Speaker 1: Good day, space fans, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your
daily dose of everything happening beyond our atmosphere.
Speaker 2: I'm Ana and I'm Avery. It is Thursday, March nineteen,
twenty twenty six, and we are recording this on what
might be one of the most action packed days in
recent space history, because tonight, the most powerful rocket ever
built heads back to the launch pad.
Speaker 1: And while that's happening, we've got particle physics bombshells from CERN,
a galaxy next door that's been hiding a dramatic secret,
a bold new take on the search for alien intelligence,
and the curious hunt for asteroids that hitch a ride
alongside planets around other stars.
Speaker 2: Buckle in, everyone, this is Astronomy Daily, and the universe
has been busy.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the big live one, because as you're
listening to this, something incredible may actually be happening right now.
Speaker 2: Tonight, Thursday March nineteenth, NASA is planning to begin rolling
the Artemis two space launch system rocket and the Orion
spacecraft out of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space
Center in Florida and transporting them on the slow journey
to launch pad thirty nine B.
Speaker 1: We say slow, and we mean that literally. The crawler
transporter that carries the rocket moves at a maximum of
about one mile per hour. The whole trip covers roughly
four miles and is expected to take up to twelve hours.
It's not fast, but it is spectacular.
Speaker 2: AASA confirmed the rollout target at eight pm Eastern Time tonight,
after a busy few days of closeout activities inside the VAB.
There was a brief scare earlier in the week when
engineers identified an issue with an electrical harness on the
flight termination system of the core stage, which pushed the
rollout day back to possibly March twentieth, but teams work
quickly and made up the lost time.
Speaker 1: And of course, the reason all of this matters so
much is what comes next. Artemis two is NASA's first
crude mission under the Artemis program, the first time human
beings will travel to the vicinity of the Moon since
Apollo seventeen in December nineteen seventy two, that's more than
fifty years ago.
Speaker 2: The crew of four commander Red Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover,
mission specialist Christina Coach, and Canadian Space Agency Mission specialist
Jeremy Hanson have already entered pre launch quarantine with plans
to arrive to Kennedy Space Center on March twenty seventh.
Speaker 1: Victor Glover will become the first person of color to
reach deep space and the Moon's vicinity. Christina Cock will
be the first woman to do so, and Jeremy Hanson
will be the first non American citizen to travel to
lunar space. This mission is genuinely historic on multiple levels.
Speaker 2: The mission itself is a ten day free return trajectory
around the Moon, not a landing, but a crucial crude
test of the or B spacecraft's life support systems and
deep space performance before later Artemis missions attempt a lunar.
Speaker 1: Landing, and the first launch opportunity is Wednesday, April first,
with a window that opens at six twenty four pm
Eastern Time. Additional windows exist through April sixth, and there's
another opportunity on April thirtieth.
Speaker 2: This rollout itself is a milestone. It's actually the second
time the rocket has made this journey this year. It
rolled to the pad in January for initial testing, but
a series of technical issues, including a liquid hydrogen leak
and a helium flow problem required it to roll back
to the VAB for repairs in late February.
Speaker 1: So tonight is the comeback tour. And if you're anywhere
near Kennedy's Space Center or just watching a live stream
at home, this is absolutely worth staying up.
Speaker 2: For. A fifty three year wait for humans to return
to the Moon ends this April, and tonight the rocket
that'll take them there is heading to the launch pad.
That's story one.
Speaker 1: Now, while all that Artemis excitement was building, humans were
also doing extraordinary things in orbit in not one, but
two space stations simultaneously.
Speaker 2: Let's start at the International Space Station, where, yesterday, Wednesday,
March eighteenth, NASA astronauts Jessica Mayer and Chris Williams completed
what's known as US Spacewalk ninety four. They emerged from
the Quest airlock at eight fifty two am Eastern Time
and concluded their excursion at three point fifty four PM,
a total of seven hours and two minutes spent working
in the vacuum of space.
