Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily guide to
the universe. I'm Anna and I'm Avery. It is Tuesday,
the third of March twenty twenty six, and we are
Season five, episode fifty three. Anna, quite a lineup today.
We really do have something for everyone. We've got an
update to that major shakeup at NASA, the kind that
has the whole space community talking.
Speaker 2: We've got a planet shaped like a lemon. That's not
a metaphor, it is literally shaped like lemon.
Speaker 1: There is a new approach to one of the biggest
unsolved mysteries in all of physics.
Speaker 2: A space probe has snapped its first close up of
an interstellar comet. And we've got your global launch roundup,
including a big one from Japan making its third attempt.
Speaker 1: And China is about to debut a new reusable rocket
that could shake up the commercial launch industry. Avery, where
do we start.
Speaker 2: Let's start at the top with NASA and a decision
that's rewriting the Artemis playbook.
Speaker 1: So Avery. When NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood up at
Kennedy Space Center just days ago and said Artemis three
will not be landing on the Moon, it was a
significant moment.
Speaker 2: It really was to understand why a quick bit of context,
Artemis three was meant to be humanity's first crude lunar
landing since Apollo seventeen back in nineteen seventy two. That's
over fifty years, a very long time to.
Speaker 1: Wait, and now it's not happening. Instead, the mission, now
targeting a launch sometime in mid twenty twenty seven, has
been completely redesigned. It will stay in low Earth orbit
and focus on testing docking procedures between NASA's Orion capsule
and the commercial lunar landers.
Speaker 2: And that's where it gets really interesting, because those landers
are SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origins Blue Moon, and NASA
is now openly keeping both of them in the running
rather than committing exclusively to Starship.
Speaker 1: Isaacman was quite candid about why he compared the current
Artemis cado to Apollo and found it wanting. Apollo was
launching missions every four to five months, Artemis has been
going every couple of years, which means the agency loses
what he called muscle memory between flights, engineers leave procedures
get rusty.
Speaker 2: And Starship, despite eleven test flights, has yet to reach
Earth orbit. It's still technically a suborbital vehicle, and the
list of milestones it needs to hit before it could
put astronauts on the Moon orbital refueling, rendezvous and docking
an uncrude lunar landing is still very long.
Speaker 1: So the plan now is Artemis three in low Earth
orbit to test systems, then Artemis four as the first
real moonlanding, targeting twenty twenty eight, and NASA is even
talking about two moon landing missions in twenty twenty eight
if they can get the launch cadence up ambitious.
Speaker 2: Very and in the meantime, Artemis two, the crewe fly
by around the Moon with no landing, is still on
track for an April launch after being rolled back to
the vehicle assembly building for repairs to a helium flow issue.
Speaker 1: A lot happening on the Artemis front. We will absolutely
keep you updated. Now, let's go somewhere much much further away,
seven hundred and fifty light years.
Speaker 2: In fact, this one genuinely made me do a double
take when I read it. Scientists using the James Web
Space telescope have found an exoplanet unlike anything ever studied,
and they are baffled.
Speaker 1: So let's set the scene. The planet is called PSR
J two three two two DASH two six five zero B.
It's about the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits its
star at a distance of just one million miles. For comparison,
Earth orbits the Sun at about one hundred million miles.
This planet is one hundredth of that distance away.
Speaker 2: One complete orbit one full year for this planet takes
just seven point eight hours.
Speaker 1: And its star is not a normal star. It's a pulsar,
a raw, rapidly spinning neutron star, the collapsed core of
a long dead massive star containing the mass of our
entire Sun packed into something the size of a city.
Speaker 2: And the gravity from that pulsar is so extreme that
it's literally stretching the planet. Instead of being roughly spherical
like Earth or Jupiter, the gravitational tidal forces are pulling
it into an elongated shape, like a lemon or an
American football, if you prefer.
Speaker 1: The lead researcher, Michael Zang from the University of Chicago
described it as the stretchiest planet we've confirmed, the stretchiness
of which is a sentence I never expected to hear
in astronomy.
Speaker 2: But the shape is almost the least weird thing about it.
When WEB turned its infrared instruments on this world, the
atmosphere came back completely wrong. Instead of water, methane, carbon dioxide,
the things you'd normally expect on a gas giant, it's
almost entirely helium and carbon.
Speaker 1: Carbon compounds called C two and C three, specifically molecular carbon,
and because the pressure inside the planet is enormous, scientists
think that carbon could actually be crystallizing in the deep
interior forming diamonds.
