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Sometimes the universe went easy on them. A comet, visiting from the edges of the solar system, showed up a week after Pettit reached orbit. Tafreshi observed the bright object in Puerto Rico, but Pettit “had the best view,” without Earth’s hazy atmosphere, with its pesky clouds, in the way. Not long after that, a major aurora storm appeared in the skies over Tafreshi’s house—how convenient!—and the photographers captured the event within hours of each other, their best timing of the entire endeavor. When it comes to the rippling, mystical green lights, two views are better than one. “If you look at the same ripple from orbit, you might find that it’s actually an oval,” Pettit said. It’s as if they had surrounded the shimmering phenomenon, revealing its true nature.  

While Pettit was spared the difficulties that can ruin a photographer’s day on the ground—rainy weather, for example—his cameras would occasionally malfunction because of the constant, invisible barrage of cosmic radiation, and now and again artifacts of astronaut life sneaked into his shots. Once, Tafreshi was scanning Pettit’s images of the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, when he noticed an intriguing patch of green in the water—an algal bloom? “I was so excited until I got the next few shots and I realized, This patch is moving very fast,” Tafreshi said. It turned out to be a weight-lifting machine, reflected in the space station’s windows. “Every crew member works out on this machine for an hour and a half a day,” Pettit said. He would occasionally ask his colleagues if they wouldn’t mind turning off the lights and working out in the dark, just for a few minutes. Not everyone obliged.

• Iberian harvester queen ants have been found to routinely give birth to ants of a different species.
• These queen ants rely on cross-species reproduction to produce workers. Some are hybrids of two species, but others contain none of the queen ant’s DNA.
• Scientists say the discovery reshapes what “family” can mean in nature.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. By Audrey O’Grady and Nataliia Kosiuk, University of Limerick. Edits by EarthSky.

Queen ants found giving birth to 2 different species

Imagine a mom who can have children from two different species. Family gatherings would be interesting, to say the least. In the insect world, this is no joke. A new study published in Nature on September 3, 2025, shows that queens of the Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) routinely lay eggs of not just their own kind, but also of males of another species, Messor structor.

The researchers even coined a word for it, xenoparity, meaning “foreign birth”. It pushes the boundaries of what we mean by “species.” And this is the first known case in the animal kingdom of this happening as part of an animal’s life cycle.

Ants often reproduce unusually

The most typical reproduction strategy in the natural world involves a mother and father of the same species who breed and produce sons and daughters, also of the same species.

However, there are exceptions to the rule. Social insects, ants in particular, are known to violate it. A 1999 study found that 17 out of 164 central Europe ant species are known to create hybrid offspring.

Typically, in ant colonies, fertilized eggs develop into workers and queens and unfertilized eggs develop into males. All the ants that we usually see foraging are females who cannot reproduce (workers), but do all the other work. Ants that breed – female queens and males – normally have wings and can be seen during mating flights. Afterwards, males often die while the females find new colonies.

However, in some ant species, unfertilized eggs develop into female clones of the mother. This process is called parthenogenesis.

Generally, ant colonies which include different ant species may contain either one or several queens that can mate with either single or multiple males. Some ant species produce only wingless males that mate inside the nest and never participate in nuptial flights.

In 2002 an even more interesting reproduction strategy was found in two seed harvester ant species, common in southwestern US, whose queens have lost their ability to produce female workers of their own kind. They need to mate with a male from a different species to lay eggs that develop into hybrid species female workers. This cross-species mating is essential for the survival of both species.

The new discovery

And now, scientists have found a startling new insight into ant reproduction. The workers (females) in Iberian harvester ant colonies are hybrids. Like the seed harvester ants, the Iberian harvester queens can’t make workers on their own. They need sperm from M. structor, and the daughters are half M. ibericus, half M. structor. This is similar to social hybridogenesis documented in other harvester ants, where only cross-species daughters become workers.

But the fascinating part is that Iberian harvester queens produce ordinary M. ibericus sons as well as M. structor sons. These males aren’t hybrids. They’re clones, carrying only their father’s DNA. Iberian harvester queens act almost like a rental womb. This resembles male-only cloning known from some clams and stick insects.

