Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates
bitesz.com 825 episodes Nov 10, 2026
Join hosts Anna and Avery for daily Space & Astronomy news, insights, and discoveries. Give us 10 minutes and we'll give you the Universe! For more visit our website and sign up for the free daily newsletter and check out our continually updated newsfeed. Follow us on X, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.
Episodes
Curiosity’s Spare Rover Heads to the Moon: Gravity Reconnection, Record-Cold Atoms...
Show notes NASA turns Curiosity's spare test-bed rover into PROMISE, a nuclear-powered rover bound for the Moon's south pole, as part of a sweep of Moon Base awards. Plus: a theory of 'gravitational reconnection' hidden in Einstein's equations, a record 9.7-picokelvin quantum gas aboard China's Tiangong space station, ESCAPADE's twin burns over southern Australia, and a both-hemispheres skywatch.
Mars May Still Be Breathing: Alba Mons’ Mysterious Gas and Swift’s Final Plunge
Is Mars still volcanically alive? Europe's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter keeps catching hydrogen chloride, a gas that comes out of volcanoes on Earth, above fresh cracks on the giant Alba Mons volcano, in the wrong season, in one place and low to the ground. We unpack the evidence, the proposed 'ice lid', and everything this result is not. Then it's The Week That Was: two black holes in one early gala
Webb’s Early-Universe Puzzle: A Radio First, New Glenn Hardware and Earth’s New Mini Moon
Show notesLight from newborn stars may have blown the fog out of the early universe. A new study by Shyam Menon (Flatiron Institute, ANU PhD) and Aaron Smith (UT Dallas) finds that Lyman-alpha radiation — ultraviolet light that bounces from hydrogen atom to hydrogen atom — can clear diffuse gas and dust out of young galaxies while leaving their dense star clusters free to keep forming stars, helpi
Webb’s Digital Twin: A Hidden Planet, Ancient Stars and China’s Moon Plan
Show notesA Northwestern-led team builds a physics-based digital twin of the James Webb Space Telescope's coronagraph and recovers the giant planet 51 Eridani b in two-year-old data where standard processing could not see it. Plus VVV CL001, a dust-hidden cluster near the Milky Way's core dated at 13.4 billion years; China's most detailed account yet of its two-launch crewed Moon landing plan; and
Escapade’s Double Slingshot: Mars-Bound Probes, Missing Oxygen and Black Holes in Pants
Show notesESCAPADE's double slingshot over Australia NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft, Blue and Gold, will each fly a powered Earth flyby on their way to Mars: the first around 5 a.m. EST on Saturday 7 November, the second around 6 a.m. EST on Monday 9 November. Each fires its engine for about nine minutes at closest approach, a manoeuvre NASA says no Mars-bound spacecraft has flown successfully be
Swift’s Final Orbit: A Lost Observatory, a Burst That Defies Explanation and Rusty Interstellar Ice
Show notes Swift's Last Orbit: NASA's burst hunter falls home, a gamma-ray burst that is two explosions in one, and 3I/ATLAS's dusty ice. Swift's Last Orbit NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere on Wednesday 4 November; the US Space Force prediction is about 03:30 EST (08:30 UTC, 19:30 AEDT), plus or minus 11 hours. Surviving fragments are confined betwee
Two Black Holes Behind the Dust: Webb Reveals a Hidden Pair in the Early Universe
Show notesTwo black holes caught feeding side by side just 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. JWST and ALMA confirm LID-1166, the first close dual AGN found beyond the nearby universe. Plus: Swift's final days and NASA's call for ideas to save Hubble, Rubin finds Neptune's missing trailing Trojans as Lucy enters Jupiter's, TRACERS' first look at where the solar wind gets in, and a both-hemisphe
The Impenetrable Wall That Failed: Killer Electrons Made Inside Earth’s Radiation Belt
Show notesElectrons made on the wrong side of Earth's 'impenetrable barrier', a gamma-ray burst that only looked weak, the week that was, and a Halloween that is astronomically a week early. The Wall That Broke In 2014 NASA's Van Allen Probes revealed a sharp inner edge to Earth's outer radiation belt: electrons at the very highest energies never got closer than about 2.8 Earth radii. During the M
Mars’s Ancient Rock: A 4-Billion-Year-Old Clue to the Red Planet’s Past
Show notes A rose-coloured rock picked up in the Sahara in 2022 turns out to be one of the oldest pieces of Mars ever found. Teghaza 001 formed at least 4.1 billion years ago, and two independent radiometric clocks agree. We explain how it was dated, what it says about early Mars losing its water, and why its source is still a shortlist of 13 craters in the southern highlands. Also: Voyager 1 goes
Betelgeuse’s Ghost Companion: The Hidden Star Stirring Orion’s Giant
