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SHOW NOTES Black hole jets follow one universal rule Adelle Goodwin (Curtin University / ICRAR, Forrest Research Foundation Fellow) and Andrew Mummery (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) show that supermassive black holes launch their outflows at the same critical accretion rate as stellar-mass black holes — about 2% of the Eddington limit — making accretion-outflow coupling scale-invariant across seven orders of magnitude in mass. Nature Astronomy, 17 September 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02951-1 JWST's Little Red Dots are black hole seeds caught mid-growth Sunmyon Chon, Shingo Hirano, Tomoaki Ishiyama, Seok-Jun Chang and Volker Springel ran fully cosmological radiation-hydrodynamic simulations on Japan's ATERUI III supercomputer and produced heavy black hole seeds of about a million solar masses, whose optically thick discs generate exactly the broad hydrogen emission seen in Little Red Dots. Nature 657, 621-625, 16 September 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10985-8 Earth's centre of mass moves about half as far as we thought Donald Argus, Felix Landerer and colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with the University of Nevada, the University of Montana and the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, revise the annual oscillation between Earth's centre of mass and its centre of figure down from roughly 11 millimetres to about 4 to 5.5. Geophysical Journal International, ggag314. DOI: 10.1093/gji/ggag314 Two numbers explain the weather on a world 20 light-years away Merle Schrader and colleagues at Trinity College Dublin applied principal component analysis to one rotation of JWST spectroscopy of the brown dwarf SIMP 0136 and found two components — temperature and vertical cloud structure — account for all the detectable variability. Astronomy & Astrophysics, open access. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202660109 The Sun goes blank With only active region AR4528 left on the Earth-facing disc and rotating out of view, the Sun was on the verge of its first spotless day since 24 February 2026 — which itself ended a 1,335-day run of continuous sunspot activity stretching back to June 2022. Skywatch: Venus at greatest brilliancy, first quarter Moon, Observe the Moon Night Venus reaches greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude -4.8; the Moon reaches exact first quarter at 20:43 UTC the same day, setting up International Observe the Moon Night on Saturday 19 September. All times and altitudes in this segment were computed for Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and London. SKYWATCH — COMPUTED REFERENCE Computed in-session with PyEphem 4.2.1. Local times. Sydney on AEST (UTC+10); Los Angeles PDT; New York EDT; London BST. City Sunset Venus alt Venus sets Mercury Mars pre-dawn Sydney 17:45 39.2 deg 20:58  (3h13m) 16.4 deg  (sets 1h20m) 20.4 deg Los Angeles 18:52 14.3 deg 20:10  (1h19m) 8.8 deg  (sets 0h43m) 48.4 deg New York 18:56 10.3 deg 19:59  (1h03m) 7.0 deg  (sets 0h38m) 46.1 deg London 19:04 3.6 deg 19:32  (0h28m) 3.9 deg  (sets 0h26m) 40.6 deg ·         Venus greatest brilliancy: 18 September 2026, magnitude -4.8. Disc 39.6 arcsec, 26% illuminated. ·         By 22 September the disc has grown to 42.3 arcsec but the lit fraction has fallen to 22.7% — the two changes nearly cancel, which is why listings disagree on the date. The peak is genuinely flat. ·         Moon reaches exact first quarter 18 September at 20:43 UTC = 06:43 AEST Sat 19 Sep / 16:43 EDT Fri 18 / 13:43 PDT Fri 18 / 21:43 BST Fri 18. ·         Moon altitude at sunset: Sydney 81.6 deg (near overhead), Los Angeles 27.1 deg, New York 20.4 deg, London 9.4 deg. ·         International Observe the Moon Night: Saturday 19 September 2026. NASA event at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Huntsville, 5:30-8:00pm CST. ·         Pre-dawn Sat 19 Sep at nautical dawn — Jupiter: Los Angeles 26.4 deg, New York 25.1 deg, London 21.9 deg, Sydney 8.9 deg. ·         Mars-Jupiter separation: 22.9 deg on 18 Sep, 12.0 deg mid-October, 1.2 deg mid-November 2026. ·         Saturn is up essentially all night; sets 06:47 Sydney, 07:55 Los Angeles. Opposition 4 October 2026, disc 19.6 arcsec, rings approx 7 deg open. ·         September equinox: a single instant, 00:05:09 UTC on 23 September 2026 — evening of the 22nd in the Americas, mid-morning of the 23rd in Australia. ·         All figures computed in-session with PyEphem 4.2.1 for the four reference cities. Sydney is on AEST (UTC+10); daylight saving begins 4 October.
 

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Astronomers have confirmed the youngest planet ever found - Elias 2-24 b, less than a million years old, sitting inside a gap it is carving in its own birth disc 450 light-years away. Plus: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter finds a 222-metre crater that was not there in 2024, a 178-year-old space weather record gets corrected by seven years, and Sakurai's Object - a star that came back from the dead - has become six times hotter in thirty years.

SOURCES Newfound 'Baby' Planet Smashes Record for Youngest Known World NASA Science, 16 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/universe/newfound-baby-planet-smashes-record-for-youngest-known-world/ Elias 2-24 b discovery paper Bernardi, Cieza et al., The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 16 September 2026, DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ae9bb6  -  https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae9bb6 ALMA Observations of Elias 2-24: A Protoplanetary Disk with Multiple Gaps (background) Cieza et al., ApJL 851 L23, 2017, DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/aa9b7b  -  https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aa9b7b NASA's Moon Orbiter Spots New, 'Once-in-Century' Moon Crater NASA Science, 16 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbiter-spots-new-once-in-century-moon-crater/ New 222-metre lunar crater - mission release W. M. Keck / Intuitive Machines / NASA LROC, 16 September 2026; two papers in Science Advances (Robinson et al., morphology and ejecta; Powell et al., Diviner thermal signature)  -  https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasas-lunar-reconnaissance-orbiter-discovers-a-new-222-m-diameter-lunar-crater-302880555.html Mystery of one of the earliest recorded space weather impacts solved Lancaster University / RMIT University, 16 September 2026; Wild, Carter, Hapgood et al., Space Weather (AGU), DOI 10.1029/2026SW005239  -  https://doi.org/10.1029/2026SW005239 'Born-again' star offers rare chance to watch stellar evolution in real time The University of Manchester, 16 September 2026; Zijlstra, van Hoof et al., 'The emergence of a [WC] star in Sakurai's object', MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1533  -  https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1533 Cargo Mission and Crew-13 Updates; Station Research, Maintenance Continue NASA Space Station Blog, 16 September 2026  -  https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2026/09/16/cargo-mission-and-crew-13-updates-station-research-maintenance-continue/ International Observe the Moon Night 2026 NASA, Saturday 19 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/moon/observe-the-moon-night/overview Skywatch ephemerides Computed in-session with PyEphem for Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and London, 17-18 September 2026

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First starlight from Roman, a shorter fuse on the Solar System, weapons in orbit, and a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Roman opens its eye — and finds it has twice as long to look NASA has activated the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera built around eighteen detectors, with a field of view at least a hundred times larger than Hubble's infrared field — a patch of sky bigger than the full Moon in a single exposure, at Hubble-comparable sharpness. The instrument reached its operating temperature of −143 °C on 11 September; detectors and the calibration system came up across the 11th and 12th; the element wheel turned in microgravity for the first time on the 12th; the focus mechanism was verified on the 13th. Roman then took its first starlight image — deliberately out of focus, and exactly as intended: a baseline diagnostic that proves the optical path is clear and every detector is live. Sharp science images are expected by early 2027. The Coronagraph Instrument has completed initial communications checkout from Caltech/IPAC and is running 30-day decontamination cycles at room temperature. Separately, NASA published the numbers from Roman's first mid-course correction: better than 99% accurate, using about 18 kg of a 200 kg propellant budget, on a spacecraft that launched lighter than its allowance. Jamie Dunn (Goddard): Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations, against a design life of ten. Caveat kept on air: that is a fuel figure, not a funding or hardware figure. Why it matters: Roman's High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey measures cosmic expansion with Type Ia supernovae, and its High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey probes cosmic acceleration across more than 5,000 square degrees through weak lensing and galaxy clustering — two independent handles on the dark energy question that Monday's Australian-led supernova compilation sharpened but could not settle. A doubled mission means a longer lever arm in time, which in this measurement is everything. Caltech: the Solar System's dynamical fuse is far shorter than we thought Konstantin Batygin, Jim Fuller and Fred Adams (Caltech), 'Terminal instability of the Solar System triggered by stochastic solar mass loss', arXiv:2609.12494, posted 11 September and accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The standard estimate for how long the giant planets hold their architecture — about 10¹⁸ years — assumes the dying Sun sheds mass smoothly. Observations of white-dwarf recoil indicate mass is instead lost in discrete, independently directed ejections, so planetary orbits take a random walk. In simulations, roughly 40% of systems are disrupted or violently scattered before white dwarf formation and about 90% within ~3 billion years after, cutting the outer Solar System's dynamical lifetime to around a gigayear past white dwarf formation. Framed on air as a prediction to test — planetary systems around old white dwarfs should be rarer and more chaotic — with the granularity of the mass loss named as the number to go and measure. The United States says, for the first time, that it has weapons in orbit Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, speaking on the opening day of the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland on Monday 14 September: the United States now has 'on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary actions'. It is the first public US acknowledgement of offensive capability in orbit. No systems, numbers, locations or timelines were disclosed. A Space Force spokesperson defined space control as employing 'kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation and even destruction, if necessary'. Gen. Douglas Schiess, Chief of Space Operations, said the following day that 'it was time' to talk about it, citing Chinese and Russian anti-satellite advances. Covered factually, with both the deterrence and the arms-control readings presented, and with orbital debris as the physical consequence that outlasts any dispute. Australian context: Operation Olympic Defender and Defence Space Command. Rubin finds a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Aashay Pai, William Cerny, Andrew Pace, Alex Drlica-Wagner and colleagues, 'Rubin Observatory Reveals a Dust-Shrouded Halo Globular Cluster in Ophiuchus', arXiv:2609.15872, posted 14 September. Rubin-GC1 was found in Rubin's Early Data Preview 2 — not the survey proper — in the direction of the galactic bulge, behind heavy dust and a crowded foreground. It sits about 31 kiloparsecs away, roughly 100,000 light-years, out in the Milky Way's halo. Half-light radius ~5 pc, absolute magnitude ≈ −2.4, placing it in the faint tail of the globular cluster luminosity function; age ≈ 9.2 billion years; moderately metal-poor. Gaia DR3 proper motions and phase-space modelling point to an origin in the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal — an accreted cluster, not one of our own. Spectroscopy is the confirming next step. Reusable framing, now used four times in a month: catalogues are detection limits, not censuses. Quick hit — Starship Flight 14 has a firm date SpaceX has published and the FAA has cleared Flight 14 for Tuesday 22 September, a 75-minute window opening 08:15 EDT / 12:15 UTC (22:15 AEST on the 22nd). This is the first orbital attempt: six orbits at about 275 km, then a Pacific splashdown west of Chile roughly ten hours after launch. The payload is 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the first flight of the next-generation satellites designed for Starship — three of them carrying cameras to photograph the ship's heat shield during re-entry. Super Heavy splashes down in the Gulf about seven minutes after liftoff. No tower catches on this flight, for either stage, confirming the correction we carried on 12 September. Skywatch — both hemispheres Tonight: a five-day-old waxing crescent Moon beside Antares — 2.5° apart and 60° up from Sydney, 5.5° apart and 18° up from Los Angeles, nearly 7° apart and 12° up from New York. The September ecliptic tilt again. Friday 18 September: Venus at greatest brilliancy, about magnitude −4.8 — brightest not when fullest but when the product of a thinning crescent (~26% lit) and a swelling disc (~39 arcsec) peaks. Steadied binoculars will show the crescent. Venus sets ~3h15m after the Sun from Sydney, ~1h20m from Los Angeles, ~1h05m from New York; northern listeners should look low in the west 20–45 minutes after sunset with a clear horizon. Mercury is a southern-only bonus at magnitude −0.4 but only 16° from the Sun: 15° up at sunset from Sydney, 3° from London. Saturn rises within about an hour of sunset everywhere and is up all night, heading for opposition on 4 October with the rings ~7° open. First quarter falls on 18 September at 20:43 UTC, setting up International Observe the Moon Night on Saturday 19 September — timed near first quarter because that is when the terminator throws long shadows. Pre-dawn belongs to the north: Mars 45–47° up at nautical dawn from Los Angeles and New York against 20° from Sydney, with Jupiter below it, and the pair closing to about 2° by mid-November. Zodiacal light returns after the 26th — false dusk in the west from the south, false dawn in the east from the north. The September equinox is a single instant, 00:05 UTC on 23 September: the evening of the 22nd in the Americas, mid-morning on the 23rd in Australia. Eye safety: never sweep the daytime sky with binoculars or a telescope while hunting Venus. Block the Sun behind a building or wall first. Eclipse glasses must carry the ISO 12312-2 certification and be undamaged, and are for looking at the Sun only. Never use optics on the Sun without proper solar filtration fitted at the front. Sources and further reading ·         NASA Roman blog — 'NASA Activates Roman's Primary Instrument, Checks Out Coronagraph' (15 Sept 2026) ·         NASA Roman blog — 'Fuel Savings Double Potential Lifetime for NASA's Roman Mission' (14 Sept 2026) ·         NASA — Roman Core Community Surveys ·         arXiv:2609.12494 — Batygin, Fuller & Adams, 'Terminal instability of the Solar System triggered by stochastic solar mass loss' (accepted, ApJL) ·         arXiv:2609.15872 — Pai et al., 'Rubin Observatory Reveals a Dust-Shrouded Halo Globular Cluster in Ophiuchus' ·         AFA Air, Space & Cyber Conference 2026 — remarks by Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, 14 September 2026 ·         SpaceX — Starship Flight 14 mission page ·         Astronomy Daily S05E193 — 'The Universe Changes Its Mind' (the dark energy lead this episode calls back to) ·         Astronomy Daily S05E187 — stellar streams (Nora Shipp co-author callback)

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An Australian-led team has rebuilt thirty years of supernova observations into one consistent catalogue — and it adds fresh weight to the idea that dark energy is not constant. We also ask whether the young Sun swallowed a super-Earth, find out why a quiet Sun is bad news at thirty-five thousand feet, and watch JWST run the most sensitive exomoon search ever attempted. Plus a Crew-13 update and a skywatch with a live aurora alert for both hemispheres. In this episode ·         Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four Type Ia supernovae, rebuilt from Pantheon+ and the Dark Energy Survey's full five-year sample into a single internally consistent catalogue by Ryan Camilleri and Professor Tamara Davis at the University of Queensland, with ANU, Swinburne and international colleagues. ·         On their own the supernovae give a matter density of 0.310 for flat ΛCDM. Combined with the CMB and baryon acoustic oscillations, a tension appears under constant dark energy — and eases when dark energy is allowed to evolve. Preference: 2.5–3.1 sigma. ·         Why that is interesting but not a discovery, and why a second independent line of evidence pointing the same way as DESI changes the shape of the argument. ·         Professor Mutlu Yildiz (Ege University) on whether the young Sun engulfed a planet of 5–10 Earth masses — and whether that single event explains both the solar sound-speed discrepancy and the Sun's missing lithium. ·         Yaniv, Yair and Price on six balloon flights to 35 km: cosmic radiation at cruising altitude runs 40–60% higher at solar minimum, with an anticorrelation of r = −0.71 against solar activity. ·         David Kipping stacks twelve JWST transits of LP 890-9c and excludes moons down to 0.1 Earth radii across the entire Hill region — the most sensitive exomoon search on record. ·         Crew-13 now targeting no earlier than late September after an oxidiser leak in Dragon's propulsion system. ·         Skywatch: a coronal-hole stream arriving today with aurora chances at both ends of the planet, Venus at greatest brilliancy on 18 September, Mars past Pollux, Saturn towards opposition, International Observe the Moon Night on the 19th, and the equinox on the 22nd. Sources ·         University of Queensland — 'Big supernova dataset challenges dark energy theory', 8 September 2026 ·         Camilleri, Lee, Davis, Rubin, Shah, Scolnic, Lidman et al., 'Supernovae Unite: Combining Pantheon+ and DES-SN5YR', Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia — arXiv:2609.05053; companion host-mass paper arXiv:2609.05321 ·         Royal Astronomical Society — ''Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet', 10 September 2026. Yildiz, MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1527 ·         Yaniv, Yair & Price, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, September 2026 — cosmic radiation at aviation altitudes across the solar cycle ·         Kipping, 'JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet', arXiv:2609.05301, 4 September 2026 ·         NASA Space Station blog — 'NASA, SpaceX Adjust Crew-13 Launch Date', 29 August 2026; Canadian Space Agency update, September 2026 ·         EarthSky sun news and NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center outlooks, 12–14 September 2026 ·         NASA Science — 'What's Up: September 2026 Skywatching Tips'

