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Speaker 1: Here is a question that sounds simple.

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Speaker 2: What is a moon something that goes around.

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Speaker 1: The planet, right, and what is a planet.

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Speaker 2: Something that goes around the star?

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Speaker 1: So what do you call a Jupiter sized world that

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orbits an object that is not quite a star and

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not quite a planet, which is itself orbiting a star

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seventy light years away?

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Speaker 2: I am going to need a minute.

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Speaker 1: So it is the International Astronomical Union.

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Speaker 2: We'll get back to that.

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily.

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Speaker 2: I'm anna and I'm avery. It is Friday, the twenty

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fourth of July twenty twenty six, and this is episode

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one hundred and forty nine.

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Speaker 1: Coming up. Astronomers confirm the first moonlike object outside our

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Solar system and immediately break the vocabulary trying to describe it.

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We have found the most powerful particle accelerator in the galaxy,

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and it has been sitting next to one of the

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brightest stars in your sky. A black hole is starving

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a galaxy. It doesn't even live in.

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Speaker 2: Tina flies the world's biggest solid rocket from the open

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ocean for the first time. Starship gets another shot at

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flight thirteen tonight for some of you, and the moon

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has a date with the heart of the scorpion.

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Speaker 1: Let's get into it. We have found thousands of planets

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around other stars, nearly six thousand confirmed, with candidates stacked

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up behind them, but there has always been a conspicuous

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gap in the catalog. No moons, not one confirmed. We

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know moons must be out there. Our own Solar system

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has close to three hundred of them, but they are small,

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they are faint, and they are parked right next to

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something far brighter. Finding one has been one of the

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great frustrations of exoplanet science, and now now a team

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publishing in Nature has confirmed the first one sort of,

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and the sort of is the whole story. This system

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is a star called C D minus thirty five twenty

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seven twenty two. It is a red dwarf roughly seventy

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light years from US, and for our listeners in Australia

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and New Zealand, it sits in your southern sky. Astronomers

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have known for years that this star has a companion

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because the star wobbles. That companion is called C D

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minus thirty five twenty seven twenty two B, and it

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is heavy, somewhere between twenty nine and thirty eight times

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the mass of Jupiter.

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Speaker 2: That's well pass planet territory.

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Speaker 1: It is above about thirteen to fifteen jupiter masses, an

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object confuse deuterium in its core. It's not doing what

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the Sun does. You need around ninety jupiter masses to

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fuse ordinary hydrogen. But it's doing something that in between

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category is a brown dwarf, too big to be a

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planet and too small to be a.

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Speaker 2: Star, the thing astronomy call a failed star, which always

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struck me as unkind.

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Speaker 1: Deeply unkind. And this particular brown dwarf is bright enough

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and far enough from its star that the very large

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telescope in Chile can photograph it directly. So the team

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took spectra of the brown dwarf itself and found that

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it wobbles too. Something is orbiting the brown dwarf. Best

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estimate of its mass about one jupiter.

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Speaker 2: So we have a Jupiter going around the brown dwarf

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going around the red.

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Speaker 1: Dwarf, a three tiered system, and nobody can agree on

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what to call the object at the.

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Speaker 3: Bottom, because if the brown dwarf counts as a planet,

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then this thing is a moon, an exo moon, the

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first one confirmed. But if the brown dwarf counts as

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a star. Then this thing is a planet and it's

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not a.

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Speaker 1: Moon at all, and the brown dwarf is genuinely physically

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both and neither. The paper hedges by calling it an

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exo satellite, which is honest and also a bit of

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a shrug.

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Speaker 2: We've been here before, though. This is the Pluto argument

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in a fresh outfit.

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Speaker 1: It really is. Pluto is not a planet because it

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has not cleared its orbital neighborhood. Fine, but Pluto has Sharon,

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and Sharon is so large relative to Pluto that the

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two of them orbit a point in empty space between them.

