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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna and I'm Avery.

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Speaker 2: You've joined us on a very eventful day for space fans, Tuesday,

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the tenth of March twenty twenty six, and the universe

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is not holding back.

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Speaker 1: We genuinely mean that we have a satellite falling out

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of the sky today, a meteorite that crashed through someone's

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roof over the weekend, Congress picking a fight with the

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space station's retirement plan, the biggest image ever taken of

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our galaxy's core, a map of the universe from ten

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billion years ago, and Jupiter doing something a bit strange tonight.

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Speaker 2: So strap in. This is Astronomy Daily, Season five, episode

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fifty nine, and we are not slowing down.

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Speaker 1: Let's kick things off with breaking news that literally cannot

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wait because it's happening today. NASA's Van Allen probe a

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is expected to fall back to Earth tonight.

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Speaker 2: Right, This is genuinely happening, as our listeners are tuning in.

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The spacecraft, which weighs about six hundred kilogram roughly the

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same size as a small car, launched back in August

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twenty twelve and has been silently orbiting Earth ever since.

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It was switched off in October twenty nineteen, and.

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Speaker 1: The US Space Force has been tracking it closely. As

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of yesterday afternoon, they were predicting re entry at around

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seven forty five in the evening Eastern time, though there's

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a plus or minus twenty four hour window on that.

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Though it could happen anytime today or tonight now.

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Speaker 2: Before anyone panics, the risk to people on the ground

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is very low. NASA says the odds of anyone being

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harmed are roughly one in four thy two hundred. Most

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of the spacecraft will burn up during re entry, and

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any surviving fragments are likely to land in the ocean,

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which covers about seventy percent of the Earth's surface.

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Speaker 1: So this satellite was originally designed for just a two

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year mission studying Earth's van Allen radiation belts, those invisible

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zones of charged particles trapped by our planet's magnetic field.

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But the mission ended up running for nearly seven years

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before the probes ran out of fuel.

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Speaker 2: And here's the interesting twist. Probe A was actually expected

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to stay up in orbit until twenty thirty four. So

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what happened. Solar activity the Sun has been unusually energetic

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in recent years, and that's caused Earth's upper atmosphere to

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expand slightly. More atmosphere means more drag on satellites, and

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Probe A got pulled down faster than predicted.

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Speaker 1: The Twin Van Allen Probe B is still up there

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and isn't expected to come down before twenty thirty, so

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we'll be going through this again in a few years.

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Speaker 2: The data from these spacecraft is still being used today

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helping scientists understand space weather, predict solar storms, and protect

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everything from GPS satellites to power grids. A proper little

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scientific workhorse.

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Speaker 1: And now it's coming home. Keep an eye on the

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sky tonight. And while we're in the theme of things

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falling from space, let's talk about this incredible story from

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Sunday evening. Yes, so, at around ten to seven in

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the evening local time on Sunday, the eighth of March

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twenty twenty six, thousands of people in Western Europe looked

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up and saw an absolutely breath taking fireball lighting up

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the sky. We're talking Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,

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all these countries with people outside going what on Earth

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is that.

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Speaker 2: The fireball lasted? About six seconds, leaving a glowing trail

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across the sky. Before breaking apart. People heard multiple loud booms.

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That's the sonic boom from the space rock to cintegrating

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in the atmosphere. The International Media Organization received over three

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thousand reports of sightings and.

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Speaker 1: Here's the remarkable bit. Some of it survived. Fragments of

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the meteorite, which is what we call it once it

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hits the ground, came down in the Rhineland Palatinate region

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of western Germany, and one fragment punched straight through the

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roof of a house in the city of Koblenz.

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Speaker 2: The largest piece left the whole the size of a

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football in the roof and landed in an unoccupied bedroom.

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Nobody was hurt, thankfully, though the homeowner now has a

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very unusual home insurance claim to make.

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Speaker 1: Ragman's have already been recovered from the area the Coblins

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district of Goals in particular, which will allow researchers to

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analyze where this rock came from and what it's made of.

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Lisa's Planetary Defense team has been working to estimate the

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size of the original object, and they believe it was

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just a few meters across.

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Speaker 2: What's wonderful about this event is how many cameras captured it.