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Today's episode — The Weekend Wrap, Saturday 12 September 2026: OUR LEAD: A SMALLER MERCURY Mercury has been contracting for four and a half billion years as its huge iron core cools, and it writes the record on its own surface — in long lobe-fronted cliffs called lobate scarps, where one slab of crust has ridden up over another. Add up all that shortening and you get the total contraction. The trouble was that the surface record always gave a smaller number than thermal models predicted. New work led by Gaku Nishiyama at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, published in Geophysical Research Letters and released by the American Geophysical Union on 10 September, explains the gap — and the explanation is beautifully simple. Impact debris buries the cliffs. Using MESSENGER imagery reworked with stereophotogrammetry, the team showed that the rougher the terrain, the fewer shortening structures you can find per unit area. Since faults don't know what the surface above them looks like, that correlation isn't geology — it's a detection limit. Correct for it and Mercury's total loss of diameter rises by 10–30%, from a range topping out near 16 km to as much as 23 km. That points to a larger metal core, fewer light elements in it, or a hotter start — and it closes the long-standing mismatch with the physics. BepiColombo is about ten weeks from gravity capture at Mercury, carrying a far better laser altimeter and a much less eccentric orbit. If Nishiyama is right, it should find the missing small scarps in exactly the rough ground where today's maps look suspiciously empty. Some of that data will come home through ESA's New Norcia station in Western Australia, run in partnership with CSIRO. THE WEEK THAT WAS ·         Monday — Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reached orbit from Andøya Spaceport in Norway on 5 September, the first vehicle ever to do it from Western European soil, carrying five university cubesats. ·         Tuesday — giant-impact simulations including temperature-dependent rock strength can produce an intact Moon in about five hours rather than a slowly accreting debris disc. A sensitivity result, not a new origin story. ·         Wednesday — Hubble and Webb together found 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects down to about 5 km, and the small ones keep the colours of their birth population rather than looking like collision fragments. ·         Thursday — 109 localised fast radio bursts were used to measure how far galactic feedback has smoothed the clumpiness of matter, finding more cool gas in big haloes than X-ray surveys see. ·         Friday — population synthesis suggests magnetars are roughly half of all neutron stars at birth, not one in a hundred, which doubles the Galactic supernova rate and makes magnetar central engines affordable. ALSO IN THIS EPISODE ·         The Sun's superflare potential — new work from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research with the University of Colorado, released 10 September. Scaling the 300 strongest modern solar flares against the size of their active regions, then applying that relation to the giant sunspot group of 1947 — the largest in four centuries of observation — gives a region with enough stored magnetic energy to power a superflare. Potential, not prediction: the caveats are covered properly on air. ·         Rocket Lab has filed a protest with the US Government Accountability Office over NASA's ~$700M Mars Telecommunications Network award to Blue Origin, on eligibility and technical-evaluation grounds. A GAO decision is due around mid-December. ·         Starship Flight 14 has slipped to no earlier than 18 September — and the tower catch of the ship is deferred to a later flight, which corrects how we framed it earlier this month. SKYWATCH — BOTH HEMISPHERES ·         The Moon and Venus about half a degree apart in front of Spica on the evenings of 13–14 September — Southern Hemisphere observers get the better geometry. ·         Venus reaches greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. ·         SN 2026aaiv, a Type Ia supernova in NGC 7331 in Pegasus, around magnitude 12 — the week's best observing target, and far easier from North America than from Sydney. ·         Saturn building towards its 4 October opposition, with Dione and Tethys events in the small hours for northern telescope owners. ·         Mars passing 6° south of Pollux pre-dawn on 18 September. ·         The zodiacal light — an evening object in the west from the Southern Hemisphere, a pre-dawn object in the east from the Northern. Best chance until early October. ·         Eye safety: never point binoculars or a telescope near the Sun when hunting daylight Venus or twilight Mercury. Solar filters must be certified to ISO 12312-2, fitted over the front of the instrument, and inspected every time. Links & sources ·         Mercury contraction — Geophysical Research Letters: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL124067 ·         Mercury contraction — AGU Newsroom release: https://news.agu.org/press-release/mercury-is-shrinking-more-than-we-thought ·         Superflares — Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research: https://www.mps.mpg.de/news ·         Superflares — release summary: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143231 ·         Rocket Lab GAO protest: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/rocket-lab-protests-nasas-decision-to-award-blue-origin-usd700-million-mars-orbiter-contract ·         Starship Flight 14 schedule: https://www.spacelaunchschedule.com/launch/starship-flight-14/ ·         SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331: https://www.rochesterastronomy.org/sn2026/sn2026aaiv.html ·         Magnetar fraction — Nature Astronomy: https://www.nature.com/natastron/articles?year=2026 ·         Sky this week: https://www.astronomy.com/the-sky-this-week/the-sky-this-week-from-september-11-to-18-2026/ ·         ESA deep space ground stations: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/New_era_for_New_Norcia_deep_space_antenna More at astronomydaily.io — full back catalogue, news feed, newsletter sign-up and listener contact form. Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E191, Friday September 11, 2026: Main story: A population-synthesis study published in Nature Astronomy on 10 September argues that magnetars make up roughly half of all neutron stars, not the one-in-a-hundred implied by the catalogues. Celsa Pardo-Araujo and Nanda Rea (Institute of Space Sciences, ICE-CSIC, Barcelona) with Michele Ronchi (ASTRON) and Vanessa Graber (Royal Holloway) modelled the whole isolated-neutron-star population as one family rather than four separate classes, evolving spin-down, magneto-thermal decay and Galactic dynamics together, then filtering the simulated population the way real surveys filter the sky. Of the 24 known neutron stars younger than 2,000 years, magnetars and central compact objects are about 59%; the derived birth fraction averages ~50% (40–70% or 30–50% depending on the assumed birth-field distribution, which peaks at 1–2.5 × 10^14 gauss). Two consequences: the Galactic core-collapse supernova rate has to be higher than assumed, around two per century, and magnetar central-engine models for superluminous supernovae, gamma-ray burst plateaus and fast radio bursts finally have the supply to work. Caveats: it is a model rather than a census, the anchor sample is 24 objects, and 'magnetar' is defined by a field threshold. Southern thread: the field began with SGR 0526−66 in the Large Magellanic Cloud on 5 March 1979, and the same Barcelona group modelled GLEAM-X J162759, found with the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia. The rest of the news: ·         Chariklo's rings: The first stellar occultation ever planned specifically for JWST — 18 October 2022 — has been published in Science Advances, led by Yücel Kılıç, Pablo Santos-Sanz and Celia Navas (IAA-CSIC) with Nicolas Rambaux, Bruno Sicardy and Josselin Desmars (LTE) and Damya Souami (LIRA). Against the 2017 ground-based occultations, the inner ring C1R is about 50% more opaque and the outer ring C2R about 60% less, with the ring positions unchanged. Chariklo is the largest known centaur at ~125 km radius; the rings sit at 390 and 405 km and are a few km wide. Candidate explanations: material loss from C2R, material arriving at or collisions grinding down C1R — or a wavelength effect, since infrared is being compared with visible light. The rings were discovered in 2013 by an occultation campaign across Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. ·         Mercury under bombardment: Kilpua et al. report in Nature Astronomy (8 September) that BepiColombo's fourth Mercury flyby in September 2024 — 165 km above the surface, closer than its eventual science orbit — coincided with a major solar particle eruption. The Finnish-built SIXS instrument watched energetic electrons and protons penetrate Mercury's magnetosphere and precipitate onto the surface over a wide area. That bombardment both sputters atoms off the surface and drives the X-ray fluorescence used to read its composition, and Mercury's small, weak magnetosphere makes it a stand-in for Earth during an extreme solar storm. The spacecraft separated its transfer module on 3 September; gravity capture is 21 November. ·         Europe buys a way home: ESA has awarded The Exploration Company a contract worth up to €760M under ALADDIN (Autonomous LEO Accelerated Demo Docking to ISS Node) — €310M for the demonstration mission, with ESA funding 60% and the company 40%, plus €450M in options for two further flights. The Nyx capsule flies on Ariane 6 and must dock with the ISS no later than Q2 2029, with up to €50M in additional incentive for using European launch vehicles. Europe has flown cargo up before, with the five ATVs, but has never returned anything from orbit. CEO Hélène Huby: 'It is the first time in Europe that a five-year-old space startup wins a contract worth hundreds of millions of euros.' The company's Mission Possible capsule survived reentry in June 2025 but was lost before splashdown — a partial success in its own words. Thales Alenia Space Italy remains in a parallel tender. ·         Parker Solar Probe: NASA reports the spacecraft completed its 29th close approach on 4 September, again matching the record set on Christmas Eve 2024 — 430,000 mph and 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, for the eighth time. The encounter ran 30 August to 9 September with nine days of autonomous operation and a beacon tone on the 7th; this pass targeted structures near the Sun's north pole, sampling nearly 40% of the solar circumference in a day. Telemetry began flowing on 11 September, science data 13–27 September. The mission is extended through 2029. ·         Skywatch: New Moon on 11 September at 14:27 AEST makes tonight and tomorrow the darkest nights of the month. Southern Hemisphere — Venus low in the west after sunset, building to greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8, with a very thin crescent Moon sweeping past on the 13th and 14th (about half a degree apart on the 14th, near Spica); EarthSky notes the Southern Hemisphere gets the better view. Saturn rises soon after sunset heading for its 4 October opposition with the rings ~7° open, and the Milky Way core is still high in the early evening. The zodiacal light is an evening object here — 'false dusk' in the west after full darkness, through early November. North America — the zodiacal light is a pre-dawn object in the east ('false dawn'), well flagged around the 15th; Jupiter dominates the pre-dawn east closing on Regulus with Mars near Castor and Pollux; Saturn is ~50° up in the south after midnight, and early Saturday morning Dione transits Saturn's north polar region around 2:55 a.m. EDT with Tethys entering Saturn's shadow around 2:10 a.m. EDT. Space weather has eased to quiet-to-unsettled after two minor G1 storms on the 8th and 9th. Eye safety: never point optics near the Sun without a purpose-built front-mounted solar filter; eclipse glasses must be ISO 12312-2 certified and are for naked-eye use only, never with binoculars or a telescope. Links & sources ·         Pardo-Araujo, Rea, Ronchi & Graber, 'Magnetar fraction in Core-Collapse Supernovae', Nature Astronomy (10 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16159 ·         ICE-CSIC — Institute of Space Sciences, magnetar population release (10 Sept 2026) — https://www.ice.csic.es/ ·         Kılıç, Santos-Sanz, Navas, Rambaux, Sicardy, Desmars & Souami, 'JWST stellar occultation reveals unexpected changes in Chariklo's ring system', Science Advances (Sept 2026) — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh4794 ·         Observatoire de Paris / LTE — The James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Chariklo's Invisible Rings Are Changing (9–10 Sept 2026) — https://lte.observatoiredeparis.psl.eu/The-James-Webb-Space-Telescope-Reveals-That-Chariklo-s-Invisible-Rings-Are ·         Sky & Telescope — Webb Space Telescope Discovers Surprising Changes in an Asteroid's Rings (10 Sept 2026) — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/webb-space-telescope-discovers-surprising-changes-in-an-asteroids-rings/ ·         Kilpua et al., 'Planetary shielding and surface precipitation of solar energetic particles during BepiColombo's close Mercury flyby', Nature Astronomy (8 Sept 2026) — https://www.nature.com/natastron/research-articles ·         University of Helsinki / SIXS — BepiColombo measures Mercury's particle bombardment up close (10 Sept 2026) — https://phys.org/news/2026-09-bepicolombo-mercury-particle-bombardment.html ·         ESA — Press Release N° 47–2026: ESA awards service contract to The Exploration Company (10 Sept 2026) — https://www.esa.int/Newsroom/Press_Releases ·         European Spaceflight — ESA Awards The Exploration Company a €760M Space Station Cargo Contract (10 Sept 2026) — https://europeanspaceflight.com/esa-awards-the-exploration-company-a-e760m-space-station-cargo-contract ·         NASA — After Latest Swing Past Sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe Checks In (10 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/parker-solar-probe/ ·         EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ ·         EarthSky — Zodiacal light: everything you need to know — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-zodiacal-light-or-false-dawn/ ·         Astronomy.com — The Sky This Week from September 11 to 18 — https://www.astronomy.com/the-sky-this-week/the-sky-this-week-from-september-11-to-18-2026/ Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E190, Thursday September 10, 2026: Main story: 109 fast radio bursts have been used to measure how much galactic feedback has smoothed out the matter in the universe. A fast radio burst lasts about a millisecond, and on its way to us it is dispersed — low radio frequencies slowed more than high ones by free electrons along the path, exactly the way a prism separates white light. The size of that delay counts the ordinary matter the burst passed through. Writing in Nature Astronomy on 8 September, a team led by Kritti Sharma at Caltech, with Vikram Ravi, Liam Connor and Elisabeth Krause (University of Arizona), used 109 bursts localised to host galaxies out to redshift ~0.3 — most of them from Caltech's DSA-110 — to constrain the suppression of matter clustering by feedback, and the gas fractions of groups and clusters between 10^13 and 10^15 solar masses. They find more gas retained than the X-ray picture implies: gas fractions about 1.9σ above stacked eROSITA measurements, and slightly above the Atacama Cosmology Telescope's kSZ constraints, consistent with the bursts counting cool gas that X-rays miss. The constraint is already competitive with both of those far larger experiments, cutting the uncertainty on clustering at these scales by roughly a factor of eight. That matters because feedback is the confound sitting under the S8 tension — it mimics the signature of massive neutrinos and of some dark energy and dark matter models. The technique's foundation is Australian: the Macquart relation, established with ASKAP in Western Australia in 2020, is what found the universe's missing ordinary matter in the first place. The rest of the news: ·         Hypersoft X-ray sources: NASA and the Chandra X-ray Center announced a new class of object on 9 September — 84 sources across six galaxies (M31, M101 and four ellipticals) that emit more than eight times as many photons below 0.3 keV as just above it, exceeding 10^38 erg/s in that narrow band and more again in the extreme ultraviolet. Led by Mustafa Muhibullah (University of Alabama) with Jimmy Irwin and Rosanne Di Stefano (CfA), published in Nature Astronomy. They are likely compact objects accreting from companions, and may be both the long-sought progenitors of Type Ia supernovae and a significant unaccounted source of ionising radiation. ·         A rendezvous with Halley's Comet: a trajectory study circulated on 6 September by Roberto Flores and Elena Fantino (Khalifa University), Mauro Pontani (Sapienza), and Ivano Bertini and Cesare Barbieri (Padua) sets out the first Halley rendezvous achievable with proven hardware — unpowered Jupiter and Saturn gravity assists plus deep-space low-thrust arcs, a Hall-effect thruster on a standard RTG, ~2,000 kg launch mass with ~750 kg of instruments, launching August 2036 or September 2037 and arriving in 2060, about a year before Halley's 2061 perihelion. Months alongside the comet instead of Giotto's minutes at 68 km/s. ·         Apollo Maneuvers 2026: US Space Command announced on 8 September that it had completed the first live-fly orbital manoeuvre exercise of its kind, moving real operational satellites across low, medium and geosynchronous orbits with Operation Olympic Defender allies (Australia among them) and commercial operators via its Commercial Integration Cell. Named for the US Army's 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers. The practical consequence is more unpredictable objects in an already crowded region, and in-orbit refuelling becoming load-bearing. ·         Skywatch: New Moon on 11 September at 14:27 AEST (04:27 UTC) makes tonight and tomorrow the darkest nights of the month. Southern Hemisphere — the galactic core still high after dark, and Venus well placed low in the west-south-west, 7.4° from Spica and building to greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. Saturn rises about an hour after sunset for everyone, heading for its 4 October opposition with the rings about 7° from edge-on. North America — the pre-dawn sky, with Mars in Gemini passing Castor on the 12th and Pollux on the 17th, and Jupiter below it in Cancer. Plus a convoy of CMEs from AR4524 arriving since 8 September, two G1 storms already recorded and G2 possible: aurora chances at both ends of the planet, including Tasmania, coastal southern Victoria and New Zealand's South Island. Links & sources ·         Caltech — Fast Radio Bursts Poised to Help with Biggest Cosmic Mysteries (8 Sept 2026) — https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/fast-radio-bursts-poised-to-help-with-biggest-cosmic-mysteries ·         Sharma, Krause, Ravi, Connor et al., 'Signatures of Suppressed Matter Clustering revealed by Fast Radio Bursts', Nature Astronomy (8 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17162 ·         NASA — NASA's Chandra Unveils Mysterious X-ray Objects (9 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/nasas-chandra-unveils-mysterious-x-ray-objects/ ·         Muhibullah, Irwin & Di Stefano, 'Hypersoft X-ray Sources: A New Class of Luminous Cosmic Emitters', Nature Astronomy (9 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06192 ·         Flores, Beolchi, Pozzi, Pontani, Bertini, Barbieri & Fantino, 'Double Gravity-Assist Rendezvous Trajectory to Halley's Comet Using Deep-Space Low Thrust' (arXiv, 6 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02189 ·         Air & Space Forces Magazine — SPACECOM Maneuvers Satellites Across Orbits in New Exercise (9 Sept 2026) — https://www.airandspaceforces.com/space-command-maneuvers-satellites-across-multiple-orbits-in-new-exercise/ ·         EarthSky — Sun news: series of sun blasts arriving, auroras to come — https://earthsky.org/sun/sun-news-activity-solar-flare-cme-aurora-updates/ ·         EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ ·         TheSkyLive — Moon calendar, September 2026 — https://theskylive.com/moon-calendar?year=2026&month=09

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Everything beyond Neptune is a leftover. The icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt never got assembled into a planet, and out there — dark, cold and empty enough that things mostly leave each other alone — they are the closest thing we have to the original building blocks of the solar system, still sitting roughly where they were made. The trouble is that everything we know about them, we learned from the big ones. Ground-based telescopes stop at around twenty-five kilometres. In two papers published on 8 September in The Astronomical Journal, teams using Hubble and Webb simultaneously — one telescope in visible light, one in the infrared, on the same field at the same moment — report twenty-seven previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, the faintest ever directly detected. The smallest is about five kilometres across. NASA's own description of the faintest of them: the equivalent of standing on Earth and picking out a small swarm of fireflies on the Moon. The surprise is the colours. Objects that small are assumed to be collision fragments, and a fragment should be showing us the fresh ice under the irradiated red rind — so the small population should look bluer and messier than the large one. It doesn't. Led by Anastasia Morgan at Northern Arizona University, the colour study finds the small objects carry the same colour relationship as their large counterparts, in both the dynamically cold population that formed in place and the dynamically hot population that was flung outward during the giant planets' migration. David Trilling: these hot objects 'retain a signature of where they were born, even though they've been orbitally scrambled since then.' The companion size-distribution study, led by Marielle Eduardo at the University of Victoria, finds the same size distribution in both populations despite their different birthplaces. Together the two results point away from small TNOs being rubble and towards planetesimals that formed quickly, at large sizes — the picture Arrokoth gave us up close in 2019. Then: Anak Krakatau. The Sunda Strait volcano went into a major explosive phase on 5 September that ran more than twenty-four hours, throwing ash to 15,000 metres — 50,000 feet — to the west. Eight airports closed across Java and Sumatra, 2,961 flights grounded, around 170,000 travellers stranded. NASA's Earth Observatory published Landsat 8 and Suomi NPP imagery on 9 September. The whole warning chain runs through orbit: geostationary Himawari-9 imaging the full disc every ten minutes, feeding the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre run by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology — because ash doesn't show up on aircraft weather radar, and the only warning a crew gets comes up from the ground. ESA closed out the 26-year Cluster mission by flying its last two satellites, Samba and Tango, into the atmosphere over the South Pacific near Tonga on 31 August and 1 September — deliberately, and precisely enough that a chartered business jet carrying thirty instruments could be underneath them. The ROSIE campaign, led by Jiří Šilha of Astros Solutions, got about fifty seconds on each spacecraft, measuring not the light show but the chemistry: titanium, sodium, potassium and aluminium, and specifically aluminium oxide, whose effect on ozone at those altitudes is a genuinely open question as constellations scale. ESA's Draco mission in 2027 will record the same process from the inside. And a study from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and released on 4 September, finds that Messier 74 — the Phantom Galaxy — is more than twice the size the catalogues give it. Deep imaging with a one-metre telescope, about ten times deeper than Sloan, traces a disc of young stars out to roughly 100,000 light years against a catalogued 45,000. Mean age in that outer region: 640 million years. The likely cause is a close pass by the neighbouring galaxy UGC 1176 about a billion years ago. Skywatch covers both hemispheres on a New Moon week — the galactic core overhead from Sydney in its last strong month, the Teapot low in the south for North America, Venus building to greatest brilliancy on the 18th, Saturn climbing towards its 4 October opposition, and the full ISO 12312-2 safety passage for anyone tempted to hunt Venus in daylight. Links & sources NASA — NASA's Hubble, Webb Find Far-out Solar System Objects 'Remember' Past — https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-webb-find-far-out-solar-system-objects-remember-past/ Morgan et al. — colours of small trans-Neptunian objects, The Astronomical Journal (8 Sept 2026) — https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ae907f Eduardo et al. — size distribution of small trans-Neptunian objects, The Astronomical Journal (8 Sept 2026) — https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ae9084 NASA Earth Observatory — Anak Krakatau Rumbles Again (Image of the Day, 9 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/anak-krakatau-rumbles-again/ ANTARA News — Volcanic ash grounds 2,961 flights in Indonesia — https://bali.antaranews.com/berita/413072/volcanic-ash-grounds-2961-flights-in-indonesia ESA — Cluster's encore for reentry science a success (2 Sept 2026) — https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Cluster_s_encore_for_reentry_science_a_success ESA — Moving satellites to meet a plane for rare reentry data — https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Moving_satellites_to_meet_a_plane_for_rare_reentry_data Space.com — 2 satellites just burned up in Earth's atmosphere, and scientists were watching from a private jet — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/2-satellites-just-burned-up-in-earths-atmosphere-and-scientists-were-watching-from-a-private-jet-heres-why Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias — An IAC study reveals that galaxies can grow in an 'explosive' way (4 Sept 2026) — https://www.iac.es/en/outreach/news/iac-study-reveals-galaxies-can-grow-explosive-way Astronomy & Astrophysics — 2026 press releases — https://www.aanda.org/2026-press-releases NASA — What's Up: September 2026 skywatching tips — https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/whats-up-september-2026-skywatching-tips-from-nasa/ TheSkyLive — Moon phase calendar, September 2026 — https://theskylive.com/moon-calendar?year=2026&month=09

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For fifty years the story has been that the Moon assembled slowly out of a disc of debris. New simulations from Southwest Research Institute add one thing everybody left out — the strength of rock — and get an intact Moon in about five hours. Plus eight black holes that outgrew their galaxies, two massive stars that fell past each other and got caught, Dragonfly's Titan landing site gets a name, and today's daylight occultation of Jupiter.

Links & sources Southwest Research Institute — SwRI-led modeling identifies new scenarios for Moon formation — https://www.swri.org/newsroom/press-releases/swri-led-modeling-identifies-new-scenarios-moon-formation Denton, Canup, Asphaug et al. — The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI) — https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae91e9 Space.com — Earth's moon could have formed in just 5 hours after giant impact — https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/earths-moon-could-have-formed-in-just-5-hours-after-giant-impact Buchner et al. — A large population of overmassive black hole quasars at z=0.3–0.8 revealed by eROSITA, A&A 713, A11 — https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2026/09/aa59356-26/aa59356-26.html Astronomy & Astrophysics — 2026 press releases — https://www.aanda.org/2026-press-releases Zhang, Garay et al. — An eccentric massive protobinary assembled via a core-merger parabolic encounter, Nature Astronomy — https://www.nature.com/natastron/articles?year=2026 Universidad de Chile coverage of the IRAS 07299-1651 result — https://www.radiofestival.cl/la-danza-nupcial-de-estrellas-masivas-astronomo-de-la-universidad-de-chile-participa-de-historico-hallazgo/ NASA / APL — Dragonfly Gets Wired Up While Titan Landing Area Is Named — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/dragonfly/2026/09/02/nasas-dragonfly-gets-wired-up-while-titan-landing-area-is-named/ Sky & Telescope — Tuesday's daytime Jupiter occultation, a warm-up for the 'big one' — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/tuesdays-daytime-jupiter-occultation-a-warm-up-for-the-big-one/ Universe Today — September's lunar occultations: circumstances and visibility — https://www.universetoday.com/articles/penultimate-lunar-occultations-inbound-for-jupiter-venus-and-more-in-september NASA — What's Up: September 2026 skywatching tips — https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/whats-up-september-2026-skywatching-tips-from-nasa/ EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/

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A German rocket lifted off from an Arctic island on Saturday and became the first vehicle ever to reach orbit from Western European soil. Plus: the gaps in stellar streams may not be dark matter after all, two white dwarfs circling every 374 seconds in the far southern sky, peptides that fold in concentrated sulfuric acid, and what Katalyst's LINK is actually doing next to Swift. Both-hemispheres skywatch, and a serious safety warning for tomorrow's daylight Jupiter occultation.

