NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

January 27, 2026

Orion's Treasures over Snowy Mountains

Rising over a frozen valley in the Tatra Mountains, the familiar stars and nebulas of Orion dominate this wide-field nightscape. The featured deep photo was taken in southern Poland's highest mountain range last month, where dark skies and alpine terrain combined to reveal both Earth's rugged beauty and the structure of our galaxy. Above the snowy mountains, Orion's bright belt stars anchor a region of glowing interstellar clouds. The Great Orion Nebula, a vast stellar nursery visible even to the unaided eye, shines near the center of the scene. Surrounding it is the enormous arc of Barnard's Loop, a faint shell of ionized hydrogen gas spanning much of the constellation. To the left, the round Rosette Nebula glows softly, while the grayish Witch Head Nebula hovers to the right, illuminated by nearby starlight. Near the top, the orange supergiant Betelgeuse marks the hunter's shoulder.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSKs0oDHjhs

Another Rare Event, Pole Shift Confirmation | S0 News and frens

Jan.27.2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJEcOcKAovo

https://twistedsifter.com/2026/01/ground-breaking-new-technology-allows-scientists-to-observe-another-stars-coronal-mass-ejection-for-the-first-time-ever/

https://asgardia.space/en/news/The-Recent-Solar-Storm-Outcomes-Disruptions-or-Discoveries

https://weather.com/storms/winter/news/2026-01-27-east-coast-storm-noreaster-bomb-cyclone-snow-wind-forecast

https://x.com/MrMBB333/status/2015857688715170243

https://x.com/volcaholic1/status/2016132621596491882

https://x.com/StefanBurnsGeo/status/2015970832963547510

https://x.com/SchumannBotDE/status/2016164564073689549

https://x.com/AstronomyVibes/status/2016152478769938802

https://x.com/forallcurious/status/2015949352767029572

https://www.space.com/live/aurora-forecast-northern-lights-possible-tonight-jan-27

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuNwEFg8fds (Ray's Astrophotography: Magnetic Pole Shift - Poles Are Drifting FASTER – What They Don’t Explain)

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

https://spaceweather.com/

>>24180956

https://www.space.com/astronomy/sun/magnetic-avalanches-european-sun-watching-probe-unveils-the-central-engine-of-a-flare

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2026/01/aa57253-25/aa57253-25.html

Magnetic avalanches on the sun reveal the hidden engine powering solar flares

January 26, 2026

A giant solar flare on our sun was powered by an avalanche of smaller magnetic disturbances, providing the clearest insight yet into how energy from our star is released in a torrent of high-energy ultraviolet light and X-rays.

The discovery was made by the European Space Agency (ESA) Solar Orbiter mission, which is imaging the sun from closer than any spacecraft before it.

Some solar flares can result in coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – huge plumes of plasma blown off the sun's corona and into deep space.

If their trajectory away from the sun intersects with Earth's location, they can trigger geomagnetic storms that can damage satellites and power grids while disrupting communications, and dazzle us with colorful auroral lights.

The more we learn about how solar flares are triggered, the better prepared we can be to predict when a harmful flare and CME is about to occur. Solar Orbiter’s new observations are a major step towards being able to do this.

"This is one of the most exciting results from Solar Orbiter so far," Miho Janvier, who is the ESA co-Project Scientist on Solar Orbiter, said in a statement.

"Solar Orbiter's observations unveil the central engine of a flare and emphasize the crucial role of an avalanche-like magnetic energy release mechanism at work."

Getting to the bottom of solar flares

On Sept. 30, 2024, Solar Orbiter came within 27 million miles (43.3 million kilometers) of the sun, when it witnessed the eruption of a medium-class solar flare.

Thanks to four of Solar Orbiter’s instruments working in unison to observe the flare, scientists have, for the first time, seen how smaller magnetic instabilities can build up into a large flare, like an avalanche on a snowy mountainside originating from a relatively small disturbance.

"We were really very lucky to witness the precursor events of this large flare in such beautiful detail," research lead author Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, said.

"We really were in the right place at the right time to catch the fine details of this flare."

Solar flares are the product of magnetic reconnection. This is when magnetic field lines on the sun, laced with high-energy plasma, become taut and snap, releasing huge amounts of energy before the field lines reconnect.

The precise origins of solar flares, however, have been secretive. Are they a single powerful eruption, or an accumulation of smaller reconnection events? For the 30 September flare at least, Solar Orbiter found the answer.

Starting with its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), Solar Orbiter witnessed the generation of the flare over the course of 40 minutes.