Speaker 2: The surface temperature is around thirty seven hundred degrees fahrenheit,
by the way, which is four times hotter than venus.
So it's a lemon shaped diamond cord thirty seven hundred
degree mystery world, orbiting a zombie star every eight hours.
Speaker 1: And nobody can explain how it formed, Zang said. The
carbon composition rules out every known formation mechanism. It's part
of what's called a black widow system, where the pulsar
is slowly evaporating its companion, but even that doesn't fully
explain what WEB is seeing.
Speaker 2: The team is seriously entertaining the idea that this might
be an entirely new class of cosmic object, not quite
a planet, not quite a stellar remnant, something in between
with no name.
Speaker 1: Yet only Web could have found this. The pulsar amidst
mostly gamma rays, which are invisible to infrared instruments, so
Web could study the planet without the star drowning it
out a pristine spectrum. The researchers called it a perfect
observational setup. Remarkable stuff from the inexplicable to the cosmological.
Speaker 2: What's next, So the Hubble tension. If you've been listening
to astronomy daily for any length of time, you've heard
us mention this. But let's quickly recap why it matters
so much.
Speaker 1: The Hubble constant is a measure of how fast the
universe is expanding. Different methods of measuring it produce different answers,
not wildly different. We're talking about a ten percent gap,
but in cosmology that gap is enormous. If the universe's
expansion rate isn't consistent, something in our fundamental model of
physics is wrong.
Speaker 2: And now a team from the University of Illinois and
the University of Chicago thinks they may have found the
new tool that could finally help resolve it. They call
let the stochastic Siren method.
Speaker 1: And it works like this. Every time two black holes
spiral together and collide somewhere in the universe, which is
happening constantly across billions of galaxies, they release gravitational waves
ripples in the fabric of space time itself. Most of
these events are too distant and too faint for us
to detect individually.
Speaker 2: But together all those undetected collisions create a background hum,
a constant, low level gravitational wave signal washing through everything
all the time, and the team realized that by looking
for or in this case, not finding that background signal
in existing data from the Ligo, Virgo and Cogra detectors,
they could actually constrain the hubble constant.
Speaker 1: Even the non detection is informative. If certain expansion rates
were correct, you'd expect to see a background signal by
now you don't, so those slower expansion scenarios can be
ruled out.
Speaker 2: Combined with exact existing measurements from individual black hole mergers,
the team produced a new, more precise estimate of the
expansion rate, one that sets right in the contested zone
where the hubble tension actually bites.
Speaker 1: The research is published in Physical Review Letters. Daniel Holtz
from You Chicago put it well, saying it's not every
day you come up with an entirely new tool for cosmology.
And as gravitational wave detectors become more sensitive over the
next decade, this method will only get sharper.
Speaker 2: The gravitational weight background itself is expected to be directly
detected within about six years. When that happens, this technique
becomes even more powerful. We might actually be within reach
of solving one of the deepest puzzles in physics. Exciting times, from.
Speaker 1: The vast and theoretical to the relatively local. We had
a visitor in our solar system and we've got a
new photo.
Speaker 2: So three I slash Atlass has been quite the recurring
care on the show, and with good reason. This is
only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected passing through
our Solar system, and it's by far the most studied
because we had more warning than with the previous.
Speaker 1: Two and now ESA's Juice spacecraft, the Jupiter icy Moons
Explore currently in Root to Jupiter, has captured its first
detailed image of the comet, and what it's showing is
a bright, glowing coma surrounding the nucleus with a sweeping
tail already developing.
Speaker 2: Juice was actually well positioned to get an early look
at this object, which makes it a brilliant opportunistic observation.
The spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter's moons, but its
cameras are perfectly capable of turning onto a bright comet.
Speaker 1: What makes three i atlas so scientifically exciting is what
it can tell us about chemistry beyond our Solar system.
Interstellar objects carry the fingerprints of wherever they formed previous
NASA observations. All Bettie revealed the coma and a flare
up as it was heading outward, and the composition data
has been trickling in.
Speaker 2: And now we have Juice's optical imagery to add to
that picture. Every instrument, every telescope, every spacecraft that can
contribute data is doing so. This is coordinated Solar System
science at its best.
Speaker 1: Three I at lists is now heading back out into
the Solar System. So the window for observations is narrowing,
but the data already collected, we'll be keeping researchers busy
for years. Now, let's check in on what's flying this week.
