky,” adds Jacob.
Together, these events sent fast-moving, energetic, magnetised plasma and X-rays flooding towards Mars. When this barrage of material hit the planet’s upper atmosphere it collided with neutral atoms and stripped away their electrons, causing the region to fill up with electrons and charged particles.
“The results improve our understanding of Mars by revealing how solar storms deposit energy and particles into Mars’s atmosphere – important as we know the planet has lost both huge amounts of water and most of its atmosphere to space, most likely driven by the continual wind of particles streaming out from the Sun,” says Colin.
“But there’s another side to it: the structure and contents of a planet’s atmosphere influence how radio signals travel through space. If Mars’s upper atmosphere is packed full of electrons, this could block the signals we use to explore the planet’s surface via radar, making it a key consideration in our mission planning – and impacting our ability to investigate other worlds.”
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Notes for editors
‘Martian ionospheric response during the May 2024 solar superstorm’ by J. Parrott et al. will be published on Thursday 5 March in Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-69468-z
The May 2024 solar storm was monitored and observed after it struck Earth by numerous ESA missions and covered in a number of subsequent web stories, including:
Several ESA missions are either currently or soon-to-be keeping an eye on our star. ESA’s Solar Orbiter is continuously observing the Sun up close and tracking its activity (including the May 2024 superstorm). Solar Orbiter will soon be joined by Smile, a mission to understand how Earth’s magnetic field responds to the solar wind scheduled to launch in spring 2026, and later by Vigil (2031), which will spot potentially hazardous solar activity in near-real-time.
The initial dose of radiation delivered to Mars orbit by the solar storm, measured by TGO in May 2025, was reported in Semkova et al.: doi.org/10.1016/j.lssr.2025.02.010
Over the weekend of 10–12 May 2024, Earth was struck by the largest solar storm in more than a decade. Positioned between the Sun and Earth, the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) caught the entire solar outburst on camera.
This simulation shows how charged particles (plasma) from the Sun, blasted out on 20 May 2024, spread through the Solar System. The Sun lies at the centre of the circle, and the positions of several planets and spacecraft are shown.
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