Links & sources ·         Isar Aerospace — mission updates — https://isaraerospace.com/mission-updates-overview ·         ESA — Spectrum launches to orbit (imagery) — https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2026/09/Spectrum_launches_to_orbit ·         NASASpaceflight — Isar 'Onward and Upward' — https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2026/09/isar-onward-and-upward/ ·         Space.com — Private German rocket makes history — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/isar-aerospace-second-launch-norway-andoya-spaceport-spectrum-rocket ·         Space.com — Gilmour Space eyes a second orbital attempt — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/australias-gilmour-space-not-going-to-give-up-as-it-eyes-2nd-orbital-launch-attempt-in-2026 ·         Sky & Telescope — Gaps in stellar streams may be common — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/gaps-in-stellar-streams-common-not-sign-dark-matter/ ·         Arora et al. — Semianalytic modeling of subhalo encounters with thin stellar streams, ApJ — https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adf740 ·         Sharma et al. — Rapid orbital decay in eRASSU J060839.5−704014 (arXiv) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09341 ·         Maitra et al. — eRASSU J060839.5−704014 discovery paper, A&A (2024) — https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/ref/2024/03/aa47811-23/aa47811-23.html ·         MIT News — Peptides can form well-defined structures in Venus-like conditions — https://news.mit.edu/2026/study-peptides-can-form-well-defined-structures-harsh-venus-conditions-0831 ·         NASA Swift blog — Commercial spacecraft for Swift boost continues tech demo — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/09/04/commercial-spacecraft-for-nasas-swift-boost-continues-tech-demo/ ·         NASA Swift blog — LINK spacecraft recovery progressing — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/08/06/link-spacecraft-recovery-progressing-for-nasas-swift-boost/ ·         EarthSky — Saturn at opposition, 4 October 2026 — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/saturn-at-opposition-closest-brightest-best/ ·         Star Walk — Astronomical events, September 2026 — https://starwalk.space/en/news/night-sky-tonight-september

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Anna and Avery open the Weekend Wrap with a genuine first: South Africa's MeerKAT has detected the 21-centimetre hydrogen signal from four to five billion light years away using radio data alone — no optical galaxy survey propping it up — proving out the technique the Square Kilometre Array will use to measure dark energy. Then the week in review: Roman's coronagraph wakes up, Starship Flight 14 gets a date, Mars turns out to be lopsided inside, BepiColombo lets go, LZ's one unexplained flash, and a centaur caught in the act of becoming a comet. Plus the sky for the week ahead, both hemispheres.

Links & sources ·         University of Manchester — Astronomers use MeerKAT to directly detect faint hydrogen signal from the distant Universe — https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/astronomers-use-meerkat-to-directly-detect-faint-hydrogen-signal-from-the-distant-universe ·         The Astrophysical Journal Letters — Paul, Wolz, Santos, Chen et al. (paper DOI) — https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae808f ·         American Astronomical Society — release listing — https://aas.org/node/730547 ·         Phys.org — MeerKAT directly detects faint hydrogen signal from the distant universe — https://phys.org/news/2026-09-meerkat-faint-hydrogen-distant-universe.html ·         Space.com — Scientists detect signals of hydrogen from billions of years ago — https://www.space.com/astronomy/galaxies/scientists-detect-signals-of-hydrogen-from-billions-of-years-ago-could-this-help-us-map-out-the-universe ·         Xinhua — MeerKAT in South Africa directly detects faint hydrogen signal from distant universe — https://english.news.cn/africa/20260905/3f6c7164a4404b0a9b79f879b1d31a59/c.html ·         SKA Observatory — the construction journey (SKA-Mid, Karoo; SKA-Low, Murchison) — https://www.skao.int/en/explore/construction-journey ·         NASA Science — Roman's planet imager has powered on (1 September 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/2026/09/01/nasa-romans-planet-imager-has-powered-on/ ·         NASA — NASA's dark universe-seeking Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches — https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-dark-universe-seeking-nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launches/ ·         Next Spaceflight — Starship Flight 14 (NET 15 September 2026, Pad 2, Starbase) — https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/8346/ ·         Tesla Oracle — FCC filing points to Starship Flight 14 on 15 September; Booster 21 33-engine static fire — https://www.teslaoracle.com/2026/09/02/fcc-filing-reveals-starship-flight-14-launch-on-september-15-spacex-conducts-33-engine-static-fire-on-booster-21/ ·         Nature — Tidal tomography reveals a thermal anomaly beneath Mars's crustal dichotomy (27 August 2026) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10893-x ·         Phys.org — Thermal anomaly discovered below Mars' south pole — https://phys.org/news/2026-08-thermal-anomaly-mars-south-pole.html ·         ESA — Latest updates: BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury — https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo/Latest_updates_BepiColombo_s_arrival_at_Mercury ·         ESA — BepiColombo's Mercury arrival begins (full replay) — https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2026/09/BepiColombo_s_Mercury_arrival_begins_-_full_replay ·         Brown University — LZ experiment sees surprising result in search for dark matter — https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results ·         The LZ Dark Matter Experiment — collaboration site — https://lz.lbl.gov/ ·         ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics — Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory — https://www.centredarkmatter.org/supl ·         University of Central Florida — UCF researchers study a centaur transforming into a comet — https://www.ucf.edu/news/ucf-researchers-study-a-centaur-transforming-into-a-comet/ ·         Phys.org — Saturn encounter may have set distant centaur on path to becoming a comet — https://phys.org/news/2026-09-saturn-encounter-distant-centaur-path.html ·         Space.com — Scientists watch a comet being born 3 billion miles away — https://www.space.com/astronomy/comets/scientists-watch-a-comet-being-born-3-billion-miles-away ·         Star Walk — Astronomical events in September 2026 — https://starwalk.space/en/news/night-sky-tonight-september ·         EarthSky — Venus greatest brilliancy, 18 September 2026 (magnitude −4.8) — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/venus-brightest-greatest-brilliancy-greatest-illuminated-extent-2/ ·         EarthSky — Sun news: flares, CMEs and aurora updates — https://earthsky.org/sun/sun-news-activity-solar-flare-cme-aurora-updates/ ·         Space.com — Night sky September 2026: the best things to see this month — https://www.space.com/stargazing/what-to-see-night-sky-september-2026 Follow us: @AstroDailyPod · astronomydaily.io

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Links & sources Brown University — LZ experiment sees surprising result in search for dark matter — https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results US Department of Energy — LZ Sees Surprising Result in Search for Dark Matter — https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/lz-sees-surprising-result-search-dark-matter Imperial College London — Dark matter hunt takes unexpected turn after puzzling signal spotted in LZ detector — https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/articles/natural-sciences/physics/2026/dark-matter-hunt-takes-unexpected-turn-after-puzzling-signal-spotted-in-lz-detector/ TeVPA 2026 — Search for high-energy dark matter interactions with the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment — https://indico-icehap.phys.s.chiba-u.ac.jp/event/3/contributions/471/ The LZ Dark Matter Experiment — collaboration site — https://lz.lbl.gov/ Space.com — Scientists may have detected the 1st direct evidence of dark matter — https://www.space.com/astronomy/dark-universe/scientists-may-have-detected-the-1st-direct-evidence-of-dark-matter ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics — Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory — https://www.centredarkmatter.org/supl SABRE South — dark matter direct-detection experiment — https://www.sabre-experiment.org.au/ Phys.org — Underground lab clears crucial hurdle for dark matter hunt — https://phys.org/news/2026-04-underground-lab-crucial-hurdle-dark.html Space.com — India sends Earth-imaging satellite toward geosynchronous orbit in milestone launch — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/gslv-mark-ii-eos-05-launch-first-indian-geo-earth-observing-satellite Outlook India — 'Successfully and precisely injected': ISRO chairman hails GSLV-F17 launch — https://www.outlookindia.com/national/successfully-and-precisely-injected-isro-chairman-hails-gslv-f17-launch-eos-05-reaches-orbit Business Standard — ISRO launches India's first imaging satellite in geostationary orbit — https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/isro-launches-india-s-first-imaging-satellite-in-geostationary-orbit-126090400054_1.html Space.com — Rocket issues delay 1st-ever private mission to Venus — https://www.space.com/astronomy/venus/rocket-issues-delay-1st-ever-private-mission-to-venus-we-are-awaiting-neutron-readiness Syracuse University — The Spin Behind Fading Black Hole Flares — https://news.syr.edu/2026/09/01/the-spin-behind-fading-black-hole-flares/ arXiv — The Role of Stellar Spin in Repeating Partial Tidal Disruption Events (2606.02692) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02692 NASA Science — What's Up: September 2026 Skywatching Tips — https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/whats-up-september-2026-skywatching-tips-from-nasa/ Universe Today — Lunar occultations of Jupiter, Venus and more in September — https://www.universetoday.com/articles/penultimate-lunar-occultations-inbound-for-jupiter-venus-and-more-in-september In-The-Sky.org — Lunar occultation of Jupiter, 8 September 2026 — https://in-the-sky.org/news.php?id=20260908_16_100 EarthSky — Sun news: flare, CME and aurora updates — https://earthsky.org/sun/sun-news-activity-solar-flare-cme-aurora-updates/ Space.com — Night sky September 2026: the best things to see this month — https://www.space.com/stargazing/what-to-see-night-sky-september-2026 Follow us: @AstroDailyPod · astronomydaily.io

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Anna and Avery cover BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury beginning today, as the ESA/JAXA mission jettisons the transfer module that has carried it for nearly eight years and nine planetary flybys. Plus: NASA awards Blue Origin a $700 million contract to build a dedicated Mars communications orbiter, Hubble confirms a brand-new ten-sided cloud pattern at Saturn's south pole — first spotted by amateur astronomers, one of them in outback New South Wales — and China's Galactic Energy flies its reusable Pallas-1 rocket for the first time.

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Today's episode — S05E183, Wednesday September 2, 2026: Main story: A thermal anomaly beneath Mars's south pole. Writing in Nature on August 27, a team led by Alexander Berne (Caltech PhD '26, now University of Arizona) reports that the interior of Mars's southern hemisphere is 200–400 °C hotter than the northern hemisphere and partially molten. The team used tidal tomography — measuring how much the solid body of Mars flexes under the Sun's tidal pull by tracking minute velocity changes in three orbiters (Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) across roughly 25 years of radio tracking data. Hotter, softer rock deforms more, so the degree of flex reveals interior temperature. The result offers a deep-interior explanation for the Martian crustal dichotomy — the sharp division between the smooth low northern plains and the ancient, thickly crusted southern highlands, unexplained since the Viking era — and also accounts for the concentration of crustal magnetic anomalies in the south and the unexpectedly strong seismic-wave damping seen by InSight. The cause of the asymmetry remains open: a giant early impact, lopsided mantle convection, or a heat-trapping compositional layer. Co-authors span Brown University, NASA Goddard, the University of Arizona, Academia Sinica, the University of Rome, TU Delft, UCLA, UT Austin, CU Boulder and UC Santa Cruz. Crew-13 stands down. NASA and SpaceX announced on August 29 that an oxidizer leak had been found in the Dragon spacecraft's propulsion system during standard prelaunch processing, delaying the Crew-13 launch from its September 12 target. Teams are performing additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework before flight; a new target date will be announced once available. The crew is commander Jessica Watkins (NASA), pilot Luke Delaney (NASA), and mission specialists Joshua Kutryk (CSA) and Sergey Teteryatnikov (Roscosmos), flying an approximately seven-month increment with significant station maintenance and several spacewalks planned. Swift is observing again. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory restarted science operations on August 26, with two of its three instruments back online and the third expected within weeks. Swift's telescopes had been powered down progressively — the ultraviolet/optical and X-ray telescopes in February, the Burst Alert Telescope in April — to reduce power draw and atmospheric drag while awaiting a boost from Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft, launched in July. NASA announced on August 19 that LINK would not attempt the capture after developing attitude-control problems. With no rescue coming, NASA has restarted the instruments to extract as much science as possible. NASA expects Swift to fall below roughly 300 km (185 miles) — where telescope operations become impractical — within the next one to two months. Katalyst will still fly proximity operations to demonstrate in-orbit servicing techniques. An 80,000-year mission to Alpha Centauri. The Seattle-area nonprofit Fermi Explorer Mission announced plans to launch a 100–200 kg probe toward Alpha Centauri (4.4 light-years away) at the end of 2029, most likely on a SpaceX rideshare. Solar electric propulsion plus repeated perihelion pumping manoeuvres would build a cruise speed of 24.2 km/s (about 54,000 mph) — faster than New Horizons at Pluto — for a journey of roughly 80,000 years: 12 years of active operations followed by around 79,500 years of coasting. Budget is under $15 million, with $10 million verbally pledged. Payload is at least 1 kg in a shielded 10 cm cube, including a digitised Voyager Golden Record, messages from children worldwide, and cosmic-ray detectors. Co-founders Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean are behind the space computing company Starcloud; the advisory board includes Rob Meyerson (former Blue Origin president) and Jeff Thornburg (former SpaceX propulsion lead). Johnston: "We'll be the first to leave, and the last to arrive." It would be the first spacecraft deliberately aimed at a specific star. Tonight's sky and the month ahead: Five naked-eye planets are in play through September. Venus dominates the early evening, low in the west/west-southwest about 14° up an hour after sunset (Sydney sunset ≈ 5:34pm AEST), still close to Spica after last night's conjunction, and building to maximum brilliance on September 18 — with a thin crescent Moon alongside on the 14th. Saturn is up most of the night at magnitude +0.4 with its rings tilted just 8° from edge-on, the narrowest in about a dozen years, and rides far higher for Southern Hemisphere observers than for northern ones. Mars rises around 1:40am and is slowly brightening; Jupiter rises east-northeast around 3:50am, and on September 8 the Moon occults Jupiter for much of North America. Mercury appears low in evening twilight in the final week, about 1° above Spica on the 25th. The Moon is a waning gibbous heading to last quarter on September 4. Also this month: International Observe the Moon Night on the 19th, the equinox on the 22nd, and a Harvest Moon near Saturn on the 26th. Standing reminder: any solar filter must be certified to ISO 12312-2.   Links & sources: Caltech — Thermal Anomaly Discovered Below Mars's South Pole (Aug 28) Nature — "Tidal Tomography Reveals a Thermal Anomaly Beneath Mars's Crustal Dichotomy", Berne et al. (Aug 27) Phys.org — Thermal anomaly discovered below Mars' south pole Space.com — Scientists discover massive underground 'thermal anomaly' on Mars NASA Space Station Blog — NASA, SpaceX Adjust Crew-13 Launch Date (Aug 29) Space.com — SpaceX, NASA delay next astronaut launch to ISS due to leak on Dragon spacecraft NASA Swift Blog — NASA's Swift Restarts Science Observations (Aug 28) Space.com — NASA's Swift space telescope resumes observations after failed orbital rescue attempt (Aug 31) GeekWire — Fermi Explorer team plans 80,000-year trip to Alpha Centauri (Sept 1) Space.com — Nonprofit wants to launch 80,000-year mission to Alpha Centauri in 2029 (Sept 1) MIT Technology Review — How AI plotted an interstellar journey to Alpha Centauri (Sept 1) NASA Science — What's Up: September 2026 Skywatching Tips Space.com — 5 planets will light up the September sky Follow us: @AstroDailyPod  

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Today's episode — S05E182, Tuesday September 1, 2026: Main story: SpaceX cleared Booster 21's static fire at Starbase's Pad 2 on August 30, the last major milestone before Starship Flight 14 — the third flight of the Starship V3 design. Ship 41 had already completed its own static fire campaign at Massey's Test Site. Flight 14 will attempt something no Starship flight has done before: catching the ship itself, not just the Super Heavy booster, with the launch tower's upgraded "chopstick" arms. Pad 2 received expanded propellant storage, additional pumps and faster-moving catch hardware ahead of the attempt. The flight follows directly on from Flight 13's Ship 40, which survived a dramatic, unplanned float in the Indian Ocean after splashdown before finally beginning its journey home to Starbase on August 30. A firm Flight 14 launch date is still pending FAA and range approvals, with current expectation pointing to sometime in September. Chang'e-7 slips to early 2027. China's four-vehicle lunar south pole mission — rolled back to the vehicle assembly building on August 24, hours before its scheduled launch — has now been retargeted to early 2027 (February–March windows), a far bigger delay than the "about a month" first reported. Chinese authorities have not disclosed a technical cause beyond an approaching storm; multiple outlets report a separate issue was likely found during final on-pad testing, with reviews continuing into whether the launch vehicle or the spacecraft itself is at fault. A very busy month at the space station. NASA's Jessica Meir (her 7th spacewalk) and ESA's Sophie Adenot (her 3rd, following her historic first-French-woman EVA a few weeks ago) began a roughly six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk at 7:30am EDT on September 1 — the ISS's 284th since 1998, and Expedition 75's fourth in a single month. Tasks include replacing a spacecraft navigational aid, prepping a cosmic particle detector for a future upgrade, and installing data-relay jumper cables. NASA's Anil Menon supported from inside on Canadarm2, with Jack Hathaway on safety watch. Planet formation is a "race against time." A team led by Naman Bajaj (University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, with the SETI Institute) published in The Astronomical Journal on August 27, using archival JWST MIRI data on 72 young, Sun-like stars to show protoplanetary disk dispersal happens in two distinct phases — magnetically driven jets and winds early on (roughly the first 1–10 million years), then photoevaporative winds taking over as the star matures. Gas giant planets must form before that gas is gone. Türkiye joins the Artemis Accords. Turkish Minister of Industry and Technology Mehmet Fatih Kacır signed on August 31 at NASA Headquarters, hosted by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman — Türkiye is the 71st country to sign. Türkiye sent its first astronaut to the ISS in 2024 and is preparing its first lunar mission, AYAP-1; it hosts the International Astronautical Congress in October. Tonight's sky: Venus is in a tight conjunction with Spica, under 2° apart, low in the west/west-southwest about 45 minutes after sunset (Sydney sunset ≈ 5:33pm AEST), setting roughly 90 minutes later. Saturn now rises near sunset and is up most of the night in Aquarius, building toward an October 4 opposition with rings tilted a photogenic angle. Jupiter has returned to the pre-dawn sky (best 4–6am), with Mars still visible nearby but fading. The Moon is a waning gibbous heading to last quarter on September 4. The weak Aurigid meteor shower peaked overnight but is Northern Hemisphere-favoured and moonlight-affected — not worth chasing from the Southern Hemisphere. Links & sources: KeepTrack — SpaceX Brief, Aug 30 2026: Super Heavy Static Fire Clears Starship Flight 14 Basenor — Starship Flight 14: 5 Details That Matter Right Now Space.com — SpaceX test-fires Starship Super Heavy booster ahead of critical Flight 14 Tesla Oracle — Starship 40 begins its journey from the Indian Ocean back home to Starbase, Texas China-in-Space.com — Chang'e 7 Moon Launch Moved to Early 2027 (Aug 31) South China Morning Post — Could the delay to China's moon mission ease pressure on Nasa? (Aug 26) NASA Space Station Blog — Expedition 75 is Go for Tuesday's Navigation and Science Maintenance Spacewalk (Aug 31) NASA — NASA Sets Spacewalk for Station Maintenance, Live Coverage Planned (Sept 1) Universe Today — Planets Hurry To Form Before the Protoplanetary Disk Dissipates University of Arizona News — Planet formation is a 'race against time,' according to new U of A research SETI Institute — JWST Reveals a Race Against Time for Forming Planets NASA — NASA Welcomes Türkiye as Newest Artemis Accords Signatory (Aug 31) When The Curves Line Up — 2026, September 1: Venus and Spica Conjunction Tonight Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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🚀 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is safely away — Anna and Avery recap Sunday's clean Falcon Heavy launch, what happens next on the road to L2, and a surprise Australian link in the mission. Then: Elon Musk signals the eventual retirement of Falcon 9, two Nobel laureates defend an accelerating universe against a slowing-expansion claim, a single ancient asteroid strike solves two mysteries on Mars's moon Deimos, and everything worth looking up at tonight, wherever you are. Chapters / topics: Roman Space Telescope's clean launch • What happens next (L2 cruise & commissioning) • Roman's science mission explained • SpaceX signals Falcon 9's eventual retirement • The universe is still speeding up (dark energy rebuttal) • One asteroid strike solves two Deimos mysteries • Tonight's sky (both hemispheres) 🔔 Subscribe for daily space and astronomy news. Full show notes and links at astronomydaily.io. #AstronomyDaily 

