Category: 7. Science

Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help your career? To find out, we asked participants in NASA’s Exoplanet Watch project about their experiences. In this project, amateur astronomers work together with professionals to track planets around other stars.

First, we heard from professional software programmers. Right away, one of them told us about getting a new job through connections made in the project.

“I decided to create the exoplanet plugin, [for citizen science] since it was quite a lot of manual work to check which transits were available for your location. The exoplanet plugin and its users got me in contact with the Stellar group… Through this group, I got into contact with a company called OurSky and started working for them… the point is, I created a couple of plugins for free and eventually got a job at an awesome company.”

Another participant talked about honing their skills and growing their confidence through Exoplanet Watch.

“There were a few years when I wasn’t actively coding. However, Exoplanet Watch rekindled that spark…. Participating in Exoplanet Watch even gave me the confidence to prepare again for a technical interview at Meta—despite having been thoroughly defeated the first time I tried.”

Teachers and teaching faculty told us how Exoplanet Watch gives them the ability to better convey what scientific research is all about – and how the project motivates students! 

“Exoplanet Watch makes it easy for undergraduate students to gain experience in data science and Python, which are absolutely necessary for graduate school and many industry jobs.”

“Experience with this collaborative work is a vital piece of the workforce development of our students who are seeking advanced STEM-related careers or ongoing education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) fields after graduation… Exoplanet Watch, in this way, is directly training NASA’s STEM workforce of tomorrow by allowing CUNY (The City University of New York) students to achieve the science goals that would otherwise be much more difficult without its resources.”

One aspiring academic shared how her participation on the science team side of the project has given her research and mentorship experience that strengthens her resume. 

“I ended up joining the EpW team to contribute my expertise in stellar variability… My involvement with Exoplanet Watch has provided me with invaluable experience in mentoring a broad range of astronomy enthusiasts and working in a collaborative environment with people from around the world. … Being able to train others, interact in a team environment, and work independently are all critical skills in any work environment, but these specific experiences have also been incredibly valuable towards building my portfolio as I search for faculty positions around the USA.”

There are no guarantees, of course. What you get out of NASA citizen science depends on what you put in. But there is certainly magic to be found in the Exoplanet Watch project.  As one student said:

“Help will always be found at Hogwarts, to those who need it.” Exoplanet Watch was definitely Hogwarts for me in my career as an astronomer!”

For more information about NASA and your career, check out NASA’s Surprisingly STEM series highlighting exciting and unexpected jobs at NASA, or come to NASA Career Day, a virtual event for students and educators. Participants must register by September 4, 2025. The interactive platform will be open from September 15-19, with live panels and events taking place on September 18.

^{Exoplanet Watch volunteer Bryan Martin}

^{Credit: Bryan Martin}

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A collision observed between two black holes, each more massive than a hundred suns, is the largest merger of its kind ever recorded, according to new research.

A team of astronomers discovered the event, dubbed GW231123, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) — a pair of identical instruments located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington — detected faint ripples in space-time produced by two black holes slamming into each other. Physicists call such ripples gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 as part of his theory of relativity, but he thought they were too weak to ever be discovered by human technology. In 2016, however, LIGO detected them for the very first time when black holes collided, proving Einstein right (once again). The following year, three scientists received awards for their key contributions to the development of what has been colloquially called a “black hole telescope.”

Since the first detection of gravitational waves, LIGO and its sister instruments — Virgo in Italy, and KAGRA in Japan — have picked up signs of about 300 black hole mergers. “These amazing detectors are really the most sensitive measuring instruments that human beings have ever built,” said Mark Hannam, head of Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff University in the UK and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “So, we’re observing the most violent and extreme events in the universe through the smallest measurements we can make.”

GW231123, however, is exceptional among those 300 black hole mergers, and not just because it is the most massive of the collisions.

“The individual black holes are special because they lie in a range of masses where we do not expect them to be produced from dying stars,” said Charlie Hoy, a research fellow at the University of Plymouth in the UK who’s also a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “As if this wasn’t enough,” he continued, “the black holes are also likely spinning almost as fast as physically possible. GW231123 presents a real challenge to our understanding of black hole formation.”

Gravitational waves are the only way scientists can observe a collision in a binary system in which two black holes orbit each other. “Before we could observe them with gravitational waves, there was even a question of whether black hole binaries even existed,” Hannam said. “Black holes don’t give off any light or any other electromagnetic radiation, so any kind of regular telescope is unable to observe them.”

