Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your source for
the latest space and astronomy news. I'm
Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. We're here to bring you
today's cosmic headlines on this Wednesday,
February 4, 2026.
Anna: We've got a packed show today with some
significant developments. NASA's Artemis
2 mission has hit another speed bump with
their moon rocket, experiencing some familiar
issues during testing.
Avery: SpaceX is making headlines on two fronts
today. Launching an innovative new space
safety system while also deal with a
temporary grounding of their Falcon 9 rocket.
Anna: The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted
something extraordinary in the early
universe. A rare five way galaxy
merger that's challenging our understanding
of cosmic evolution.
Avery: Scientists have finally cracked a 50 year
mystery about why nearby galaxies seem to be
fleeing from us. And it involves a massive
cosmic void.
Anna: And we'll wrap up with fascinating new
research on runaway stars. Massive
stellar objects racing through the Milky Way
at incre speeds.
Avery: Let's dive in.
Anna: Our top story today comes from NASA's Kennedy
Space center in Florida, where Artemis 2
mission has been delayed by at least a month
following issues during a critical wet dress
rehearsal test.
Avery: This is the mission that will send four
astronauts on a flyby of the moon, the first
crewed lunar mission in over 50 years.
The crew includes NASA astronauts Reid
Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch
and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy
Hansen.
Anna: So what happened during this test? NASA
concluded a 49 hour practice countdown on
Tuesday after loading 700,000
gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen
into the massive Space Launch System rocket.
Avery: And early in the tanking process, as we
reported yesterday, they detected a hydrogen
leak from the interface that routes cryogenic
propellant into the rocket's core stage.
Sound familiar?
Anna: Unfortunately, yes. These hydrogen leaks
are reminiscent of the issues that plagued
the Artemis I launch attempts back in 2022.
However, there's some good news. They did
resolve the issue during this test and
actually achieved full tanking on the first
try, which NASA considers a tremendous
success.
Avery: That's actually quite significant progress.
The resolution involved stopping the hydrogen
flow, allowing the interface to warm up so
the seals could reseat and then adjusting the
flow of propellant. It worked, but it raised
concerns about launch day operations.
Anna: NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced
they're moving off the February launch window
and targeting March for the earliest possible
launch. The first opportunity next month is
Friday, March 6th at
8:29pm Eastern Time, with the window
extending through March 11th.
Avery: There were other issues too, weren't there? I
read about problems with a valve and some
communication dropouts.
Anna: Right, a, uh, valve associated with the Orion
crew Module hatch pressurization had to be re
torqued and closeout operations took longer
than planned. Cold weather affected several
cameras and other equipment. And perhaps most
concerning, there were dropouts in audio
communication channels that have been
recurring over the past few weeks.
Avery: What's the crew saying about all this?
Anna: Commander Reid Wiseman posted on social media
expressing immense pride in seeing the rocket
reach 100% fuel loading. Especially
knowing how challenging the scenario was for
the launch team. He said they're jumping back
into training tomorrow to start preparations
for March.
Avery: And uh, NASA's planning another wet dress
rehearsal before the actual launch, correct?
Anna: That's right. Launch Director Charlie
Blackwell Thompson confirmed they'll conduct
another wet dress before proceeding with the
actual launch. The team needs to fully review
all the data from this test, mitigate each
issue and return to testing before setting an
official target launch date.
Avery: It's a delay, but safety has to come first,
especially with a crewed mission to the moon.
Anna: From the Moon to low Earth orbit.
SpaceX has just unveiled a
revolutionary new space safety system called
stargaze that could fundamentally change
how we manage the increasingly crowded space
around our planet.
Avery: This is fascinating technology, Anna. Uh,
stargaze is a space situational awareness
system that uses data From M nearly 30,000
star trackers across the Starlink satellite
constellation to continuously monitor objects
in low Earth orbit.
Anna: 30,000 star trackers, that's an
incredible network. And they're detecting
approximately 30 million transits
daily across the fleet. That's uh, a several
order of magnitude increase in detection
capability compared to conventional ground
based systems.
Avery: The need for this kind of system has never
been more urgent. Practices like leaving
rocket bodies in LEO operators,
maneuvering satellites without sharing
trajectory predictions and anti satellite
tests have all heightened collision risks.
Conventional methods typically observe
objects only a limited number of times per
day, causing large uncertainties in orbital
predictions.