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So is Sharon a moon of a non planet? Are

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they a double dwarf planet? And our own moon is

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bigger than Pluto? Should it be a dwarf planet that

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happens to be captured?

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Speaker 2: Nature does not care about our filing system.

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Speaker 1: Nature does not care at all. And here's the part

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I find genuinely exciting. Brown dwarfs are common. If this

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one has a Jupiter mass companion, plenty of others probably

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do too. Some of those could sit in the habitable

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zone of the parent star. You could have a warm,

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temperate world with liquid water orbiting a failed star orbiting

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a real one.

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Speaker 2: And we would not have a word for it.

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Speaker 1: The team says, this is the first of its kind,

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not the last. I suspect the IAU is going to

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have a long decade.

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Speaker 2: Now. If you go outside tonight and look up, one

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of the first bright stars you will find is Altaire.

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Northern listeners. It is high overhead in the evening, the

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southern corner of the Summer Triangle. Southern listeners, look north,

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it's lower down, but it's unmistakable one.

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Speaker 1: Of the closest bright stars to us sixteen and a.

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Speaker 2: Half light years sixteen point seven now roughly in that

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same direction, but nowhere near it in actual space. Sits

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an object that has just been confirmed as the most

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powerful particle accelerator in the Milky Way. By the way,

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I should stress the nowhere near it as the key

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point here.

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Speaker 1: Worth being precise about that same patch of sky, wildly

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different distance.

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Speaker 2: Wildly Altare is sixteen light years away. This thing is

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closer to fourteen thousand. It just happens to line up.

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It's called lhaa aso J nineteen twelve plus ten fourteen U,

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which I'm going to say exactly once. And it was

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picked up in twenty twenty four by a Chinese observatory

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high on the Tibetan Plateau.

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Speaker 1: And what makes it special.

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Speaker 2: It's throwing protons out at more than one thousand trillion

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electron volts one pev Astronomers call an object that can

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do that a pevotron, and it's worth pausing on what

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that number means. The Large Hadron Collider is twenty seven

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kilometers of superconducting magnets buried under the French Swiss border,

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and it's the most powerful machine humanity has ever built

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for this purpose. This object beats it by a factor

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of well over one hundred.

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Speaker 1: With no magnets and no budget.

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Speaker 2: With no magnets and no budget. Now, we've known about

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pevetron candidates for a while. There are dozens of them.

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The problem has always been proving what's actually being accelerated.

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Because when you detect very high energy gamma rays coming

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from one of these sources, there are two ways to

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make them. Protons smashing into gas or electrons scattering off light.

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Both produce gamma rays. The observatories that found these sources

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can't tell the two apart because their images are too

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blurry to see the difference.

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Speaker 1: So how do you settle it, you.

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Speaker 2: Stop relying on one telescope. A team led by Tsunafumi

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Mizuno at Hiroshima University pulled together three completely different instruments

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looking at three completely different kinds of light. NASA's Fermi

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Space Telescope for gamma rays at lower energies, a Japanese

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radio survey from the forty five meter dish at Nobayama,

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which maps the cold gas clouds in that region, and

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NASA's Chandra Observatory for X rays.

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Speaker 1: Three views of the same patch of sky.

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Speaker 2: And the pattern only works one way. Fermi found an

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excess of gamma rays at exactly the energies you'd expect

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if protons were slamming into gas, and the radio data

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showed the gas was right there for them to slam into.

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The electron explanation doesn't fit the shape of the signal,

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So this is a proton accelerator, confirmed in the Astrophysical Journal.

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Speaker 1: What was it? Originally thought to be.

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Speaker 2: A super nova remnant the expanding wreckage of a dead star,

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perfectly reasonable until it started putting out gamma rays above

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one hundred trillion electron volts and stopped being ordinary. And

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it is big on the sky. It spans more than

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one degree twice the width of the full moon.