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity is a stretching of space and time, and it forces objects to move through curved space. When objects move very rapidly, like spinning black holes, the curved space forms ripples that spread outward like waves.

These gravitational waves are “ridiculously weak,” according to Hannam, and there are limitations to the information they can provide. For example, there’s uncertainty about the distance of GW231123 from Earth; it could be up to 12 billion light-years away. Hannam is more confident about the mass of the two black holes, which are believed to be approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the sun.

Those numbers, however, are puzzling: “There are standard mechanisms where black holes form — when stars run out of fuel and die and then collapse,” Hannam said. “But there’s a range of masses where we think that it’s not possible for black holes to form that way. And the black holes from GW231123 live bang in the middle of that (mass) gap. So there’s a question of how they formed and that makes them pretty interesting.”

The “mass gap” Hannam refers to starts at about 60 solar masses and goes up to roughly 130, but because it is a theoretical range, meaning it has not been directly observed, there is some uncertainty about where this gap starts and where it ends. But if the black holes from GW231123 indeed fall into this gap, then they likely didn’t form from stars collapsing, but in some other way.

In a study published Monday on the open access repository Arxiv, Hannam and his colleagues suggest that the “mass gap” could be explained if the two black holes are the results of previous mergers, rather than the product of dying stars. “This is a mechanism that people have talked about in the past and we’ve seen hints of before,” he said.

In this scenario, a chain reaction of black hole mergers occurs. “You can have this process where you just build up more and more massive black holes. And since the black holes in GW231123 look like they’re at masses where you couldn’t get them by normal mechanisms, this is a strong hint that this other process is going on where you have these successive mergers,” Hannam explained.

If this hypothesis were to be confirmed, it would suggest the existence of an unexpected population of black holes that, in terms of mass, fall somewhere between black holes that form from the death of massive stars and the supermassive black holes that are found in the centers of galaxies, said Dan Wilkins, a research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology of Stanford University. Wilkins was not involved with the GW231123 discovery.

“Gravitational waves are opening a really interesting window into black holes, and are revealing some really intriguing mysteries,” he added. “Before the advent of gravitational wave astronomy, we could only detect black holes that are actively growing by pulling in material, producing a powerful light source. Gravitational waves are showing us a different part of the black hole population that is growing not by pulling in material, but instead by merging with other black holes.”

The other surprising feature of GW231123 is how quickly the two black holes are spinning around each other.

“So far, most black holes we have found with gravitational waves have been spinning fairly slowly,” said Charlie Hoy. “This suggests that GW231123 may have formed through a different mechanism compared to other observed mergers, or it could be a sign that our models need to change.”

Such high-speed spins are hard to produce, but they also support the idea that the black holes had undergone prior mergers, because scientists would expect previously merged black holes to spin faster, according to Hannam.

“GW231123 challenges our models of gravitational wave signals, as it is complex to model such (fast) spins, and it stands out as an extraordinary event that is puzzling to interpret,” said Sophie Bini, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and a member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration. “What surprised me the most is how much there is still to learn about gravitational waves. I really hope that in the future we can observe other events similar to GW231123 to improve our understanding of such systems.”

The previous record for the most massive black hole merger ever observed belonged to a merger called GW190521, which was only 60% as big as GW231123. But scientists could find even more massive mergers in the future, Hannam said, and the collisions might one day be observed through even more accurate instruments that could become available the next couple of decades, such as the proposed Cosmic Explorer in the US and the Einstein Telescope in Europe.

This new discovery opens a new window on how black holes can form and grow, said Imre Bartos, an associate professor at the University of Florida who was not involved with the research. “It also shows how quickly gravitational wave astronomy is maturing,” he added. “In less than a decade we’ve moved from first detection to charting territory that challenges our best theories.”

While he agrees that previous mergers could explain both the high mass and the fast spin of the black holes, other possibilities include repeated collisions in young star clusters or the direct collapse of an unusually massive star. He added, however, that those possibilities would be less likely to produce black holes that spin this fast.

It is very natural to explain the black holes in GW231123 as remnants of one or even multiple generations of previous mergers, said Zoltan Haiman, a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria who also was not involved with the discovery. “This idea was already raised immediately after the first ever LIGO detection of a (black hole) merger, but this new merger is very hard to explain in other ways.”