EUI detected changes in the magnetic environment of the sun's corona local to the eruption point of the flare, capturing details as small as a few hundred kilometers on timescales of less than two seconds, which is the time covered in each image frame.

The spacecraft saw an arching filament made from entwined magnetic fields carrying plasma and connected to a cross-shaped region of magnetic activity laced with more magnetic field lines.

It watched as the region grew increasingly unstable, field lines snapping and reconnecting, releasing bursts of energy that appeared as bright points of light.

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>>24180999

These bursts were the beginning of the avalanche. They triggered a chain reaction of increasingly powerful reconnection events.

At one point, the arching filament detached from one of its anchor points on the sun and launched out into space, blown by the ferocity of the solar wind.

The cascade of smaller reconnection events quickly gathered steam before culminating as a medium-class flare.

"These minutes before the flare are extremely important, and Solar Orbiter gave us a window right into the foot of the flare where this avalanche process began," said Chitta.

"We were surprised by how the large flare is driven by a series of smaller reconnection events that spread rapidly in space and time."

Three other instruments aboard the Solar Orbiter – SPICE (Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment), STIX (X-ray spectrometer/Telescope) and PHI (Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager) – also observed the flare, measuring events at different depths in the sun’s atmosphere, from the outer atmosphere, the corona, all the way down to the visible surface of the sun, called the photosphere.

They captured waves of giant blobs of plasma, which gained their energy from magnetic fields, raining from the corona down onto the photosphere.

"We saw ribbon-like features moving extremely quickly down through the sun's atmosphere, even before the main episode of the flare," said Chitta.

"These streams of raining plasma blobs are signatures of energy deposition, which get stronger and stronger as the flare progresses. Even after the flare subsides, the rain continues for some time."

After the flare reached peak energy, during which X-ray levels rose dramatically, and charged particles were accelerated to between 40 and 50 percent of the speed of light, the cross-shaped magnetic region began to relax.

The plasma cooled, and particle emission decreased to normal levels. Chitta described how completely unexpected it was that the avalanche process could drive such high-energy particles.

The avalanche model of weaker disturbances cascading into something more serious had previously been proposed to explain the collective behavior of hundreds of thousands of flares all across the sun, but until now, it hadn't really been considered that it could apply to a single flare.

There are two important questions to come out of this. First, are all the flares on the sun produced as an avalanche? "What we observed challenges existing theories for flare-energy release," said David Pontin of the University of Newcastle, Australia, who was part of the team analyzing the Solar Orbiter data.

Further observations of solar flares will be required to shed light on this.

Second, our sun is not the only star to have flares. They erupt from all stars, and some stellar bodies, such as red dwarfs, have much more powerful and more frequent flares than the sun.

"An interesting prospect is whether this mechanism happens in all flares, and on other flaring stars," said Janvier.

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https://usaherald.com/3i-atlas-is-just-a-comet-why-the-cias-silence/

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/

https://medium.com/@nhojsull/3i-atlas-anti-tail-looks-like-a-whale-818d251a8518

https://medium.com/universe-condensate-space-theory-ucst/tiny-magnet-language-4pap-pairing-rules-of-reality-thank-you-3i-atlas-7247d1a4f0de

https://astrobiology.com/2026/01/perihelion-asymmetry-in-the-water-production-rate-of-tthe-interstellar-object-3i-atlas.html

https://me.mashable.com/science/66311/3iatlas-after-the-sun-harvard-prof-avi-loeb-spots-something-seriously-off-with-the-interstellar-visi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpJI87o_KOI (Angry Astronaut: Did 3I Atlas send probes to Mars? WE FOUND SOMETHING!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE-Bog1Hm9g (Dobsonian Power: MY UFO CAPTURE HAS NO OFFICIAL RECORD!)

https://x.com/Inside3iA/status/2016067850050666965

https://x.com/uma_latina_br/status/2016012640338718982

https://x.com/AlphaTruther/status/2016003417756598368

https://x.com/theMatildaTv/status/2016032286693896346

https://x.com/WeedThawts/status/2016149705877602727

If 3I/ATLAS Is Just a Comet, Why the CIA’s Silence?

January 27, 2026

There is a peculiar pattern that repeats itself whenever an anomaly appears at the edge of our knowledge: curiosity flickers briefly, authority intervenes decisively, and the case is declared closed.

The interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS seems to fit this pattern uncomfortably well.

From the outset, 3I/ATLAS refused to behave like an ordinary comet. It displayed a prominent anti-tail jet pointing toward the Sun, both before and after perihelion—an orientation that defies the intuitive behavior of dust and gas driven by solar radiation pressure.