Anna: What makes Stargaze particularly powerful is
that it provides conjunction screening
results within minutes compared to the
current industry standard of several hours.
That speed can be the difference between a
successful collision avoidance maneuver and
a catastrophic impact.
Avery: Basics actually shared a real world example
that demonstrates just how critical the
system is. In late 2025, a
Starlink satellite encountered a uh,
conjunction with a third party satellite that
was performing maneuvers, but whose operator
wasn't sharing ephemeris data.
Anna: Ephemeris data, that's the trajectory
prediction information, right?
Avery: Exactly. So initially the close approach was
anticipated to be about 9,000 meters away,
considered a safe missed distance with zero
probability of collision. But then just five
hours before the conjunction, the third party
satellite performed a maneuver that Collapsed
the anticipated missed distance to just 60
meters.
Anna: 60 meters. That's terrifyingly close
in space terms.
Avery: Stargaze quickly detected this maneuver and
published an updated trajectory to the
screening platform, generating new
conjunction data messages that were
immediately distributed. The Starlink
satellite was able to react within an hour of
detecting the maneuver, planning an avoidance
maneuver to reduce coll back down to zero.
Anna: And here's the really important part. SpaceX
is making this data available to all
satellite operators free of charge. Starting
this spring, satellite operators who submit
their own trajectory predictions to the
platform will receive conjunction data
messages against stargaze data.
Avery: It's been in closed beta with over a dozen
participating satellite operators, and the
response has been positive. SpaceX is drawing
a parallel to commercial aviation. There are
hundreds of thousands of sites daily, but
they avoid collision broadcaster location and
flight plans to other aircraft.
Anna: SpaceX is calling on all spacecraft operators
to follow this same minimal standard of
sharing predicted trajectories, Starlink
updates and shares their ephemeris publicly
every hour as an example.
Avery: This is the kind of collaborative approach we
need. As space becomes more congested, it's
not just about protecting SpaceX's massive
constellation. It's about creating a safer
orbital environment for everyone.
Anna: Speaking of SpaceX, the company has
temporarily grounded its Falcon 9 rocket
following an issue with the upper stage on a
recent Starlink launch. And the timing
couldn't be more critical.
Avery: This happened on Monday, February 2nd. A UH
Falcon 9 successfully delivered 25
Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit as
planned. But after deploying the payloads,
the rocket's upper stage failed to perform
its deorbit burn.
Anna: That deorbit burn is designed to bring the
spent upper stage down for controlled
destruction in Earth's atmospher. Without it,
we have another piece of debris in orbit,
exactly the kind of problem that stargaze is
designed to help monitor.
Avery: The good news is the upper stage did manage
to passivate itself by venting propellant,
which lowered its perigee to about
110km, according to
satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. It will
re enter quickly, but SpaceX.
Anna: Has grounded the Falcon 9 fleet while teams
review data to determine root cause and
corrective actions. And here's where the
timing gets tricky. The Crew 12 astronaut
mission to the International Space Station is
currently scheduled to launch on February 11,
just eight days from now.
Avery: Crew 12 is particularly important because it
will restore the ISS to its normal complement
of seven crew members. The station has been
operating with a skeleton crew of just three
astronauts since January 15, when the four
crew 11 astronauts departed in the first
ever medical evacuation from the ISS.
Anna: NASA Associate Administrator Amit uh
Kshatriya confirmed that NASA teams from the
commercial crew program are embedded in the
investigation alongside SpaceX and the FAA.
He said they're pressing towards the Crew 12
window, but the launch will be contingent on
the return to flight rationale.
Avery: It's worth noting that the Falcon 9 has an
incredible safety record. Last year alone, it
launched a record breaking 165
times, with all missions successful. Just
a single mission experienced a significant
anomaly, a Starlink launch where a booster
toppled after landing at Sea.
Anna: That March 3rd incident was traced to a fuel
leak in one of the booster's nine Merlin
engines, which led to a fire that weakened a
landing leg. SpaceX halted launches for a
week at that time as well.
Avery: The question now is whether they can resolve
this upper stage issue quickly enough to meet
the February 11th crew 12 launch date.
If not, those three astronauts on the ISS
will have to wait a bit longer for
reinforcements from orbital mechanics to.
Anna: The deepest reaches of space. The James Webb
Space Telescope has spotted something
extraordinary. A five way galaxy merger
in the early universe that's challenging our
understanding of cosmic evolution.