Future detections, he added, will tell us “whether this heavyweight bout was a one‑off or the tip of a very hefty iceberg.”

It has been a decade since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its historic flyby of Pluto, delivering humanity’s first close-up look at the solar system’s distant dwarf planet.

Launched on January 19, 2006, aboard an Atlas V rocket, New Horizons spent nine and a half years traversing nearly 9 billion miles through the solar system before reaching Pluto. The spacecraft made history on July 14, 2015, capturing high-resolution images and data that transformed scientific understanding of the icy world.

NASA has re-published the photo exactly 10 years later to celebrate the mission, which revealed a complex landscape, including Pluto’s now-iconic heart-shaped plain, Sputnik Planitia, rich in nitrogen and methane ice. This feature, along with evidence of cryovolcanoes and a possible subsurface ocean, indicates that Pluto is a geologically active body, contrary to previous beliefs.

The image was captured on New Horizons’ Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). Refined calibration efforts have allowed scientists to produce a color rendering that closely resembles what the human eye would perceive. It took over 15 months to downlink the mission’s full dataset of 6.25 gigabytes due to the spacecraft’s distance — about 4.5 light-hours from Earth — and a transmission rate of just 1–2 kilobits per second.

“Such a lengthy period was necessary because the spacecraft was roughly 4.5 light-hours from Earth and it could only transmit 1–2 kilobits per second,” NASA explains.

The mission’s success was hard-won. According to The Planetary Society, efforts to launch a spacecraft to Pluto faced nearly two decades of resistance due to cost concerns. In 2002, the White House attempted to cancel New Horizons during early development, but congressional intervention, spurred by public and scientific outcry, secured the mission’s funding.

Following its Pluto flyby, New Horizons continued into the Kuiper Belt. In January 2019, it flew past Arrokoth, the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. This contact provided insight into the early solar system and helped secure a mission extension through at least 2029, when the spacecraft is expected to exit the Kuiper Belt.

Threat to New Horizons

But as NASA commemorates this milestone, the mission’s future hangs in the balance due to proposed budget cuts that could prematurely end its extended operations.

The White House’s proposed 2026 budget includes a $6 billion cut to NASA’s overall funding, slashing the agency’s planetary science budget from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. If enacted, the cuts could terminate dozens of missions, including New Horizons.

“The New Horizons mission has a unique position in our solar system to answer important questions about our heliosphere and provide extraordinary opportunities for multidisciplinary science for NASA and the scientific community,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in 2023 per Gizmodo.

These complex, looping tracks pressed into ancient seafloor mud look much more like doodles made by a child with a stick than fossils of animal movement.

However, new measurements have shown those squiggles were, in fact, purposeful movements along paths made by primitive animals navigating their world almost 550 million years ago, well before textbooks say complex life “took off” during the Cambrian Explosion.

Analysis of 170 trace fossils, which are the preserved marks of animal movement rather than the animals actual bodies, tell a much different story.

They suggest that streamlined, sensor‑rich creatures were gliding across the seabed roughly 10 million years before the start of the Cambrian Explosion, a 20‑million‑year interval beginning near 538.8 million years ago when most major animal groups appear in rocks.

Paleontologist Dr. Zekun Wang of the Natural History Museum, London, led the work with colleagues in Canada and China.

When animals started moving

The Cambrian Explosion has often been framed as a sudden evolutionary big bang that conjured eyes, limbs, and hard shells out of nowhere.

Yet the new study argues that many key traits, including directed movement and elongated bodies, emerged quietly during the preceding Ediacaran Period, which stretched from 635 million to 539 million years ago.

Wang’s team grouped the oldest tracks into three phases that mirror escalating anatomical sophistication. Early trails twist abruptly, matching stubby builders with limited perception.

Mid‑stage paths smooth out, implying better coordination. Latest tracks resemble modern worm burrows, pointing to long, hydrodynamic bodies.

“Life in the Ediacaran was no longer microscopic, but typically, it wasn’t able to move along the seafloor,” said Wang. His catalog shows that by about 545 million years ago, motion had transformed from stumble to cruise.

