TYB
Hope everyone had a real swell day yesterday
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
December 26, 2025
3I/ATLAS Flyby
Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19 at a distance of 1.8 astronomical units. That's about 900 light-seconds. Still, this deep exposure captures the comet from another star system as it gently swept across a faint background of stars in the constellation Leo about 4 days earlier, on the night of December 15. Though faint, colors emphasized in the image data, show off the comet's yellowish dust tail and bluish ion tail along with a greenish tinged coma. And even while scrutinized by arrays of telescopes and spacecraft from planet Earth, 3I ATLAS is headed out of the Solar System. It's presently moving outward along a hyperbolic trajectory at about 64 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, too fast to be bound the Sun's gravity.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Electrostatic Life, Solar Storm Risks, Sunspots | S0 News and frens
Dec.26.2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiDr26ZH2zs
https://lisboatv.pt/something-strange-is-happening-on-the-sun-new-data-reveal-unusual-activity-before-solar-cycle-25s-peak/
https://x.com/MrMBB333/status/2004548577062969677
https://x.com/StefanBurnsGeo/status/2004399030504485325
https://x.com/TamithaSkov/status/2004283840144216273
https://x.com/NorthernSkies5/status/2003981218367644118
https://x.com/schumannbot/status/2004552827969179896
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
https://spaceweather.com/
Modern Nuremberg trials gives me frogbumps
The Dust Mass Shed by 3I/ATLAS
December 26, 2025
In my latest essay — accessible here, I showed that the characteristic radius of dust particles in the anti-tail from 3I/ATLAS must be much bigger than 1 micron in order for them to reach the observed length of this jet and much smaller than 100 microns in order for them to reach the required jet speed through drag on the outflowing gas.
My calculation implies that the anti-tail contains dust particles with a characteristic radius of order 10 microns. The mass loss rate carried by these dust particles can be estimated from the brightness of glow surrounding 3I/ATLAS.
The total luminosity of the glow around 3I/ATLAS during the month after perihelion is equivalent to the reflection of sunlight from a spherical mirror of 10-kilometers radius, which is a billion (10⁹) times larger than the 10-micron radius of a dust particle.
Since area scales as radius squared, there must be (10⁹)²=10^{18} dust particles to yield the total luminosity of scattered sunlight in the glow around 3I/ATLAS.
Since the mass of a single 10-micron dust particle is ~10^{-8} grams, the total mass in scattering particles is 10 million kilograms.
The duration over which this mass must be supplied is of order the solar deceleration time of the dust particles, after which the dust is dispersed.
For the jet length L=400,000km, and the solar deceleration value of A~0.01cm/s² associated with particle radius of R~10micron, we get a required supply time,
t_supply ~ (2L/A)^{1/2} ~ 1 month = 3 million seconds.
This implies a mass loss rate in 10-micron dust particles of 10 million kilograms in 3 million seconds or ~3.3 kg/s, which is a fraction of 0.7% of the total mass loss rate of gas Mdot~500 kg/s.
The dust-to-gas ratio in the interstellar medium of the Milky-Way galaxy is similar, of order ~1%, but most of it is in particles with a radius below 1 micron. However, in molecular clouds, larger dust particles with R~10micron are made. This raises the question:
Did 3I/ATLAS originate from a molecular cloud, where it collected 10-micron dust particles on its surface?
The additional anomalies of 3I/ATLAS (listed here) raise other questions about its nature, to which we do not have answers yet.
Being honest about what we do not know, would motivate us to seek answers. Those who are not curious about the unknown and fill their mind with pride about what they know, end up being dull.
Below is a delightful correspondence with a young girl who was inspired to become a scientist after viewing one of my interviews. She gives me hope that the next generation of scientists will be better than those who came before them.