Links & sources: Space.com — Liftoff! NASA's Roman Space Telescope soars to the stars on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in spectacular launch (video) NASA Science (Roman blog) — NASA's Roman Space Telescope Launches NASA Science (Roman blog) — NASA Concludes Roman Space Telescope Launch Coverage Space.com — What time will SpaceX launch NASA's Roman Space Telescope? (Full mission timeline) Space.com — Goodbye, Falcon 9: SpaceX planning to retire workhorse launcher when Starship is up and running Teslarati — Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it ScienceDaily — The universe is still speeding up, but nobody knows why University of Bern (media relations) — Asteroid impact shaped the appearance of Mars' moon Deimos Nature Astronomy — Raducan, Agrusa, Asphaug et al. (2026), DOI 10.1038/s41550-026-02956-w When The Curves Line Up — 2026, August 31: Venus Nears Spica TelescopeAdvisor — Night Sky in September 2026: Saturn Approaching Opposition Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E180, Saturday August 29, 2026, The Weekend Wrap: Main story: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches tomorrow, Sunday August 30, with a primary window opening 7:26am EDT (11:26 UTC / 9:26pm AEST Sunday night in Sydney) on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center; backup window Monday August 31 at 7:22am EDT. Total ascent to spacecraft deployment is about 31 minutes 31 seconds, with Falcon Heavy's side boosters landing back at Cape Canaveral roughly 7 minutes 40 seconds after liftoff. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer Nancy Grace Roman (the "mother of Hubble"), the telescope shares Hubble's 2.4-metre primary mirror but pairs it with a Wide Field Instrument boasting a field of view roughly 100 times larger at similar resolution. Its major science campaigns: the High Latitude Wide Area Survey, mapping ~2 billion galaxies to probe dark matter and dark energy; a companion supernova time-domain survey; and the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey, a gravitational-microlensing exoplanet hunt expected to find on the order of 100,000 new worlds, including free-floating rogue planets. A Coronagraph Instrument will demonstrate direct exoplanet imaging technology. After deployment, Roman heads for the Sun-Earth L2 point (~1.5 million km out), a month-long cruise followed by months of commissioning. The mission closes out three threads covered this week: its clearance for launch nine months early (S05E176), its Cold War spy-satellite origin story (S05E178), and its narrow escape from budget cancellation (S05E179). The week in review: ●        Chang'e-7's delay, revisited: Monday's episode (S05E175) reported China's Chang'e-7 lunar south pole mission scrubbing on August 24 due to Tropical Storm Narra, with the next window estimated at about a month out. Since then, reporting has split — some outlets still cite a mid-September window, while others report a slip to February or March 2027, citing the mission's roughly 100-days-per-year favorable lighting geometry at Shackleton Crater. China's Manned Space Agency has not issued a firm new date as of this recording; we're flagging the uncertainty rather than picking a side. ●        Betelgeuse's bubbling surface: ALMA's most detailed image yet of the red supergiant's actual surface shows a corrugated, hot-spotted texture, with one hot spot persisting for over seven years — possibly stirred by a newly confirmed companion star (S05E177). ●        Diamond rain, decoded: A Lawrence Livermore experiment recreated Neptune- and Uranus-like interior pressures, settling a 20-year dispute over diamond's melting point and pointing toward roughly triple the energy gain in certain fusion reactor configurations (S05E178). ●        The space-mirror fight: US startup Reflect Orbital has FCC approval for its first demonstration mirror satellite; a new peer-reviewed study (Kocifaj, Bakos & Kundracik) finds the planned full-scale mirrors would appear roughly 40 times brighter than the full Moon to anyone in their beam — "worse than big cities like London," per Princeton's Gáspár Bakos (S05E179). ●        Starship's Ship 40 is actually heading home: hours after Friday's episode aired, Ship 40 was loaded onto the heavy-lift vessel Forte and departed Christmas Island on the ~20,000km voyage back to Starbase, Texas, expected to take several weeks. Flight 14 remains targeted no-earlier-than September 15, with Booster 21's static-fire testing now complete. Links & sources: ●        Space.com — What time will SpaceX launch NASA's Roman Space Telescope on Aug. 30? (Full mission timeline) ●        NASA Science — Roman Launch Countdown ●        Engadget — How to watch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's launch ●        Scientific American — China delays ambitious Chang'e 7 moon mission until 2027 ●        SpaceNews — China delays Chang'e-7 lunar south pole landing mission launch ●        CGTN — Explainer: Why Chang'e-7 can't simply launch a few days later ●        Space.com — The bubbling surface of doomed supergiant star Betelgeuse has been revealed like never before ●        ScienceDaily — Scientists crushed diamond beyond Neptune-like pressures — and solved a 20-year mystery ●        Gizmodo — Scientists recreate the melting "diamond rain" of Neptune and Uranus. It may help fusion power ●        Space.com — Massive space mirrors could be 40 times brighter than the full moon, astronomers warn ●        ABC News (Australia) — SpaceX rocket begins journey back to Texas from Christmas Island ●        NASASpaceFlight.com — Ship 40 arrives at Christmas Island, plans return to Starbase Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E179, Friday August 28, 2026:   Feature story: US startup Reflect Orbital has FCC approval for Eärendil-1, a demonstration satellite carrying a 60-foot mirror, the first step toward a planned constellation of 50,000-plus orbital mirrors beaming reflected sunlight to Earth on demand. A new peer-reviewed study (Kocifaj, Bakos and Kundracik, accepted at The Astrophysical Journal Letters) finds a full-scale, 174-foot operational mirror would appear about 40 times brighter than the full Moon to anyone standing in its roughly 3.4-mile beam, with measurable sky-glow extending 20-34 km further — astronomer Gáspár Bakos says it would be "worse than big cities like London," warning "you would not see any stars if you were in the beam."   The rest of the news:   Starship update: Ship 40 — the Flight 13 upper stage that survived an intact splashdown on July 24 — has been loaded onto a heavy-lift transport vessel off Christmas Island and is now heading home to Starbase, Texas, a journey expected to take several months. Meanwhile Flight 14 has quietly slipped to no-earlier-than September 15, per internal SpaceX/FAA planning documents, with Booster 21's static fire testing now the pacing item.   A hot, watery world on borrowed time: astronomers led by Sylvain Breton (INAF) have characterised HD 176071 b, an exoplanet 335 light-years away that's roughly 50% water by mass, orbiting so close to its star (a 14-hour year) that it's expected to eventually be consumed by tidal forces. Found via a reflected-light technique applied to archival Kepler data.   Roman Space Telescope: two days from its Sunday, August 30 launch (7:26am ET, Falcon Heavy), with today's Launch Readiness Review still underway as we record. We trace the mission's near-cancellation in leaked 2025 budget documents proposing a 24% NASA funding cut — and how Roman's team responded to Congress restoring funding by pulling the launch forward eight months, finishing under budget.   Tonight's Sky: the G2 geomagnetic storm NOAA forecast for today is playing out now — aurora chances improve at northern latitudes, unlikely to reach much past Tasmania locally. Venus and Saturn remain the reliable local targets, under a near-full Moon.   Links & sources: Space.com — Massive space mirrors could be 40 times brighter than the full moon, astronomers warn arXiv — Atmospheric Light Pollution by Proposed Reflect Orbital Space Mirrors (Kocifaj, Bakos & Kundracik) Space.com — The FCC just gave Reflect Orbital permission to launch its 1st space mirror to orbit Space.com — Starship is coming home: SpaceX loads floating spacecraft onto huge ship in the Indian Ocean Space.com — Astronomers discover hot watery exoplanet destined to be swallowed by its star Space.com — Trump tried to scrap NASA's Roman Space Telescope last year. Now it's ready to launch Watchers.news — M6.9 solar flare produces Earth-directed CME, G2 geomagnetic storm watch issued for August 28   Follow us: @AstronomyDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E178, Thursday August 27, 2026:
Feature story: Physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, led by Marius Millot, used the Omega Laser Facility at the University of Rochester to shock-compress diamond samples to about 1 terapascal — roughly three times Earth's core pressure — and temperatures hotter than the Sun's surface, recreating conditions found deep inside Neptune and Uranus. The results resolve a 20-year, ~1,000-degree disagreement between lab measurements and quantum simulations over diamond's actual melting point, confirming the simulations were right. The team also found diamond stays in its normal crystal structure right up until it melts — no intermediate phase — and confirmed solid diamond floats in liquid carbon, the same basic physics as ice floating on water. Published in Nature Physics, the corrected melting-point data could help triple energy gain in inertial confinement fusion reactors by allowing gentler, more efficient laser compression of diamond-shelled fuel capsules.
The rest of the news:

• Roman Space Telescope's strange origin: three days out from its Sunday, August 30 launch (7:26am ET, Falcon Heavy), we trace how Roman's core optics began life inside the National Reconnaissance Office's canceled "Future Imagery Architecture" spy-satellite program, donated to NASA in 2012 after the program's spectacular 2005 collapse. The telescope is currently being mated to its Falcon Heavy at LC-39A, with a Launch Readiness Review Friday, August 28.

 

• NOAA storm watch: the Space Weather Prediction Center has issued an official G2 (moderate) geomagnetic storm watch for Friday, August 28, following Tuesday's M6.9 solar flare — aurora chances improve for northern-tier US states, the UK and similar latitudes; minor storming isn't expected to reach much past Tasmania locally.

 

• AI solar storm detection: NJIT researchers have built a Transformer-based AI model, EarlyDetect, that spots hidden precursor signals of solar active regions forming roughly 9.24 hours before they're visible — not yet ready for real-time forecasting, but a promising extension of the warning window.

 

• SpaceX Starbase Louisiana: a $100 billion, five-complex, ten-pad second Starbase announced for Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, alongside Governor Jeff Landry — construction targeted for 2027, first launch aimed at 2029.

 

• Tonight's Sky: a 96%-partial lunar eclipse peaks at 4:13 UTC / 12:13am ET August 28 — spectacular from the Americas, broad daylight in Sydney (~2:13pm AEST). Venus and Saturn remain the reliable local targets.

Links & sources:

• ScienceDaily — Scientists crushed diamond beyond Neptune-like pressures — and solved a 20-year mystery

 

• Gizmodo — Scientists Recreate the Melting "Diamond Rain" of Neptune and Uranus. It May Help Fusion Power

 

• Space.com — From spy satellite to space telescope: the unlikely origins of NASA's Roman Space Telescope

 

• Space.com — Nancy Grace Roman Telescope live updates: NASA readies Roman for launch

 

• Watchers.news — M6.9 solar flare produces Earth-directed CME, G2 geomagnetic storm watch issued for August 28

 

• Universe Today — AI Spots Hidden Solar Storm Signs 9 Hours Early

 

• EurekAlert / NJIT — New AI model detects hidden signs of solar eruptions hours before they emerge

 

• Space.com — Starbase Louisiana: SpaceX announces enormous $100 billion Starbase launch site

 

• SpaceNews — SpaceX to develop Starship launch site in Louisiana

 

• EarthSky — Partial lunar eclipse of the August 27-28, 2026

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Today's episode — S05E177, Wednesday August 26, 2026:
Feature story: Astronomers using the ALMA array in Chile, led by Bill Dent (European Southern Observatory), have released the most detailed picture yet of the actual surface of Betelgeuse, the red supergiant marking Orion's shoulder — a corrugated, irregular surface with bright convective hot spots, some nearly 1,000°F hotter than the surrounding plasma. One hot spot in the northeastern region has persisted for more than seven years, far longer than current models predict, and its orientation lines up with the position of Betelgeuse B — a companion star imaged for the first time in July by a separate VLT/SPHERE study — raising the possibility the companion is influencing the giant star's surface. Betelgeuse is one of the closest stars to us expected to eventually go supernova (on a timescale of roughly the next 100,000 years); Dent notes the imagery builds a crucial "before" baseline for whenever that happens.
The rest of the news:

• ISS Spacewalk 98: NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot finished replacing a Space-to-Ground antenna on the station, six and a half hours outside, restoring communications redundancy that had been running on a backup since November. Adenot's spacewalk record as the first French woman to conduct an EVA is now backed by two completed outings.
• Solar flare/CME: The Sun fired an M6.9 flare from sunspot region 4513, triggering radio blackouts over Africa, Europe and the Arctic; a slow-moving CME is due to graze Earth around Friday, August 28, with an outside chance of minor geomagnetic storming — mostly a Northern Hemisphere aurora story.
• Falcon 9 reuse record: SpaceX's booster B1067 flew for the 37th time — a new single-booster reuse record — on the company's 100th Falcon 9 launch of 2026.
• Tonight's Sky: A 96%-partial lunar eclipse falls the night of August 27-28, spectacular from the Americas but invisible from Australia and the rest of Asia-Pacific (broad daylight here). Venus and Saturn remain good evening/overnight targets locally.

Links & sources:

• Space.com — The bubbling surface of doomed supergiant star Betelgeuse has been revealed like never before
• Space.com — Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! Astronomers capture clearest image yet of famous star's elusive companion
• Space.com — "You just saved the video dish": Two astronauts complete spacewalk to replace ISS antenna
• NASA — NASA, ESA Spacewalkers Finish Installing High-Speed Antenna
• Space.com — Sun fires powerful M6.9 solar flare and CME toward Earth
• Space.com — SpaceX sets rocket-reuse record on 100th Falcon 9 launch of the year
• Space.com — Partial lunar eclipse Aug. 27-28: stages and visibility

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Today's episode — S05E176, Tuesday August 25, 2026:
Feature story: NASA's Roman Space Telescope is fully encapsulated inside its Falcon Heavy fairing and cleared to launch no earlier than 7:26 a.m. ET this Sunday, August 30 — about nine months ahead of its original schedule, a rarity for a NASA flagship mission. Roman is headed to Sun-Earth L2 for a five-year mission mapping dark energy and dark matter and hunting exoplanets with a starlight-cancelling coronagraph. Its wide-field camera surveys roughly a hundred times faster than Hubble at comparable image sharpness. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer, Nancy Grace Roman — the "mother of Hubble" — the mission is a formal ESA partnership; some of its data will come down through a new ESA antenna at New Norcia, Western Australia.
The rest of the news:

• ISS Spacewalk 98: NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot are outside the station today finishing a Space-to-Ground antenna replacement and, time permitting, installing a new docking retroreflector — their third spacewalk together in under a month.
• Milky Way merger scar: A Hubble-based study (the ARMA project, led by Davide Massari) has found evidence of a ~500-million-solar-mass dwarf galaxy, dubbed Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles, absorbed by the Milky Way roughly 12 billion years ago — the earliest documented merger in our galaxy's history.
• Perseids 2028 watch: Jupiter's gravity may nudge Perseid debris closer to Earth's path in 2028, potentially producing an outburst of 200-300 meteors/hour under favorable dark-sky conditions — though modelers caution the forecast is an "educated guess."
• Tonight's Sky: A 96%-partial lunar eclipse falls the night of August 27-28 — spectacular from the Americas and parts of Europe/Africa, but invisible from Australia and the rest of Asia-Pacific, where it happens in broad daylight. Venus and Saturn remain good evening targets locally in the meantime.

Links & sources:

• NASA Science — Roman Launch Countdown
• NASA Roman Blog — Roman Telescope Enclosed in Falcon Heavy Fairing
• Space.com — The Roman Space Telescope is ready to launch Aug. 30
• JPL — NASA Telescope Named for "Mother of Hubble" Nancy Grace Roman
• ESA — Roman factsheet
• NASA — NASA to Cover Three US Spacewalks
• Space.com — The earliest galaxy "swallowed" by the cannibal Milky Way left a scar at its heart
• Space.com — Could Jupiter supercharge the Perseids in 2028?
• Space.com — Partial lunar eclipse Aug. 27-28: stages and visibility

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Today's episode — S05E175, Monday August 24, 2026:
Main story: China delays Chang'e-7's launch by about a month. The Chang'e-7 lunar south pole mission's launch window opened today, August 24, but a tropical system (reported as Tropical Depression/Storm Narra) over the Gulf of Tonkin, alongside a cited safety and reliability review, forced a scrub with no immediate new date. Because the mission's landing site — the rim of Shackleton Crater — requires specific solar illumination geometry on top of standard orbital mechanics, its launch windows recur only about once a month for roughly a week at a time, unlike China's earlier equatorial lunar missions. Independent trajectory analysis puts the next viable opportunity around mid-to-late September.
The rest of the news:

• LandSpace / Zhuque-3 follow-up: Thursday's celebrated first-ever leg-landing of an orbital-class Chinese booster had a coda — residual methane and oxygen ignited near the booster's base after touchdown, damaging a landing leg and toppling the vehicle. The landing itself (four legs, near dead-center, ~390km downrange in Gansu) still stands as the achievement it was reported as; the post-landing fire is a separate, and not unprecedented, engineering challenge — SpaceX's own Falcon 9 booster B1086 suffered a near-identical fire and tip-over in March 2025.
• SpaceX's 100th launch of 2026: A Falcon 9 carrying 27 Starlink satellites lifted off from Vandenberg on August 22, SpaceX's 100th orbital mission of the year (99 Falcon 9 flights plus one Falcon Heavy). The booster landed on its ninth flight; Starlink has passed 11,000 operational satellites.
• Tonight's Sky: Comet 220P/McNaught is in outburst — roughly 20,000 times brighter than normal — and observable with binoculars rather than requiring a telescope, at least until it fades after an October close pass. Also: a reminder that a 96%-partial lunar eclipse falls the night of August 27–28.

Links & sources:

• NASASpaceFlight.com — LandSpace's Zhuque-3 Topples After Landing
• Space.com — Bad weather delays launch of China's historic Chang'e 7 mission to moon's south pole
• SCMP — China puts Chang'e-7 mission to lunar south pole on hold
• SpaceNews — China delays Chang'e-7 lunar south pole landing mission launch
• China in Space — Chang'e 7 Moon Mission Delayed by One Month
• CNN — China postpones launch of unprecedented water-hunting moon mission amid space race
• Space.com — SpaceX sends 27 Starlink satellites to orbit on 100th Falcon rocket launch of the year
• APOD — Comet 220P in Outburst (August 24, 2026)

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Anna and Avery cover China's Chang'e-7 mission — a four-vehicle lunar south pole expedition, including a leaping hopper robot, that a Brown University scientist calls the most ambitious robotic Moon mission any nation has ever attempted, with its launch window opening Monday. Then: this week's biggest hardware stories, catching up on Starship's Ship 40 (still marooned off Christmas Island), LandSpace's historic private rocket landing in China, NASA pinpointing exactly where a Falcon 9 hit the Moon, and the failed rescue mission for NASA's Swift telescope.   Full show notes:   Today's episode — S05E174, Saturday August 22, 2026, our second "Weekend Wrap":   Main story: China's Chang'e-7 targets the most ambitious lunar mission ever. China's Long March 5 Y14 rocket rolled out to the pad at Wenchang Space Launch Site on August 19, ahead of a launch window running August 24–31. Chang'e-7 comprises four vehicles — an orbiter, a lander built for up to eight years of surface operations, a rover, and a six-legged, thruster-powered hopper capable of 15km leaps — targeting the rim of Shackleton Crater at the lunar south pole, with landing expected near year's end. The mission's primary goal is the first landed, direct search for water ice in the Moon's permanently shadowed craters. Brown University planetary scientist James Head called it "the most ambitious, comprehensive, and complex robotic lunar mission ever attempted by any nation or entity." The mission carries international instruments from Russia, Italy, Thailand, Switzerland, Bahrain, Egypt, and a University of Hong Kong/International Lunar Observatory Association telescope. It precedes Chang'e-8 (~2028) and China's targeted crewed lunar landing by 2030.   The week in review:   -       Starship's Ship 40: After Tuesday's episode reported recovery as complete, fuller reporting showed the ship was towed further than first known, arriving August 18 off Christmas Island (not a mainland port) after 24 days adrift and 400+ km of drift. SpaceX has no announced plan yet for the final leg to Starbase, Texas — at its current tow pace that trip would take over a year. Separately, Elon Musk said August 20 that a Starship tower-catch attempt is now "probably... in a few months" rather than on Flight 14 as earlier hoped; Flight 14 is targeted no earlier than August 28 and will attempt Starship's first-ever full orbital flight. -       LandSpace / Zhuque-3: On August 19, Chinese commercial company LandSpace became the first private Chinese company to land an orbital-class rocket booster, recovering Zhuque-3's first stage in Gansu Province on the rocket's second flight (the first, in December 2025, reached orbit but failed its landing attempt). -       SpaceX Moon impact site: NASA and South Korea's Danuri orbiter pinpointed and imaged the crater left by a spent Falcon 9 upper stage that struck the Moon on August 5 — a 60-foot-wide, sub-10-foot-deep crater at 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E, with ejecta rays revealing space-weathering data. -       Swift telescope rescue fails: NASA confirmed on August 19 that the LINK rescue spacecraft's attitude-control failure (two of three reaction wheels down, plus a thruster malfunction) ended the rescue attempt for the aging Swift Observatory, which will now reenter uncontrolled later this year — not expected before October per early reporting, though NASA hasn't confirmed a date.   Links & sources:   -       Space.com — China's Chang'e 7 moon probe will launch this weekend on the most ambitious lunar mission in history -       Scientific American — China is about to launch its most ambitious moon mission yet -       Al Jazeera — China's new moon mission could unlock secret of lunar ice: Why that matters -       China in Space — Chang'e 7 Rolls Out Ahead of Moon Launch From Wenchang -       NASASpaceFlight.com — Ship 40 arrives at Christmas Island, plans return to Starbase -       Starlust — SpaceX finally hauls Starship's Ship 40 to Christmas Island after 24 days lost at sea -       Space.com — SpaceX will try for 1st Starship tower catch 'in a few months,' Elon Musk says -       Spaceflight Now — LandSpace becomes first commercial Chinese company to land an orbital-class booster -       NASA Science — NASA's LRO Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, Learns New Details -       Nature World News — NASA Says Swift Observatory Will Likely Reenter Earth's Atmosphere This Year After Commercial Boost Mission Ends -       CBS News — NASA's Swift telescope will plunge toward Earth after rescue mission called off   Follow us: @AstronomyDailyPod

