Strange, powerful signals from deep space called fast radio bursts are slippery little suckers. Most of them just flash once, a mysterious huge spike in the radio data out of nowhere, lasting just milliseconds at most. They can't be predicted, and because they're so brief, they're incredibly hard to trace. Hard; but not impossible. Less than a year ago, for the first time, astronomers announced they traced one of these mysterious one-off signals to its source galaxy. Since then, their techniques have allowed them to trace three more. And this has now given us one of the keys that help us unlock the mystery of what fast radio bursts are - a census of the galaxies that spat them out across the Universe. "Just like doing video calls with colleagues shows you their homes and gives you a bit of an insight into their lives, looking into the host galaxies of fast radio bursts gives us insights to their origins," explained astrophysicist Shivani Bhandari of the Common
Mars - glorious, dusty, complex Mars - may once have been even more dazzling. New research provides even more evidence that a rubbly ring once circled the Red Planet. The new clue lies in Deimos, the smaller of the two Martian moons. It's orbiting Mars at a slight tilt with respect to the planet's equator - and this could very well be the result of the gravitational shenanigans caused by a planetary ring. Ring systems aren't actually all that uncommon. When you think about ring systems, your mind immediately leaps to Saturn, no doubt - but half the planets in the Solar System have rings, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter. Dwarf planet Haumea, and centaurs Chiron and Chariklo also have rings. In 2017, a pair of researchers theorised that Mars, too, once had a ring. They conducted simulations of the larger of the two Martian moons, Phobos, and found that it could have formed after an asteroid slammed into Mars, sending debris flying into space, forming a ring that then