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-dust-mass-shed-by-3i-atlas-b4ed260addef
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/3i-atlas-sheds-particles-that-are-much-bigger-than-common-sunlight-scattering-dust-703cc2220df0
https://medium.com/the-quantastic-journal/3i-atlas-gods-and-aliens-when-intelligent-agency-enters-too-early-56afe4182780
https://subarutelescope.org/en/news/topics/2025/12/25/3638.html
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2025-12-25-show/
https://www.iflscience.com/breakthrough-listen-searched-interstellar-object-3iatlas-for-technosignatures-during-its-closest-approach-to-earth-82021
https://usaherald.com/3i-atlas-remains-radio-silent-as-new-measurements-complicate-its-origin
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/scientists-edge-silent-3i-atlas-sparks-wild-theories-defies-everything-we-know-1765848
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/3i-atlas-alien-tech-nasa-associate-administrator-reveals-truth-about-interstellar-comet-1765968
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/scientist-makes-extremely-puzzling-find-36458145
https://x.com/AstronomyVibes/status/2004516792618930473
https://x.com/Ammar1176708/status/2003969566632796280
https://x.com/admpubmx/status/2004324771811701048
https://x.com/UAPWixy/status/2004469170172506342
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcEsb11M9yk (Ray's Astrophotography: We're Watching the SOLAR SYSTEM REACT — Not Just a Comet | Comet 3I ATLAS — I Took a PICTURE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTNJapwDbKc (Dobsonian Power: AVI LOEB FINALLY ADMITTED!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofrthW0dPtk (The Angry Astronaut: A new discovery reveals where 3I Atlas is from, and maybe why! NEW PHOTOS!)
Without the theater, maybe exposing all theaters.
It sure would get everyone tuning in though.
Tonlé Sap, Cambodia
Dec. 26, 2025
Base image, overlaid with flood information captured on December 23, 2025, by the VIIRS instrument aboard the NOAA-20 platform.
Tonlé Sap is visible in the center of this false color corrected reflectance (Bands M11-I2-I1) image captured on Dec. 23, 2025, during the dry season, by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the joint NASA/NOAA NOAA-20 platform. Dark blue/black areas show areas covered in water.
Tonlé Sap is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia, located in northwest Cambodia. Fed by rivers and rainfall, the size and volume of the lake varies throughout the year.
In the dry season (November to March), the minimum area is about 2,500-3,000 square kilometers (970 - 1,160 square miles) with a volume of 1 cubic kilometer (0.24 mi3).
In the rainy season (May - October), the lake swells and can reach a maximum area of 16,000 square kilometers (6,200 square miles) and the volume can reach about 80 cubic kilometers (19 mi3).
The map above shows the false color corrected reflectance image on the left side and the Flood (3-day Window) layer on the right side.
Swipe the center bar back and forth to compare the dark blue/black areas that represent water in the left image with areas classified as surface water (in cyan), recurring flood (in yellow), and flood (in red) in the right image.
The Flood layer provides a daily global map of flooding and accumulates water detections for all observations (from the NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 platforms) over the 3 day compositing period, and if the total exceeds the required threshold, the pixel is marked as water.
These pixels are then classified as surface water (displayed in cyan), recurring flood (yellow), or flood (red), based on separate reference water and recurring flood layers.
The recurring flood class was introduced on December 10, 2025, and helps discriminate unusual flooding from recurring flooding, which is defined as flooding which has been observed in the same location in roughly 1/3 of the years in the reprocessed 22 year MODIS flood product archive (2003-2024).
This comparison shows how the flood layer differs before and after the recurring flood class was introduced on Dec. 10, 2025.
On the left side is the flood layer from Dec. 9, 2025, which shows the main portion of the lake in cyan, with much of the surrounding area in red to indicate the flood class.
The right side shows the flood layer from Dec. 23 2025, where the recurring flood class has been introduced.
The updated flood layer demonstrates that most flooding is occurring in regularly flooded areas and that the flooded areas are not unusual. Learn more in the MODIS/VIIRS NRT Global Flood User Guide.
