Neurons have hogged the spotlight in neuroscience for over a century. But a new study using single-cell RNA sequencing combined with calcium imaging has found that astrocytes — the star-shaped glial cells that were thought to just support neurons — actively participate in memory encoding. Specific astrocyte populations fire in spatially and temporally specific patterns during learning tasks and replay those patterns during sleep consolidation, just like hippocampal place cells. The implication: our model of how the brain stores information is fundamentally incomplete.