Space, in brief

The northern lights lit up skies across the UK on Friday and Saturday evenings. [1]

People saw them as far south as Devon, Hampshire and Kent, though they are mostly seen near the Arctic Circle and in northern Scotland. [1]

The lights came from three coronal mass ejections, huge clouds of charged gas and magnetic field thrown off by the Sun. [2]

All three came from one group of sunspots, called AR4549, which faces Earth. Two left the Sun on 6 and 7 October, and a third on 8 October. [2]

The first came with a solar flare, a sudden burst of energy from the Sun, early on 6 October. [3]

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, the US government office that forecasts solar storms, expected a moderate storm on 9 October. [2]

In past storms of that strength the lights have been seen as far south as New York and Idaho in the US. [2]

Forecasters could not say in advance how far south the lights would reach. That depends on the magnetic direction each cloud carries when it meets Earth's magnetic field. [2][3]

The arrival times were also uncertain by several hours, because the clouds were travelling close behind each other through the Sun's steady stream of particles. [2]

The lights appear when charged particles from the Sun are steered toward the poles by Earth's magnetic field and make the gases high in the air glow. [4]

Oxygen glows green, and higher up a rare red. Nitrogen gives blue and purple. [1]

The Met Office, the UK's weather service, said the lights could be seen in clear skies until Tuesday. AR4549 still faces Earth and may erupt again. [1][2]

Why it matters. Watch whether the third cloud and a stream of fast solar wind expected around 11 October keep the lights in southern skies into the week, as the Met Office allows until Tuesday. [1][3]

LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit with radar, saw Meteor 2-7 break into an estimated tens of pieces as it passed over its site in Western Australia. [5] Meteor 2-7 was a Soviet weather satellite launched in 1981, and it had already broken apart once, in March 2004. [5] It flies about 855 km up, where debris is most crowded, the debris expert Jim Shell said. [5] LeoLabs called it the latest of several breakups in six months, including the US spy satellite USA 32 in September. [5]

Why it matters. Every new piece is something working satellites must dodge, and the European Space Agency now tracks more than 44,000 pieces of debris, against about 16,000 in 2005. [5] In February a piece of debris damaged the return capsule of three Chinese astronauts on the Tiangong space station. [5]

Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo ship, named the S.S. Steven R. Nagel, was scheduled to be let go from the International Space Station by the station's robot arm on 9 October. [6] It had arrived in April on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying 4,990 kg of science gear and supplies. [6] It is packed with thousands of pounds of rubbish and is due to burn up with it as it falls into the air on Sunday. [6] It was the 24th Cygnus to bring cargo to the station. [6]

Why it matters. Three of the four robot cargo ships serving the station are burned up like this after one trip. [6] Only SpaceX's Dragon capsule comes back down whole, by parachute into the sea, to be used again. [6]

US President Donald Trump gave Elon Musk, who runs the rocket company SpaceX, the National Medal of Science at a ceremony on 8 October. [7] It is the highest honour the US gives a scientist or engineer, and 529 people had received it before. [7] Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Lisa Su of the chip maker AMD received it too. [7] Musk was cited for engineering in space exploration, 'intelligence systems' and communications. [7]

Why it matters. The medal came about a week after the US defence department named Musk a co-leader of Project Meridian, a four-month study on preparing for future wars. [7] SpaceX's founder is now honoured by the US president while also helping to shape US military planning. [7]

Astronomers say a flash of X-rays that lasted 10 minutes probably came from two neutron stars crashing together. [8] A neutron star is the tiny, very heavy core left when a giant star explodes. [8] The Einstein Probe, a European-Chinese X-ray telescope, caught the flash on 4 July 2025, after half a second of gamma rays. [8] Its light took 6 billion years to reach Earth, and the study is in the journal Science Bulletin. [8]

Why it matters. Crashes like this make heavy elements such as gold, silver and platinum. [8] The team thinks one of the stars was a magnetar, a neutron star with a huge magnetic field. [8] Crashes like this may explain some of the hundreds of X-ray flashes the Einstein Probe has seen since 2024 that nobody has explained. [8]

Japan's space agency JAXA plans to launch its Martian Moons eXploration mission, MMX, from Tanegashima island on 20 October. [9] The $350 million spacecraft is to land twice on Phobos, the larger of Mars's two small moons, and bring samples back in 2031. [9] Scientists are split on whether Phobos is a captured asteroid or rubble thrown up when something huge hit Mars. [9] About 1% of what it scoops may be dust knocked off Mars itself, says mission science lead Kiyoshi Kuramoto. [9]

Why it matters. NASA effectively cancelled its own $11 billion plan to bring back rocks from Mars early this year. [9] That leaves MMX as a cheaper way to bring at least some Mars material to Earth, though three Russian attempts to reach Phobos all failed. [9]

Three papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters report results from SUNRISE III, a 1-metre solar telescope hung under a helium balloon about 35 km up in 2024. [10] Flying above most of the air removes the blur that hides the Sun's finest magnetic details. [10] It found the calm parts of the Sun's lower atmosphere full of narrow magnetic threads about 725 km wide. [10] A computer model matched some of them to twisted ropes of magnetic field. [10]

Why it matters. Twisted magnetic ropes like these are what seem to set up solar flares when they snap and reconnect. [10] A flare of that kind launched the first of the clouds behind this weekend's northern lights. [3]

The Vulcan rocket of United Launch Alliance, a US rocket company, is now due to fly again no earlier than 29 October, Ars Technica reports. [11] The flight will carry satellites for Amazon Leo, Amazon's space internet network, and another Amazon flight on Vulcan is planned this year. [11] Amazon's Rajeev Badyal said two Vulcans are already standing upright in two assembly buildings. [11]

Why it matters. Badyal said getting rockets has been one of Amazon's main problems, which is why it signed deals with four launch companies. [11] Ars says Vulcan could fly far more often next year, if its solid rocket boosters work. [11]