Visit Worldview to visualize near real-time imagery and historical imagery from NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS); find more imagery in our Worldview weekly image archive.
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/worldview-image-archive/tonle-sap-cambodia
Supernova from the dawn of the universe captured by James Webb Space Telescope
December 25, 2025
An international team of astronomers has achieved a first in probing the early universe, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), detecting a supernova—the explosive death of a massive star—at an unprecedented cosmic distance.
The explosion, designated SN in GRB 250314A, occurred when the universe was only about 730 million years old, placing it deep in the era of reionization.
This remarkable discovery provides a direct look at the final moments of a massive star from a time when the first stars and galaxies were just beginning to form.
The event, which has been reported on in the recently published academic paper JWST reveals a supernova following a gamma-ray burst at z ≃ 7.3, (Astronomy & Astrophysics, 704, December 2025), was initially flagged by a bright burst of high-energy radiation, known as a long-duration Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB), detected by the space-based multi-band astronomical Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) on March 14, 2025.
Follow-up observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO/VLT) confirmed the extreme distance.
The key finding came from targeted observations with JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCAM) approximately 110 days after the burst. Scientists were able to separate the light of the explosion from its faint, underlying host galaxy.
Co-author, and astrophysicist at UCD School of Physics, Dr. Antonio Martin-Carrillo said, "The key observation, or smoking gun, that connects the death of massive stars with gamma-ray bursts is the discovery of a supernova emerging at the same sky location.
Almost every supernova ever studied has been relatively nearby to us, with just a handful of exceptions to date. When we confirmed the age of this one, we saw a unique opportunity to probe how the universe was there and what type of stars existed and died back then.
"Using models based on the population of supernovae associated with GRBs in our local universe, we made some predictions of what the emission should be and used it to propose a new observation with the James Webb Space Telescope.
To our surprise, our model worked remarkably well and the observed supernova seems to match really well the death of stars that we see regularly. We were also able to get a glimpse of the galaxy that hosted this dying star."
The data indicate that the distant supernova is surprisingly similar in brightness and spectral properties to the prototype GRB-associated supernova, SN 1998bw, which exploded in the local universe.
This similarity suggests that the massive star that collapsed to create GRB 250314A was not significantly different from the progenitors of GRBs observed locally, despite the vastly different physical conditions (such as lower metallicity) in the early universe.
The observations also ruled out a much more luminous event, such as a superluminous supernova (SLSN).
The findings challenge the assumption that the stars of the early universe, formed under extremely low-metallicity conditions, would lead to markedly different, perhaps brighter or bluer, stellar explosions than those seen today.
While this discovery provides a powerful anchor point for understanding stellar evolution in the early universe, it also opens new questions about the observed uniformity.
The research team plans to secure a second epoch of JWST observations in the next one to two years.
By that time, the supernova light is expected to have faded significantly (by over two magnitudes), allowing the team to completely characterize the properties of the faint host galaxy and confirm the supernova's contribution.
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-supernova-dawn-universe-captured-james.html
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/12/aa56581-25/aa56581-25.html
China launches internet satellites into space
Last Updated: 26 Dec 2025 - 03:31 pm
Beijing, China: China today launched a Long March-8A rocket carrying a group of internet satellites into space.
The rocket lifted off from the Hainan launch site in southern China and successfully placed low-Earth-orbit internet satellites into their predetermined orbit.
The launch comes as part of China’s efforts to build a competing space-based internet network. It also represents a new mission for the Long March rocket series, which uses environmentally friendly fuel.
It is worth noting that China had launched a group of satellites on Dec. 7 aboard a Long March-8A rocket from the same province, with the payload successfully deployed into its planned orbit.