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There's a network called all Sky seven dedicated fireball watching

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cameras run by private citizens across Europe that caught it beautifully,

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and of course dozens of mobile phone videos went viral

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on social media almost immediately.

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Speaker 1: Meteorite impacts in populated areas are rare, but not unheard of.

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Germany actually had one in two thousand and two near

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the Neuschwanstein Castle and another in twenty twenty three in

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Schliswick Holstein. But this is one of the most well

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documented falls in recent European history. Quite the Sunday evening.

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Speaker 2: All right, let's shift from falling things to things we

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want to keep up big space policy news this week,

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Congress is making moves to extend the life of the

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International Space Station.

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Speaker 1: The NASA Authorization Act of twenty twenty six passed through

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the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee last week with

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bipartisan support, which is always good to hear, and one

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of its biggest changes is pushing back the retirement of

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the ISS from twenty thirty to September twenty thirty two.

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Speaker 2: So the ISS has been continuously occupied since November two thousand.

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That's over twenty five years of humans living in space.

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It was originally set to be decommissioned and deliberately de

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orbited in twenty thirty. The plan was to crash it

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into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean in a

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controlled re entry.

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Speaker 1: But Congress is saying not so fast. The concern is

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that commercial space stations, which are supposed to replace the

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ISS in low Earth orbit just aren't going to be

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ready in time. Companies like Blue Origin, BAST and Axiom

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Space are all working on successor stations, but timelines have slipped,

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and there's also.

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Speaker 2: A geopolitical dimension to this. China's Tiandong Space Station is

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fully operational and will keep running well into the twenty thirties.

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The bill specifically uses the language of avoiding a gap

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in continuous human presence in Low Earth orbit and explicitly

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mentions not wanting to see leadership to China.

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Speaker 1: The bill also does something very significant on the funding side.

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It rejects proposed cuts to NASA's budget and instead allocates

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substantial funding for fiscal year twenty twenty six and twenty

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twenty seven. Programs like the Chandra X ray Observatory are

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saved under this bill.

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Speaker 2: There is a caveat here though. This bill has passed

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committee but still needs a full Senate vote and then

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the House of Representatives and then a presidential signature. So

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it's not law.

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Speaker 1: Yet, but it sends a very clear signal about where

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Congress stands on the future of American human spaceflight. The

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ISS isn't going anywhere just yet.

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Speaker 2: Now let's move from policy to pure science, and this

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next one is genuinely jaw dropping.

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Speaker 1: Astronomers have just released the largest image ever produced by

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the ALMA telescope, and it's a portrait of the heart

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of our own Milky Way galaxy.

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Speaker 2: ALMA stands for Athagama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array. It's a

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telescope complex and the high altitude desert of Chile, and

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it detects radio waves rather than visible light, which means

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it can see through all the dust and gas that

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hides the galactic center from optical telescopes.

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Speaker 1: The new image comes from a survey called ACES, the

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ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey, and it maps a region called

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the Central Molecular Zone. That's the area surrounding the supermassive

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black hole at the heart of our galaxy, Sagittarius, a

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star stretching across six hundred and fifty light years.

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Speaker 2: To put that in perspective, the finished mosaic spans an

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area equivalent to three full moons placed side by side

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in the sky. It was assembled from hundreds of individual observations,

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stitched together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

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Speaker 1: And what it reveals is extraordinary. The central molecular zone

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is filled with this intricate web of filaments, long thin

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threads of cold molecular gas snaking through the region, feeding

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into dense clumps where new stars are being born. It

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looks almost like a web or a circulatory system.

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Speaker 2: The survey also mapped the chemistry of the region in

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incredible detail, detecting dozens of molecules, from relatively simple cons

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like silicon monoxide, all the way to complex organic molecules

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like methanol, actone, and even ethanol. There's a cocktail of

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chemistry going on near the center of our galaxy.

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Speaker 1: The team involved was enormous, over one hundred and sixty

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scientists from more than seventy institutions around the world, and

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they say this is just the beginning an upcoming upgrade

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to ALMAH, plus the eventual arrival of ESO's extremely large

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telescope will let them push even deeper into this region.

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Speaker 2: One researcher put it beautifully, it's a place of extremes,

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invisible to our eyes, but now revealed an extraordinary detail.

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We'll have a link to the image in the show notes.

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It really is something.