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Speaker 1: Which matters because cosmic rays are not just an abstraction.

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They're hating us constantly, constantly.

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Speaker 2: They are a genuine hazard for astronauts and for spacecraft electronics,

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and they play into the chemistry of the interstellar medium.

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Knowing where the most energetic ones actually come from is

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not a trivia question. The team says, there are dozens

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more candidates to work through, and now they have a

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method that works. Expect more of these. Next up story three,

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The starved Red Potato.

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Speaker 1: Every imagine a desert right on the coastline, stretching to

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the horizon on one side, and almost no rainfall for

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years at a time.

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Speaker 2: The Atacama or the namebe.

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Speaker 1: Exactly those All that water is sitting there, right there,

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and none of it arriving. That image is what got

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an astronomer in Milan thinking about a galaxy.

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Speaker 2: Go on.

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Speaker 1: Back in January, we got word of a galaxy nicknamed

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the Red Potato, named with real scientific rigor for looking

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like a red potato in the JWST image. It's more

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than eleven billion light years away. We're seeing it as

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it was when the universe was under two billion years old,

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and it sits in the southern sky at a declination

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of about minus forty nine.

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Speaker 2: And the problem with it.

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Speaker 1: The problem is that it's sitting in the middle of

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an enormous reservoir of cold gas, a node in the

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cosmic web, exactly the kind of place where galaxies are

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supposed to gorge themselves and blaze with new stars, and

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it's making almost none. It's quiet, red, old, and quiet

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at an age of the universe that it has no

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business being any of those things.

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Speaker 2: Coastal desert, coastal desert.

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Speaker 1: Now, the usual suspect for shutting down star formation is

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the galaxy's own central black hole. It fires up, blows

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the gas out, and the galaxy starves textbook, but the

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observations showed no sign of an active black hole in

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the Red Potato and no sign of any strong outflows.

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There was nothing there to blame.

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Speaker 2: So what changed? This week?

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Speaker 1: Tandra, the team led by Waychen Wang at the University

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of Milano Bikacoa, took deep X ray observations and found

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a long jet of particles. And it's not coming from

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the Red Potato. It's coming from a black hole in

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a neighboring galaxy, and it's pointed straight at the Red

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Potatoes gas cloud.

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Speaker 2: What it's being starved by someone else's black hole.

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Speaker 1: That's the finding. The jet doesn't appear to be doing

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much to its own host galaxy. It's narrow near home,

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and it widens out as it travels. By the time

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it reaches the Red Potato's neighborhood, it's wide enough to

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stir up that whole gas reservoir. One turbulent gas is

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turbulent gas. Turbulent gas will not settle down and fall in.

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The galaxy is surrounded by fuel. It cannot collect.

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Speaker 2: What's the measured evidence for the turbulence.

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Speaker 1: The gas motions are elevated. They can read that off

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the shape of the emission lines. It's not proof of causation,

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and the team is careful about that. They can't fully

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rule out that the Red Potato had some earlier violent

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episode that evtied it out, but there's no evidence for one,

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and there is a very obvious jet pointing at it.

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Speaker 2: And this is the interesting bit for the wider picture,

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because Web keeps finding these quiet early galaxies.

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Speaker 1: It does, and they're a genuine problem for our models.

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If a galaxy can be shut down by a neighbor

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rather than by itself, then galaxy evolution is not something

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a galaxy does on its own. It's something done to

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it by whatever happens to be nearby. That's a considerably

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messier universe than the one we had drawn.

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Speaker 2: Let's move on to story four. Gravity one at open

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On Wednesday morning, Beijing time, a rocket lifted off from

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the deck of a ship one hundred and seventy kilometers

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out in the East China Sea, east of Shanghai, and

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put nine satellites into orbit.

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Speaker 1: Fee launch is not new, but that distance is unusual.

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Speaker 2: That is the story. The rocket is Gravity one, built

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by a commercial company called Orient Space, based in Shandong Province.

