Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. It's great to have you with us
for your essential daily update on everything
happening in the cosmos. We've got a packed
show for you today.
Anna: Indeed, we'll be talking about exciting
comets, including an interstellar visitor.
We'll delve into surprising findings about
the early universe, uncover why it rains on
the sun, and catch up on the latest rocket
launches.
Avery: Absolutely, Anna.
Uh, let's kick things off with Comet C by
2025. A6lem this
comet is putting on an encore appearance at
dusk this October, joining Comet R2
Swan in what promises to be a
fantastic show for observers.
Anna: Asics LEMMON slides past Earth at about twice
the distance of R2 Swan just 24 hours
later. Both are currently fine objects for
binoculars or a small telescope vying for top
spot at around magnitude
6A6 LEMMON was.
Avery: Discovered by astronomer D. Carson Fuls
during the Mount Lemmon Sky Survey back on
January 3rd. It's proven to be a
dependable performer. Crossing from the
constellation Leominer into Ursa
Major recently just below the famous Big.
Anna: Dipper A6 LEMMON is on a roughly
1350 year inbound orbit. Its path
will be slightly tweaked by Jupiter. It
reaches its closest point to the sun or
perihelion at Ah, 0.53
astronomical units from the sun on November
8th.
Avery: Then it's off to a chilly aphelion beyond the
main kuiper belt at uh, 219 AU
from the sun around 3175 AD.
Anna: Good news is a 6 lemon seems to be
brightening slightly ahead of predictions. It
maxes out in northern declination on October
10th and actually goes circumpolar for
observers north of the 50th parallel,
roughly above London and Vancouver around the
same date.
Avery: From mid latitude Northern Hemisphere
observers, it's transitioning to the evening
sky. By mid month a 6 lemon will
hug the western horizon, never getting much
higher than 20 degrees an hour after sunset.
Unlike R2 Swan, we can always hope.
Anna: For an outburst to enhance its visibility.
Remember, comet magnitudes can deceive.
A comet's light gets smeared out, often
needing to be around third magnitude to be
seen without binoculars.
Avery: To actually look like a comet with a fuzzy
head and a tail, it needs to be even brighter
around first magnitude or better. But
don't let this deter you from your cometary
quest.
Anna: Both Artoo Swan and Asics LEMMON should make
excellent binocular objects right around
Halloween. Asics LEMMON then starts to
head southward and will favor the Northern
Hemisphere into November as it continues its
long journey out of the solar system.
Avery: And for those with large telescopes, there's
an extra special treat interstellar comet
3I Atlas. Also visible
as a 11th magnitude object, it'll just look
like a dot, but it's a rare interloper from
beyond our solar system. Precise coordinates
are needed, but sites like Kevin's above
offer excellent comet pages.
Anna: Astrophotographer Elliot Herman noted that if
a comet is three or four, it will be a
nice binocular object, suggesting apps like
Stellarium to locate it. Observing Comet
Asics LEMMON is as easy as sweeping at low
power, and even a tripod mounted DSLR
with 10 to 30 second exposures should reveal
it as a small green blob.
Avery: That's fantastic advice.
And speaking of interstellar comets, Anna,
let's dive deeper into three IAT
LAs. This object has really
captured the astronomical spotlight since its
discovery in July 2025.
Anna: It's definitely captured a lot of attention.
To clarify, 3i Atlas is actually the third
interstellar object ever discovered after
1eye Oumuamua in 2017 and
2i Borisov in 2019.
It was found by the Atlas station in Chile.
Avery: 3I Atlas, like Borisov,
is clearly a comet, but it's thought to be
quite large with a nucleus estimated at about
a kilometer in diameter, roughly the length
of 10 football fields.
Anna: One of its most unusual features is that its
dust tail appears to point towards the Sun.
Normally, solar radiation pushes comet tails
away. 3i Atlas has that
faint normal tail but also heavier dust
grains pushed by its own internal activity.
Avery: Because the Sun's energy increases that
internal activity, dust is primarily
pushed out towards the sun, creating this
backward looking tail. Initial studies
suggest this comet may be between 3 and
14 billion years old, potentially older
than our solar system, an.