That mission marked the first time the Long March-8A rocket series relied on coal-based rocket fuel instead of traditional kerosene.
https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/26/12/2025/china-launches-internet-satellites-into-space
https://www.space.com/astronomy/exoplanets/the-most-exciting-exoplanet-discoveries-of-2025
The most exciting exoplanet discoveries of 2025
December 26, 2025
This year, the number of NASA-tracked confirmed worlds discovered beyond our solar system surpassed 6,000, and several thousand more await confirmation.
The milestone, reached just three decades after the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the first planet orbiting a sunlike star in 1995, is largely the result of the planet-hunting power of NASA's Kepler space telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
The growing tally reflects how dramatically humanity's view of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has expanded — and how diverse its planetary population has turned out to be.
Far from mirroring the relatively flat, orderly architecture of our own solar system, new observations and more detailed reexaminations of familiar worlds revealed entire classes of planets with no counterparts at home — super-Earths, mini-Neptunes and hot Jupiters — as well as worlds on contorted orbits that are forcing astronomers to rethink how planets form and evolve.
As the year comes to a close, here's a look back at some of the most intriguing, puzzling and rule-breaking exoplanets astronomers studied in 2025. These worlds illustrate both how far exoplanet science has come and how much there still is to learn.
"Tatooine" worlds
More "Tatooine-like" worlds leapt from science fiction into the exoplanet database this year, as astronomers identified multiple planets orbiting two suns — sometimes in configurations that challenge the basic rules of planetary formation.
The strangest of these worlds emerged in April, when a team reported the discovery of 2M1510 (AB) b, a planet orbiting two brown dwarfs, which are often called "failed stars" because they're not massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion.
Located about 120 light-years from Earth, the world orbits above and below the poles of its two stars, rather than along the usual flat plane.
The discovery team inferred the planet's presence using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, after detecting an unusual backward wobble in the brown dwarfs' orbits.
This was a gravitational clue that the researchers said could be explained only by a hidden, steeply inclined planet that was possibly knocked into place by a stellar flyby long ago.
Later in the year, a different team discovered three Earth-size planets orbiting the compact binary system TOI-2267, just 73 light-years from Earth.
Using data from TESS, the team found that all three worlds transit both stars, even though such tightly bound stellar pairs are thought to be gravitationally unstable environments for planet formation.
Adding to the haul, two independent teams identified HD 143811 (AB) b, a massive planet that had been hidden in archival data for years.
Captured by the Gemini Planet Imager on the Gemini South telescope in Chile, the world orbits a young twin-star system about 446 light-years from Earth.
Though it's roughly six times the size of Jupiter, the planet is only 13 million years old and still glows with heat left over from its formation.
The alien world's host stars whirl around each other every 18 days, while the planet itself traces a slow, 300-year orbit around both.
The contrast of a fast-dancing binary and a distant, lumbering giant poses a lingering mystery of how such a massive planet formed and survived in such a dynamically complex system.
The search for life on K2-18b
The exoplanet K2-18b arguably became one of 2025's loudest exoplanet flash points after renewed claims of possible life swiftly ignited scientific debate.
The world made headlines in April when a University of Cambridge-led team announced what it called its strongest evidence yet for potential biosignature gases in the planet's atmosphere.
Using new transit spectra from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the researchers argued that the data were consistent with dimethyl sulfide, and possibly dimethyl disulfide — gases that on Earth are strongly associated with marine biology.
The findings, the team argued, bolstered the case that the planet could support life on an ocean-covered world they described as potentially "teeming with life."
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Within weeks, however, independent analyses challenged that interpretation.
One group showed that nonbiological gases, including propyne, could reproduce the same spectral features without invoking life, while another concluded that the JWST signal was too noisy or too weak to draw definitive conclusions.
The debate also drew attention to the limits of JWST, which was conceived before the discovery of exoplanets and is now being pushed to the edge of its capabilities to study one.
Still, researchers emphasize that K2-18b remains a high-value target for understanding sub-Neptunes, a class of planets absent from our solar system. Additional JWST transits already in hand may yet clarify what, if anything, the planet's atmosphere is truly revealing.
