Speaker 1: Tonight, the night sky puts on a show. The Moon
has a date with Jupiter, and six planets are lined
up for your viewing pleasure. This is Astronomy Daily. I'm
Avery and I'm Anna, Season five, episode forty nine, Thursday,
the twenty sixth of February twenty twenty six. Lots to
get through today, so let's go.
Speaker 2: If you've been watching the western sky after sunset this week,
you may have noticed something spectacular building. Six of the
Solar System's planets are above the horizon simultaneously right now,
and tonight is the visual highlight.
Speaker 1: We've also got a deep dive into some extraordinary new
findings about our galaxy's magnetic field, a quick update on
Artemis two, the identity of the astronaut at the center
of last month's historic ISS medical story, and a brief
heads up on a scrubbed military hypersonic launch that we'd
been previewing earlier in the week.
Speaker 2: Big show, let's get into it.
Speaker 1: So, Avery, I know you've been watching this planet parade
build all week, and tonight is the moment we've been
waiting for.
Speaker 2: It really is. As darkness falls this evening, if you
head outside and look west, you'll see the Moon sitting
right next to Jupiter. It's a stunning pairing, and it's
the centerpiece of a six planet alignment that's been building
throughout February.
Speaker 1: Let's break this down. Fix planets above the horizon at once, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
and Neptune. How does that work? Exactly?
Speaker 2: The planets orbit the Sun and roughly the same flat plane,
the Ecliptic, so from Earth they always appear in a
band across the sky. When they spread out enough that
several are visible simultaneously, we get what astronomers call a
planet parade or alignment. Right now, they're nicely spaced across
that band.
Speaker 1: Now, I want to be honest with listeners here, because
not all six planets are easy to spot. Some are
quite the challenge.
Speaker 2: Absolutely right, Jupiter is by far the star of the
show tonight, pun intended. It's high in the western sky
after sunset, unmistakably bright and sitting just below the waxing,
gibbous Moon. If you only look once this week, look tonight,
look for the Moon, and that blazing point of light
right beside it is Jupiter.
Speaker 1: What about the others?
Speaker 2: Saturn, and Mercury are visible, but low on the western horizon.
And I mean low, they said, not long after the sun,
so you've got a fairly tight window. Venus is actually
dimmer than you'd expect right now because it's also sitting
low in the twilight glare. Urinus needs binoculars, and Neptune
really requires a telescope, and you'll need to wait until
the Sun is fully below the horizon before even attempting
that one.
Speaker 1: So Jupiter and the Moon for casual observers, extra kit
for the dedicated stargazer, exactly.
Speaker 2: And here's something that keeping your diary. We're one week
away from the full moon on March third, and this
isn't just any full moon. It's a total lunaric LIL,
which means we're heading into a blood moon. We'll have
full coverage of that next.
Speaker 1: Week, something to really look forward to. So tonight, get outside,
find the Moon and say hello to Jupiter right beside it. Beautiful.
Speaker 2: Now to the heart of our galaxy. Astronomers using the
world's largest radio telescope array have peered deeper into the
Milky Way's central molecular zone than ever before, and what
they found is extraordinary.
Speaker 1: The region around Sagittarius, a star. Our galaxy's super massive
black hole at the very center is a violent, turbulent environment,
and new observations have revealed hidden chemistry swirling through that chaos.
Speaker 2: What the researchers have done is essentially map the complex
molecules in the cloud of gas and dust that surround
Sagittarius astar at a level of detail that wasn't previously possible.
They're finding chemical signatures that challenge how we've thought about
that region of the galaxy.
Speaker 1: When the lead researchers describe this as just the beginning,
that's telling, isn't it. That phrase usually means they've opened
a door rather than closed one.
Speaker 2: Precisely, this is a proof of concept for a new
era of galactic center observations. As the arraysed capabilities continue
to improve, the resolution and sensitivity will only get better.
We're talking about unlocking processes at the very engine room
of our galaxy, how molecules form in extreme environments, how
the black holes, radiation and gravity shape the surrounding chemistry.
Speaker 1: And it all feeds into the bigger question of how
galaxies like ours evolve over cosmic time.
Speaker 2: Exactly right, it's one of those stories where the science
is genuinely exciting right now, but the best discoveries are
still ahead of us.
Speaker 1: As we've been reporting throughout the week, NASA's Artemis two
Space launch System rocket has now been rolled back from
launch Pad thirty nine B to the Vehicle assembly building.
Speaker 2: The Crawler transporter made the journey on Tuesday, a spectacle
haular but somewhat sobering sight that six point six million
pound vehicle hauling a rocket that was supposed to be
heading for the Moon.
Speaker 1: The issue is with the upper stage, and engineers now
need to diagnose and repair whatever's causing the problem in
the controlled environment of the VAB rather than on the pad.
The current expectation is that the earliest realistic launch opportunity
is now early April.
Speaker 2: Interestingly, President Trump gave a State of the Union address
on Monday and gave a shout out to the Space Force,
calling it and I quote, my baby, but notably didn't
mention the Artemis two crew by name.
Speaker 1: Make of that what you will. We'll continue to follow
this as it develops, but for now, no moonshot in March.
Speaker 2: Now to a story that first broke last month and
which has just had a significant new development. NASA has
now identified the astronaut at the center of the first
ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station.
Speaker 1: To recap for anyone who missed the original story, in January,
Space Excess Crew eleven mission returned to Earth early. One
member of that crew had experienced a medical issue serious
enough to warrant cutting the mission short and bringing the
entire crew home.