Episode summaryBetelgeuse is being haunted. New VLA and ALMA radio observations show the red supergiant's atmosphere stretches and relaxes in step with the orbit of its hidden companion, Siwarha — a companion too faint to see in radio, caught by the ripples it leaves behind. Also: lithium-fluoride crystals that rode around the Moon on Artemis I, why comets almost certainly didn't deliver life's in
Rubin’s Hidden Dwarf Planet: The World Lost in the Milky Way
Show notesAstronomy Daily S05E216 — A New World in the Crowd (Thursday 29 October 2026). Hosts Anna and Avery. Lead: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has found its first dwarf-planet candidate. 2026 ED138 lies beyond Pluto, about 46 au from the Sun. Matthew Holman (CfA) found it on 13 October with a search code built with Kevin Napier, and it was announced on 27 October at the DPS meeting in Spokane
The Star That Was Born Twice: Orion’s Nebula Mystery
Show notesAstronomy Daily S05E215 — The Star That Was Born Twice (Tuesday 27 October 2026). Hosts Anna and Avery. Lead: the Orion Nebula's age paradox. Its planet-forming discs and its expanding gas shell both look far younger than its million-year-old stars. Wilhelm, Trani and Portegies Zwart (Leiden / Universidad de Concepción) propose that the nebula's most massive star, θ1 Orionis C1, formed a
A Gamma-Ray Burst’s Split Personality: The Week Swift Fell Silent
Show notes In 2016, NASA's Swift caught a gamma-ray burst that came in two parts: a 1.7-second spike, four minutes of silence, then a 51-second burst from the same spot. A new Nature Astronomy paper finds that nearly every classification test labels the first part a merger and the second a collapsing star. It was published three days after Swift ended science operations. Also today: a black hole d
Artemis 4: The Moon's Tiebreaker Awaits - The Weekend Wrap
Show notes NASA lays out Artemis III day by day: fourteen days in Earth orbit, two rival landers, one Orion. Plus the week that was, Swift's final bow, and Venus changing sides. The Rehearsal NASA's 23 October Artemis update laid out Artemis III day by day: a 14-day low-Earth-orbit mission targeted for summer 2027 in which Orion docks with a Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 2 test lander on day three (c
Starry Nights and Cosmic Insights: Van Gogh's Real Sky Revealed
Show notes Astronomers argue The Starry Night shows a real pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy around 22 July 1889; Roman enters science commissioning; Rubin's test camera and the Seagull Nebula; quick hits on Hera, Starship, Swift and Artemis; Skywatch with Venus at inferior conjunction. · Lead: The Night Van Gogh Saw · Roman Enters Science Commissioning · Rubin'S Test Camera And
From Solar Storms to Martian Canyons: The Latest in Space News
Show notes Last November the Sun produced its strongest radiation storm in almost twenty years, and this time scientists were ready: neutron monitors from Cornwall to Shetland, sensors on transatlantic airliners, and weather balloons launched within the hour. A new Space Weather paper shows just how patchy the storm was, with one Shetland balloon passing aviation warning thresholds while others sa
Born Thick, Settled Thin
Show notes The Milky Way's disc settled in two stages; metal-rich gas around Sgr A*; two mirror-image simulated universes; shadows in the Orion Bar; quick hits on Hera, Uzbekistan and Artemis; Orionid-night skywatch. Sources · IAC — Milky Way's disc formed in two very distinct stages — https://www.iac.es/en/outreach/news/research-iac-reveals-milky-ways-disc-formed-two-very-distinct-stages
Cracking the Moon's Secrets: New Findings on Lunar Shrinkage
Show notes The Moon Is Still Shrinking Watters, Banks, Nypaver and Robinson (Planetary Science Journal, 14 Oct 2026) map more than 10,000 young thrust faults — ~8,900 lobate scarps and 2,000+ small mare ridges — with LRO's camera. Together they record about 42–46 m of radial contraction over the last ~400–800 million years, at most ~11 cm per million years. That's less than thermal models predict,
A Round Trip to Phobos Underway
MMX: A Round Trip to Phobos JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration mission launched on schedule on H3 Flight No. 10 at 04:41:03 JST on 20 October 2026 (19:41 UTC 19 Oct; 06:41 AEDT Tue; 15:41 EDT / 12:41 PDT / 20:41 BST Mon). Mars orbit August 2027, Phobos quasi-satellite orbit from September 2027, Idefix rover (CNES/DLR) release early 2029, landing and sampling 2030, and at least 10 g of Phobos returne
Time's Tipping Point: The End of Leap Seconds and a Lunar Clock Revolution
Show notes Time Lets Go of the Sky On 15 October 2026 the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles adopted Resolution 5: UTC becomes continuous on 20 May 2027, ending leap seconds, with the UTC–UT1 gap allowed to reach one hour. The driver: a growing chance (about 30% by 2035) of a first-ever negative leap second. Resolution 6 starts work on an international lunar reference ti