Its rotation axis, measured at large heliocentric distances, was aligned to within eight degrees of the sunward direction, a geometric coincidence that is statistically awkward.

Its orbital plane was aligned to within five degrees of the ecliptic, despite having no obvious reason to share the architectural preferences of our planetary system.

Even its chemical signature, unusually rich in nickel relative to iron, evoked comparisons not with pristine cosmic chemistry but with industrially processed alloys.

Taken individually, each of these features might be waved away. Taken together, they form a constellation of puzzles—exactly the kind that should provoke open scientific debate.

Yet no such debate followed. Instead, on November 19, 2025, NASA officials publicly stated—firmly and without visible hesitation—that 3I/ATLAS is a comet of entirely natural origin.

Case closed. Questions discouraged. Curiosity politely dismissed. Then something odd happened.

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>>24181046

On December 31, 2025, the CIA responded to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding 3I/ATLAS by stating that it could “neither deny nor confirm the existence or nonexistence of records.”

The so-called Glomar response is typically reserved for matters of national security, covert operations, or intelligence failures—not for icy debris drifting through the Solar System.

If 3I/ATLAS were simply a mundane comet, as asserted, why would even the existence of records about it be treated as sensitive?

The simplest interpretation is not sensational, but strategic.

Intelligence agencies are paid to worry about low-probability, high-impact events—the black swans that experts insist are unlikely right up until they happen.

Even if the probability that 3I/ATLAS represents something non-natural is vanishingly small, the consequences of being wrong would be enormous.

Multiply a tiny probability by a catastrophic impact, and the rational response is not dismissal, but quiet verification.

Under such circumstances, a division of labor makes sense.

Scientific agencies reassure the public with the most likely explanation, while intelligence agencies quietly ask the uncomfortable questions—out of sight, to avoid panic, market instability, or the erosion of trust caused by false alarms.

The Glomar response becomes a tool not of secrecy for secrecy’s sake, but of damage control.

If this interpretation is correct, 3I/ATLAS may represent the first astronomical object to trigger such a response—not because it is known to be dangerous, but because it cannot yet be ruled out as a black swan.

During the summer of 2025, Avi Loeb proposed a formal classification scale for interstellar objects as potential alien technology, urging policymakers to consider precaution without hysteria.

Around the same time, radio observations were encouraged. Data from the Green Bank Telescope later ruled out continuous technological radio emissions in the 1–12 GHz range during a five-hour window in December 2025.

But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

A technological object would have little reason to transmit continuously. Interstellar travel spans billions of years; a brief passage through the Solar System lasts only thousands.

Efficient communication would be directional, brief, and rare—easy to miss unless one is watching persistently, from many angles, across long timescales.

The story of 3I/ATLAS is not finished. Its journey will continue until it passes near Jupiter’s Hill radius. If it were to deploy probes, shed companions, or behave in ways that defy cometary physics, the opportunity to notice will exist only if someone is looking.

The deeper question is not whether 3I/ATLAS is artificial or natural. It is whether our institutions are willing to look carefully before declaring certainty.

Because unless we check, we may never know whether this swan—quietly gliding through our cosmic backyard—was white all along, or something far rarer.

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https://esahubble.org/news/heic2603/

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/12/aa55512-25/aa55512-25.html

Researchers discover hundreds of cosmic anomalies with help from AI

27 January 2026

A team of astronomers have used a new AI-assisted method to search for rare astronomical objects in the Hubble Legacy Archive.

The team sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just two and a half days, uncovering nearly 1400 anomalous objects, more than 800 of which had never been documented before.

Rare and anomalous objects like colliding galaxies, gravitational lenses and ring galaxies are of immense scientific interest, but they’re difficult to find in the growing masses of data from telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope.

Increasingly, astronomers must ask how they can find a cosmic needle in a haystack the size of the Universe.

Recently, researchers David O’Ryan and Pablo Gómez of the European Space Agency developed an AI tool that allows them to inspect millions of astronomical images in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

The team trained their tool and demonstrated its capabilities using the Hubble Legacy Archive, which contains tens of thousands of datasets spanning Hubble’s long lifetime.

“Archival observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now stretch back 35 years, providing a treasure trove of data in which astrophysical anomalies might be found,” says David O’Ryan, lead author of the research paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Astrophysical anomalies are usually discovered when scientists manually search for objects that are outside the norm — or find them by chance.

While trained scientists excel at spotting cosmic anomalies, there’s simply too much Hubble data for experts to sort through at the necessary level of fine detail by hand.

Citizen science projects, which enlist non-scientists to collaborate on tasks such as classifying galaxies, provide another way to chip away at the mountains of data available.