Speaker 1: Their task was to prepare the ISS's to a power
channel for the future installation of a new IROSA, an
International Space Station rollout solar array. These rollout arrays don't
need a motor to deploy. The potential energy stored in
the rolled up carbon composite booms is enough to to
unfurled full nineteen meter length and about six minutes once installed.
It'll be the seventh of eight planned rollout arrays since
the upgrades began in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: For Jessica Mayer, this was her fourth spacewalk, bringing her
total EVA time to twenty eight hours and forty six minutes.
For Chris Williams, it was his very first time stepping
outside of spacecraft into open space, and after they closed
the hatch, Mayor had some beautiful words to mark the occasion.
Speaker 1: She noted that March eighteenth was exactly sixty one years
since Alexei Leonov made the very first human spacewalk back
in nineteen sixty five. A nice piece of space history
to carry out into the void with you.
Speaker 2: This EVA had actually been a long time coming. It
was originally planned for January eighth with a different crew,
but to a medical emergency involving astronaut Mike Fink led
to the cancelation of that spacewalk and ultimately the unprecedented
medical evacuation of the entire crew eleven mission, so yesterday
was the culmination of a very eventful few months at
the station.
Speaker 1: And while Jessica and Chris were suiting up at the
iss over at China's tiang Goong Space station, there was
an EVA of their own underway. On Monday, March sixteenth,
Shenzo twenty one mission commander Zonglu and crewmate Wu Fe
spent approximately seven hours outside Tianggung installing debris shielding to
the exterior of the three module station.
Speaker 2: But what made this one especially notable was the milestone
for zang Lu. It was his sixth career spacewalk, tying
him to fellow Chinese astronaut Chen Dong for the record
of most EVAs ever completed by a Chinese national. Zang
made his first trip to space on Shenzo fifteen back
in late twenty twenty two, and completed four spacewalks during
that mission. He's now matched Chen's tally of six.
Speaker 1: For context, the overall record for most spacewalks belongs to
Russian cosmonaut Anatoli Salovyev, who completed a remarkable sixteen EVAs
during his career from nineteen eighty eight to nineteen ninety nine.
The American record sits with Peggy Whitson at ten.
Speaker 2: So in the space of just two days Monday and Wednesday,
humans from two different nations conducted spacewalks from two different
space stations orbiting Earth. That is not something that happened
very often, even a decade ago, and it's becoming increasingly routine.
Speaker 1: The era of humanity as a multi station spacefaring spaces
is very much here all right.
Speaker 2: Time to get small, very very small, because this week
physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider made a significant discovery
in the subatomic world.
Speaker 1: The LHCb experiment, that's the Large Hadron Collider Beauty Experiment,
has detected a new particle. It's called the Zi cc
plus written as the Greek letter ZI with cc plus,
and it's a proton like particle known as a baryon
that contains two heavy charm quarks and one down cork.
Speaker 2: To appreciate why that's exciting, a quick refresher. A proton,
the particle at the heart of every atom, is made
of three quarks, two up quarks and one down quark.
Quarks come in six flavors, up, down, charm strange top
and bottom. Most everyday matter is built from the lightest
two up and down. The others are heavier and more exotic.
Speaker 1: The zi cc plus is like a proton that's had
a dramatic upgrade. Its two upquarks have been replaced by
two heavy charm quarks, and because charm quarks are far
more massive than upquarks, the result particle weighs roughly four
times more than an ordinary proton.
Speaker 2: This is actually only the second baryon ever detected that
contains two heavy quarks. The first, also discovered at LHCb
back in twenty seventeen, had two charm quarks and an upquark.
This new one has a down cork instead, and despite
the similarity, it's predicted to be up to six times
less stable, meaning it flashes in and out of existence
even faster than its cousin.
Speaker 1: The discovery was announced this week at the Rencontra des
Morion Conference, a prestigious annual gathering of particle physicists, and
it's the first new particle found using the upgraded LHCb detector,
which received a major overhaul completed in twenty twenty three.
It's actually the eightieth particle ever discovered by LHCb since
operations began.