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Anna and Avery cover how NASA, working with South Korea's Danuri orbiter, pinpointed and imaged the exact crater left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 stage that struck the Moon on August 5th. Plus: the private rescue mission for NASA's ailing Swift telescope has officially failed, astronomers may have caught dark matter bending a black hole's jet, and Rocket Lab launches its ninth radar satellite for Japan's iQPS.   Full show notes:   Today's episode — S05E173, Friday August 21, 2026:   Main story: NASA finds the crater a SpaceX rocket left on the Moon. A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage struck the Moon's surface on August 5, 2026, at 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E. South Korea's Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (Danuri) imaged the impact site within hours using its LUTI camera, confirming the predicted location to within 0.6 miles and passing refined coordinates to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team. LRO's Narrow-Angle Camera imaged the site on August 11–12, revealing a crater roughly 60 feet wide and less than 10 feet deep, with dark rays of space-weathered material excavated from about 1.5 feet down and brighter rays of fresh, unweathered material from deeper still. NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (Planetary Defense program) refined the original impact prediction using data from independent astronomers.   Swift telescope rescue mission fails. NASA's Swift Observatory, losing altitude faster than expected due to heightened solar activity, was the target of a $30 million rescue attempt by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies. Their LINK spacecraft launched July 3 on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket but suffered an attitude-control failure roughly three weeks later, spinning uncontrollably before it could dock with and boost Swift. NASA confirmed the mission's failure on August 19; Swift is now expected to reenter the atmosphere uncontrolled before the end of 2026. LINK will still attempt a proximity flyby to gather data for future servicing missions. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman: "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting."   Dark matter may be magnifying a black hole's jet. A team led by Silke Britzen at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, combining data from the VLBA, the Fermi gamma-ray telescope, and NASA's Swift X-ray instrument, found that the plasma jet from blazar PKS 2233-148 shows an unexpected deviation consistent with gravitational lensing by an unseen dark matter clump — a potential first detection of dark matter substructure lensing a blazar jet. The result could also help confirm blazars as sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, July 31.   Rocket Lab launches a new radar satellite for Japan. Rocket Lab launched SUSANOO-II, a synthetic aperture radar Earth-observation satellite, for Tokyo-based iQPS on an Electron rocket from New Zealand (mission: "The Lightning God Defends"). It's Rocket Lab's ninth launch for iQPS, part of a planned 36-satellite constellation, and marks the company's 14th flight of 2026 and 93rd Electron mission overall.   Tonight's sky: the Moon is a waxing gibbous, about 63% illuminated. With a telescope, find the Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra — look for bright star Vega overhead, then the small parallelogram of stars just below it. Mark your calendars for a 96%-partial lunar eclipse on August 27–28, nearly total — full viewing details to come.   Links & sources:   -       NASA Science — NASA's LRO Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, Learns New Details -       Universe Today — NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, With Some Help From a Korean Spacecraft -       Space.com — Private mission to save NASA's Swift space telescope fails -       Live Science — 'This is not the outcome we were working towards': $30 million mission to save NASA's Swift telescope fails -       Space.com — Dark matter could magnify the jets of a ravenously feeding supermassive black hole -       Space.com — Rocket Lab launches private Japanese Earth-observing satellite to orbit -       Space.com — Night sky August 2026: what you can see tonight -       TheSkyLive — Moon Phase on August 21, 2026   Follow us: search astrodailypod on your favorite platform · astronomydaily.io

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Anna and Avery cover LandSpace becoming the first Chinese commercial company to land an orbital-class rocket booster — a big step for the country's private space sector. Plus: astronomers find a "mega-Earth" 23 times more massive than our planet that shouldn't be able to exist, a star weaving impossibly close to our galaxy's supermassive black hole that could reveal its spin within a decade, and new JWST data showing the early universe's galaxies were hiding roughly four times more mass than we thought.   Full show notes:   Today's episode — S05E172, Thursday August 20, 2026:   Main story: China's private spaceflight sector sticks the landing. On August 19, Chinese commercial launch company LandSpace successfully recovered the first stage of its Zhuque-3 (ZQ-3) rocket after liftoff from the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone in northwestern China — the first time any Chinese commercial company has landed an orbital-class booster. The 76.6-metre, stainless-steel, methane-fueled rocket (taller than a Falcon 9) touched down on four legs roughly 390km downrange in Gansu Province about eight minutes after liftoff, running on a single Tianque-12 engine. It's ZQ-3's second flight — the first, in December 2025, reached orbit but couldn't stick the recovery. The landing puts LandSpace among a very small club of companies with proven booster-reuse technology and marks, in the company's words, a shift "toward the engineering application phase of reusability."   A "mega-Earth" that shouldn't be this dense. Astronomers led by Max Kroft (University of Wisconsin–Madison) have identified GJ 523b, a rocky exoplanet 23.5 times more massive than Earth but only 2.5 times its width — extraordinarily dense for its size. Standard planet-formation models say a planet this massive, orbiting its star every 17.75 days in a system just 170 million years old, should have pulled in a thick hydrogen-helium envelope; instead it's stayed almost entirely rocky. Found by TESS and confirmed with the WIYN 3.5-metre telescope at Kitt Peak; submitted to The Astronomical Journal, not yet peer-reviewed.   The star that could reveal a black hole's spin. A newly identified star, S301, is orbiting our galaxy's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, closer and faster than any star found before it — passing within 12 astronomical units at roughly 25,000 kilometres per second and completing a full orbit in just 8.7 years. Led by K. Abd El Dayem (Paris Observatory) with Nobel laureate Reinhard Genzel's group, researchers expect to use S301's orbit to directly measure the black hole's spin within a decade — a first for any supermassive black hole, and a real-world test of Einstein's general relativity.   JWST finds the early universe's galaxies were hiding their mass. A team led by Chloe Cheng (Leiden University), using JWST's NIRSpec instrument alongside data from the VLT's LEGA-C survey, found that ancient "quiescent" galaxies contain far more faint, low-mass stars than previously accounted for — potentially raising their true mass estimates by a factor of four. The hidden stars had simply been outshone by brighter ones in the same galaxies. Published in Nature Astronomy; the finding deepens existing tension with current galaxy-formation models.   Tonight's sky: the Moon is about 56% illuminated and well-placed for lunar observing — look along the sunrise terminator for the crater Theophilus and its dramatic, shadowed walls. Venus is still blazing at magnitude -4.1 low in the western sky after sunset, and Saturn continues its predawn "moon parade" in the south-southeast for early risers.   Links & sources:   -       Spaceflight Now — LandSpace becomes first commercial Chinese company to land an orbital-class booster -       Space.com — Touchdown! Private Chinese rocket aces landing on 2nd-ever flight -       NASASpaceFlight.com — Zhuque-3 Completes Second Flight with Successful First-Stage Landing -       Space.com — Astronomers discover a giant, rocky 'mega-Earth' 23 times more massive than our planet -       Phys.org — Mega-Earth GJ 523b is 23 times as massive as our planet—but only 2.5 times as wide -       Universe Today — The Fastest Star in the Milky Way Will Test Relativity -       Universe Today — Whoa! The JWST's Ancient Galaxies Are Much More Massive Than Thought -       Space.com — Night sky August 2026: what you can see tonight   Follow us: @AstronomyDailyPod

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Anna and Avery cover Sophie Adenot becoming the first French woman ever to conduct a spacewalk — a historic EVA that ran into some antenna trouble along the way. Plus: a trillion-mile river of gas that explains why some planetary systems end up tilted, an honest update on Starship's Ship 40 as it turns out the recovery saga wasn't quite finished, and SpaceX quietly closing in on 11,000 satellites in orbit.
Full show notes:
Today's episode — S05E171, Wednesday August 19, 2026:
Main story: First Frenchwoman to spacewalk. ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot became the first French woman ever to conduct a spacewalk on August 18, working alongside NASA's Anil Menon (on his second EVA, delayed from August 13 after a carbon dioxide sensor flag on his first spacewalk August 6). The pair set out to replace one of the station's space-to-ground antennas, but the job took longer than planned — after 6 hours and 23 minutes (the station's 282nd spacewalk overall), controllers called it before the swap was fully complete. The old antenna is secured but not stowed; the new one remains on its storage platform. Another spacewalk is scheduled for next Tuesday to finish the job. France's first-ever spacewalk was performed by Jean-Loup Chrétien on Mir in 1988.
A trillion-mile river of gas explains tilted planets. Astronomers led by Maria Galloway-Sprietsma (University of Florida), with advisor Jaehan Bae and international collaborators, used the ALMA telescope in Chile to trace a gas streamer roughly 1.2 trillion miles (0.2 light-years) long feeding into the young triple-star system GW Orionis, 1,300 light-years away in Orion. The streamer's infall angle closely matches the tilt of the system's warped outer disk ring, offering a mechanism for why some planetary systems end up with misaligned or even retrograde orbits. Published August 6 in The Astronomical Journal.
Correction/update: Ship 40's journey continues. Last episode we reported Starship's Ship 40 recovery as complete after its intact splashdown and tow toward Western Australia. Fuller reporting since shows the ship was towed further and arrived, as of August 18, in sheltered waters off Christmas Island after 24 days and 400+ km adrift — with SpaceX now planning to transport it back to Starbase, Texas, for full inspection. Musk has cited the intact recovery as strengthening the case for attempting a tower catch of a returning ship as early as Flight 14.
SpaceX quietly passes 11,000 satellites. Tuesday night's Starlink 17-50 launch from Vandenberg — SpaceX's 100th mission of 2026 overall (97th Falcon 9 flight of the year) — added 24 more satellites, pushing the Starlink constellation to nearly 11,000 operational satellites. Booster B1097 flew for the 12th time, targeting a droneship landing in the Pacific.
Tonight's sky (well, tomorrow's predawn sky): Saturn is showing off a "moon parade" before dawn, its unusually narrow, shallowly tilted rings (7.5°) lining up major moons — Titan, Rhea, Tethys, Dione and, in larger scopes, Iapetus and Enceladus — almost in a straight row. This evening, catch a waxing crescent Moon.
Links & sources:

• Space.com — Watch European astronaut make history during spacewalk today
• Spaceflight Now — Astronauts remove failed antenna; run out of time to install a spare
• France 24 — Sophie Adenot set to become first French female astronaut to venture outside ISS
• Space.com — A 'river' of cosmic gas 1 trillion miles long sent planets in the Orion constellation into tilted orbits
• University of Florida News — Cosmic river of gas may have tilted a young planetary system in Orion constellation
• ALMA Observatory — ALMA Captures a Trillion-Mile Stream Feeding the Triple-Star System GW Orionis
• NASASpaceFlight.com — Ship 40 arrives at Christmas Island, plans return to Starbase
• Space.com — Starship lives! SpaceX craft arrives at Christmas Island after 24-day ocean ordeal
• Space.com — SpaceX launches its 100th mission of the year, sends Starlink satellites to orbit
• Spaceflight Now — Live coverage: SpaceX to send Starlink satellites to orbit with Tuesday night launch from California
• Space.com — Night sky August 2026: what you can see tonight

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Anna and Avery close out a three-week saga: SpaceX has recovered Starship's Ship 40 from the Indian Ocean after a soft splashdown, a difficult tow, and a moment where recovery odds looked as low as 18%. Plus: a dead star in the Helix Nebula previews our own Sun's five-billion-years-from-now fate, new evidence the Milky Way was built in part by an ancient galactic collision, and China's fast recovery from a rocket failure with back-to-back launches.
Full show notes:
Today's episode — S05E170, Tuesday August 18, 2026:
Main story: Starship's Ship 40 makes it home. SpaceX has completed recovery of Ship 40, the Starship Flight 13 upper stage that survived an unprecedented soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean on July 24. After drifting over 400km and a difficult multi-week tow through rough seas (prediction markets had given it ~18% odds as of mid-August), recovery vessels including the Normand Ranger brought the ship in to Western Australia this week. SpaceX had already secured the imagery it needed from the heat shield and engines regardless of outcome; Ship 41 and Flight 14 (targeting ~August 20) are already in the pipeline.
A dead star shows us our Sun's future. A Yale-led team studying the Helix Nebula's white dwarf found 22 bow-shock structures in its outer halo — the first direct observation of a dead star's ejected material dispersing back into the galaxy. It's a preview of what our own Sun will undergo in roughly 5 billion years. Published August 12 in Nature.
The collision that built the Milky Way. Hubble and Gaia data revealed a previously unknown ancient dwarf galaxy, "LKH," which merged with the Milky Way 11.8 billion years ago — predating the well-known Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger by 1.8 billion years. Published August 17 in Nature Astronomy.
China bounces back from a rocket failure. After an August 10 Long March 7A failure destroyed a communications satellite, China launched twice within 23 hours on August 16 — a Long March 12 from Wenchang and a Long March 2C from Taiyuan — demonstrating operational resilience across two rocket types and launch sites.
Tonight's sky: the waxing crescent Moon pairs with a brilliant Venus (magnitude -4.1) low in the western sky, about 45 minutes after sunset.
Links & sources:

• NASASpaceFlight.com — While SpaceX recovers Ship 40, Ship 41 prepares for testing ahead of Flight 14
• MarineRadar — SpaceX recovers Starship from Indian Ocean after three-week tow
• CNN — Satellite imagery captures race to recover 170-foot SpaceX Starship in the Indian Ocean
• Space.com — Scientists find dead star that predicts our Sun's future
• Space.com — How an ancient collision with another galaxy transformed the Milky Way
• Space.com — China bounces back from Long March rocket explosion with back-to-back launches
• Space.com — Night sky August 2026: what you can see tonight

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Anna and Avery cover NASA's newly funded concept for spherical, propeller-free "aerobots" that could one day explore the methane-carved cave systems of Saturn's moon Titan. Plus: SpaceX breaks its own launch-turnaround record with two Falcon 9 missions 38 minutes apart, Rocket Lab lands its biggest-ever defense contract to build "Flatellites" for the U.S. Space Force, and a geomagnetic storm arriving today could bring aurora to high latitudes tonight.
**Full show notes:**
Today's episode — S05E169, Monday August 17, 2026:
**Main story: NASA funds spherical "Aerobots" to explore Titan's caves.** A NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase 1 grant is backing SPARK (Solid-state Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst) — small, propeller-free spherical robots using electrohydrodynamic (EHD) thrusters, led by Daniel Drew (University of Hawaii) with JPL's Ethan Schaler and Jacob Izraelevitz and Michael Malaska (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science). The concept targets Titan's karst terrain — sinkholes and caves carved by liquid methane and ethane rather than water — as a candidate site for astrobiology research. Phase 1 covers nine months; a Phase 2 award could follow. No confirmed mission link yet, though NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft is headed to Titan around 2028.
**SpaceX sets a new launch-turnaround record.** Two Falcon 9 missions launched 38 minutes apart on August 15 — a Globalstar satellite mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 9:12 p.m. ET, and the classified USSF-366 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 9:50 p.m. ET — beating SpaceX's previous 65-minute record from August 2024. Both boosters landed successfully (14th and 18th flights respectively). 2026 tally: 96 Falcon 9 launches so far.
**Rocket Lab wins $397 million Space Force contract for "Flatellites."** The flat-panel satellites will support the SB-AMTI (Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator) program and launch stacked aboard Rocket Lab's still-undebuted Neutron rocket. It's Rocket Lab's largest defense contract to date, bringing 2026 government contract funding to $943 million.
**Geomagnetic storm expected today.** A double CME plus a high-speed solar wind stream is forecast to bring G1–G2 level geomagnetic storming, with the main impact expected later today. Aurora is possible at high latitudes — potentially Scotland, northern England, Northern Ireland, Alaska, Canada, and the northern US, plus southern New Zealand and Tasmania in the Southern Hemisphere. Comes amid an active stretch for the Sun, including 14 C-class flares from sunspot region AR4507 over August 15–16.
**Links & sources:**
  - [Space.com — NASA funds spherical 'Aerobots' for Titan's caves](https://www.space.com/technology/nasa-funds-spherical-aerobots-that-could-explore-the-caves-of-saturns-moon-titan)
  - [JPL Robotics — Titan Aerobots](https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/research-tasks/titan-aerobots/)
  - [JPL — Shapeshifter concept for Saturn's moons (background)](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-designing-shapeshifting-robots-for-saturns-moons/)
  - [Space.com — SpaceX breaks launch doubleheader record](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/spacex-breaks-record-launch-doubleheader-ussf-366-globalstar-2r)
  - [Spaceflight Now — Globalstar/USSF-366 launch coverage](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/08/15/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-satellite-replenishment-mission-for-globalstar-from-cape-canaveral/)
  - [Space.com — Rocket Lab's $397M Flatellites contract](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/us-space-force-gives-rocket-lab-usd397-million-to-build-threat-tracking-flatellites)
  - [Rocket Lab — Flatellites contract announcement](https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/rocket-lab-awarded-397-million-contract-to-build-and-launch-flatellites-for-u-s-space-forces-space-based-airborne-moving-target-indicator-program/)
  - [ummid.com — Geomagnetic storm set to hit Earth Monday Aug 17](https://www.ummid.com/news/2026/8/16/what-is-geomagnetic-storm-set-to-hit-earth-monday-aug-17.html)
  - [EarthSky — Sun news / solar flare, CME, aurora updates](https://earthsky.org/sun/sun-news-activity-solar-flare-cme-aurora-updates/)
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Today's episode — S05E168, Saturday August 15, 2026, our "Weekend Wrap":
**Main story: a magnetar confirms 90-year-old vacuum birefringence prediction.** A team led by Rachael Stewart (George Washington University), using NASA's IXPE spacecraft, found the strongest evidence yet that extreme magnetic fields polarize light passing through empty space — confirming a 1936 prediction by Werner Heisenberg and Hans Euler. The team studied magnetar 1E 1547-5408 and found X-rays nearly 3x more polarized than expected, in a direction matching the star's magnetic field. Published August 5 in *Nature*.
**The week in review:**
- **Starship:** Ship 40 (Flight 13, splashed down July 24) remains adrift in the Indian Ocean after recovery efforts stalled in rough seas; Elon Musk said August 7 that recovery is "not looking good right now." Still unresolved as of this weekend — roughly 18% recovery odds per prediction markets. SpaceX has moved on to Flight 14 prep (Ship 41, targeting ~August 20).
- **Eclipse:** The August 12 total solar eclipse swept a 182-mile shadow from the Arctic through Greenland, Iceland (2m18s max totality at Látrabjarg) and northern Spain. Next Spanish total eclipse: August 2, 2027.
- **Black hole star:** JWST's "Mirage or Miracle" survey identified MoM-BH*-1, a gas-shrouded black hole glowing from just 660 million years after the Big Bang — a candidate explanation for how supermassive black holes grow so fast.
- **Virgin Galactic:** Commercial flights delayed again, from Q4 2026 to February 2027; Q2 earnings (revenue $1.54M, net loss ~$55.9M) sent shares down further, with heavy cash burn guided for Q3/Q4 and a new shelf filing for capital flexibility.
**Links & sources:**
- [Space.com — Is empty space really empty? This magnetic star may finally solve a 90-year-old mystery](https://www.space.com/astronomy/stars/is-empty-space-really-empty-this-magnetic-star-may-finally-solve-a-90-year-old-mystery)
- [Space.com — 'Not looking good right now': Starship likely to be lost at sea](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/not-looking-good-right-now-starship-likely-to-be-lost-at-sea-2-weeks-after-epic-13th-test-flight-elon-musk-says)
- [NASASpaceFlight.com — While SpaceX recovers Ship 40, Ship 41 prepares for testing ahead of Flight 14](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2026/08/spacex-recovers-ship-40-ship-41-flight-14/)
- [Manifold Markets — Will Starship Ship 40 be recovered to shore?](https://manifold.markets/Mqrius/will-starship-ship-40-be-recovered)
- [Space.com — Total solar eclipse 2026 thrills millions](https://www.space.com/stargazing/solar-eclipses/total-solar-eclipse-2026-thrills-millions-with-a-stunning-cosmic-spectacle-photos-video)
- [Wikipedia — Solar eclipse of August 12, 2026](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_12,_2026)
- [EurekAlert — Mirage or miracle? JWST finds earliest known 'black hole star' at cosmic dawn](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139484)
- [SpaceNews — Virgin Galactic delays resumption of commercial flights to 2027](https://spacenews.com/virgin-galactic-delays-resumption-of-commercial-flights-to-2027/)
- [Virgin Galactic — Q2 2026 financial results and business update](https://www.virgingalactic.com/news/virgin-galactic-announces-second-quarter-2026-financial-results-and-provides-business-update)
- [StocksToTrade — Virgin Galactic (SPCE) news, Aug 13 2026](https://stockstotrade.com/news/virgin-galactic-holdings-inc-spce-news-2026_08_13/)
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Anna and Avery break down JWST's discovery of MoM-BH*-1, the earliest known "black hole star" — a black hole shrouded in dense gas, glowing from just 660 million years after the Big Bang, that might explain how supermassive black holes grow so fast. Plus: the Perseid meteor shower's spectacular overnight peak, a new satellite built to watch other satellites in geostationary orbit, and veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke's retirement after 30 years and four spacecraft.
**Full show notes:**
Today's episode — S05E167, Friday August 14, 2026:
**Main story: JWST finds the earliest known "black hole star."** Astronomers led by Rohan Naidu (University of Hawai'i) and Jorryt Matthee (ISTA) identified MoM-BH*-1 — a young black hole wrapped in a dense gas envelope so thick it radiates almost like a star, appearing over 100,000 times the Sun's radius. Light from the object left it roughly 13 billion years ago, just 660 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery, from the "Mirage or Miracle" JWST survey, may explain how supermassive black holes grow fast enough to match observations of the early universe, and may be linked to the population of mysterious "little red dots" Webb has found since 2024.
**The Perseid meteor shower's spectacular peak.** The Perseids peaked overnight on August 12–13, just hours after this week's total solar eclipse, with dark, moonless skies delivering hundreds of visible meteors per hour at the best sites. Debris from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle remains active through roughly August 24.
**Astranis unveils Perceptor.** A new satellite line built to monitor activity in geostationary orbit, using electric propulsion for repeated multi-angle flybys of other spacecraft. Astranis CEO John Gedmark cited past close approaches by Russian and Chinese spacecraft near U.S. satellites as motivation. No launch date announced yet.
**Astronaut Mike Fincke retires after 30 years.** Fincke flew four missions across four spacecraft types — Soyuz (twice), Space Shuttle Endeavour, and SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour — commanded the ISS twice, and capped his career with Crew-11, a mission cut short in January after a frightening in-orbit medical incident.
**Links & sources:**
  - [EurekAlert — Mirage or miracle? JWST finds earliest known 'black hole star' at cosmic dawn](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139484)
  - [phys.org — Mirage or miracle? JWST finds earliest known black hole star](https://phys.org/news/2026-08-mirage-miracle-jwst-earliest-black.html)
  - [Scientific American — JWST images illuminate 'black hole stars' at cosmic dawn](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwst-images-illuminate-black-hole-stars-at-cosmic-dawn/)
  - [ERC — Earliest known black hole star found at cosmic dawn](https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/earliest-known-black-hole-star-found-cosmic-dawn)
  - [Space.com — Perseid meteor shower peak photos](https://www.space.com/stargazing/meteor-showers/the-perseid-meteor-shower-peak-was-spectacular-here-are-our-favorite-photos-aug-2026)
  - [Space.com — Astranis Perceptor satellites for geostationary orbit awareness](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/astranis-perceptor-satellites-geostationary-orbit-space-situational-awareness)
  - [Spaceflight Now — Mike Fincke, a 30-year astronaut, retires from NASA](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/08/12/mike-fincke-a-30-year-astronaut-with-experience-across-four-human-rated-spacecraft-retires-from-nasa/)
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Anna and Avery break down yesterday's total solar eclipse — a 182-mile-wide shadow that swept from the Arctic through Greenland and Iceland to northern Spain, giving millions of people up to 2 minutes 18 seconds of totality. Plus: astronomers find three supermassive black holes sharing one distant galaxy (two are about to merge), Virgin Galactic pushes commercial spaceflight back to February 2027, and Rocket Lab signs a new launch customer for Neutron even as the rocket's debut slips further.
**Full show notes:**
Today's episode — S05E166, Thursday August 13, 2026:
**Main story: The August 12 total solar eclipse.** The Moon's shadow crossed the Arctic Ocean, eastern Greenland, western Iceland, northern Spain, the Balearic Islands and out into the Mediterranean. Longest totality on land: 2 minutes 18 seconds at Látrabjarg, Iceland. Millions gathered across northern Spain, with the path also crossing A Coruña, Bilbao, Zaragoza, Valencia and Palma (Madrid and Barcelona were just outside the path). Observers reported seeing the solar corona, a prominence, and Jupiter, Mercury and Venus during totality. Spain gets another total eclipse on August 2, 2027.
**Three supermassive black holes, one galaxy.** Astronomers led by Hannah Übler (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics) used JWST to confirm three actively feeding supermassive black holes in galaxy J0148-4214, 12.5 billion light-years away — the first such triple system ever confirmed. Two of the three are on course to merge.
**Virgin Galactic delays commercial flights to 2027.** The company's upgraded Delta-class spaceplane will now begin commercial service in February 2027, pushed back from Q4 2026, to complete avionics and systems installation. Shares fell 12% after-hours. $750,000 seat packages were oversubscribed.
**Rocket Lab's Neutron: delay and deal.** Rocket Lab is hedging on a 2026 debut for its Neutron rocket, with the window potentially slipping into 2027 — even as the company signs a new five-launch deal with Kepler Communications.
**Links & sources:**
- [Space.com — Total solar eclipse live updates](https://www.space.com/news/live/total-solar-eclipse-today-aug-12-2026-live-updates)
- [Space.com — Total solar eclipse 2026 thrills millions (photos, video)](https://www.space.com/stargazing/solar-eclipses/total-solar-eclipse-2026-thrills-millions-with-a-stunning-cosmic-spectacle-photos-video)
- [CNN — Photos: Total solar eclipse 2026](https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/12/science/gallery/photos-total-solar-eclipse)
- [Wikipedia — Solar eclipse of August 12, 2026](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_12,_2026)
- [Max Planck Institute — Three supermassive black holes discovered in a single galaxy](https://www.mpg.de/26904239/three-black-holes-discovered-in-a-young-galaxy)
- [SpaceNews — Virgin Galactic delays resumption of commercial flights to 2027](https://spacenews.com/virgin-galactic-delays-resumption-of-commercial-flights-to-2027/)
- [Spaceflight Now — Window for 2026 Neutron debut is narrowing](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/08/10/window-for-2026-launch-debut-of-rocket-labs-neutron-rocket-is-narrowing-as-development-continues/)
- [Rocket Lab — Neutron launch deal with Kepler Communications](https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/rocket-lab-inks-neutron-launch-deal-with-kepler-communications/)
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In this episode •      Shadow Day: the only total solar eclipse of 2026 crosses Arctic Russia, Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain today — the first total eclipse over western mainland Europe since 1999 (Spain’s first since 1905, Iceland’s since 1954). Max totality ~2 min 18 s. Reykjavík ~17:48 UT; northern Spain ~18:27–18:33 UT (Sun very low, ~4–10° up). Live via NASA, timeanddate and the Exploratorium. •      Where you are: North America gets an afternoon partial (Nova Scotia ~33%, N. Maine ~28%, Montreal ~18%, Boston ~16%, NYC ~9–10%, Toronto ~8%, DC ~10%; Fairbanks ~37% in the morning) — no totality anywhere on the continent, glasses on throughout. Europe outside the path sees a deep evening partial (London ~91%). Australia/SH: not visible directly — watch the streams (~1:30–6:00 am AEST Thu). •      Chasing the shadow: NASA’s WB-57 jet flies the path at ~50,000 ft (~740 km/h), extending totality to nearly 3 minutes with four visible/IR cameras (SCIFI) to probe coronal heating, prominences and the solar wind (PI Amir Caspi, SwRI). The Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (A. Des Jardins, Montana State) launches ~86 balloons from Iceland and Spain to measure atmospheric changes. •      A star-building magnetic field: ALMA captures the first direct high-resolution image of a twisted, toroidal magnetic field wrapped around a protostellar jet in NGC 1333 IRAS 4A (~960 ly, Perseus cloud), confirming a decades-old prediction of how young stars launch jets and shed spin — the same physics that scales up to black-hole jets (Ching et al., Nature Communications 2026; NSF NRAO/ALMA). •      Why worlds turn hellish: UC Riverside’s Stephen Kane argues planetary rotation is an overlooked driver of climate and habitability — slow spin may help tip a world into a Venus-style runaway greenhouse. Measuring true spin is hard because winds can masquerade as rotation; ESA’s PLATO (launch March 2027) could test the idea across hundreds of Venus-like planets (Astronomical Journal, accepted). •      Skywatch — both hemispheres: the Perseids peak overnight 12–13 Aug under a genuinely moonless sky (best midnight–dawn; NH-favoured). Southern Hemisphere: evening Venus (mag −4.4, just past dichotomy), the pre-dawn planet line-up, and Comet 10P/Tempel 2. ISO 12312-2 eye-safety line included.   Sources •      NASA Science — Total Solar Eclipse on August 12, 2026; “NASA Science Soars During August Total Solar Eclipse” •      timeanddate; Eclipsophile; NationalEclipse.com; azmth.space — path, contact times, magnitudes •      Astronomy.com; Forbes; CBS News — North American partial times & percentages •      Space.com; Smithsonian — WB-57 SCIFI campaign & Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project •      NSF NRAO / phys.org — Ching et al., “Unveiling dominant toroidal magnetic fields in a protostellar outflow,” Nature Communications (2026) •      UC Riverside (news.ucr.edu) / phys.org — S. Kane, planetary rotation & runaway greenhouse (Astronomical Journal, accepted) •      EarthSky; Astronomy.com — Perseid peak (moonless), Venus dichotomy