Anna: Ancient relic Tracing its exact galactic
origin is almost impossible as its
trajectory has been nudged countless times.
However, JWST and SphereX
observations show it's rich in carbon
dioxide, suggesting it formed far from its
parent star in a very cold environment.
Avery: So while we don't know where it came from, we
do know where it's going. 3i
Atlas reaches perihelion, its closest point
to the sun around October 29th.
Then it will pass 0.65 AU
from Venus on November 3rd.
Anna: And here's an exciting ESA's Juice
spacecraft en route to Jupiter will attempt
to observe 3i Atlas. Its
closest approach to Earth will be December
19th. After passing Jupiter in
March 2026, it will leave our solar
system.
Avery: It's incredibly fast too, at
perihelion it's expected to hit 68
kilometers per second. 3 IA
Atlas certainly won't be the last. With
powerful survey telescopes like the Vera
Rubin Observatory coming online,
astronomers expect to discover many more
interstellar objects, giving us unique
insights into the universe from interstellar
wanderers.
Anna: Let's turn our attention to the very
beginning of everything. New research from
astronomers in Australia suggests that the
early universe was surprisingly warmer than
expected, particularly around 800 million
years after the Big Bang.
Avery: This discovery specifically probes the epoch
of reionization. The universe
originated 13.8 billion years ago.
Initially, it was a hot soup of particles,
then cooled enough for hydrogen and helium
nuclei to form with three electrons,
making the universe opaque.
Anna: About 380,000 years after the Big
Bang, it cooled further, allowing the first
neutral atoms to form and light could finally
travel freely, creating the cosmic
microwave background we observe today.
Then came the Dark ages. For about 200
million years, a dark expanse of mostly
hydrogen.
Avery: The epoch of reionization ended these
dark ages when the first stars ignited.
These early stars emitted ultraviolet light
energetic enough to ionize the surrounding
hydrogen gas, clearing the cosmic fog
and making the universe transparent, allowing
starlight to eventually reach our telescopes.
This period is incredibly important because
it's when the first stars and galaxies
formed.
Anna: So what about its temperature? Researchers
used the Murchison Wide Field Array radio
telescope, analyzing a decade's worth of data
from 2013 to 2023. They looked for
the faint signal of the 21cm
hydrogen line. From this extremely distant
epoch, red shifted to longer radio
wavelengths.
Avery: The challenge, as Ridima Nun Hoki explained,
was meticulously cleaning the data to remove
all the foreground signals, emission from
closer objects like stars and galaxies,
interference from Earth's atmosphere, and
even noise from the telescope itself. It's a
massive data science undertaking, and.
Anna: After all that careful work, they didn't find
the telltale characteristics that would
indicate a very cold universe. This implies
the gas between galaxies was heated.
Catherine Trott noted this rules out very
cold reionization. A, uh, really interesting
finding.
Avery: The new research suggests this warmer early
universe was heated by x rays from early
sources, specifically nascent black holes and
the remains of dead stars. And it helps us
understand the conditions that allowed light
to eventually break free.
Anna: Looking ahead, the team will apply these
cutting edge data analysis techniques to even
higher quality data from the Square Kilometer
Array telescopes currently under construction
to fine tune our understanding of this
critical epoch.
Avery: Moving from the early universe to our own
star, the Sun. Prepare for a surprising
revelation. Scientists at the University of
Hawaii have finally discovered why it appears
to rain on the Sun. Changing
elemental makeup, um, drives these mysterious
downpours of plasma.
Anna: That's right, Avery. This solar rain
involves cooler, denser clumps of plasma that
condense high in the sun's corona and then
descend back towards the surface. Researchers
were puzzled by how rapidly this could happen
during intense solar flares, and.
Avery: The long standing mystery has been solved by
Luke Bennevitz, uh, a graduate student, and
astronomer Jeffrey Reap. Their findings,
published in the Astrophysical Journal,
provide an essential update to solar models
that have puzzled scientists for decades.
Anna: Bennovitz explained that current models
assume the distribution of elements in the
corona is constant, but their work shows
that when elements like iron are allowed to
change with time, the models finally match
what's observed. This means the physics truly
comes alive and feels real.