Speaker 2: It is a busy week at launch sites around the globe.
Five missions on the schedule, and there are some real
standout moments to watch for.
Speaker 1: The international highlight is japan Space one, a commercial startup
backed by Canon Electronics and Ihi Aerospace, is attempting its
third launch of the Cairos rocket from Spaceport Key on
the Key Peninsula. The window opens Wednesday, the fourth of March.
Speaker 2: Now, the first two Cairos flights did not go well.
Flight one in March twenty twenty four was terminated by
the Autonomous Flight Termination System due to first stage underperformance.
Light two in December twenty twenty four was lost because
a sensor failure caused loss of control during the first
stage burn.
Speaker 1: Third time lucky hopefully. This flight is targeting Sun synchronous
orbit and is carrying five small payloads from a range
of customers, including satellites from Taiwan and a microsatellite from
a Japanese high school. Lovely to see that kind of diversity.
Speaker 2: On the SpaceX side, there are four Falcon nine missions
this week, launching from both Cape Canabrol and Vandenberg. The
standout is a Vandenberg launch on Wednesday, where booster B
ten seventy one will be flying for its thirty second mission,
and that landing will mark SpaceX's six hundredth Falcon booster
recovery attempt.
Speaker 1: Six hundred the numbers just keep getting bigger and more
mind boggling. A booster that's flown thirty two times is
extraordinary by any standard. This week's Falcon nine missions will
also push SpaceX to its thirtieth launch of twenty twenty six. Overall,
the cadence is relentless, and we're watching.
Speaker 2: The Chiros launch particularly closely. Japan's commercial launch sector has
been growing, and the successful Chiros flight would be a
significant milestone for the country's private space industry. Fingers crossed
now speaking of new rockets.
Speaker 1: And we close today's episode with a look further ahead
to the end of March, when China's commercial space sector
is about to make a significant move.
Speaker 2: CAS Space, a commercial offshoot of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
is preparing to debut its new Connecticut two rocket. Launch
is targeted for late March from the Gooquan Satellite Launch
Center out in the Gobi Desert.
Speaker 1: The Connecticut two is a fifty three meter tall rocket
powered by three YF one oh two engines running on
kerosene and liquid oxygen, a similar propellant combination to SpaceX's
Falcon nine, and like Falcon nine, it's designed to be reusable.
Speaker 2: It can carry up to twelve thousand kilograms to low
Earth orbit or around seventy eight hundred kilograms to a
five hundred kilometers Sun synchronous orbit. That's a meaningful capability.
It puts it in a similar class to Falcon nine
in terms of payload.
Speaker 1: For its debut mission, it's carrying the qin Zau one,
a prototype cargo spacecraft designed to eventually resupply China's Tiongong
space station. Think of it as China's equivalent of testing
a dragon capsule, a first step toward a regular, affordable resupply.
Speaker 2: System, and cast Base has ambitious plans. They're aiming for
at least four Kinetica two launches in twenty twenty six alone,
including missions to deploy satellites into mega constellations, directly competing
with Starlink in the global broadband market.
Speaker 1: It's worth noting that CAAs Space's smaller solid fuel rocket,
the Kineticut one, has already flown eleven successful missions and
has eight more planned for this year, so this is
not a first time player, they have operational experience.
Speaker 2: The broader picture is that the global commercial launch industry
is genuinely becoming competitive in a way it never was before.
BaseX still leads, but you now have serious players from China, Japan,
Europe and beyond all developing capable, affordable rockets. It's a
fascinating time to be watching this space unabsolutely intended.
Speaker 1: And on that note, it's time to wrap up episode
fifty three.
Speaker 2: Really already?
Speaker 1: Yes, that is a wrap on Astronomy Daily Season five,
episode fifty three. What a week it's shaping up to be.
From NASA's lunar reset to lemon planets, to cosmic background
hums to ar new reusable rocket on the launch pad.
Speaker 2: If you've enjoyed today's episode, we would love it if
you leave us a review. Wherever you listen, it really
does make a difference in helping new listeners find the show.
Speaker 1: You can find full show notes, blog posts, and more
over at Astronomy Daily dot io, and follow us on
social media at astro Daily Pod for daily space updates.
Speaker 2: Until next time, keep looking up. The universe has no
shortage of surprises.
Speaker 1: Clear skies everyone, goodbye.
Speaker 2: Say stars, Star