Stellar Breakthroughs: The Discovery of Deuterated Methanol and the First Green Star
Show notes Episode 206 opens with the first results from ALMA's COMPASS survey: the first detection anywhere in interstellar space of fully deuterated methanol, and methanol masers turning up around more than half of a sample of young Sun-like stars. Then the first star that would look green, Magellanic Cloud pulsars recovered from decades-old Parkes data, a supernova caught days old when the univ
Martian Mystery: Unveiling the Secrets of Arsia Mons' Elusive Clouds
Show notes A cloud on Mars that forms only if textbook-theoretical physics really happens; Webb maps a hot Jupiter's edge angle by angle; multi-planet systems turn out to come in two families tied to their stars; and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy's original disc is rebuilt from its own debris. Plus Hera's first braking burn, the station's final solar arrays, NASA ADS hands over to SciX, and a both-
Cosmic Revelations: Artemis 2's Historic Observations and the Case of Hypernovae
Show notes Six months after Artemis II swung around the far side of the Moon, NASA has published what the crew saw, said and sketched — including five faint impact flashes spotted during a 54-minute eclipse. Plus: two UCL papers that take apart the chemical evidence for hypernovae, Juno finds Jupiter's magnetodisk crumpled into ripples, and IISc simulations suggest magnetised white dwarfs could gr
HERA's Grand Maneuver: Braking for Didymos and the Future of Planetary Defence
Show notes Hera Hits the Brakes ESA's Hera spotted its target asteroid for the first time last week and fires its first braking burn on Thursday — 93 minutes of thrust to start stopping at Didymos and Dimorphos, the asteroid pair NASA's DART hit in 2022. Plus: Solar Orbiter traces a solar-wind switchback back to the Sun, Gemini North finds chains of giant knots in the remnant of the supernova of 1
Cloudy with a Chance of Water: The Mysteries of WISE 0855 Unveiled
The coldest brown dwarf we know has weather. JWST watched water clouds thicken and thin on WISE 0855, a sunless world seven and a half light-years away — plus a star slowly eating a brown dwarf, ten minutes of X-rays after a half-second burst, a Soviet satellite breaking up over Western Australia, NASA's lunar cave hunt, and Mercury's best evening show of the year for the south. Stories Weather on
A Nobel in Ice: Unveiling the Secrets of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
Show notes We're back after a short break! Today: the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Francis Halzen for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory — a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice turned into a telescope. Then a Sydney-led team publishes the most distant fast radio burst yet, from a dwarf galaxy just 3 billion years after the big bang; Hubble's archive yields a possible second-generation planet aro
The Great Water Mystery: Jezero Crater and the Hunt for Mars' Hidden History
Perseverance drove to the edge of an ancient Martian lake expecting a beach and found the inside of a volcano — rock that water has been through at least three separate times. Europe's Jupiter probe comes home on Monday night and crosses Australia in a fully dark sky. Two teams, using two completely different techniques, both find something hiding inside the most famous planetary system we have ev
What Keeps a Galaxy Churning: Andromeda's Supernova Secrets Revealed
Supernovae keep galaxies churning A new study led by Fan Yi Meng from Tsinghua University provides the first comprehensive census of superbubbles in the Andromeda Galaxy, revealing that clustered supernova feedback is sufficient to sustain galactic-scale turbulence. This finding helps to explain why galaxies remain active over billions of years, with turbulence playing a crucial role in regulating
The Unifying Mystery of Black Hole Jets: Stellar and Supermassive Connections
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
The Youngest Planet Ever Found
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 dea
Roman Opens Its Eye
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
The Evolving Enigma of Dark Energy and the Sun's Mysterious Past
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
The Planet That Keeps Shrinking plus the Weekend Wrap
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 tr
Half the Neutron Stars
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 Hol
A Hundred and Nine Flashes
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 ligh
The Smallest Things Remember
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
The Moon in Five Hours
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, a
Europe Launches From Europe — And Two White Dwarfs Six Minutes Apart
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