"If the ultimate result of this story is that the public is more circumspect about future claims of life detection, that's not a terrible thing," Eddie Schwieterman, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved with the research, told Space.com.
Dashed hopes for TRAPPIST-1e's habitability
New analyses of TRAPPIST-1e, one of seven Earth-size planets orbiting a cool red dwarf star about 40 light-years from Earth, suggest the planet may lack a substantial atmosphere, complicating hopes that it could support life-friendly liquid water.
Earlier JWS
T observations hinted at methane in the planet's atmosphere, raising the possibility of complex chemistry or even biological activity. Follow-up studies, however, indicated those signals were likely contaminated by the star itself.
Computer simulations showed that any methane on TRAPPIST-1e would be rapidly destroyed by intense ultraviolet radiation, surviving only about 200,000 years — not nearly long enough for geological processes to replenish it.
Variations in the signal from transit to transit further suggest that if an atmosphere exists at all, it remains extremely difficult to detect — a reminder that even the most promising worlds can defy easy answers.
A clearer look at Proxima Centauri
In 2025, astronomers sharpened their view of the planetary system around Proxima Centauri — the sun's closest stellar neighbor, which lies just 4.2 light-years away — thanks to a powerful new instrument designed to hunt worlds around small, cool stars.
The Near-Infrared Planet Searcher (NIRPS), a new high-resolution spectrograph installed at La Silla Observatory in Chile, delivered its first science results in July.
A team led by Alejandro Mascareño of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands in Spain confirmed the presence of Proxima b, an Earth-size planet known to orbit within the star's habitable zone, thereby validating the instrument's capabilities.
NIRPS also confirmed a smaller planet, Proxima d, and helped rule out a previously claimed third world, thus refining the census of the nearest planetary system.
The results also marked a technical milestone. For the first time, astronomers reached the precision needed to detect the faint gravitational pull of small, rocky planets around red dwarf stars, which emit most of their light at infrared wavelengths — making instruments like NIRPS valuable in the search for Earth-like planets beyond our solar system.
The tails of disintegrating worlds
This year, astronomers discovered rare exoplanets that orbit so close to their stars that they have long tails of material. These worlds are caught in a fleeting moment, in cosmic terms, before they disintegrate.
One such world, BD+05 4868 Ab, was spotted by TESS about 140 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pegasus. The planet completes a full orbit every 30.5 hours, circling its star at a distance roughly 20 times closer than Mercury orbits the sun.
At such proximity, intense stellar heat vaporizes material from the planet's surface, which then streams into space, forming a blazing, comet-like tail. That tail is enormous, stretching up to 5.6 million miles (9 million kilometers), or about half the planet's orbit.
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The discovery team estimates that the planet sheds the equivalent of a Mount Everest's worth of material every orbit and could completely disintegrate within 1 million to 2 million years.
The dust in the tail may contain material from the planet's crust, its mantle or even its core, which would give scientists a rare opportunity to study the internal composition of a distant world — something normally far beyond observational reach.
Another team used JWST to study a very different kind of planetary tail around the ultrahot Jupiter WASP-121b, also known as Tylos, located about 858 light-years from Earth.
Instead of shedding rock, the planet is losing its atmosphere. JWST revealed two enormous helium tails spanning nearly 60% of the planet's orbit — one trailing behind, pushed back by stellar radiation and wind, and a second, rarer leading tail curved ahead of the planet, likely drawn inward by the star's gravity.
A lava world that refuses to go bare
Astronomers using JWST found an atmosphere clinging to a planet that, by all conventional rules, should be completely airless.
The world, TOI-561b, is a small, scorching lava planet that orbits one of the oldest stars in the Milky Way so closely that its year lasts less than a single Earth day.
Tidally locked, with one side permanently facing its star, the planet reaches surface temperatures of more than 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,726 degrees Celsius) — hot enough to melt rock — and is old enough that any primordial atmosphere should have escaped long ago.