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Speaker 1: To look at, from the heart of our galaxy to

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the dawn of time. Our next story is about a

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brand new map of the early universe.

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Speaker 2: Researchers have published the largest and most detailed three D

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map yet of light from the the universe's early history,

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specifically the period between nine and eleven billion years ago.

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That's the time astronomers call cosmic noon, when the universe

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was producing stars at the fastest rate in its entire history.

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Speaker 1: The map was created using data from the Hobby Eberly

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Telescope Dark Energy Experiment pet DECKS, which operates from McDonald

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Observatory in Texas, and the technique used is really clever.

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Speaker 2: Most cosmic maps focus on individual bright galaxies. They are

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essentially dot to dot maps of the universe, but this

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team used a technique called line intensity mapping, which instead

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of counting individual galaxies tracks a specific kind of light

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called Lyman alpha radiation.

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Speaker 1: Liman alpha light is produced when hydrogen atoms, the most

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abundant element in the universe, get energized by young hot stars.

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Though wherever you see that glow, you know there's hydrogen

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gas and likely star formation happening near by.

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Speaker 2: And by tracking that glow across the sky and through time,

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the researchers were able to build a three D picture

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of not just the bright galaxies, but all the dim,

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faint matter in between them, the cosmic web of gas

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that connects galaxies together. They called it a sea of light.

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Speaker 1: The data set they used was enormous, over six hundred

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million spectra collected by headdecks, and here is the staggering part.

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The team only used about five percent of those spectra

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for their primary research mission. Is this the first time

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anyone has gone back and mined that remaining data to

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do this kind of mapping.

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Speaker 2: What the map Lets scientists do is test their computer

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simulations of the early universe against reality. As one researcher

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put it, we have simulations of this period, but those

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are just simulations, not the real universe. Now we have

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a foundation to check if the physics underpinning those simulations

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is correct.

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Speaker 1: It's like having a map of the world for the

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first time. You can finally compare what you thought was

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there with what's actually there.

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Speaker 2: And finally something you can go outside and see for yourself. Tonight, Jupiter,

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the biggest planet in our Solar system, appears to be

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doing something a bit odd in the sky.

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Speaker 1: If you've been keeping an eye on Jupiter over the

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past few weeks, you may have noticed it's slowly moving

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across the stars from night to night, which is normal

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for planets as they drift against the background of distant

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stars due to their orbital motion.

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Speaker 2: But tonight and over the coming nights, Jupiter appears to

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change direction. This is what astronomers call retrograde motion, and

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it's been confusing, delighting, and in ancient times, mystifying people

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for thousands of years.

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Speaker 1: So what's actually happening. Nothing is actually going backwards. It's

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all about perspective. Earth and Jupiter are both orbiting the Sun,

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but Earth's orbit is smaller and faster. As Earth catches

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up to and begins to pass Jupiter on the inside track,

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Jupiter appears to drift backwards against a star background, like

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how a slower car on the motorway seems to move

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backwards when you overtake it.

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Speaker 2: The change is subtle and it happens gradually over many nights,

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so don't expect to see it in real time. But

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if you compare Jupiter's position tonight to where it was

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a few weeks ago, and then check again in a

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few weeks, you'll see it. Jupiter is high in the

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evening sky right now and easy to find as one

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of the brightest objects up.

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Speaker 1: There, and tonight there's also a lovely waning gibbous moon

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in the southern sky, sitting close to the bright reddish

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star and Terry's, so there's plenty to look at if

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you step outside after dark.

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Speaker 2: No telescope needed for Jupiter, though one will reveal its

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four brightest moons, the Galilean moons, which Galileo himself spotted

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back in sixteen ten. A pair of binoculars is perfect,

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so go look up. And that is it for today's

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episode of Astronomy Daily. What a day lights, falling, meteorites,

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crashing space stations, getting a reprieve, galaxy portraits, cosmic maps,

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and a planet doing loops. The universe never disappoints.

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Speaker 1: If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe wherever you get

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your podcasts and share us with a friend who love space.

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Find all our episodes and show notes at Astronomy Daily

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dot io, and come say hello on social media. We're

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at astro Daily pod on x, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook.

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Speaker 2: We'll be back tomorrow with more from the Cosmos. Until then,

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keep looking up clear skies everyone. Sunday Stars

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Speaker 1: Start