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This was its third flight and its third success, and

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its first genuine open ocean launch. The previous two went

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up from waters just off the coast. This time the

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ship sailed properly out to sea. Why does that matter conditions?

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The chief designer, Su Gul Kwang made the point that

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open sea is a different problem, different swell, different weather,

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no easy shore support. If you can launch out there,

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you can launch from almost anywhere, which means you can

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pick your orbit rather than being stuck with whatever your

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fixed past that allows. It also happens to be China's

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first commercial sea launch in the Yanksee River.

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Speaker 1: Delta, and the rocket itself is unusual.

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Speaker 2: Very Gravity one is about thirty meters tall, STUW squat

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four strap on boosters, around three core stages, and every

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single one of those motors is solid fuel, no cryogenic propellant,

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no complex plumbing. You build it, you ship it, you

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light it. That makes it the most powerful all solid

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fueled orbital rocket in the world, at six and a

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half tons to low Earth orbit.

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Speaker 1: Which sounds enormous until you compare it, and we should.

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Speaker 2: Falcon nine does about twenty two point eight tons, so

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Gravity one is roughly a third of that. The record

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it holds is specifically for solid fueled rockets, and that

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is a meaningful category. Solids are simple, storable, and quick

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to prepare, which is exactly what you want if your

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business is putting up batches of satellites on a schedule.

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But went up nine payloads, including six satellite for a

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constellation called Hwantian, two optical satellites carrying artificial intelligence hardware

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to do image recognition on board rather than beaming everything

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down first and four radar satellites designed to fly in formation.

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Speaker 1: And orient space is not stopping at solids.

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Speaker 2: No Gravity two is the next vehicle, liquid fueled, recoverable

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twenty one and a half tons to low Earth orbit

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MAIDE in flight, targeted for the final quarter of this year,

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which is ambitious and the wider context is worth noting.

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That launch was China's forty ninth orbital attempt of twenty

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twenty six. The national record is ninety two set last year.

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They're on pace to clear one hundred.

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Speaker 1: One more from the Chinese program worth having on your radar.

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Speaker 2: The big one, the long March five that will send

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Changa seven to the lunar South Pole, arrived in wen

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Chong on the thirteenth of July. Navigation warnings point to

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a launch window opening around the twenty fourth of August.

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That is a landing mission to the most contested real

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estate on the Moon, and it's now about a month out.

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In our next story, we visit an old friend for

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an update our Starship Flight thirteen watch guide.

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Speaker 1: Quick update on a story we've been following all week,

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and this one is a watch guide rather than a

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result because as we record. It hasn't happened yet.

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Speaker 2: Light thirteen has had a fortnight.

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Speaker 1: It has back On the sixteenth, the countdown reached zero

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and the flight software called an aubort because four of

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the thirty three Raptor engines on the booster failed to

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reach acceptable starting conditions. The limit is three, so the

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vehicle stood itself down, which is the system working exactly

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as designed.

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Speaker 2: Two raptors were swapped out after that.

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Speaker 1: Two raptors replaced a leak check on the twenty second

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Ship forty stacked back on Booster twenty that evening, and

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SpaceX went for it yesterday and then waved off at

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ten past four in the afternoon Central time. Not a

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vehicle problem.

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Speaker 2: Weather, which is a slightly unusual reason to scrub.

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Speaker 1: It is, and the explanation is interesting. One of the

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key objectives this flight is getting clean camera footage from

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the ground of the heat shield while the vehicle is

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punching through maximum aerodynamic pressure on the way up. Cloud

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cover means no footage, and no footage means a lost objective.

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Though they waited for a clear day.

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Speaker 2: So here are the times.

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Speaker 1: The window opens Tonight, Friday the twenty fourth, at six

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forty five in the evening Eastern time. That's five forty

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five Central, four forty five Mountain, three forty five Pacific.

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The stream starts about half an hour before and.

