Last week, the Sheriff’s Office in Stevens County, Minnesota made a startling Facebook post.

“On October 14, 2026, at approximately 3:30pm, the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office received a phone call of foreign debris that was found in a cornfield in Scott Township,” it wrote. “Upon responding, deputies confirmed that a large, metallic object, approximately 11-feet in diameter, presumably a space object, was present in the cornfield. The Sheriff’s Office is working closely with several state and federal agencies to identify and notify the owner of the debris and to plan for removal from the field.”

The post, which included a photo of a banged-up metal object surrounded by yellowed stalks of corn, quickly started picking up traction on social media due to the implication that the object had come from space.

Now, Ars Technica has the receipts: the object was almost certainly chunk of a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket that launched from the Gobi Desert, deployed 10 satellites, and then headed back Earthward, where it was spotted burning up in the skies over Kansas and Minnesota.

As launches get more common and rockets get larger and sturdier — the model built by LandSpace, which deposited the debris in the cornfield, is a workhorse spacecraft meant to ferry cargo to Earth’s orbit — the chances of their detritus surviving the journey back to the ground increases.

These chunks of spacefaring equipment can sometimes crash down in populated areas. In 2024, a NASA component from the International Space Station withstood reentry and crashed through a home in Florida where a family was sleeping. Space wreckage has previously been discovered previously on farms in Canada and Australia.

Nobody has yet been injured by a piece of falling space debris, but as commercial ambitions for Earth’s orbit increase — the Chinese rocket had been launched to deploy satellites for a connectivity constellation meant to rival SpaceX’s Starlink — it’s probably only a matter of time.

More on space debris: Space Junk Now Almost Constantly Crashing Down to Earth

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In 1181 — during the early years of the samurai who would dominate Japan’s feudal period — astronomers there witnessed a spectacular sight in the night sky. They observed remnants of a star that had survived its own explosion, a bright object in the Cassiopeia constellation visible for at least 185 days.

The supernova, independently documented almost a millennium ago by Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic astronomers, is just one out of five events like it recorded before the invention of the telescope several hundred years later.

Now, thanks to breathtaking new images taken by NOIRLab’s Gemini North telescope — made up of two powerful telescopes in Hawaii and Chile — we get to see the debris field, dubbed Pa 30, in unprecedented detail.

The astronomers were also left with a puzzle: the explosion perfectly preserved the surviving progenitor star at the dead center of perfectly uniform knots of ionized gases, bizarre conditions suggesting a perfectly symmetric, yet chaotically violent, event.

The supernova remnant is located around 7,500 light-years from Earth, roughly a fourth the distance to the center of the Milky Way.

“We can see this much detail because of Pa 30’s proximity to Earth,” said Institute of Science and Technology Austria assistant professor Ilaria Caiazzo, coauthor of a new paper about the latest observations published in The Astrophysical Journal, in a statement. “This proximity makes Pa 30 uniquely valuable for study.”

Their Gemini North observations of Pa 30 resolve enormous strands of red ionized sulfur and blue-green ionized oxygen. The sulfur observations alone feature ten times as many filaments compared to previous images.

The scale of the structure is hard to wrap one’s head around.

“The planetary region of our solar system could fit in each knot about ten times with room to spare,” Caiazzo explained. “The knots are quite strikingly uniform. We are excited to try to model them.”

Pa 30 is unique in the Milky Way as it’s the only known star in our galaxy to have survived an incomplete, Type Iax supernova. The class of explosion is far less energetic than other types of supernovae, typically allowing its white dwarf star to “survive” the blast, turning it into a so-called “zombie star.”

Scientists believe that Pa 30 was the result of two white dwarfs, extremely dense, Earth-sized husks of former stars, colliding.

Unlike many other supernovae, which are energetic enough to kick a star far away from the site of the explosion, Pa 30’s progenitor star remains exactly at the center. That left researchers with an enigma.

“Explosions conserve momentum,” Caiazzo said. “If the explosion itself was perfectly symmetric, the ejecta should also be symmetric, and the surviving star should not receive a substantial kick.”

However, “we practically don’t see the star moving away at all” in the case of Pa 30, she added.

The team is now hoping to discover more Type Iax supernova survivors in the Milky Way as observations become more detailed.

More on supernovae: Evidence Grows That One of the Largest Known Stars Is Poised to Explode in a Spectacular Blast

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Using the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers led by University of Minnesota astrophysicist Mason Huberty had a closer look at a group of almost 10,000 galaxies spanning billions of light-years in the Fornax constellation. As detailed in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, they honed in on a small space in the region that they thought was entirely unoccupied.

But to their astonishment, they observed a single emission line emanating from it — twice over a span of just three months. Emission lines are bright, narrow bands of light emitted at a specific wavelength by distant celestial objects and other phenomena. Puzzlingly, prior observations from the same region didn’t feature the same reading.

Put simply, the JWST stared into the abyss — and the abyss stared back.

Instead of hunting down already known objects, Huberty and his colleagues tried to use the James Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph to uncover new ones, as Science Alert explains. The team examined what they thought was an empty region twice, in August and November 2023, at different angles to rule out any artifacts.

Out of seven total detections of emissions in the region, one stood out because they couldn’t match it to a distant galaxy.

It also stood out as the only near-infrared emission without any other accompanying emission lines near it. It should’ve also shown up in earlier James Webb observations since it’s technically bright enough — but didn’t.

The astronomers offered several possible explanations, none of which “provide a fully satisfactory explanation,” according to their paper. The emission line may have been produced by a galaxy dating back to the earliest days of the Universe. It could’ve also come from a younger galaxy or a supernova, both of which are usually accompanied by other emission lines. Finally, the researchers propose that it could’ve been the result of a black hole devouring a star — a guess that would require plenty of other data to confirm.

“Follow-up observations are essential to confirm the redshift and determine the physical origin of the emission,” the team concluded in their paper. “Deeper, more sensitive spectroscopy could reveal additional emission lines and definitively establish the redshift and nature of the source.”

More on the James Webb: Astronomers Discover an Entirely New Type of Object: a “Black Hole Star”

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