Avery: This is a significant breakthrough. Earlier
models assumed elemental distributions were
constant, which didn't match fast acting
solar flares. This new understanding
of shifting elemental abundances explains
how rain can form so quickly. As Arip
noted, if our models haven't treated
abundances properly, cooling times were
likely overestimated, meaning a lot of new
work is needed on coronal heating.
Anna: This discovery has implications far beyond
coronal rain, challenging long standing
models that assumed fixed elemental
abundances in the Sun's atmosphere. It
pushes researchers to rethink how the sun's
outer layers behave and how energy moves
through its atmosphere, potentially aiding
space.
Avery: Weather prediction that's crucial for our
technological society.
Now let's blast off into our launch
roundup. For the first week of October
2025, SpaceX is
absolutely dominating the manifest with
five Falcon 9 missions scheduled.
Four of these will launch more satellites
into their Starlink Internet Constellation,
and the fifth will carry satellites for
Amazon's Project Cooper first.
Starlink Group 1059 lifted off on
Tuesday, October 7th at 12:10am
EDT from Cape Canaveral. Its
Falcon 9 booster B1090
completed its eighth flight and landed
successfully just hours later. On Tuesday
Evening, Starlink Group 1117
launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in
California, carrying another 28
Starlink V2 mini satellites into low
Earth orbit. That's a rapid turnaround even
for SpaceX. Blue Origin also
joins the schedule with their 36th New
Shepard mission, planned for Wednesday,
October 8, carrying six people to
suborbital space. This marks New
Shepard's 15th crewed mission and its eighth
flight this year, doubling their total
flights from 2024, a significant
increase. Then on October 9,
another Falcon 9 will launch the
KF03 mission for Amazon's Project
Kuiper sending 24 communications
satellites into LEO. This adds to the
12 nine Kuiper satellites already deployed,
aiming for a total of
3,336. Booster
B1091 will be making its second flight with a
quick 60 day turnaround. Meanwhile,
in China, CASC is expected to launch
the fifth Changzang 8A rocket from
Wencheng, a mission initially delayed by
Typhoon Makmo. And to cap off SpaceX's
busy week, two more Starlink missions, Group
1052 and 1119, are slated
for October 12th. This will make Falcon
9's 130th mission of
2025 and 548th over,
what, a week for launches?
Anna: That's an incredible pace, Avery finally
today, Johns Hopkins astronomers have
developed a new algorithm that can render
images from ground based telescopes as clear
as those taken from space. This
groundbreaking method uses algorithms to
strip away atmospheric interference, making
it possible for earthbound instruments to
produce the deepest, clearest images.
Thomas Budavari says it allows us to see
farther, fainter targets Even the most
powerful ground based telescopes struggle
with Earth's atmosphere. Variations in
temperature, pressure and air conditions
cause subtle but significant distortions.
Traditional techniques often blur fine
details or introduce grainy artifacts.
The new solution, called ImageMM,
models how light travels through our restless
atmosphere, effectively stripping away
distortions. Yashil Sukhardeep
described our algorithms learn to see past
that curtain, reconstructing the still sharp
image hidden behind it. Early tests
with images from the Subaru Telescope, one of
the world's largest, restored blurry and
noisy images in a matter of seconds,
revealing intricate spiral galaxy structures
with unprecedented clarity. These
images were specifically acquired to test for
similar quality as future captures by the
Vera C Rubin Observatory.
Sukhardeep explained that their framework can
recover a near perfect image from a series of
imperfect observations, getting as close as
possible to ground truth. This is
critical for astronomers who need to
accurately measure the shapes of objects.
While space telescopes offer superior deep
imaging capabilities, they cover only a tiny
fraction of the observable sky. Ground
based facilities like the Rubin Observatory,
however, will image the entire visible sky
every few days. With this new technique,
hundreds of ground based observations can be
turned into images almost comparable to what
was previously only achievable with a space
telescope. This is a massive leap for ground
based astronomy.
Avery: What an incredible collection of stories
today. Ana uh, it's clear the cosmos is
always full of surprises.
Anna: It certainly is. Avery and that's all we have
time for today. Thank you for tuning in to
Astronomy Daily.
Avery: Join us tomorrow for more space and astronomy
news. Until then, keep looking up.