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Speaker 2: For those of us on this side of the world,

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that is Saturday morning, eight forty five am Eastern Australian time,

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ten forty five am in New Zealand. Coffee in hand,

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entirely civilized for once.

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Speaker 1: The payload is the headline twenty Starlink V three satellites,

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the first time real functional V three spacecraft have gone

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up on Starship rather than the mass simulators of earlier flights.

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Six of them carry cameras aimed back at Starship's own

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heat shield, so the vehicle gets to inspect itself on

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the way through.

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Speaker 2: Also raptor relay in space, a booster splashed down in

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the Gulf and the ship coming down in the Indian Ocean.

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Speaker 1: That is the flight. We will have the result for

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you in tomorrow's weekend wrap, whatever it turns out to be.

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And finally, today let's turn our eyes skywards with our

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daily SkyWatch.

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Speaker 2: We're talking about the sky over your head.

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Speaker 1: Tonight, the moon has a close encounter with Antari's the

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Red Super giant at the heart of Scorpius, the star

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whose name literally means rival of Mars, and.

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Speaker 2: This one favors the north, which is a nice change.

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Speaker 1: It genuinely does, so let us be straight about it.

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The closest approach happens at six in the evening Eastern

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Time on Friday, when the moon passes about six tenths

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of a degree south of Antaris. For North American observer,

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that's right around your evening. By the time the sky

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is properly dark, the moon will have drifted a little,

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but you're still looking at a waxing gibbous moon and

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a bright orange red star sitting within a degree or

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two of each other. Bring binoculars if you have them.

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The color contrast is lovely.

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Speaker 2: And for us in Australia and New Zealand, the exact

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moment falls in daylight on Saturday morning, so we get

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the pairing on either side of it Friday evening and

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Saturday evening, with the moon and ataris several degrees apart,

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rather than snuggled up, but.

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Speaker 1: With an enormous compensation.

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Speaker 2: An enormous one. In late July, Scorpius is not scraping

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the southern horizon for us, it's close to overhead the

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whole constellation, the claws, the curve of the body. The

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sting is laid out near the zenith in a way

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northern observer simply never gets a see. So take the

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wider pairing and enjoy the best view of Scorpius on

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the planet.

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Speaker 1: And while you're out there, find all tear again our

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particle accelerator. From earlier listeners, it's high in the east

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to southeast in the evening, the bottom point of the

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summer triangle with Vega and DANEB. Southern listeners look north

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and about a third of the way up somewhere in

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that direction fourteen thousand light years past it something is

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flinging protons at energies. Our best machines cannot touch.

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Speaker 2: Good thing to think about while you're standing in the cold.

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Speaker 1: A few more for the diary. Full moon on Wednesday,

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the twenty ninth, the buck moon peeking at half past

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two in the afternoon utc over in Capricornice, which does

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mean the sky is brightening all.

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Speaker 2: Week, though if you're chasing the delta acarids, do it

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now rather than waiting for the peak. We've said that

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all week, and it still holds.

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Speaker 1: And in the pre dawn east Mars and Saturn are

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both up. Saturn is the brighter and easier of the two,

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and the rings are tilted about nine degrees at the moment,

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far better than the near edge on view we had

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at the end of last year. Worth a telescope if

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you are up early.

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Speaker 2: And keep the twelfth of August circled total solar eclipse

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across Iceland and Spain, and a moonless Percy had peaked

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the same night. We will have plenty on both closer

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to the time.

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Speaker 1: That is Astronomy Daily for Friday, the twenty fourth of July.

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Speaker 2: You can find us at Astronomy Daily dot io and

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on your social platform of choice at astro Daily Pod.

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Astronomy Daily is part of the bites dot com podcast network.

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Speaker 1: We're back tomorrow with the weekend wrap and with whatever

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Starship has done overnight until then from both of us

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Clear Skies.

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Speaker 2: Sunday stars start