While citizen science groups greatly expand the amount of data that can be inspected, they’re still no match for extensive archives like Hubble’s, or for datasets from telescopes that survey the sky like ESA’s Euclid space telescope.

Now, this new work by O’Ryan and Gómez takes the search to a whole new level. The team developed what’s called a neural network, an AI tool that uses computers to process data and search for patterns in a way that is inspired by the human brain.

Their neural network, which they named AnomalyMatch, is trained to search for and recognise rare objects like jellyfish galaxies and gravitational arcs.

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The team used AnomalyMatch to search through nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, marking the first time the archive has been systematically searched for astrophysical anomalies.

In just two and a half days, AnomalyMatch completed its search of the archive and returned a list of likely anomalies.

As the process of tracking down rare objects still requires an expert eye, O’Ryan and Gómez personally inspected the sources rated by their algorithm as most likely to be anomalous.

Of these, more than 1300 were true anomalies, more than 800 of which had never been documented in the scientific literature.

Most of the anomalies were galaxies in the process of merging or interacting, taking on unusual shapes or trailing long tails of stars and gas.

Many others were gravitational lenses, in which the gravity of a foreground galaxy bends spacetime and warps the light from a distant background galaxy into a circle or arc.

The team also discovered examples of several other rare objects such as galaxies with huge clumps of stars, jellyfish galaxies with gaseous ‘tentacles’, and planet-forming disks seen edge-on, giving them a hamburger-like or butterfly-like appearance.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, there were several dozen objects that defied classification altogether.

“This is a fantastic use of AI to maximise the scientific output of the Hubble archive,” says study co-author Pablo Gómez.

“Finding so many anomalous objects in Hubble data, where you might expect many to have already been found, is a great result. It also shows how useful this tool will be for other large datasets.”

Hubble has generated just one of many large data archives in astronomy, and more are on the horizon.

New facilities that will return an enormous amount of data include Euclid, which began its survey of billions of galaxies across a third of the night sky in 2023, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will soon begin its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time and collect more than 50 petabytes of images, and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, to which ESA contributes as a Mission of Opportunity, that is scheduled to launch no later than May 2027.

AI tools like AnomalyMatch can help astronomers handle the deluge of incoming data and discover new examples of rare and unusual objects — and maybe even things never seen before in the Universe.

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Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold

Wednesday 21 January 2026 13:16 GMT

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold.

Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons.

So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom? As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold.

Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

How to steal a proton

Protons are found in the nucleus of an atom. How can they be pulled out?

Well, protons have an electric charge, which means an electric field can pull or push them around. Placing an atomic nucleus in an electric field could do it.

However, nuclei are held together by a very strong force with a very short range, imaginatively known as the strong nuclear force.

This means an extremely powerful electric field is required to pull out protons – about a million times stronger than the electric fields that create lightning bolts in the atmosphere.

The way the scientists created this field was to fire beams of lead nuclei at each other at incredibly high speeds – almost the speed of light.

The magic of a near-miss

When the lead nuclei have a head-on collision, the strong nuclear force comes into play and they end up getting completely destroyed. But more commonly the nuclei have a near miss, and only affect each other via the electromagnetic force.

The strength of an electric field drops off very quickly as you move away from an object with an electric charge (such as a proton). But at very short distances, even a tiny charge can create a very strong field.

So when one lead nucleus just grazes past another, the electric field between them is huge. The rapidly changing field between the nuclei makes them vibrate and occasionally spit out some protons.

If one of them spits out exactly three protons, the lead nucleus has turned into gold.

Counting protons

So if you have turned a lead atom into gold, how do you know? In the ALICE experiment, they use special detectors called zero-degree calorimeters to count the protons stripped out of the lead nuclei.

They can’t observe the gold nuclei themselves, so they only know about them indirectly. The ALICE scientists calculate that, while they are colliding beams of lead nuclei, they produce about 89,000 gold nuclei per second.

They also observed the production of other elements: thallium, which is what you get when you take one proton from lead, as well as mercury (two protons).

An alchemical nuisance

Once a lead nucleus has transformed by losing protons, it is no longer on the perfect orbit that keeps it circulating inside the vacuum beam pipe of the Large Hadron Collider. In a matter of microseconds it will collide with the walls.

This effect makes the beam less intense over time. So for scientists, the production of gold at the collider is in fact more of a nuisance than a blessing.

However, understanding this accidental alchemy is essential for making sense of experiments – and for designing the even bigger experiments of the future.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/big-bang-large-hadron-collider-gold-b2903961.html