There are quiet nights where the sky above us behaves like a polite machine. Then there are nights where some guy with a backyard antenna accidentally steps on a classified rake. This story belongs firmly in the second group. A few weeks ago, an amateur radio astronomer named Scott Tilley picked up a signal that should not have existed. He expected the usual background chatter from commercial satellites, but instead found a rising whine in the 2025 to 2110 megahertz band. At first it looked like interference. Then he traced it back to a cluster of classified satellites belonging to

Tomorrow, NASA will finally release the real, high-resolution images of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. It is only the third confirmed visitor ever to enter our Solar System from outside, and if this feels like the end of a long and strange wait, that is because it is. The images were captured six weeks ago when the object skimmed 19 million miles past Mars, exactly when its jets were at full strength. Instead of releasing the photos then and there, everything stopped. NASA was unable to process or publish them during the federal government shutdown, and the teams normally responsible for

For a species that imagines the universe as a playground of infinite biological variety, we have a remarkable habit of summoning the same aliens over and over again. If you skim through a century of encounter reports, the late-night bedroom visitors, the abduction narratives, the rural close-shaves, you’d think the cosmos is populated entirely by small, symmetrical figures with oversized heads and an expression permanently set to “Windows startup error.” There’s something almost comical about it. Light-years of evolutionary potential, and yet we keep meeting creatures built like underfed department store mannequins. Two arms, two legs, a central head, forward-facing

Interstellar visitors don’t drop by often, but when they do, they behave like messengers from a much colder, less civilised part of the galaxy. They cut across the Solar System on one-off trajectories, violate a few rules of polite celestial behaviour, and are gone again before the arguments about what they were have even settled. 3I/ATLAS is the latest of these uninvited guests. And it wasted absolutely no time in causing trouble. On 11 November, the Nordic Optical Telescope captured the object throwing out a plume apparently aimed toward the Sun, a bizarre echo of what had already been seen

If you’d told me a decade ago that the biggest atmospheric experiment of the twenty-first century wouldn’t come from oil companies, governments, or a Bond-villain billionaire trying to “fix climate change” with a volcano-sized aerosol cannon, but from the cremation of broadband satellites, I’d have classed you somewhere between sleep-deprived and unwell. Yet here we are, learning that every time a satellite dies, it doesn’t simply burn up. It performs a sort of metallic last rite across the sky, scattering nanoparticles that linger for years. Scientists finally sampled the stratosphere properly and found something alarming: about ten percent of the