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Astronomy Daily · S05E164 “Eclipse Eve” · Tuesday 11 August 2026. Sources are primary/agency where possible; aggregator dates were checked against originals. In this episode •    LEAD — The 12 August total solar eclipse: the only total eclipse of 2026 and the first over mainland Europe since 1999. Totality arcs from Siberia over the North Pole to eastern Greenland, western Iceland, northern Spain and a sliver of Portugal; maximum totality ~2 min 18 s. Partial for much of North America near sunset; not visible from Australia. ESA livestreams from the Javalambre Observatory, Spain. •    MIDDLE 1 — A state CASC Long March 7A exploded ~85 seconds after lifting off from Wenchang on 10 August, a total loss (payload reported as the Zhongxing-4B communications satellite). Separately, Landspace’s private Zhuque-3 was on the same-night manifest from Jiuquan for its second propulsive landing-legs recovery attempt — outcome unconfirmed at recording. China’s first orbital-booster landing (net-capture, Long March 10B) already succeeded on 10 July. •    MIDDLE 2 — The Perseids peak overnight 12–13 August under a New Moon — the darkest conditions in roughly two decades. Parent comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Realistic ~30–50 meteors/hr from dark sites (nominal ~100), with a slim chance of a dust-trail boost; the next confidently forecast outburst is 2028. •    MIDDLE 3 — Japan’s H3 launched Michibiki No. 7 (QZS-7) from Tanegashima, bringing the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System up to the strength Japan needs to run it as a standalone service — a regional navigation layer that keeps a satellite near the zenith over Japan/Asia-Pacific, reinforcing GPS and building navigation resilience. The satellite also hosts a US Space Force space-surveillance sensor (SACHI). •    CLOSER — Both-hemispheres skywatch: eclipse viewing times (totality window ~16:58–18:34 UT, greatest ~17:46 UT) and the ISO 12312-2 eye-safety rule; Perseid how-to for the North (best 2 a.m.–dawn); and Southern-Hemisphere content — pre-dawn planets, evening Venus, Comet 10P/Tempel 2. Eye safety •    A partial eclipse is never safe to view with the naked eye. Use ISO 12312-2 certified eclipse glasses/viewers, or indirect projection (pinhole). Direct viewing is only safe during true totality, and only inside the path (Greenland, Iceland, Spain). Links •    astronomydaily.io — full back-catalogue, daily news feed, listener reviews, newsletter sign-up, contact form •    @AstroDailyPod on your platform of choice

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Astronomy Daily · S05E163 · “The Long Way Home” · Monday 10 August 2026. Sources verified against primary / institutional outlets. Starship “lost at sea” (Flight 13) •    Flight 13 launched 24 July 2026 from Starbase, South Texas; the upper stage (“Ship,” Ship 40, ~52 m) made the softest Starship water landing yet in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia — and, in a program first, survived intact and afloat. •    SpaceX had not planned to recover it. Musk confirmed the salvage attempt on 28 July (“We’re sending a ship out to recover Starship”); recovery ship Go Australis was joined by Norwegian tugs Normand Ranger and Skimmer Tide, with a tow line to the nose. •    On 7 August, Musk said recovery is “not looking good right now” in rough seas — but the team had already obtained close-up photos of critical heat-shield and engine regions for future upgrades. A saltwater-soaked Ship was never going to be reflown. •    Heat shield: on SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings call (4 August) Musk said he’d “consider the heat-shield problem solved,” long the biggest hurdle to full reuse. •    The flight also deployed 20 next-gen Starlink V3 satellites; the Super Heavy booster had engine trouble and was lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Stacked, Starship stands ~124 m. Flight 14 is targeted for late August — its first attempt at operational orbit with production Starlink. •    Sources: SpaceX / @elonmusk on X (7 Aug); Space.com (Mike Wall, 7 Aug); CNN (3 Aug). Landspace Zhuque-3, second landing attempt •    Landspace (private, Beijing, founded 2015) targets liftoff ~7:45 p.m. EDT Mon 10 Aug (23:45 UTC / ≈9:45 a.m. AEST Tue 11 Aug) from Jiuquan, aiming for a propulsive first-stage recovery on legs (Falcon 9-style), landing downrange in Gansu. •    The methalox, stainless-steel Zhuque-3 (~66 m) is broadly a Falcon 9 rival. Its Dec 2025 maiden flight reached orbit but the first stage failed its landing burn and crashed. •    Accuracy note: this is China’s fourth orbital-class recovery attempt. A Long March 10B already landed via net-capture on 10 July (China became the 2nd nation to land an orbital booster) — so tonight would make Landspace the first Chinese company to attempt a propulsive/landing-legs recovery, not “China’s first.” •    Sources: Space.com (7 Aug); Yahoo/Space (7 Aug); launch trackers (NOTAM-based). Uranus’s “breathing” bow shock •    New multifluid-MHD modelling shows Uranus’s bow shock expands and contracts over a single ~17-hour Uranian day — driven by the planet’s own extreme rotation and tilted, offset magnetic field, not by changes in the solar wind. •    The model is constrained by Voyager 2’s 1986 flyby — still the only direct measurements ever taken inside the Uranian system (a nice callback to E159’s Voyager 2 “Big Bang” lead). •    Implications for future ice-giant missions and for the many ice-giant exoplanets now being found. Cao et al., AGU Advances; surfaced via an Eos research spotlight this week. (Framed as newly-spotlighted rather than newly-published.) •    Sources: AGU Advances (Cao et al.); Eos research spotlight; phys.org (7 Aug). Total solar eclipse — 12 August 2026 •    The only total solar eclipse of 2026. Unusual over-the-pole path: Arctic Siberia → eastern Greenland → western Iceland → northern Spain (clipping NE Portugal) → the Balearics at sunset. •    Greatest eclipse ≈17:46 UTC; max totality 2 min 18 s just off Iceland’s west coast, with the Sun only ~26° high. Iceland’s first total eclipse since 1954 (Reykjavik’s first in 593 years); Spain’s first since 1905. •    North America sees a partial across the northern tier (Alaska to North Carolina) and most of Canada — deepest in the far north, a shallow bite (<10%) from the US Northeast, late morning to early afternoon local. NASA livestream from 1:15 p.m. EDT at nasa.gov/live. •    Not visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Sources: NASA eclipse pages; national eclipse guides. Skywatch — both hemispheres •    Perseids peak the night of 12–13 August under a new Moon — excellent for the Northern Hemisphere (up to ~50–100/hr from dark sites, best pre-dawn 13 Aug); modest and low for the Southern Hemisphere. •    Southern-Hemisphere targets: a pre-dawn planet spread; brilliant evening Venus (brightest ~22 Sep); Comet 10P/Tempel 2 low in the pre-dawn south (binoculars/small scope, dark site). •    Aurora watch: a G2 storm produced auroras 7–9 Aug; more activity is possible around 11–12 Aug for high-latitude watchers. •    Eye safety: certified ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses required for all partial phases; never view the Sun through an unfiltered camera, binoculars or telescope.

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This weekend on Astronomy Daily: the Inouye Solar Telescope reveals whirlpools on the Sun’s surface for the first time, a Falcon 9 upper stage carves a fresh crater on the Moon, Voyager 2 pulls off a daring "Big Bang" power swap 21 billion kilometres away, and the LINK spacecraft wins its de-spin battle in the race to save NASA’s Swift. Plus your both-hemispheres guide to the 12 August total solar eclipse and the moonless Perseid peak. In this episode ●        (01:20) LEAD — First-ever sighting of Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices on the Sun (Nature, 5 Aug; Inouye Solar Telescope / NSO / MPS) ●        (09:00) Falcon 9 upper stage 2025-010D impacts the Moon near Einstein Crater ●        (12:15) Voyager 2’s "Big Bang" power swap buys another year of interstellar science ●        (15:30) LINK spins down from 9°/s to 1.47°/s — software update next in the Swift rescue ●        (18:45) Skywatch: 12 Aug total solar eclipse + Perseid peak — both hemispheres, with eye-safety Links & sources ●        Nature: Kuridze et al., "Ubiquitous Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities driving plasma mixing on the Sun" (5 Aug 2026) ●        NSO / NSF and Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research press releases (5 Aug 2026) ●        NASA/JPL Voyager blog: "NASA Engineers Help Prolong Voyager 2’s Science Mission" (4 Aug 2026) ●        NASA Science Swift blog: LINK stabilisation update; ESA & NASA eclipse pages for 12 Aug 2026

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Astronomy Daily · S05E161 · “The Colour of Empty Space” · Friday 7 August 2026. Hosts: Anna & Avery. astronomydaily.io · @AstroDailyPod ① Vacuum birefringence: reading a magnetar ●        NASA’s IXPE, with NICER and the Parkes/Murriyang radio telescope (NSW), measured the polarised X-rays of magnetar 1E 1547.0−5408. ●        Result: soft X-ray polarisation ~65% at 2 keV, rising to nearly 80% at some rotation phases — the strongest signal yet of vacuum birefringence, a QED effect predicted by Heisenberg in 1936. ●        The team calls it the “most definitive signal to date,” not a confirmed detection; an April 2026 analysis disputes it under different geometry. Co-leads: Rachael Stewart; Hoa Dinh Thi (Rice); with Marcus Lower (Swinburne). ●        Source: Stewart et al., Nature, 5 Aug 2026 (DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-10859-z); NASA IXPE release. ② Gateway HALO hardware → Lunar Infrastructure Demos ●        NASA and Northrop Grumman are repurposing the HALO module’s power, data and avionics into three surface missions — LID-1, LID-2, LID-3. ●        Goal: “survive-the-night” power and thermal tech for the lunar South Pole, where night lasts ~14 Earth days and temperatures plunge below −200 °C. ●        Part of a wider Moon-base update in which four commercial landers reached final qualification testing at once. ●        Source: NASA & Northrop Grumman releases, 4 Aug 2026; Spaceflight Now. ③ New Glenn: the cause is a valve ●        Blue Origin traced the 28 May New Glenn booster explosion (during a pad hot-fire at Cape Canaveral) to the main oxygen valve on one of the seven BE-4 engines. ●        Fix: small, retrofittable valve modifications; return to flight still targeted by year’s end. The BE-4 also powers ULA’s Vulcan. ●        Source: Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, 5 Aug 2026; SpaceNews. ④ LINK’s de-spin: the fight to save Swift ●        Katalyst Space’s LINK robot — tasked with boosting NASA’s ageing Swift observatory before re-entry — hit a multi-axis tumble when two of three reaction wheels failed. ●        Using gimballed electric-propulsion thrusters, the team cut the spin from ~9°/s to ~1.47°/s on under 100 g of propellant. A flight-software update is next; rendezvous slips to ~end of August. ●        Source: NASA Swift blog, 6 Aug 2026; Katalyst mission updates. ⑤ Skywatch: eclipse + Perseids ●        12 Aug total solar eclipse — totality across Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain; afternoon partial for eastern Canada and the NE United States (>10% only NE of the NYC–Rochester line; ~50% in Atlantic Canada). NASA live from 1:15 pm EDT. ●        Perseid peak the night of 12–13 Aug under a New Moon — up to ~100/hr from dark rural sites. ●        Southern Hemisphere: eclipse not visible; Perseids barely clear the horizon. Sydney: pre-dawn planet line-up + Venus + winter Milky Way. ●        EYE SAFETY: use only ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses for every partial phase; never combine them with a camera, telescope or binoculars.
 

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Astronomy Daily · S05E160 · 6 August 2026. In this episode: a Falcon 9 upper stage confirmed to have struck the Moon; a live ISS spacewalk; supernova SN 2026gzf caught at first light; SpaceX Crew-13 previewed; and a both-hemispheres guide to the 12 August eclipse and Perseids. FALCON 9 LUNAR IMPACT (LEAD) ●        Spent upper stage 2025-010D struck near Einstein Crater (~19.4°N, 93.3°W) at ~06:35 UTC, 5 Aug 2026 — matching Bill Gray / Project Pluto predictions. ●        ESO’s Very Large Telescope (Paranal) detected sodium and lithium in the impact plume for ~5–10 minutes — sodium from lunar soil, lithium likely from the rocket. ●        NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter holds a pre-impact baseline and will image the fresh crater, giving a rare before-and-after dataset to validate hollow-body impact models for future landers. ●        Origin: Falcon 9 launched 15 Jan 2025 with Firefly Blue Ghost 1 and ispace Resilience; the stage was left adrift and returned unplanned via solar activity and gravity. ●        Sources: NASA; ESO / VLT; CNN; Project Pluto (projectpluto.com); Fernando et al., arXiv:2607.14625. ISS SPACEWALK — U.S. EVA 96 ●        NASA’s Jessica Meir (Expedition 75 commander) and Anil Menon; ~6.5 h EVA beginning ~08:35 EDT, 6 Aug; live on NASA+. ●        Task: reconfigure the 3B power channel to accept a seventh roll-out solar array later in 2026 — part of station upkeep ahead of the planned 2030 deorbit. ●        Menon’s first spacewalk; two further EVAs scheduled 13 and 25 Aug. ●        Sources: NASA / NASA+ ; NASA ISS blog. SUPERNOVA SN 2026GZF ●        X-ray “shock breakout” (EP260321a) detected by China’s Einstein Probe on 21 Mar 2026 from a galaxy ~500 million light-years away; follow-up revealed a broad-lined Type Ic supernova. ●        Unusually, no gamma-ray burst and no lasting relativistic jet — and the faintest shock breakout yet linked to this class; a possible missing link between ordinary and GRB-producing supernovae. ●        Follow-up used NSF NOIRLab facilities including DECam and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Two teams: O’Connor et al. (CMU) and Rastinejad et al. (UMD), in ApJL. ●        Sources: NSF NOIRLab; Carnegie Mellon University; The Astrophysical Journal Letters. SPACEX CREW-13 ●        Targeting NET 12 Sep 2026 aboard Crew Dragon Grace from SLC-40, Cape Canaveral. ●        Crew: Jessica Watkins (NASA, cmdr — first NASA astronaut to fly Dragon twice), Luke Delaney (NASA, pilot), Joshua Kutryk (CSA), Sergey Teteryatnikov (Roscosmos). 180-day stay; moved up from November. ●        Sources: NASA; SpaceX; Houston Public Media. SKYWATCH — 12 AUGUST & BEYOND ●        Total solar eclipse 12 Aug: totality across E Greenland, W Iceland, N Spain and NE Portugal (max 2m18s). Partial across northern US (Alaska–N Carolina), most of Canada, much of Europe and NW Africa. NASA livestream from 1:15 pm EDT. ●        US partial highlights: Presque Isle ME ~29% (contiguous-US max); NYC ~9% from ~1:07 pm EDT; Boston ~16%; Toronto ~8%; Montreal ~18%; St John’s ~53%. ●        Perseids peak 12–13 Aug under a new Moon (northern-favoured, up to ~100/hr from dark northern sites). ●        Southern Hemisphere: pre-dawn planet parade (Saturn best, near opposition; Mars, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune), brilliant Venus in the evening west, and the winter Milky Way high overhead. ●        Look-ahead: deep partial lunar eclipse 28 Aug (96% umbral), favouring the Americas. ●        SAFETY: use only ISO 12312-2 certified eclipse glasses / solar filters during any partial phase. ●        Sources: NASA; ESA; Sky & Telescope; BBC Sky at Night; EarthSky; timeanddate.com; The Planetary Society.