Speaker 2: The signal was detected with a statistical significance of seven
sigma of the five sigma threshold required to officially claim
a discovery, and it also settles a long standing dispute.
Over twenty years ago, an experiment called Seleix claimed to
have spotted the same particle at a much lower mass,
but no other lab could confirm it. This LHCb results
at a mass consistent with theoretical predictions finally resolves that mystery.
Speaker 1: Why does this matter? Because studying how these exotic heavy
quark particles behave and how they decay helps physicists better
understand the strong nuclear force, which is the force that
binds quirks together inside protons and neutrons. The better we
understand that, the better we understand matter itself at its
most fundamental level.
Speaker 2: Particle physics doesn't always make the loudest headlines, but every
time we add a new entry to the subatomic zoo,
we learn a little more about what the universe is
actually made of.
Speaker 1: Now, let's zoom out, way way out from sub atomic
particles to an entire galaxy.
Speaker 2: The small Magellanic cloud a dwarf galaxy that's one of
the Milky Way's closest neighbors, visible to the naked eye
from the southern hemisphere, has long been one of the
most studied objects in the sky. Astronomers have cataloged its stars,
mapped its gas, and tracked its motion for decades, but
one stubborn mystery has persisted. The galaxy stars simply don't
orbit around its center the way stars in most galaxies do.
Instead of rotating in an orderly fashion, their motions appear
chaotic and disordered.
Speaker 1: Now, a team of astronomers from the University of Arizona,
led by graduate student hemansh Rethor and senior author Professor
Gertina Besla, have cracked that mystery, and the answer is dramatic.
The Small Magellanic Cloud crashed directly through its larger companion,
the Large Magellanic Cloud, a few hundred million years ago,
and it's still reeling from that collision today.
Speaker 2: The lmc's immense gravity disrupted the SMC's internal structure, sending
its stars into wildly different, random trajectories. At the same time,
the dense gas of the LMC applied enormous pressure to
the SMC's own gas as it punched through, destroying its
gas rotation. Rathor described it beautifully. Imagine sprinkling water droplets
on your hand and moving it through the air. As
the air rushes past, the droplets get blown off by
the pressure. Something similar happened to the SMC's gas on
a galactic scale.
Speaker 1: What's particularly fascinating is that for decades astronomers thought the
SMC's gas was rotating. It turns out that was an
illusion of viewing angle. The collision is actually stretching the
SMC and gas moving toward and away from Earth along
that stretch just looks like rotation from our perspective, one
of those wonderful moments where what we thought we were
seeing was something completely different.
Speaker 2: The collision has also left some lasting scars on the
large Magellanic cloud, including a tilted bar shaped structure at
its center, tilted out of the plane of the galaxy
by the impact.
Speaker 1: And this discovery has an important implication beyond just understanding
these two galaxies. For decades, the SMC has been used
as a benchmark, a kind of cosmic yardstick, for understanding
how early universe galaxies formed and evolved. Because it's small
gas rich and low and heavy elements. But if it's
a galaxy still recovering from a catastrophic collision, it may
not be the clean reference point we thought it was.
Speaker 2: As Professor Besler put it, the SMC went through a
catastrophic crash that injected a tremendous amount of energy into
the system. It is not a normal galaxy by any means.
Speaker 1: The research is published in the Astrophysical Journal, and the
Ta Teme says this is just the first step. They
now want to build detailed models of the full collision
to understand how it's shaped. The SMCS stars, gas, dust,
and even its invisible halo of dark matter.
Speaker 2: Galaxy next door transforming before our eyes.
Speaker 1: Story five takes us from colliding galaxies to a very
different kind of cosmic companion, tiny asteroid like objects that
share an orbit with a planet around another star.
Speaker 2: These are called exotrojans. To understand the concept, you first
need to know about trojans in our own solar system,
in our neighborhood. There are more than ten thousand confirmed
asteroids that orbit at special gravitational sweet spots called lagrange
points in front of and behind Jupiter on its path
around the Sun. At these points, the gravitational polls of
the Sun and Jupiter balance out, allowing objects to essentially
hitch a stable ride along with the planet.
