A photo of a huge plasma arc next to the Andromeda Galaxy has won this year’s prestigious photography prize.

A team of amateur astronomers led by Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner and Yann Sainty captured the surprising discovery.

Scientists are now investigating the newly discovered giant cloud of gas.

It could be the largest such structure in the nearby environment in the Universe.

Judge and astrophotographer László Francsics said the image was as spectacular as it was valuable.

“It not only presents Andromeda in a new way, but also raises the quality of astrophotography to a higher level,” he said.

The Royal Observatory Greenwich in London, which runs the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, also awarded two 14-year-old boys from China the Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year prize.

Runwei Xu and Binyu Wang collaborated to capture this image of The Running Chicken Nebula, IC 2944, which is located in the constellation of Centaurus, 6,000 light years away from the Earth.

Embedded in the nebula’s glowing gas, the star cluster Collinder 249 is visible.

Yuri Beletsky, judge and professional astronomer, described it as a strikingly beautiful picture.

The thoughts of one Moroccan schoolteacher immediately turned to her pupils when she felt the 6.8-magnitude earthquake strike a week ago.

Nesreen Abu ElFadel was in Marrakesh – but Adaseel, the mountain village was home to her school and pupils, was closer to the epicentre.

The Arabic- and French-language teacher returned to Adaseel where she went searching for the children.

She discovered that all 32 – ranging from six to 12 years old – had died.

“I went to the village and started asking about my kids: ‘Where is Somaya? Where is Youssef? Where is this girl? Where is that boy?’ The answer came hours later: ‘They are all dead.’

“I imagined holding my class’s attendance sheet and putting a line through one student’s name after another, until I had scratched off 32 names; they are all now dead,” she told the BBC.

They were among the almost-3,000 people killed by the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Morocco, which struck on the evening of 8 September.

The hardest-hit areas were those south of Marrakesh, where many mountain villages were completely destroyed. Adaseel was one of those places.

Ms ElFadel recalled how she heard about what happened to six-year-old Khadija.

Rescuers found the body of the child lying next to her brother Mohamed and her two sisters, Mena and Hanan. They had all been in their bed – probably asleep – during the quake, and they all went to Ms ElFadel’s school.

“Khadija was my favourite. She was very nice, smart, active and loved to sing. She used to come to my house, and I loved studying and talking to her.”

The language teacher described her students as “angels”, and respectful children who were eager to learn. Despite struggling with poverty and a crushing cost-of-living crisis, the children and their families thought of going to school as “the most important thing in the world”.

“Our last class was on Friday night, exactly five hours before the quake hit,” Ms ElFadel said.

“We were learning Morocco’s national anthem, and planned to sing it in front of the whole school on Monday morning.”

The school where Ms ElFadel worked was badly damaged by the earthquake

Despite her calm voice, Ms ElFadel has been suffering with trauma. She still cannot process what happened to her students and to her school.

“I don’t sleep; I’m still in shock,” she said.

“People consider me one of the lucky ones, but I don’t know how I can continue living my life.”

Ms ElFadel loved teaching Arabic and French to kids in a village populated by Amazigh – who mainly speak their own language, Tamazight.

“Arabic and French were very hard to learn, but the kids were very bright, and they were almost fluent in both languages,” she recalled.

She plans to continue her career in teaching, and hopes authorities will rebuild Adaseel’s school – which collapsed during the earthquake.

A total of 530 educational institutions have been damaged to varying degrees, including some of which have completely collapsed or suffered severe structural damage, according to official statements.

The Moroccan government has temporarily halted classes in the hardest-hit areas.

“Maybe one day when they rebuild the school and classes are back in session, we can commemorate those 32 kids and tell their story,” Ms ElFadel said.

Hurricane Lee barreled across the North Atlantic toward New England and Eastern Canada on Friday, threatening to bring drenching rains, powerful winds and a life-threatening storm surge to the region over the weekend.

Lee is expected to weaken into a strong tropical storm before making landfall in southwestern Nova Scotia as a strong tropical storm late on Saturday, the Canadian Hurricane Center said.

Even so, the storm has the potential to dump as much as 4 inches (10 cm) of rain and produce winds of up to 60 miles (97 km) an hour in some spots, prompting U.S. and Canadian officials to urge residents to prepare for possible flooding and power outages.

“Please plan ahead to stay indoors if possible on Saturday and check on your loved ones and neighbors,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement to the city’s 650,000 residents.

Some 8 million Americans in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine were under a tropical storm warning, with conditions in those states expected to deteriorate on Friday and into Saturday, the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) said.

In Canada, more than 1 million people in Nova Scotia and eastern New Brunswick were also under a tropical storm warning as the massive storm crawls northward over the open waters of the Atlantic.

Some spots, such as Cape Cod in Massachusetts and eastern Halifax County in Nova Scotia may see storm surge of up to 3 feet (91 cm), forecasters said.

As of Friday morning, the storm was about 490 miles (785 km) southeast of the Massachusetts island of Nantucket as it moved north at about 16 miles per hour. It was expected to pick up speed and weaken through the day, the weather service said.

Lee is the latest storm in what is proving to be a busy hurricane season that has featured a higher-than-average number of named storms.

Just two weeks ago, on Aug. 30, Hurricane Idalia slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coaston. As Idalia moved north, the powerful storm dumped heavy rains across Florida and southeastern Georgia, flooding numerous communities and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses.

More than two-thirds of the world’s population favours solar energy, five times more than public support for fossil fuels, a global poll has found.

The survey, conducted by Glocalities in collaboration with advocacy groups Global Citizen and The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, was based on interviews with more than 21,000 people in 21 countries between January and June.

The countries included Australia, Brazil, China, India, Italy, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the United States.

With 68% support, solar power was the most popular energy source, trailed by wind (54%), hydropower (35%) and nuclear (24%), with only 14% of respondents saying they favoured fossil fuels, the survey found.

The Glocalities poll reinforced other surveys showing robust support for renewables in Europe and the United States. The EU’s latest Eurobarometer from May-June found 85% of Europeans support “investing massively” in renewable energies, such as wind and solar power.

A Pew Research Center poll from early 2022, which pre-dated a global spike in energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, showed 69% of U.S. adults prioritised developing alternative energy sources such as wind and solar over expanding the production of oil, coal and natural gas, down from 79% two years earlier.

In the United States, the Glocalities poll found, solar energy was also the most favoured power source at 58%, while fossil fuel was supported by 24%, well ahead of the global average.

Fossil fuels, however, still accounted for 77% of global energy consumption in 2022, said Michael Sheldrick, Co-Founder and Chief Policy, Impact and Government Affairs Officer at Global Citizen.

Global energy demand rose 1% last year and record renewables growth did nothing to shift the dominance of fossil fuels, the most recent Statistical Review of World Energy report said.

Scientists say the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 43% by 2030 from 2019 levels to have any hope of meeting the international Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.