The researchers sequenced the DNA of hundreds of Iberian harvester ants and repeatedly found this same pattern.

M. ibericus and M. structor split from a common ancestor millions of years ago. They look and behave differently in the wild, with M. ibericus having smaller queens. Yet one is now literally producing the other. Multiple colonies of M. ibericus live together in habitats ranging from pastures to suburban areas. But M. structor ants are a mountain species and their colonies live separately. The two ant species can live close together in overlapping habitats in lanes and fields near mountains.

The cloned M. structor sons raised inside M. ibericus colonies don’t just differ genetically, they even look odd. Compared with their wild cousins, they appear almost hairless.

Want to know more about ants? Watch this video.

How did queen ants evolve to do this?

The most probable explanation of how this reproduction strategy evolved is a phenomenon called sperm parasitism. This is when females of one species use sperm of the males of another species to stimulate asexual reproduction or even partially incorporate the male’s genome into their offspring.

Over time, they cut out the middleman (adult M. structor males) and started making their own supply of cloned M. structor males. Instead, they mate with these clones that hatch in the colony nest.

It shows that evolution can re-engineer reproduction in radical ways. People sometimes like to think nature follows straight paths. Parents make their own species. Colonies stick to one lineage.

But evolution doesn’t care about our rules. So the next time you see ants marching across a path, remember, somewhere in southern Europe, there’s a queen casually running a two-species household. And you thought your family tree was complicated.

Audrey O’Grady, Associate Professor in Biology, and Nataliia Kosiuk, PhD Candidate in Biological Sciences, University of Limerick.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bottom line: Scientists have found that Iberian harvester queen ants routinely give birth to two different species.

Read more: Ants, little but tough: Lifeform of the week

Astronomers at Penn State have nicknamed the objects “universe breakers,” which may be unusual black hole atmospheres and could represent a missing link in the fast growth of supermassive black holes.

Small, faint red sources detected by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are giving astronomers fresh clues about how galaxies formed in the early universe — and may point to a completely new category of cosmic object: a black hole consuming huge amounts of matter while emitting light.

When the telescope’s first data became available in 2022, an international collaboration that included researchers from Penn State identified puzzling “little red dots.” At first, the team proposed that these objects could be galaxies as developed as today’s Milky Way, which is about 13.6 billion years old, existing only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Rethinking early galaxies

The researchers informally named the objects “universe breakers,” since they initially appeared to be galaxies far older and more evolved than expected in the early universe — a finding that would challenge long-held ideas of galaxy formation.

In a paper published on September 12, 2025, in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the team, which included astronomers and physicists from Penn State, proposed a different explanation. They argue the red dots are not galaxies at all but a previously unknown type of object known as a black hole star.

According to their analysis, the faint points of light may actually be enormous spheres of hot gas so compact that they resemble the atmospheres of ordinary stars fueled by nuclear fusion. In this case, however, the energy source is not fusion but supermassive black holes at their centers, which draw in matter at high speed, transform it into energy, and emit light.

One gigantic cold star

“Basically, we looked at enough red dots until we saw one that had so much atmosphere that it couldn’t be explained as typical stars we’d expect from a galaxy,” said Joel Leja, the Dr. Keiko Miwa Ross Mid-Career Associate Professor of Astrophysics at Penn State and co-author on the paper. “It’s an elegant answer really, because we thought it was a tiny galaxy full of many separate cold stars, but it’s actually, effectively, one gigantic, very cold star.”

Leja explained that cold stars give off only faint light because their surface temperatures are much lower than those of typical stars. Although the majority of stars in the universe fall into this low-mass, cooler category, they are often difficult to detect since their dim glow is overshadowed by the rarer but much brighter massive stars. Astronomers recognize cold stars by their emission in the red optical and near-infrared range, wavelengths of light that are no longer visible to the human eye. In contrast to the extremely hot gas usually found near supermassive black holes, which can reach millions of degrees Celsius, the light from these “red dot” black holes was dominated by very cold gas. According to the researchers, this emission closely resembled the atmospheres of low-mass, cold stars, based on the wavelengths detected.