Speaker 2: That was unprecedented in the entire history of the ISS.
We'd never had a medical evacuation at that level before.
Speaker 1: NASA has now shed more light on what happened, specifically
at the request of the astronaut involved, who wanted their
identity made public. The crew of Crew eleven included NASA
astronauts Mike Fink and Xena Cardman, Jackson astronaut Kmiya Yui,
and Ross Cosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platinoff. It turns out it
was Mike Fink who needed the medical help. It was
explained that he needed some more imaging scans performed, which
just couldn't be done with the equipment on board the
ISS SO home they came, However, the nature of his
ailment still hasn't been revealed.
Speaker 2: The details emerging give the medical community and space agencies
important data for future long duration mission planning. It raises
real questions about how we handle health crises in orbit,
what protocols are in place, and how they might need
to evolve, especially as missions eventually go beyond Low Earth orbit.
Speaker 1: A deeply human story alongside all the engineering and science.
Will link to the full NASA disclosure in the show notes.
Speaker 2: Right and now for what might be my favorite story
of the episode, And honestly, it's one of those pieces
of research that just makes you stop and think about
how strange and wonderful our galaxy is.
Speaker 1: Tell me everything.
Speaker 2: So, a team led by doctor joe Anne Brown at
the University of Calgary has produced the most detailed map
yet of the Milky Ways magnetic field, and what they
found has fundamentally surprised them.
Speaker 1: Let's back up a second. How do you even map
a magnetic field across a galaxy?
Speaker 2: Great question. The technique is called Faraday rotation. When radio
waves travel through space, they interact with electrons and magnetic fields,
and that interaction causes them to shift slightly. They rotate.
Doctor Brown student Rebecca Booth described it brilliantly. Think of
a straw in a glass of water looking bent because
of refraction. Faraday rotation is the same concept, but it's
electrons and magnetic fields benting radio waves instead of light
through water.
Speaker 1: That's a genuinely beautiful analogy.
Speaker 2: Isn't it. And by carefully measuring how much those radio
waves shift, the team can trace the invisible magnetic lines
flowing through the galaxy. Now here's the astonishing finding. If
you could look at the Milky Way from above, the
overall magnetic field runs clockwise, but in the Sagittarius arm,
one of our galaxy spiral arms, it runs counterclockwise, a
complete reversal.
Speaker 1: They must have known about that reversal before, though.
Speaker 2: Right, they knew about the reversal, Yes, what they didn't
understand was how the transition happened, how the field switches direction.
And this is where the new data delivered a genuine
moment of discovery. Doctor Brown describes it perfectly. She says,
one day her student Anna brought in the new data,
and Brown's reaction was, and I'm quoting here, OMG, the
reversal's diagonal.
Speaker 1: I love that and OMG moment in astrophysics.
Speaker 2: It's wonderful. The reversal doesn't happen in a flat, clean
plane as previously assumed. It runs diagonally through the galaxy
in three dimensions. That changes everything about how we model
the magnetic structure. The team has now built a new
three D model to explain it.
Speaker 1: And why does it matter? Why does the galaxy's magnetic
field matter at all?
Speaker 2: Well, as doctor Brown puts it, without a magnetic field,
the galaxy would collapse in on itself due to gravity.
The magnetic field is essentially one of the forces holding
the whole structure and balance. Understanding how it's shaped and
how it's evolved over billions of years tells us something
profound about how galaxies like ours come to exist and persist.
Speaker 1: Absolutely mind expanding. We'll have the research details and links
in the show notes.
Speaker 2: And finally, a quick update on a launch we'd been
previewing earlier in the week. Rocket Lab's Haste suborbital rocket
was due to lift off from Wallops Island, Virginia on Tuesday,
but the mission was scrubbed due to out of bounds
launch commit criteria.
Speaker 1: No new launch date has been announced yet, but just
to give listeners the full picture on what this mission
actually is, because it's genuinely fascinating.
Speaker 2: It really is. The mission is called That's not a knife,
and yes, that is a deliberate crocodile done d reference
and it's carrying a scramjet powered hypersonic demonstrator called dart AE,
built by the Australian company Hypersonics.
Speaker 1: A scramjet being the key technology here.
Speaker 2: Exactly a scramjet supersonic combustion ramjet ingests air flowing through
it faster than the speed of sound and burns fuel
in that airstream. What makes hypersonics version particularly interesting is
that it runs on hydrogen rather than kerosene, making it
essentially zero carbon dioxide emissions at hypersonic speeds. The dart
AE is designed to validate advanced propulsion materials and guidance
systems for the US Defense Innovation.
Speaker 1: Unit, and HASTE itself is Rocket Labs workhorse electron rocket
adapted for suborbital hypersonic testing.
Speaker 2: Correct, this would have been the seventh HASTE flight. The
mission will fly, just not this week. We'll update you
when a new data is confirmed.
Speaker 1: That's everything for Series five, episode forty nine. An enormous
thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2: Lots to look at both in the sky and in
the science. Don't forget Moon and Jupiter tonight, get outside
if you can.
Speaker 1: You enjoyed today's episode, please do subscribe, leave us a review,
and share us with a friend who loves space. We
are Astronomy Daily, part of the Bytes dot com podcast network.
Find us on all major podcast platforms at Astronomy Daily
and on social media at astro Daily Pod.
Speaker 2: We'll be back tomorrow with more from the universe.
Speaker 1: Until then, keep looking up blear skies everyone, Sunny
Speaker 2: Day, star Starz