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Astronomy Daily S05E159 — Wednesday, 5 August 2026. In this episode: a power-saving “Big Bang” keeps Voyager 2 doing science, direct-to-phone satellites reach orbit, Curiosity finds a vast honeycomb field on its 14th Martian anniversary, and NASA’s Aspera prepares to hunt the universe’s missing gas. ① Voyager 2’s “Big Bang” power save •   JPL engineers freed up power by simultaneously switching off certain devices and substituting lower-power alternatives, while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to operate. •   The Voyagers run on radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) and lose ~4 watts per year as their plutonium decays; after nearly 50 years, power margins are razor-thin. •   The move keeps three instruments — magnetometer, plasma wave subsystem and cosmic ray subsystem — running at least a year longer; the same swap is planned for Voyager 1. •   Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause in Nov 2018 and is now >13 billion miles (21 billion km) from Earth; its southerly path means it is commanded via the Canberra Deep Space Network dish. Source: NASA/JPL Voyager blog, 4 Aug 2026 · science.nasa.gov/blogs/voyager ② AST SpaceMobile BlueBird 11–13 •   Three next-generation direct-to-smartphone satellites launched on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral (liftoff targeted 3:42 a.m. EDT, 5 Aug; backup 5:10 a.m.). •   Their phased-array antennas span ~2,400 sq ft — the largest commercial arrays ever deployed in low Earth orbit — and connect to standard, unmodified phones. •   They deliver nearly double the peak download speed of the first-generation BlueBirds (which hit ~98.9 Mbps to a phone); the company targets beta service later in 2026. Source: AST SpaceMobile / Space.com, Aug 2026 · confirm deployment before publish ③ Curiosity’s “sea of polygons” + 14 years •   Curiosity found its largest-ever field of honeycomb-like polygonal fractures (each ~4–8 cm across) in a valley nicknamed “Valle Grande” on Mount Sharp. •   The 360° panorama was captured on 19–20 June from 340 images; the polygons wrap around a ~6 m butte nicknamed “Miraflores.” •   Such patterns point to ancient water — drying mud, wet–dry cycles, or compaction — consistent with lakes and streams once present on Mount Sharp’s foothills. •   Today, 5 August, is Curiosity’s 14th landing anniversary (landed 5 Aug 2012). Source: NASA/JPL, announced ~29 Jul 2026 · jpl.nasa.gov ④ NASA’s Aspera (mission preview) •   Aspera is a shoebox-sized NASA Pioneers smallsat launching NET 15 Aug on a Rocket Lab Electron from Mahia, New Zealand. •   It is the first NASA astrophysics mission to map the circumgalactic medium — hot gas around galaxies — in ultraviolet light, tracing the “missing baryons.” •   Led by Carlos Vargas at the University of Arizona, one of the youngest principal investigators in NASA history. Source: NASA Pioneers / Rocket Lab, 2026 · rocketlabcorp.com ⑤ Skywatch •   Tonight (5 Aug): Last Quarter Moon; Mars forms a triangle with Elnath and cluster M35 (binoculars help). •   12 Aug: total solar eclipse (Arctic–Greenland–Iceland–northern Spain; partial for parts of the US) — not visible from Australia; use ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses. •   12–13 Aug: Perseid peak under a New Moon (NH-favoured); plus a six-planet pre-dawn alignment. •   SH targets: eta-Eridanids peak 7 Aug; Sagittarius star fields; deep partial lunar eclipse 27–28 Aug (Americas + parts of Europe/Africa). Source: NASA Skywatching “What’s Up” Aug 2026; Sky & Telescope; timeanddate.com

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S05E158 — “The Crater Makers” · Tuesday 4 August 2026. Four stories on cosmic impacts — and a new map of the X-ray sky — plus a both-hemispheres skywatch. ① A dead Falcon 9 is about to crater the Moon ●        A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage (catalogued 2025-010D) is predicted to strike the Moon near Einstein Crater on 5 Aug 2026 at ~06:35 UTC — the second documented uncontrolled rocket impact on the Moon. ●        The stage launched Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience landers in Jan 2025, then was stranded in a chaotic Earth orbit for ~18 months. Impact speed ~2.4 km/s (~5,400 mph); expected crater ~17–27 m across. ●        Prediction by Bill Gray (Project Pluto). NASA’s LRO can image the site before and after; a ~two-dozen-author campaign is coordinating observers to chase the ejecta plume. ●        Governance angle: no international framework governs cislunar debris — a growing hazard as lunar traffic increases (callback to E154’s distant-retrograde-orbit debris study). Sources: Space.com / Forbes / Reuters (Cris Tolomia) — impact preview, 31 Jul–3 Aug 2026  ·  Project Pluto (Bill Gray) — 2025-010D impact page  ·  ZME Science — impact timing, 3 Aug 2026 ② Neptune’s inner moons: shrapnel of a shattered world ●        JWST NIRSpec spectroscopy of Neptune’s inner moons Larissa, Galatea and Proteus (Caltech; lead author Ryleigh Davis, Mike Brown’s group) detected magnesium-rich phyllosilicates — clay minerals that require liquid water and had never been seen beyond Jupiter. ●        The clays imply the material came from much larger, water-bearing worlds — evidence that Neptune’s original regular moon system was destroyed when Triton (a captured Kuiper Belt object) arrived. ●        Proteus, the largest of the three, lacks the clays — possibly re-heated and reprocessed after re-forming, hiding its history. Sources: Davis et al., Science Advances, 29 July 2026  ·  Caltech / phys.org press coverage, 29 Jul–3 Aug 2026  ·  Space.com (Charles Q. Choi), 3 Aug 2026 ③ “Charbroiled within hours”: impact dust and the dinosaurs ●        New modelling (Brandon Johnson et al., Purdue) argues ultrafine impact dust from Chicxulub acted as an insulating blanket, raising surface heating ~3.5× above the spherule-only estimate — enough to ignite global wildfires and kill exposed animals within hours. ●        The same dust then blocked sunlight for years — so the model adds a ferocious opening act to the established “impact winter,” rather than replacing it. Sheltering underground or underwater aided survival. ●        Caveat: the strongest physical wildfire evidence is so far confined to North America (per UCL’s Alfio Chiarenza, not involved in the study); a truly global fire record remains unconfirmed. Sources: Johnson, Johnson, Wakita & Robertson, JGR: Biogeosciences, 2026  ·  Popular Science / Space.com / ZME Science, 28 Jul–2 Aug 2026 ④ eROSITA DR2 — the X-ray sky doubles ●        The eROSITA telescope (SRG mission) released its second data set (DR2) on 31 July 2026: ~1.9 million pointlike and ~64,000 extended X-ray sources from the first three all-sky scans — nearly doubling the previously released eROSITA catalogue. ●        For scale: ROSAT catalogued ~130,000 sources in the 1990s and was the benchmark for 30 years. Lead author: Miriam Ramos-Ceja (MPE). ●        DR2 delivers the first direct census of cataclysmic-variable binaries sufficient to explain the decades-old Galactic Ridge X-ray Emission. It coincides with SDSS DR20 (Black Hole Mapper), enabling 3D mapping of active black holes. Sources: Ramos-Ceja et al. (eROSITA-DE), arXiv:2607.27772; DR2 release  ·  Max Planck Society press release, 29 July 2026  ·  phys.org, 31 Jul 2026 Skywatch — both hemispheres ●        Falcon 9 impact (5 Aug, ~06:35 UTC): not naked-eye; ejecta plume a long shot for advanced amateurs in the Americas near the western limb (~2:35 a.m. EDT). Sydney: Moon below horizon — watch for LRO after-images. ●        Comet 10P/Tempel 2: perihelion 2 Aug, closest to Earth 3 Aug (~0.41 AU); ~mag 8–9 near M30 in Capricornus. Best return of the century; Southern-Hemisphere-favoured; Northern viewers low on the southern horizon. Darkest window ~7–8 Aug. ●        This evening: Venus threads between Regulus (Leo) and Spica (Virgo) in the west — both hemispheres, no equipment. Mercury at its best morning showing (greatest western elongation 2 Aug), low in the pre-dawn east. ●        Diary — 12 Aug: total solar eclipse (Greenland/Iceland/Spain), moonless Perseid peak, six-planet alignment. Always use certified ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses / solar filters except during totality.

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Astronomy Daily · S05E157 · “The Edge of Everything” · Monday 3 August 2026 
In this episode •      The largest galaxy, measured at last. Ultra-deep imaging of IC 1101 in the Abell 2029 cluster has traced its outer edge for the first time: an edge radius of ~260 kpc, a diameter near 520 kpc (~1.7 million light-years), and ~3.4 trillion solar masses in stars — about 17× the width of the Milky Way. Faint outer structures aligned with cluster X-ray disturbances show it is still accreting. Source: Marrero-de la Rosa et al., “How large can galaxies be? Ultra-deep imaging of IC 1101”, accepted A&A (arXiv:2607.15340, 16 Jul 2026); phys.org, 31 Jul 2026; The Debrief, 1 Aug 2026. •      Hayabusa2's record asteroid flyby. JAXA confirmed (press conference 30 Jul) that its Hayabusa2 probe passed just 400 m from the surface of near-Earth asteroid Torifune on 5 July — 744 m from centre at >18,000 km/h — the closest asteroid flyby by any mission, plus the first-ever laser ranging of an asteroid during a flyby. Torifune proved to be a contact binary. Source: JAXA press conference, 30 Jul 2026; phys.org / Japan Today (AFP), 31 Jul 2026; autoevolution, 1 Aug 2026. •      UK's first orbital launch on hold. Rocket Factory Augsburg de-stacked its RFA One at SaxaVord Spaceport (Unst, Shetland) after finding a vehicle issue during hot-fire test prep (announced 28 Jul). The certified launch window opens 10 August; a successful flight would be the first orbital launch from UK soil. Source: RFA statement (X), 28 Jul 2026; Space.com, 1 Aug 2026; Shetland Times, 28 Jul 2026. •      Andromeda is winding down. A new Hubble study mapping ~200 million stars across two-thirds of Andromeda's disk finds star formation has declined over ~500 million years (from ~1 to ~0.2 solar masses/year), with the steepest drop in the last 40 million years — possibly linked to an interaction with satellite galaxy M32. Source: Williams et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 27 Jul 2026; NASA/STScI release, 27 Jul 2026. Skywatch — both hemispheres •      Comet 10P/Tempel 2 — perihelion 2 Aug; closest approach to Earth tonight (3 Aug). Binoculars/small scope, dark skies. Best pre-dawn from the Southern Hemisphere; ~9:30–10:30 pm local for mid-northern latitudes before moonrise. •      Moon near Saturn tonight (3 Aug) — naked-eye pairing, both hemispheres, up into dawn. •      Mercury at greatest western elongation (2 Aug) — low eastern horizon ~1 hr before sunrise, toward Gemini; Mars higher. Better placed for northern observers. •      Diary (2 days out): Falcon 9 upper stage (2025-010D) lunar impact near Einstein Crater, 5 Aug ~06:35 UTC — ~2:35 am EDT / 11:35 pm PDT (4 Aug); North America best-timed on the dark limb. Southern Hemisphere: ~4:35 pm AEST (daylight) — await orbiter after-images. •      Looking ahead: 12 Aug total solar eclipse (Greenland/Iceland/Spain) + moonless Perseid peak + six-planet dawn alignment. View partial phases only through certified ISO 12312-2 filters. Links & follow •      Website, back catalogue, news feed & newsletter: astronomydaily.io •      Social: @AstroDailyPod  ·  Part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network

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Astronomy Daily S05E156 — Weekend Space & Astronomy News Wrap. Saturday, 1 August 2026. In this episode •    The first “self-driving” telescope — a SkAI deep-learning system (Northwestern / UChicago / Fermilab) schedules and re-plans observations in real time on the Dark Energy Camera at the Blanco 4-m, Cerro Tololo, Chile — matching human schedulers across two runs. •    Betelgeuse's companion imaged — ESO's VLT delivers the clearest view yet of likely “Betelgeuse B,” ending a century-long search (recap, E153). •    (44) Nysa — first known three-lobed (trilobate) asteroid, plus a ~1 km moon, from LBT + VLT high-contrast imaging (recap, E155). •    A black hole's 300,000-light-year reach — XRISM traces quasar-driven winds from H1821+643 reshaping an entire galaxy cluster (recap, E154). •    August skywatch — Comet 10P/Tempel 2 at perihelion (2 Aug); total solar eclipse crossing Greenland, Iceland, Spain & Portugal (12 Aug) paired with a moonless Perseid peak (12–13 Aug); a six-planet line-up through the month.   Sources •    SkAI / self-driving telescope: Northwestern University news release, 31 July 2026; phys.org, 31 July 2026 (Blanco 4-m / DECam / Cerro Tololo). •    Betelgeuse companion: ESO / VLT; Montargès et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics (covered in E153). •    (44) Nysa: Large Binocular Telescope (SHARK-VIS) + VLT high-contrast imaging; Lowell Observatory release (covered in E155). •    Black-hole feedback: XRISM observations of quasar H1821+643 (covered in E154). •    Skywatch: timeanddate.com and Space.com August 2026 sky guides; Royal Observatory Greenwich 2026 highlights (eclipse path and Perseid peak details).   astronomydaily.io · @AstroDailyPod · Part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network

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S05E155 · Friday 31 July 2026 · Astronomy Daily with Anna & Avery. Four stories and a both-hemispheres skywatch. Australian English. ① Asteroid (44) Nysa — the first three-lobed world, and its hidden moon ●        trilobate body — three lobes joined by two narrow necks; a candidate “first” of its kind. ●        A new ~1 km moon, S/2026 (44) 1, was found orbiting ≥170 km out — spotted using high-contrast imaging borrowed from exoplanet work, and confirmed moving across two observing runs. ●        The moon lets astronomers weigh Nysa (mass → density), which should help decide between a genuine contact-trinary and a single, deeply indented body. ●        Nysa is a bright, main-belt E-type (enstatite-rich) asteroid, ~75 km across, known since 1857. ●        Source: Lowell Observatory / University of Arizona press release, 29 Jul 2026; study “Unmasking (44) Nysa: Evidence for a Trilobate Structure” (Minker et al.). Coverage: Space.com, Gizmodo, 29–30 Jul 2026. ② Mapping Alien Continents — a NASA concept to image an exoplanet’s surface ●        NASA’s 2026 NIAC round funds 18 early-stage “visionary” concepts (~$175k each, 9 months). These are seed studies, not missions. ●        Paul Stankus (Brookhaven) proposes “Mapping Alien Continents”: resolve the surface of an Earth-like exoplanet — continents, oceans — in visible light. ●        Method: a novel “dynamic hierarchical nulling” interferometer to suppress starlight at 10¹⁰-to-1 contrast, then combine beams from two spacecraft ~100 km apart (optical VLBI-style imaging). ●        Source: NASA “2026 Innovative Technology Concepts” release and NIAC selections (posted 21 Jul; consolidated release ~29 Jul 2026); Universe Today feature, 30 Jul 2026. ③ Solar-storm watch — CMEs inbound, minor-storm and aurora potential ●        Two faint coronal mass ejections, plus coronal-hole solar wind, are set to give Earth glancing blows; forecasters flag possible G1 (minor) geomagnetic storms and auroras over the coming days. ●        G1 means little grid impact but aurora visible at somewhat lower latitudes than usual — see the skywatch for where to look, both hemispheres. ●        Source: NOAA SWPC (WSA-ENLIL model); EarthSky / The Sun Today, 30 Jul 2026. ④ ESCAPADE’s family portrait of Earth and the Moon ●        NASA’s twin Mars orbiters (“Blue” and “Gold,” built by Rocket Lab) imaged Earth and the Moon as thin crescents in visible and thermal-infrared light from a loiter orbit near Sun–Earth L2. ●        In infrared, Earth’s night side glows with its own heat; the Moon’s shadowed half is far colder — a calibration check before Mars. ●        ESCAPADE’s science goal (arrival Sept 2027): measure how the solar wind strips Mars’s unshielded atmosphere — the payoff of today’s solar-wind thread. ●        Source: NASA (Goddard) image feature, ~25 Jul 2026 (images captured 3 Jul); NAU / phys.org; Universe Today, 29 Jul 2026. Skywatch — both hemispheres ●        Bright waning-gibbous Moon (post-Buck-Moon, 29 Jul) washes out faint targets. ●        Southern Delta Aquariids + Alpha Capricornids just past peak (SH-favoured; Moon-hampered). Perseids build to a near-moonless peak on the night of 12–13 Aug — prime for North America, low in the north for the SH. ●        12 Aug total solar eclipse: totality across Greenland / Iceland / Spain; partial for parts of northern North America and Europe. ISO 12312-2 eye protection required for any partial phase. ●        Pre-dawn planets low in the east (Sydney and North American framing). Aurora watch for high latitudes both hemispheres if the storms land. ●        Diary: a spent Falcon 9 upper stage (2025-010D) is predicted to hit the Moon near Einstein Crater on 5 Aug 2026, ~06:35 UTC (~2:34 a.m. ET). North America best-timed; telescope needed, Moon ~56% lit, target the limb dust plume. From Sydney the Moon is down at impact — rely on LRO after-images. Callback to E125/E147. Source: Fernando et al., arXiv 2607.14625.

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Astronomy Daily S05E154 — “The Reach of a Giant.” Thursday, 30 July 2026. Hosted by Anna and Avery. In this episode •    A supermassive black hole caught heating and stirring an entire galaxy cluster — turbulence reaching ~300,000 light-years, about 100× more energetic than expected (XRISM / quasar H1821+643). •    Why some “clean” white dwarfs are secretly feasting: magnetic fields funnel shredded planetary debris to the poles, aurora-style, hiding the meal. •    NASA’s Psyche used its Mars flyby as a dress rehearsal — spotting Phobos and Deimos from afar to practise for its 2029 moonlet hunt at asteroid 16 Psyche. •    A new study on keeping the road to the Moon clear: modelling how debris disperses in Distant Retrograde Orbits as cislunar traffic climbs. •    Skywatch: tonight’s double meteor shower — the Southern Delta Aquariids and Alpha Capricornids — with both-hemispheres viewing details and local times. Sources •    Yamada, S. et al., “Vigorous turbulence driven by quasar-mode feedback in a cluster core,” Nature Astronomy, 28 July 2026 (DOI 10.1038/s41550-026-02939-x; arXiv 2607.24911). Tohoku University release. •    “White Dwarfs Eat More Planetary Debris Than Thought, But Magnetic Fields Hide It,” Universe Today, 29 July 2026 (Pham et al., arXiv 2607.20747). •    “NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Aces Mars Flyby,” NASA JPL / ScienceDaily, 28 July 2026. •    “The Risks of Debris Between the Earth and the Moon for Future Exploration,” Universe Today, 29 July 2026 (Chinese Academy of Sciences DRO study). •    Double meteor shower peak: American Meteor Society; NASA; Scientific American; CNN; National Geographic, 28–30 July 2026. Correction / caveat desk •    Skywatch numbers assume the ~98% waning Buck Moon (full 29 Jul). Faint Delta Aquariids will be washed out; the Alpha Capricornid fireballs are the reliable catch tonight.

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Astronomy Daily · S05E153 · Wednesday 29 July 2026. Four stories from the frontier of space and astronomy, plus a both-hemispheres look at the sky — and news of our brand-new website. In this episode •  Betelgeuse is not alone. ESO’s VLT/SPHERE has captured the clearest direct image yet of Betelgeuse B, the long-suspected companion to the famous red supergiant — ending a roughly century-long search. Published 28 July 2026 in Astronomy & Astrophysics (Montargès, Boccaletti et al.). The companion is more massive than predicted (≈2–3 solar masses), likely paces Betelgeuse’s ~6-year brightness cycle, and may eventually spiral into the supergiant. •  Swift catches a wandering black hole. TDE 2025abcr — the most off-centre tidal disruption event ever seen — reveals a ~1-million-solar-mass “wandering” black hole ~30,000 light-years from its galaxy’s core, ~750 million light-years away. First flagged by the Zwicky Transient Facility (Nov 2025) and pinned down with NASA’s Swift; an AI sifted ~500,000 nightly flashes to find it. Published 27 July 2026 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (Stein et al.; Carney et al.). •  Roman is fuelled for launch. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope completed fuelling on 25 July (≈290 gallons of hydrazine) and holds its mission-preview briefing today — one month from a 30 August launch, roughly eight months ahead of schedule. Roman will survey ~50× as much sky as Hubble in five years, probe dark energy, and is expected to find 100,000+ exoplanets via microlensing. •  Swift’s rescue mission is in trouble. Katalyst’s LINK servicing spacecraft — launched 3 July to boost the decaying Swift observatory — began spinning over the weekend; two of three reaction wheels are non-operable, with some cold-gas thruster degradation. LINK remains powered and in contact; the team is using its electric (xenon) thrusters to arrest the spin before deciding, with NASA, whether to proceed. Developing story — details accurate as of recording. •  Skywatch. Full Buck Moon tonight (29 July); Jupiter at solar conjunction; Southern Delta Aquariids favour the Southern Hemisphere but are washed out by the Moon this year; Alpha Capricornid fireballs are the pick for both hemispheres; the Perseids peak on the moonless night of 12–13 August alongside a total solar eclipse (Greenland/Iceland/Spain; partial for parts of Europe and North America). Never view the partial phases without ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses. Sources •  ESO release eso2611 & Astronomy & Astrophysics, Montargès, Boccaletti et al., “VLT/SPHERE imaging of the candidate companion of Betelgeuse” (28 Jul 2026). •  NASA Swift / The Astrophysical Journal Letters — TDE 2025abcr wandering-black-hole discovery (27 Jul 2026); UNC-Chapel Hill release. •  NASA — Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope fuelling & launch-preview updates (25–29 Jul 2026). •  NASA Swift blog — “Commissioning Update for Spacecraft to Boost NASA’s Swift” (28 Jul 2026); Katalyst Space Technologies. •  EarthSky, NASA, American Meteor Society, timeanddate — meteor showers, Buck Moon, Jupiter conjunction, 12 Aug eclipse. New — astronomydaily.io Our new website is live: full back catalogue, a continuously-updating space-news feed, listener reviews (read and leave your own), and a daily newsletter sign-up. Got a question or a story tip? Drop us a note — and tell us what you think of the new site.