That timeline overlaps a sedimentary upheaval known as the Cambrian Substrate Revolution, when burrowers began churning seafloor mud and opening new ecological real estate. The traces imply the engineers of that revolution were already in rehearsal.

How ancient animals moved

Most Ediacaran body fossils are little more than quilted impressions, making it tricky to match shape to behavior. Ichnology, the study of trace fossils, fills the gap by reading sediment as a behavioral diary.

Classic ichnology relies on eyeballing trail patterns, but Wang’s group added mathematics. They calculated curvature along each path, converting wavy lines into numbers that capture turning radius and smoothness.

Paths that rarely bend sharply signal creatures with elongated, flexible trunks; jerky turns point to compact forms that pivot on the spot.

Those metrics can also hint at senses. An animal plotting a straight, efficient route was likely following chemical or tactile gradients toward food, whereas a meandering track betrays a blind wanderer bumping into meals by chance.

By comparing fossil tracks to modern analogs, horseshoe crabs, snails, and worms, the researchers estimated how animals moved and found body length‑to‑width ratios climbing from roughly 1:1 to as high as 12:1 during the final Ediacaran chapter.

Movement style and animal shapes

In a second paper, the team applied power‑spectral analysis, a signal‑processing tool more common in engineering than paleontology.

The technique isolates periodicities in trajectory curvature, teasing out repeated movement motifs such as rhythmic undulation or peristalsis.

Results hint that early trace makers moved by extending blobs of tissue, akin to giant amoebae. Later forms show signatures of muscular waves consistent with bilateral nerve‑muscle systems, the hallmark of bilaterian animals that dominate today’s fauna.

“By studying their mathematical properties instead, we can infer what the animals that made the traces might have been like,” added Wang. The numbers back a gradual rise in body coordination rather than an overnight makeover.

Because trace density also spikes near the Ediacaran‑Cambrian boundary, some researchers speculate that mobile bilaterians outcompeted stationary soft‑bodied cousins, contributing to an extinction that wiped out many iconic quilt‑patterned taxa.

Body changes over time

Curvature metrics separated paths into “unsmooth,” “regional‑smooth,” and “smooth” categories. Unsmooth tracks, older than 550 million years, loop and kink like cracked phone cords.

Regional‑smooth trails appear a few million years later, tracking short animals that likely glided with cilia or stubby legs.

Smooth trails dominate at 545 million years, matching long, tapered worms using muscular ripples to push through sediment.

Importantly, the switch did not require shells or skeletons. Streamlining alone would have lowered drag and extended sensory coverage, advantages in search of patchy microbial mats that coated the sea floor.

As body plans slimmed, animals began to burrow vertically, ventilating deeper layers and altering chemical gradients.

That engineering likely changed oxygen levels and nutrient cycling, paving the way for the bustling Cambrian seascapes familiar from Burgess Shale snapshots.

The data reinforce a view that evolution’s tempo can accelerate smoothly rather than spiking. What looks like an explosion in body fossils may instead record the moment when durable hard parts first preserved an already diverse cast of animals and their moves.

Why early animal movement matters

Mobility reshapes ecosystems by mixing sediments, redistributing microbes, and linking food webs. The Ediacaran traces show these processes igniting earlier than once thought, giving Earth an extra 10 million years of ecological tinkering before skeletons burst onto the scene.

Understanding that prelude helps resolve puzzles such as why some soft‑bodied lineages vanished while others thrived.

Animals able to seek favorable niches or escape stress would outlast immobile epifauna during environmental swings of the late Precambrian.

The work also highlights how quantitative tools borrowed from physics and computer science can wring fresh insight from humble scrapes in stone.

What once looked like random squiggles now provide centimeter‑scale snapshots of nervous systems coming online.

Next steps include three‑dimensional imaging of burrow architecture and geochemical probes that trace oxygen footprints around the tunnels, offering further clues to how early animals moved, breathed, and fed.

Looking beyond the fossil bones

The updated timeline invites revisions to evolutionary trees calibrated on the Cambrian Explosion, because behavioral innovations precede skeletal ones.

It may also adjust models of Earth’s biogeochemistry, as active burrowing accelerates the burial of carbon and sulfur.

Paleobiologists are already scanning older rock layers for similar curved tracks, hoping to push complex mobility even deeper into geological time.

Each new find tightens the connection between behavior, environment, and evolutionary opportunity.