Avery: This is remarkable. Anna, uh, the system
consists of five compact, actively star
forming galaxies that were emerging when the
universe was only about 800 million years
old. That's just 6% of the universe's
current age.
Anna: And the level of complexity is what's really
stunning astronomers. These five galaxies are
packed into a remarkably small region of
space. They're separated by only tens of
thousands of light years. To put that in
perspective, that's far closer together than
most neighboring galaxies in the modern
universe.
Avery: Dr. Wada H. Yu from Texas A and M University,
the study's lead author, explained that what
makes this remarkable is that a merger
involving such a large number of galaxies was
not expected so early in the universe's
history. At that time, galaxy mergers were
thought to be simpler, usually involving only
two to three galaxies.
Anna: But it's not just the number of galaxies
that's impressive. These five galaxies are
producing stars at a combined rate of roughly
250 solar masses per year.
That's far exceeding typical star formation
rates for that era.
Avery: And this rapid stellar production has already
enriched the system with heavier elements
like oxygen, materials forged in stellar
interiors and dispersed through galactic
interactions. The presence of these elements
indicates that multiple generations of stars
had already lived and died.
Anna: The really fascinating part is that gas
containing oxygen and hydrogen extends
beyond the galaxies themselves. This suggests
that gravitational interactions are pushing
enriched material into intergalactic space,
showing how early mergers may have shaped not
just galaxies, but the larger cosmic
environment.
Avery: This discovery really disrupts the standard
model of galaxy assembly. That model proposes
a, uh, gradual buildup where small galaxies
merge over long periods to form larger
systems. But this five way merger
demonstrates that complex multi galaxy
interactions were already underway less than
a billion years after the Big Bang.
Anna: Professor Casey Popovich, a UH co author on
the study, emphasized the implications
by showing that a complex merger driven
system exists so early. It tells us
our theories of how galaxies assemble and
how quickly they do so need to be updated to
match reality.
Avery: This adds to the growing body of evidence
from JWST that the early universe
was capable of producing massive mature
looking galaxies at astonishing speed.
Matter in the early universe appears to have
clustered more rapidly and efficiently than
our simulation suggested.
Anna: The study was published in Nature Astronomy,
and it's another example of how JWST
is fundamentally changing our understanding
of the cosmos.
Avery: Sticking with cosmic mysteries, Scientists
have finally solved a 50 year old puzzle
about why nearby galaxies appear to be
fleeing from our own Milky Way. And the
answer involves a massive cosmic void right
in our neighborhood.
Anna: This is one of those mysteries that's been
nagging at astronomers for decades. Avery
most large galaxies near the Milky Way, with
the exception of Andromeda, appear to be
moving away from us and seem largely
unaffected by the gravitational pull of our
Local Group of galaxies.
Avery: The Local Group being the Milky Way,
Andromeda and dozens of smaller galaxies.
So what's the solution?
Anna: Led by Ewood Wempe at the Captain Institute
in Gronigan, an international research team
used advanced computer simulations and
discovered that matter just beyond the Local
Group forms a broad flat
structure stretching tens of millions of
light years across. And here's the
vast empty regions lie above and
below this structure.
Avery: So we're basically living on a cosmic pancake
surrounded by voids.
Anna: That's actually a pretty good analogy. This
flat distribution of matter is the only way
to accurately account for both the combined
mass of the Milky Way and Andromeda and
unexpected motions of nearby galaxies.
Avery: But how does this flat structure explain why
galaxies are moving away from us?
Anna: It comes down to the Local Void, a
vast empty region discovered back in
1987 by Brent Tully and Rick
Fisher. The Local void extends
approximately 60 megaparsecs, or
about 200 million light years. Beginning
at the edge of the Local.
Avery: Group, The Local Void is growing because
there's very little matter inside it to exert
gravitational pull. Our Milky Way sits in
what's called the Local Sheet, a flat array
of galaxies that, um, bounds the void. And
this Local Sheet is Rushing away from the
void's center at 260 kilometers
per second.
Anna: How fast is that affecting the Milky Way?
Avery: The Milky Way's velocity away from the local
void is 970,000
kilometers per hour. That's 600,000
miles per hour. It's astonishingly fast.
Anna: So the new simulations show that this hidden
geometry, the flat plane of dark matter
beyond the Local Group, with voids above and
below, is what's driving these galactic
motions.