The Hydrogen Map: How a Radio Telescope Heard Half the Universe
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 g
One Flash in the Xenon: The Dark Matter Event Nobody Can Explain
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
BepiColombo Lets Go: Eight Years, Nine Flybys, One Irreversible Moment
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
There's Something Molten Under Mars's South Pole
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
Catching the Uncatchable: Starship's Boldest Test Yet
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
Roman Launches: A Telescope's Countdown Ends
🚀 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
The Weekend Wrap, August 29: Roman's Countdown Begins
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
Forty Times Brighter Than the Full Moon: Inside the Space-Mirror Fight
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
Diamond Rain, Decoded: Twenty Years of Disagreement, Solved
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 Neptun
Betelgeuse, Up Close: A Star's Boiling Skin, Revealed
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 surroundin
NASA's Roman Space Telescope Is Ready to Fly — Nine Months Early
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 ma
China Delays Its Most Ambitious Moon Mission Ever
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 l
China's About to Attempt the Most Ambitious Moon Mission Ever
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), LandSp
NASA Finds the Crater a SpaceX Rocket Left on the Moon
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
LandSpace Nails It: China's First Private Booster Recovery
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 n
First Frenchwoman in Space Steps Outside
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
Starship's Ship 40 Makes It Home
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 recove
Tiny Robots, Alien Caves: NASA's Plan for Titan
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 arriv
Is Empty Space Really Empty? A 90-Year-Old Mystery Gets Its Answer (S05E168 — The Weekend Wrap)
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 Heisenber
The Black Hole Wrapped in a Star: JWST's Cosmic Dawn Discovery
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
Two Minutes of Totality: Inside the August 12 Eclipse
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,
Eclipse 2026: Where, When & How to Watch (Both Hemispheres)
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 t
Eclipse Eve: Totality Returns to Europe
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
SpaceX Starship Lost at Sea? Plus China’s Landing Attempt & Uranus “Breathing”
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
Whirlpools Found on the Sun’s Surface for the First Time
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
The Colour of Empty Space
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% a
A Rocket Just Hit the Moon — And Telescopes Caught It
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
Voyager 2’s “Big Bang” Rescue: One More Year in Deep Space
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 of
The Crater Makers: Falcon 9 Hits the Moon Tomorrow | Today’s Space News
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
The Largest Galaxy in the Universe, Measured at Last
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. F
The First “Self-Driving” Telescope Goes Stargazing (SkAI )
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 companio
Three of a Kind
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 hig
Three of a Kind
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 hig
The Reach of a Giant
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 shredde
Betelgeuse Is Not Alone!
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 searc
Reading Io’s Hidden Heat: Juno’s First Subsurface Reading | Today’s Space News
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, th
Pluto's Big Night & a Sharper Look at M87's Black Hole | Today's Space News
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-colo
Lucky 13 | The Weekend Wrap
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 f
The Moon That Isn't | Today's Space News
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 Al
Far Side | Today's Space News
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 t
Space Mechanic | Today's Space News
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 galax
Postcards From Mars
Astronomy Daily · S05E146 · “Postcards from Mars” · Tuesday 21 July 2026 NASA’s Psyche probe phones home from its Mars flyby — data and a spellbinding month-long time-lapse — as Europe’s Plato planet-hunter clears its final test. From the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting: a CubeSat that could give us hours of solar-storm warning, and a new way to forecast the Sun’s next acti
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