By quantifying wiggles in mud, Wang and colleagues show that the story of animals and their moves is written not only in bones but in the graceful arcs of forgotten journeys. The quiet crawl before the boom matters as much as the boom itself.

The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Our cosmic neighborhood may be far more crowded than previous estimates have suggested. New research hints the Milky Way could have many more small dwarf galaxy “satellites” around it than expected.

The team, comprised of cosmologists from Durham University, combined supercomputer simulations with mathematical modeling to predict the existence of missing Milky Way “orphan” galaxies. The researchers’ novel technique suggests that as many as 100 extra satellite dwarf galaxies could orbit our large, spiral galaxy.

An international team of astronomers has discovered a massive cloud of gas and dust located in a little-known region of our Milky Way galaxy. The Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC) is about 60 parsecs—or 200 light years—long.

In a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Green Bank Telescope (NSF GBT) have peered into a molecular cloud known as M4.7-0.8, nicknamed the Midpoint cloud. Their observations have revealed a dynamic region bustling with activity, including potential sites of new star formation.

“One of the big discoveries of the paper was the GMC itself. No one had any idea this cloud existed until we looked at this location in the sky and found the dense gas. Through measurements of the size, mass, and density, we confirmed this was a giant molecular cloud,” shares Natalie Butterfield, an NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO) scientist and lead author of this paper.

“These dust lanes are like hidden rivers of gas and dust that are carrying material into the center of our galaxy,” explained Butterfield. “The Midpoint cloud is a place where material from the galaxy’s disk is transitioning into the more extreme environment of the galactic center and provides a unique opportunity to study the initial gas conditions before accumulating in the center of our galaxy.”

The NSF GBT observations focused on molecules like ammonia (NH3) and cyanobutadiyne (HC5N), which are tracers of dense gas. Besides revealing the previously unknown Midpoint cloud in the Galaxy’s inward-bound dust lane, the data also showed:

• A New Maser: The team discovered a previously unknown “maser,” a natural source of intense microwave radiation, associated with ammonia gas. This is often a sign of active star formation.
• Potential Star Birth Sites: The cloud contains compact clumps of gas and dust that appear to be on the verge of forming new stars. One of these clumps, dubbed Knot E, might be a frEGG (free-floating evaporating gas globule) – a small, dense cloud being eroded by radiation from nearby stars.
• Evidence of Stellar Feedback: The team found a shell-like structure within the cloud, possibly created by the energy released from dying stars.
• Turbulent Gas: The gas within the cloud is highly turbulent, similar to what is seen in the galaxy’s central regions. This turbulence could be caused by the inflow of material along the dust lanes or by collisions with other clouds.

“Star formation in galactic bars is a bit of a puzzle,” said Larry Morgan, a scientist with the NSF Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO), “The strong forces in these regions can actually suppress star formation. However, the leading edges of these bars, such as where the Midpoint is located, can accumulate dense gas and trigger new star formation.”

The team’s findings suggest that the Midpoint cloud is a crucial link in the flow of material from the Milky Way’s disk to its center. By studying this region, astronomers can learn more about how galaxies build their central structures and form new stars in extreme environments.

About NSF NRAO & NSF GBO

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Green Bank Observatory are major facilities of the U.S. National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

Searching for habitable exoplanets will require decades of work, new technologies, and new ideas. A lot of that effort seems to coalescing around the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a proposed mission expected to launch in the early 2040s that would be capable of directly imaging potentially habitable worlds, and, importantly, detecting features about them that could prove whether or not they host life as we know it. A new paper by exobiology specialists in Europe and the US, led by Svetlana Berdyugina of ISROL in Locarno, Switzerland, details an observational plan with HWO that could definitely prove that life exists on another planet – if they’re able to find one where it does anyway.

HWO and its planned observations are part of the outcome of the Astro2020 Decadal Survey. That report showed an increasing interest to find a habitable exoplanet, and potentially definitively answer the question “are we alone in the universe?” But to do so is going to take some technological advancements – and a lot of money.

Two of the most important features of HWO are its coronagraph, which blocks the light from a star while allowing light from its exoplanet to shine through, and its polarimeter, which detects how light vibrates as it travels through space. While each of these systems has been launched on previous missions, HWO’s integration of both and design from the ground up to specifically target habitable exoplanets will make it much more capable than existing space telescopes for its intended mission.