Avery: Exactly. When researchers included this
configuration in their simulations, they
closely matched the observed positions and
speeds of nearby galaxies. It provides a
coherent explanation for motions that have
puzzled astronomers for half a century.
Anna: This is connected to research about the
Hubble tension, too, isn't it? The
discrepancy in measurements of the universe's
expansion rate?
Avery: That's right. Some researchers have proposed
that if we're inside a large local void, it
could affect how we measure cosmic expansion,
making the local universe appear to be
expanding faster than it actually is. Though
that particular idea remains controversial
and needs more evidence.
Anna: What's remarkable is that we're learning Our
immediate cosmic neighborhood is far more
structured and dynamic than we previously
understood. We're not just floating in a
uniform sea of galaxies. We're on a sheet
of matter bordering a massive void.
Avery: And that void is shaping our galaxy's journey
through space in fundamental ways.
Anna: For our final story today, we're turning to
some of the fastest objects in our galaxy,
Runaway stars that are racing through the
Milky Way at incredible speeds.
Avery: Researchers from institutes across Spain have
just completed the most extensive
observational study to date of these stellar
speedsters, analyzing 214 O
type stars, the brightest and most massive
class of stars in our galaxy.
Anna: These aren't just fast moving stars, Avery.
We're talking about stars with velocities
that often exceed 700 kilometers per
second. That's fast enough to escape the
Milky Way's gravity entirely.
Avery: The term runaway stars was first used back
in the early 1960s by Dutch astronomer
Adrian Blau. He observed stars moving at
unusually high speeds and proposed they
originated in binary systems and were
ejected when the companion star collapsed and
exploded in a supernova.
Anna: By 2005, astronomers discovered even
faster runaway stars, Leading to the
designation hypervelocity stars. These
objects are fascinating because of the
influence they have on galactic evolution.
Avery: By escaping their systems of origin, these
stars irradiate gas and dust in the
interstellar medium, eventually seeding it
with heavy elements after they go supernova.
This affects how future stars and planets
will form.
Anna: So what did this new study reveal? The team
used data from ESA's Gaia
observatory and the IACOB
Spectroscopic Database to analyze these
214o type stars.
Avery: They found that most runaway stars rotate
slowly, while those that rotate faster are
more likely to be linked to supernova
explosions in binary systems. And here's an
interesting finding. The highest velocity
stars tend to be single, suggesting they were
ejected from young clusters through
gravitational interactions.
Anna: So there are actually two different
mechanisms creating runaway stars.
Avery: Exactly. Some are explosively ejected by
supernovae in binary systems, while others
are gravitationally ejected from close
encounters with star clusters. The study
helps clarify the relative contributions of
these two mechanisms. Lead author
Marcro Castrillo, now at the European
Southern Observatory, called this the most
comprehensive observational study of its kind
in the Milky Way. By combining information on
rotation and binarity, they're providing
unprecedented constraints on how these
runaway stars are formed.
Anna: The team also identified 12 runaway
binary systems, including three X ray
binary sources that contain neutron stars or
black holes, and three additional systems
that are likely candidates for hosting black
holes.
Avery: Perhaps the strongest evidence for multiple
ejection mechanisms was Virtually
no stars in the study exhibited both high
velocities and rapid rotation. If all
runaway stars came from the same process,
you'd expect to see some with both
characteristics.
Anna: Future Gaia data releases and ongoing
spectroscopic studies will help astronomers
trace these stars back to their birthplaces
within the Milky Way, which will confirm
which mechanism was responsible in each case.
Avery: And there might be another fascinating angle
to this research. Understanding these systems
could shed light on another role they may
play in galactic evolution, potentially
distributing the basic ingredients of life
throughout the Milky Way as they.
Anna: Travel cosmic messengers carrying the seeds
of life across the galaxy. That's a beautiful
thought to end on.
Avery: And that wraps up today's episode of
astronomy daily.
Anna: From NASA's moon mission delays to SpaceX's
new safety innovations, from ancient galaxy
mergers to mysteries in our cosmic
neighborhood, it's been quite a journey
through the cosmos today.
Avery: Thanks for joining us. For more space news,
visit our website at astronomydaily IO
where you can explore our full archive and
stay updated on the latest cosmic
discoveries.
Anna: You can also find us on social media
astrodaily POD across all major
platforms. Until next time, keep looking up.