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Astronomy Daily S05E152 — “Reading the Heat” · Tuesday 28 July 2026. Hosts Anna & Avery. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has taken the first-ever temperature reading beneath the surface of Io, Jupiter’s volcanic moon — and the technique behind it could reshape how we study icy ocean moons and even volcanoes on Earth. We also look at why JWST’s “Little Red Dots” might be globular clusters being born, the first SETI search built from archived ALMA data (and its six-million-star surprise), and a live burst of space weather feeding into a meteor-filled — if Moon-washed — skywatch. In this episode ●        Juno reads Io’s subsurface temperature for the first time — >20°C rise within a few metres, heat flow up to ~30× Earth’s average, and a remarkably smooth, low-density surface. ●        Why the method matters: a multi-depth microwave thermometer that works from orbit — promising for Europa, Enceladus, and terrestrial volcanology. ●        JWST’s “Little Red Dots” may be globular clusters in formation, powered by a short-lived supermassive star — linking two long-standing mysteries. ●        The first SETI survey of archived ALMA data opens the millimetre band — and reveals “stellar bycatch” of 6.1 million background stars. ●        Live space weather: an M3.2 flare from region AR4494 and a glancing CME, with G1–G2 storms and possible aurorae, north and south. ●        Skywatch: meteor week under the full Buck Moon (29 July), the Alpha Capricornid fireball tip, evening Venus, pre-dawn Saturn/Mars/Mercury — and Jupiter vanishing behind the Sun. Sources ●        NASA/JPL — “NASA’s Juno Takes Temperature of Jupiter’s Fiery Moon Io” (22 July 2026); Brown et al., J. Geophys. Res.: Planets, DOI 10.1029/2025JE009622. ●        Chisholm et al., “Little Red Dots as Globular Clusters in Formation,” Astrophysical Journal Letters (press cycle 20 July 2026; UT Austin / McDonald Observatory). ●        L. Mason (University of Manchester), first ALMA-archive SETI survey, RAS National Astronomy Meeting 2026. ●        Space-weather status: EarthSky Sun news / NOAA SWPC (M3.2 flare AR4494, 26 July; 24 July CME; G1–G2 outlook, 27–28 July). ●        Skywatch data: EarthSky, Star Walk, American Meteor Society, NASA — Southern Delta Aquariids (peak ~30 July), Alpha Capricornids (30–31 July), full Buck Moon 29 July, Jupiter solar conjunction 29 July.
 

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Astronomy Daily · S05E151 · “The Faint Little World Has Its Day” · Monday 27 July 2026 · Hosts Anna & Avery. Pluto has its brightest night of the year — so we go deep on the world nobody can agree how to label. Then a crew comes home after 241 days, the galaxy’s most common planet turns out to maybe hide oceans of molten rock, and the first black hole ever photographed gets a sharper, two-colour read. In this episode LEAD — PLUTO AT OPPOSITION •    Tonight Pluto sits opposite the Sun in Capricornus, near its closest point to Earth (~34.5 AU) and at its brightest for the year — yet still only magnitude ~15. •    The full arc: Percival Lowell’s “Planet X,” Clyde Tombaugh’s 1930 discovery by blink comparator, and the name suggested by 11-year-old Venetia Burney. •    The 2006 IAU reclassification to “dwarf planet” (the “clearing the neighbourhood” rule) — and the still-live debate between dynamical and geophysical definitions of a planet. •    What New Horizons found in 2015: the nitrogen-ice plain of Sputnik Planitia, the famous “heart,” water-ice mountains, a hazy atmosphere, and a possible subsurface ocean. STORY 2 — HOME AFTER 241 DAYS •    Soyuz MS-28 lands in Kazakhstan with NASA’s Chris Williams and cosmonauts Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev; ~3,856 orbits, 102M+ miles; Expedition 74→75 handover to Jessica Meir. STORY 3 — SUB-NEPTUNES •    New ASU modelling: deep clouds of vaporised rock and salt can act as a thermal blanket, potentially sustaining a hidden magma ocean and reshaping how we read JWST spectra. STORY 4 — M87 IN TWO COLOURS •    A Shanghai Astronomical Observatory-led team builds the first spatially-resolved dual-frequency spectral map of M87* (1.3 mm + 3.5 mm, EHT + GMVA), linking the famous ring to the real physics of plasma at the event horizon. SKYWATCH — BOTH HEMISPHERES •    South: Southern Delta Aquariids peaking (ZHR ~25) + Comet 10P/Tempel improving into August. North: Mu Cephei, Herschel’s Garnet Star, high in Cepheus. Both: Pluto at opposition, Saturn after midnight in Pisces. Caveat: a ~95% Moon washes out faint targets this week. Sources •    NASA — “Astronaut Chris Williams, Crewmates Return from Space Station.” •    ASU News / The Astrophysical Journal Letters — Mukherjee et al., clouds and the interiors of sub-Neptunes. •    The Astrophysical Journal Letters — Zhao et al., “Spatially Resolved Spectral Properties of M87* on Event Horizon Scales” (DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ae84ca). •    Explore Scientific / Star Walk / astronomy.com — July 2026 observing notes (Pluto opposition, Southern Delta Aquariids, Comet 10P/Tempel, Mu Cephei).

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Astronomy Daily · S05E150 · “Lucky Thirteen” · Saturday 25 July 2026. Your Weekend Wrap: Starship Flight 13 finally flies and floats, the strongest exomoon candidate yet, a robotic satellite-servicer on its way to GEO, and what the Moon’s far side reveals about Earth — plus a both-hemispheres skywatch. In this episode Chapter Segment 00:00 Cold open & headlines 01:30 LEAD: Starship Flight 13 flies — softest splashdown yet, first real Starlink V3 deploy 09:00 Exo-satellite at CD-35 2722 — strongest exomoon candidate yet (Nature) 11:45 Northrop Grumman MRV-MEP — a mechanic for the geostationary belt 14:30 Chang’e-6 — the Moon’s far side records Earth’s magnetosphere (Nature Geoscience) 17:15 Skywatch — Buck Moon, Delta Aquariids, the 12 Aug Perseids + total solar eclipse 20:45 Sign-off Sources & further reading STARSHIP FLIGHT 13 •     Space.com — Starship’s “softest splashdown” yet after Flight 13 — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/spacexs-starship-megarocket-makes-the-softest-splashdown-ever-after-launching-next-gen-starlink-satellites-in-flight-13-test-video •     UPI — Starship successful flight test, splashes down in Indian Ocean — https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/07/24/Starship-has-successful-flight-test-splash-down-in-Indian-Ocean/3791784840519/ •     CNN — Starship hits key milestones in “Lucky 13” test flight — https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-starship-flight-13-launch EXO-SATELLITE CD-35 2722 •     ESO — New “exomoon” detection challenges cosmic labels — https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2610/ •     Nature (paper) — Planetary-mass exosatellite around a substellar companion — https://www.nature.com/ •     Phys.org — Jupiter-mass “exomoon” orbiting a brown dwarf — https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jupiter-mass-exomoon-orbiting-brown.html MRV-MEP SATELLITE SERVICING •     Northrop Grumman — MRV launches, ushering in a new era of in-space servicing — https://news.northropgrumman.com/launch/northrop-grummans-mission-robotic-vehicle-launches-ushering-in-a-new-era-of-in-space-servicing •     Spaceflight Now — Novel geosynchronous robotic servicing satellite launch — https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/21/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-novel-geosynchronous-robotic-servicing-satellite-on-decade-long-mission/ CHANG’E-6 FAR-SIDE SOLAR WIND •     Nature Geoscience — Deeper solar wind penetration on the Moon’s far side — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-026-02042-w •     EurekAlert! / CAS — Chang’e-6 samples reveal how Earth slows the solar wind — https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1136535 SKYWATCH •     EarthSky — Delta Aquariid meteor shower 2026 — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-delta-aquarid-meteor-shower/ •     EarthSky — Visible planets & night-sky guide / 12 Aug total solar eclipse — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ Astronomy Daily is part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network. Follow @AstroDailyPod and find every episode at astronomydaily.io.

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Astronomers have confirmed the first moon-like object beyond our solar system — and immediately discovered our vocabulary cannot handle it. A Jupiter-mass world orbits a brown dwarf, which orbits a red dwarf, seventy light-years away. Is it a moon? A planet? Something we have not named yet? Also on today’s show: the Milky Way’s most powerful particle accelerator is confirmed in the direction of Altair, out-punching the Large Hadron Collider by a factor of a hundred. Chandra catches a black hole starving a galaxy it does not even live in. China flies the world’s largest solid rocket from the open ocean for the first time. Starship Flight 13 gets another window. And the Moon meets the heart of the Scorpion. Chapters Time Chapter 00:00 Cold open — what is a moon, exactly? 00:35 Welcome and headlines 01:15 The first exo-satellite — CD-35 2722 05:55 The galaxy’s most powerful particle accelerator 10:00 The Red Potato galaxy and its hostile neighbour 13:35 Gravity-1 launches from the open sea 16:55 Starship Flight 13 — when and where to watch 19:10 Skywatch — the Moon and Antares 22:30 Sign-off Story sources 1. First confirmed exo-satellite •      Hoy, K., Zurlo, A., Peña R, P.A. et al. “Planetary-mass exosatellite detected around the substellar companion of a star.” Nature 655, 865–869 (2026). •      European Southern Observatory release eso2610a, 23 July 2026. •      Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, Cerro Paranal, Chile. 2. Proton PeVatron confirmed •      Mizuno, T., Sano, H., Murase, T., Oka, T., Suzuki, H., Nakahara, N. “Hadronic Scenario for Galactic PeVatron LHAASO J1912+1014u Supported by Fermi-LAT Gamma-Ray Data and FUGIN CO Data.” The Astrophysical Journal, 16 July 2026. •      Hiroshima University news release; instruments: Fermi-LAT, Nobeyama 45 m / FUGIN survey, Chandra X-ray Observatory. 3. The Red Potato galaxy •      NASA / Chandra X-ray Observatory news release, July 2026. Wang, W., Cantalupo, S., Travascio, A. et al., University of Milano-Bicocca. •      Galaxy designation MQN01 J004131.9-493704, redshift approximately 3.25. Original JWST identification announced January 2026; the Chandra jet result is the new element. 4. Gravity-1 open-sea launch •      Orienspace Gravity-1 Y4, third flight. Liftoff 0254 UTC, 22 July 2026, from a launch service ship approximately 170 km east of Shanghai. •      Reporting via SpaceNews, CGTN and Space.com. Nine payloads including six Huantian constellation satellites. 5. Starship Flight 13 •      SpaceX; live coverage via Spaceflight Now and Space.com. Booster 20 / Ship 40, second flight of Starship V3. •      Launch window opens 24 July 2026 at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 UTC). Payload: 20 Starlink V3 satellites. 6. Skywatch •      Astronomy.com Sky This Week; timeanddate.com Moon guide; EarthSky visible planets guide. •      Moon 0.6° south of Antares, 6:00 p.m. EDT 24 July. Full Buck Moon 29 July, 14:36 UTC, in Capricornus. 
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Astronomy Daily S05E148 — "Far Side" Thursday 23 July 2026 Starship gets a second shot at Flight 13 — with a schedule caveat worth knowing about. The first far-side lunar samples reveal that Earth has been quietly shielding the side of the Moon that faces us. Astronomers debate whether the lunar far side should be closed to industry. The Milky Way's only helium nova finally steps out from behind twenty-five years of dust. And the case that our entire galaxy once turned over. Plus a skywatch closer with a straightforward piece of advice about the Delta Aquariids: do not wait for the peak.

In this episode Starship Flight 13 ●        Window opens 6:45pm EDT / 2245 GMT Thursday 23 July — 8:45am AEST and 10:45am NZST Friday 24 July. ●        Schedule is not locked: Starbase road and beach closure notices point to further Pad 2 testing. ●        The 16 July attempt aborted at T-0 when four of 33 Raptors missed start parameters; the limit is three. ●        Two Raptors were removed and replaced before this attempt. ●        First-ever Starship deployment of V3 Starlink satellites — 20 of them. ●        Super Heavy splashes down in the Gulf at ~7 minutes; Ship targets the Indian Ocean off Western Australia at ~65 minutes. No catch attempts. Chang'e-6 and the solar wind ●        Published in Nature Geoscience by a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geology and Geophysics. ●        Based on 1,935 grams of regolith returned from the South Pole–Aitken basin on the lunar far side. ●        First direct laboratory comparison of solar wind implantation between the near and far sides. ●        Far-side soil records faster, deeper-penetrating particles; the neon isotope ratio sits below every near-side sample measured. ●        About a quarter of the solar wind exposure at the Chang'e-5 near-side site involved wind decelerated by Earth's magnetosphere. The far-side site shows none. ●        Opens the possibility of using lunar noble gases as a fossil record of Earth's magnetic field over deep time. The far side debate — NAM 2026 ●        Held Tuesday 21 July at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting, University of Birmingham. Convened by Prof Martin Ward. ●        For the motion: Prof Joe Silk (Johns Hopkins) and Dr Jonathan McDowell (Durham Space Research Centre). ●        Against: Dr Nikita Chiu (Durham) and Dr Manuel Salvoldi (aerospace engineer and educator). ●        For: the far side is the only radio-quiet site near Earth — critical for detecting the cosmic dark ages, and an exceptional platform for gravitational wave detection. ●        Against: commercial investment is what makes lunar exploration sustainable, and governance can let science and industry coexist. ●        Audience support for the motion rose from 68% to 76% across the debate. V445 Puppis ●        Presented at NAM 2026 by John Mills, University of Warwick. ●        The only confirmed helium nova in the Milky Way. Erupted in late 2000, then vanished behind its own dust for over twenty years. ●        Now confirmed as a white dwarf accreting from a rare stripped helium star — only a few thousand such stars are thought to exist in the entire galaxy. ●        Orbital period of 3.7 days, roughly double previous estimates. Mass transfer has resumed. ●        Unexplained high-speed "bullets" of possibly oxygen-rich gas travelling up to 20 million mph (~9,000 km/s) — never seen in any other nova. ●        Data from ESO's Very Large Telescope, Hubble, the Southern African Large Telescope and TESS. ●        Helium novae may be one pathway to Type Ia supernovae, the standard candles used to measure cosmic expansion. The Milky Way disc flip ●        Presented at NAM 2026 by Kirill Batrakov, Durham University. ●        Based on 25 Milky Way-like galaxies in the Auriga simulation suite, followed across roughly 11 billion years. ●        Galaxies with the most slowly rotating stellar haloes shared a major head-on merger and a disc reorientation greater than 90 degrees. ●        Our stellar halo rotates at only 10–20 km/s; the disc moves at around 220 km/s. ●        The Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus collision roughly 10 billion years ago is the candidate trigger. ●        Batrakov describes a disc flip as likely rather than confirmed, and is looking for independent signatures. ●        Separate 2026 work led by Ling Zhu, using 600,000+ giant stars from Gaia and LAMOST, found the outer dark matter halo oriented almost vertically to the stellar disc — consistent with the disc having tilted. Skywatch ●        Southern Delta Aquariids are active now, running into late August, with maximum around 30 July. ●        Full Moon on 29 July means peak night is close to 98% illuminated — the worst conditions of the run. ●        Best window: the pre-dawn mornings from now until roughly 27 July, after moonset. ●        Radiant near Skat in Aquarius. Use Fomalhaut and the Great Square of Pegasus to locate it. ●        Australia and New Zealand: radiant climbs near overhead. Best from around 2am to first light. ●        North America: radiant sits low in the south — fewer meteors, but a better chance of long-trailed earthgrazers. Same 2am-to-dawn window, local time. ●        Sunspot region AR4493 has grown rapidly to beta-gamma-delta complexity — the highest classification — and has already fired three M-class flares in a day. Worth watching aurora alerts. Sources ●        SpaceX / Space.com — Starship Flight 13 mission details and timing ●        Nature Geoscience — noble gas analysis of Chang'e-6 regolith (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geology and Geophysics) ●        Royal Astronomical Society — NAM 2026 far side governance debate ●        Royal Astronomical Society — NAM 2026, V445 Puppis (John Mills, University of Warwick) ●        Royal Astronomical Society — NAM 2026, Milky Way disc flip (Kirill Batrakov, Durham University) ●        EarthSky and the American Meteor Society — Delta Aquariid observing guidance ●        NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center / EarthSky Sun News — AR4493 activity

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Astronomy Daily — S05E147: "Space Mechanic" Wednesday 22 July 2026 A spacecraft with robotic arms is on its way to geostationary orbit to keep other satellites alive. A discarded rocket stage is two weeks out from hitting the Moon, and twenty-three astronomers have just asked the world to watch. Plus the first binary star system where both stars exploded, the first complete magnetic map of a galaxy cluster, and the asteroid breakup that may have bombarded three worlds while Earth froze. In This Episode ●      The Space Mechanic Launches — Northrop Grumman's Mission Robotic Vehicle lifted off from Cape Canaveral on 21 July carrying three Mission Extension Pods. With two 3-metre robotic arms built by the US Naval Research Laboratory, it is designed to inspect, relocate, repair and refuel satellites in geostationary orbit. Each pod can give a 2,000 kg satellite up to eight more years of life. ●      UPDATE — The Rocket Aimed at the Moon — A new arXiv preprint signed by 23 astronomers calls for a coordinated observing campaign when Falcon 9 upper stage 2025-010D strikes the Moon near Einstein crater on 5 August. North America has the best seat: 2:34am EDT, with the paper naming observers in the Americas as the ideal group. Refined impact time, predicted crater size, and why the ejecta plume may be visible even if the flash is not. ●      Sibling Supernovae — Sixteen years of Fermi data reveal a faint supernova remnant hiding in the glare of the Jellyfish Nebula. The two may be the first known pair of remnants traced back to a single binary star system. ●      Mapping a Cluster's Magnetic Field — Using the deepest radio observations ever made with LOFAR, astronomers have reconstructed the magnetic field of galaxy cluster Abell 2255 from nucleus to outer edge for the first time. ●      The Eulalia Bombardment — A new Planetary Science Journal paper links the breakup of a main-belt asteroid to an impact shower that battered the Moon, Earth and Mars 800 million years ago — and may connect to a global freeze. ●      Skywatch, Both Hemispheres — Why this week beats peak night for the Delta Aquariids wherever you are, how to catch them from the southern US and Mediterranean, and what's coming on 12 August: a total solar eclipse across Iceland and Spain, a North American partial, and the best Perseid peak in years on a new Moon.
Sources & Further Reading ●      Space.com — SpaceX launches satellite repair drone with 10-foot robotic arms to Earth orbit ●      NASASpaceflight.com — Falcon 9 to launch MRV-1 robotic servicing spacecraft for Northrop Grumman ●      Northrop Grumman SpaceLogistics — Mission Robotic Vehicle and Mission Extension Pod fact sheets ●      Scientific American — A SpaceX rocket is about to crash into the moon; scientists will be watching ●      Phys.org — When a SpaceX rocket crashes into the moon, scientists will be watching (arXiv preprint) ●      Project Pluto (Bill Gray) — Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5 ●      Stanford University — Researchers uncover evidence for sibling supernovas (Michailidis et al., Nature Communications) ●      Reuters — Scientists spot evidence of two huge companion stars that blew up ●      Space.com — Galaxy cluster's magnetic field reconstructed for 1st time with record-breaking astronomy map (Botteon et al., INAF, A&A) ●      Southwest Research Institute — SwRI-led research connects asteroid collision to impact showers 800 million years ago ●      The Planetary Science Journal — Bottke, Vokrouhlický, Dykhuis & Zellner, "An 800 Myr-old Impact Shower on the Terrestrial Planets from the Breakup of the Eulalia Parent Body" ●      EarthSky — Delta Aquariid meteor shower: all you need to know in 2026 ●      NASA Science — Total Solar Eclipse on August 12, 2026 (path, partial visibility and safety guidance) ●      BBC Sky at Night Magazine — August 12, 2026 solar eclipse: USA and Canada guide   Connect ●      Website: astronomydaily.io ●      Socials: @AstroDailyPod ●      Part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network

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