Did Nuclear Testing Cause These Mysterious Lights in the Sky?

In the late 1940s, as humans were busy inventing new ways to annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons, we started noticing that all of our fiddling with nuclear weaponry was beginning to do something weird to the sky. It was creating a “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of phenomenon that has puzzled scientists for decades.

According to new research published in Scientific Reports, mysterious lights recorded in astronomical surveys during the dawn of the nuclear era, once theorized to be camera glitches, might have actually been the sky reacting to nuclear explosions.

The research team is composed of an unlikely duo: a theoretical physicist, Beatriz Villarroel, of Stockholm University, and an anesthesiologist, Stephen Bruehl, of Vanderbilt University. The team dug through several midcentur