Yet JWST observations suggest the planet's dayside is cooler than expected for a bare, airless rock, pointing to the presence of a substantial atmosphere that may have persisted for billions of years and is redistributing heat around the planet.
If confirmed, the finding would mark the strongest evidence yet for a long-lived atmosphere on a hot, rocky world that is neither massive nor temperate, challenging assumptions about the extreme conditions in which planetary atmospheres can survive.
The birth and death of an alien world
This year, astronomers observed two cosmic moments that bookend the life of a planet.
In one study, astronomers captured a never-before-seen view of a planet forming about 437 light-years from Earth.
The observations, taken with the Magellan Telescopes in Chile and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, show the alien world as a faint, purple dot embedded within a ring-shaped gap in a dusty disk around its star.
The forming world, WISPIT 2b, is just 5 million years old, yet it is already about five times as massive as Jupiter, and it's sitting within a clearing in the disk as it gathers dust and gas to grow.
Astronomers have long suspected that such gaps mark the presence of newborn planets, but this is the first time one has been directly observed actively carving out its orbit.
The team also identified a second candidate planet closer to the star, hinting that this system may be building multiple worlds at once.
Closer to Earth, another team captured a glimpse of a dead star's remains.
Observations of the white dwarf LSPM J0207+3331, the dense remnant of a long-gone massive star about 145 light-years from Earth, reveal the ongoing destruction of a planetary relic — possibly a body roughly 120 miles (193 km) wide — being torn apart by the star's intense gravity.
Using telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, astronomers detected heavy elements recently deposited on the white dwarf's surface, which they say is evidence that the debris was accreted within the past 35,000 years and may still be falling in today.
The findings suggest that gravitational forces that shift as the star decays can destabilize surviving planets and smaller bodies such as asteroids, thereby triggering collisions and sending fragments spiraling inward to their destruction.
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Exclusive: 'A patriotic endeavor to push our space industry forward,' expert says Trump administration helps case for space stocks
December 25, 2025
Space stocks have experienced liftoff to end 2025 thanks to the potential for a SpaceX IPO in 2026 and an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to boost the sector.
A space investing expert tells Benzinga a potential renewed "space race" and defense ambitions could be good for the space sector.
Trump Administration Impact on Space Stocks
The recent executive order from Trump and the appointment of Jared Isaacman to lead NASA are steps that could lead to strong interest in space stocks in 2026.
Procure Holdings CEO Andrew Chanin told Benzinga that having certain people in certain positions can help "pull different levers" that can drive things further in one direction.
The Procure Space ETF UFO is an ETF that could benefit from those levers being pulled.
Chanin highlighted the Artemis program, NASA's effort to get humans back to the Moon, which will be a key item for Isaacman.
The billionaire, who has downplayed what he calls a business relationship with SpaceX and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, is also tasked with listening to Musk say that Mars is a better opportunity than the Moon and should be the space exploration focus.
Focus on Defense, New Space Race
Chanin said more attention could come for the space sector thanks to a focus on defense and a potential space race against other countries.
"I think space has been kind of recognized globally as the new military high ground," Chanin said.
The space expert says the United States is now placing a greater emphasis on "defense national security," which could impact investments and incentives for the space sector.
Chanin said countries like China, Russia and India are not slowing down when it comes to space and the United States could look to make sure it is focused on being a "leader in the space race."
"China and Russia and India and others compete for space because they see an opportunity and no one wants to get left behind there."
The Procure Holdings CEO said the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has shown how important space is to international relations.
"It is a national security. It's a national defense. It's secure communications. It's having access to your communications when you need them."
Chanin said the United States could continue to increase its spending and focus on space going forward based on what other countries are doing.
"I know our adversaries will not slow down regardless of what we decide to do."
Chanin said the "winners of this next decade" could come from the space sector.
