On March 1, 2020, humanity’s only spacecraft orbiting Venus—Japan’s Akatsuki—saw a mysterious flash in the planet’s alien skies. The flicker could provide crucial evidence in a 40-year quest to answer a perplexing planetary puzzle: Is there lightning on this cloud-shrouded world?

Lightning is found all over the solar system. Spacecraft have detected extraterrestrial lightning strikes in the clouds of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Cloaked in thick clouds, “we expect there to be lightning on Venus” as well, says Noam Izenberg, a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins University and deputy chair of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group.

The flash seen by the spacecraft Akatsuki, which means “Dawn” in Japanese, was revealed by planetary scientist Yukihiro Takahashi of Hokkaido University at this