Seeing back in time

The most powerful telescope in space, JWST was designed to see the genesis of the cosmos with infrared-sensing instruments capable of detecting light that was emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies. Essentially, the telescope allows scientists to see back in time roughly 13.5 billion years, near the beginning of the universe as we know it, Leja explained.

From the moment the telescope turned on, researchers around the world began to spot “little red dots,” objects that appeared far more massive than galaxy models predicted. At first, Leja said, he and his colleagues thought the objects were mature galaxies, which tend to get redder as the stars within them age. But the objects were too bright to be explained — the stars would need to be packed in the galaxies with impossible density.

Extreme object named the cliff

“The night sky of such a galaxy would be dazzlingly bright,” said Bingjie Wang, now a NASA Hubble Fellow at Princeton University who worked on the paper as a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State. “If this interpretation holds, it implies that stars formed through extraordinary processes that have never been observed before.”

To better understand the mystery, the researchers needed spectra, a type of data that could provide information about how much light the objects emitted at different wavelengths. Between January and December 2024, the astronomers used nearly 60 hours of Webb time to obtain spectra from a total of 4,500 distant galaxies. It is one of the largest spectroscopic datasets yet obtained with the telescope.

In July 2024, the team spotted an object with a spectrum that indicated a huge amount of mass, making it the most extreme case of such an early and large object. The astronomers nicknamed the object in question “The Cliff,” flagging it as the most promising test case to investigate just what those “little red dots” were.

A fiery cocoon of gas

“The extreme properties of The Cliff forced us to go back to the drawing board, and come up with entirely new models,” said Anna de Graaff, a researcher for the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and corresponding author on the paper, in a Max Planck Institute press release.

The object was so distant that its light took roughly 11.9 billion years to reach Earth. The spectra analysis of that light indicated it was actually a supermassive black hole, pulling in its surroundings at such a rate that it cocooned itself in a fiery ball of hydrogen gas. The light that Leja and his colleagues spotted was coming not from thick clusters of stars, but from one giant object.

Black holes at galaxy centers

Black holes are at the center of most galaxies, Leja explained. In some cases, those black holes are millions or even billions of times more massive than our solar system’s sun, pulling in nearby matter with such strength that it converts to energy and shines.

“No one’s ever really known why or where these gigantic black holes at the center of galaxies come from,” said Leja, who is also affiliated with Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. “These black hole stars might be the first phase of formation for the black holes that we see in galaxies today — supermassive black holes in their little infancy stage.”

He added that JWST has already found signs of high-mass black holes in the early universe. These new black hole star objects, which are essentially turbocharged mass-builders, could help explain the early evolution of the universe — and may be a welcome addition to current models. The team is planning future work to test this hypothesis by examining the density of gas and strength of these early black hole stars, Leja said.

Of course, the mysterious “little red dots” are great distance away in both time and space — and their small size makes it especially challenging to get a clear picture.

“This is the best idea we have and really the first one that fits nearly all of the data, so now we need to flesh it out more,” Leja said. “It’s okay to be wrong. The universe is much weirder than we can imagine and all we can do is follow its clues. There are still big surprises out there for us.”

Reference: “A remarkable ruby: Absorption in dense gas, rather than evolved stars, drives the extreme Balmer break of a little red dot at z = 3.5” by Anna de Graaff, Hans-Walter Rix, Rohan P. Naidu, Ivo Labbé, Bingjie Wang, Joel Leja, Jorryt Matthee, Harley Katz, Jenny E. Greene, Raphael E. Hviding, Josephine Baggen, Rachel Bezanson, Leindert A. Boogaard, Gabriel Brammer, Pratika Dayal, Pieter van Dokkum, Andy D. Goulding, Michaela Hirschmann, Michael V. Maseda, Ian McConachie, Tim B. Miller, Erica Nelson, Pascal A. Oesch, David J. Setton, Irene Shivaei, Andrea Weibel, Katherine E. Whitaker and Christina C. Williams, 10 September 2025, Astronomy & Astrophysics.
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202554681

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