Fraser discusses the importance of biosignatures.

The HWO itself is still too early in the development stage, but estimates put it in the $10bn range. But, while that might seem expensive, it would provide a space telescope unmatched in its ability to answer one of life’s most fundamental questions. The new paper lays out just how it would do that.

It proposes a 4-stage observational program. First would be finding potentially habitable worlds. Next up would be trying to determine if those worlds are “living”. Then HWO would try to map these worlds in greater detail, potentially giving a breakdown of surface area vs water / cloud cover. The final step would be measuring whether there are homochiral molecules that would be indicative of life as we know it.

Finding potentially habitable worlds isn’t the purview of HWO alone. JWST and other space telescopes have already been looking, and have started to add items to the list of those in the habitable zones of other stars. HWO can further contribute to this because of its integrated coronagraph and polarimetry capabilities.

Fraser discusses the importance of what a “sufficient” biosignature is.

Next up would be finding “Living Worlds”, which primarily means searching for “biopigments” like chlorophyll. These have a distinct pattern in polarized light that would be detectable by HWO, but not by existing instruments that would simply search for the planets themselves.

Once a suitable candidate for a Living World is found, the next step would be to create a surface map of the world. We’ve discussed the difficulty of doing so at high resolution in other recent articles, but at least in theory, HWO could create a very low resolution map of a far away habitable exoplanet, and help map out the differences between land, ocean, and wherever might be covered by photosynthetic life.

But that is all a prelude to the fourth, and most important step in the observational pipeline – chirality. In astrobiology circles, chirality is most talked about as a smoking gun that would definitively prove there is life on another planet. All life on Earth uses molecules that are homochiral, meaning they are either “right handed” or “left handed” according to the direction in which the proteins they are made out of fold themselves.

Fraser discusses the future of exoplanet research.

Importantly for the HWO, that chirality means it creates a signal in polarized light – specifically in a type called “circular polarization”. In this polarization, light oscillates in a circle – either clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on which chirality the molecules are. HWO is especially capable of detecting these signals even though they are expected to be very, very weak (0.1% of the whole spectra signal). However, those weak signals are expected to show very clear, narrow, spectrally distinct signs that are caused only by biological molecules, as opposed to other, more general processes that could create circular polarization like light scattering or reflections off of metal surfaces.

If HWO does find such a signal, it would be a smoking gun of life existing on that world, according to the paper at least. Whether or not it will ever get to that point, especially given all the budget cuts to large-scale observational missions lately, remains to be seen. However, if the project stays on track and on budget, in a few decades we could be getting the first glimpses of an exoplanet’s biosphere, and all the nuances that go along with it.

Learn More:

S. Berdyugina et al – Detecting alien living worlds and photosynthetic life using imaging polarimetry with the HWO coronagraph

UT – Astronomers Think They’ve Found a Reliable Biosignature. But There’s a Catch

UT – Clouds Could Enhance the Search for Life on Exoplanets

UT – Want to Find Life? You’ll Want Several Exoplanets in the Same System to Compare

On July 15, a colossal filament erupted from the sun’s northeastern limb, dramatically reshaping part of our star’s surface, albeit briefly, and unleashing a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space.

The outburst was so powerful that it carved a glowing trench of hot plasma more than 250,000 miles (about 400,000 kilometers) long, roughly the distance from Earth to the moon.

The explosive event was captured in stunning detail by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), showing the filament unraveling as solar material arcs and cascades through the sun’s atmosphere. As the filament collapsed, it left behind what some call a “canyon of fire,” with towering walls estimated to rise at least 12,400 miles (20,000 km) high, according to Spaceweather.com

These glowing rifts form when the sun’s magnetic field lines violently snap and realign after an eruption, leaving behind a searing hot trench of plasma that traces the reshaping magnetic field, according to NASA.

This fiery chasm isn’t just a visual spectacle. Filaments are cooler, dense ribbons of solar plasma that can hang suspended above the sun’s surface by magnetic fields, according to NOAA. When these become unstable, they can erupt dramatically, sometimes launching coronal mass ejections (CMEs) into space — powerful blasts of solar plasma and magnetic fields that can trigger geomagnetic storms here on Earth.

Coronagraph imagery from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and GOES-19 satellite suggests that while the filament eruption did release a CME, there is no Earth-directed component.