"I think it's a patriotic endeavor to push our space industry forward further."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/exclusive-a-patriotic-endeavor-to-push-our-space-industry-forward-expert-says-trump-administration-helps-case-for-space-stocks/ar-AA1T2Hn5?ocid=finance-verthp-feeds
A passenger jet dropped 10 stories in 7 seconds. Space particles may be to blame
December 25, 2025
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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A recent passenger flight of a JetBlue-operated Airbus A320 experienced an unexplained drop in altitude, injuring 15 passengers onboard.
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The company says solar radiation caused the equipment malfunction, but space weather experts suggest a more likely culprit is cosmic rays produced from some far-flung supernova.
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Cosmic rays are known to produce soft errors, known as bit flips, which turn a bit from a one to a zero (or vice versa) unintentionally.
On October 30, 2025, a JetBlue passenger jet was making its way from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey, when after reaching cruising altitude at 35,000 feet, it suddenly dropped precipitously.
Although the pilots regained control of the aircraft, the flight landed in Florida, where 15 people were taken to the hospital. Thankfully, everyone eventually arrived in Newark alive and well.
However, what exactly occurred over the Gulf of Mexico remained a mystery—that is, until around a month later, when Airbus (the makers of the A320 in question) released a statement saying that the cause of this mishap was due to solar radiation “corrupt[ing] data critical to the functioning of flight controls.”
A couple of days later, Airbus announced that around 6,000 of its aircraft received updates to address this problem. Mystery solved, right?
Well, not so fast.
Speaking with Space.com, Clive Dyer—a space weather and radiation expert at the University of Surrey in the U.K.—said that on October 30, solar radiation levels were normal and nowhere near impactful enough to mess with avionics.
Instead, Dyer thinks another invisible reason may be to blame: cosmic rays.
“[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer told Space.com. “They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0.
They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out.”
The unintentional change of a bit zero to a one (or vice versa) is known as a “bit flip,” and it’s a phenomenon that dates back to early days of the computer age.
One of the most famous examples of cosmic rays wreaking havoc on terrestrial electronics is during an election in Brussels, when a little-known politician from Schaerbeek received more electronic votes than was possible—4,096 added votes, to be precise.
This is a suspicious number because it’s the exact amount that would appear if the 13th bit flipped from zero to a one. After testing and re-testing the voting system, the error wasn’t reproducible, suggesting that perhaps cosmic rays were the culprit.
This isn’t even the first time cosmic rays may have impacted air travel. In 2008, an Airbus A380 similarly dropped suddenly on its way to Perth, Australia.
After investigating several possible explanations, one plausible theory was that a high-energy atmospheric particle struck the CPU module. But because this was a soft error, it’s impossible to know for sure if this was the cause.
Typically, the Earth shields us from these harmful high-energy charged particles, but at the cruising altitudes of aircraft, things are a little bit different.
According to the Oxford Scientist, exposure to cosmic rays increases 100-fold at cruising altitude (compared to sea level).
Pregnant pilots or aircrew will also typically refrain from flying during their first trimester, due in part to this increased exposure to radiation.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/a-passenger-jet-dropped-10-stories-in-7-seconds-space-particles-may-be-to-blame/ar-AA1T4r84
President Trump speaks with U.S. Space Force Guardians on Christmas Day
December 25, 2025 7:27 PM
UNITED STATES (KRDO) - On Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke with United States Space Force Guardians through a video call.
The U.S. Space Force reports that the Guardians are members of the 42nd Electromagnetic Warfare Combat Detachment.
The video call was held within the CENTCOM area of responsibility, according to Space Force.
The Space Force states that the detachment supports Space Force Central by integrating new systems, monitoring space activity and maintaining mission readiness.
During his first term, President Trump created the Space Force on December 20, 2019, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
https://krdo.com/news/2025/12/25/president-trump-speaks-with-space-force-guardians-on-christmas-day/