Star jelly
gelatinous substance sometimes found on the ground
Star jelly (also called astromyxin, astral jelly) is a gelatinous substance sometimes found on grass and less commonly on the branches of trees. According to folklore, it is deposited on the Earth during meteor showers. It is described as a translucent or grayish-white gelatin that tends to evaporate shortly after having "fallen".
Explanations have ranged from it being the remains of frogs, toads, or worms, to colonies of cyanobacteria, to being the fruiting bodies of jelly fungi or masses of amoeba called slime molds. Nonbiological origins proposed for instances of star jelly have included byproducts from industrial production or waste management. Reports of the substance date back to the 14th century and have continued to the present.
History
There have been reports of 'star-jelly' for centuries. John of Gaddesden (1280–1361) mentions stella terrae (Latin for 'star of the earth' or 'earth-star') in his medical writings, describing it as "a certain mucilaginous substance lying upon the earth" and suggesting that it might be used to treat abscesses. A fourteenth-century Latin medical glossary has an entry for uligo, described as "a certain fatty substance emitted from the earth, that is commonly called 'a star which has fallen'". Similarly, an English-Latin dictionary from around 1440 has an entry for sterre slyme with the Latin equivalent given as assub (a rendering of Arabic ash-shuhub, also used in medieval Latin as a term for a "falling" or "shooting" star).
“Star jelly” enters the record as gelatinous substance sometimes found on the ground. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Star, jelly and gelatinous can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Star jelly” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Star, jelly and gelatinous provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2345829. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1280, 1361 and 1440.
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This entry incorporates text from “Star jelly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.