Speaker 1: Virtually every planet in our Solar system has trojans, though
none come close to Jupiter's impressive collection, and for years
astronomers have theorized that similar co orbital companions exotrojans, should
exist around planets orbiting other stars. After all, if the
physics works here, it should work everywhere.
Speaker 2: The problem no one has confirmed one yet. Projects like
the Troy Initiative have been specifically hunting for exotrojans, but
these objects are extraordinarily difficult to detect. They're small, they
don't produce much of a signal, and disentangling their presence
from other noise is genuinely challenging.
Speaker 1: A new paper in the Astrophysical Journal by Jackson Taylor
of West Virginia University and a team of co authors
has pushed that hunt into some of the most extreme
environments astronomers can imagine the teams searched for exotrojans in
conditions far more intense and exotic than anything in our
own Solar system. Taking this search to new limits.
Speaker 2: While no confirmed detection has been announced, research like this
is essential for two reasons. First, finding exotrojans would tell
us a huge amount about how planetary systems formed and evolved.
Trojans are essentially preserved remnants of the early Solar System
little time capsules of planetary formation history. Second, some researchers
have speculated that trojan regions around habitable zone planets could
themselves be interesting places in the context of astrobiology.
Speaker 1: The first confirmed exotrojan will be a landmark discovery, and
research like this is steadily narrowing down where and how
to look.
Speaker 2: And we round out today's episode with a big question
about an even bigger search. Humanities hunt for signals from
alien civilizations.
Speaker 1: The search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI has been underway in
various forms for decades. The classic approach has focused on
scanning the sky for radio or microwave signals in very
narrow frequency bands. The reasoning was that any technological civilization
might use these wavelengths to communicate, and narrowband signals are
easier to distinguish from natural cosmic noise.
Speaker 2: But a new paper is arguing that this long established approach,
maybe leaving us blind to a huge swath of potential signals.
The researcher suggests it's time to broaden the electromagnetic search dramatically,
moving beyond just radio and microwave into a much wider
range of the spectrum.
Speaker 1: The logic is intuitive once you think about it. Our
own civilizations communications have changed dramatically, even just over the
past few decades. We've moved from narrowband AM radio broadcasts
to broadband Internet signals, which are spread across wide frequency
ranges and might actually look more like background noise to
an outside observer. A civilization more advanced than ours might
communicate in ways that look nothing like what we've been
searching for.
Speaker 2: There's also the question of what we might be missing
in other parts of the spectrum, entirely infrared, optical, ultraviolet,
even higher energy bands. All that these could theoretically carry
engineered signals that we simply haven't been systematically scanning for.
Speaker 1: This doesn't mean that traditional radio SETI searches have been wrong.
They've been enormously valuable, and the infrastructure built for them
has led to real astronomical discoveries. But as our tools
and computing power improve, expanding the search makes sense.
Speaker 2: The universe is enormous, intelligent life, if it exists elsewhere,
might communicate in ways we haven't yet imagined, and the
electromagnetic spectrum is vast. Casting a wider net seems like
exactly the right thing to do.
Speaker 1: If there's someone out there trying to reach us, Let's
make sure we're actually listening on the right channels. And
that's our episode.
Speaker 2: What an extraordinary day to be following the Cosmos, a
moon rocket rolling to the pad, two space stations running
EVA simultaneously, a new particle from CERN, a galaxy in transformation,
and humanity still reaching out into the dark hoping to
hear something back.
Speaker 1: This is why we do this every day. Thanks so
much for spending part of your Thursday with us. Everyone.
Speaker 2: You'll find links to all of today's stories in the
show notes, along with our blog posts and all the
ways to follow us on social media.
Speaker 1: Astronomy Daily is part of the bytes dot com podcast network.
Find us at Astronomydaily dot io and on x, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube,
and tumbler at at astro Daily Pod.
Speaker 2: Until tomorrow, keep looking.
Speaker 1: Up clear skys. Everyone.
Speaker 2: Sunday, start st the story is the soul. Story is
the soul.