Anna: Hello, space fans. You're tuned in to
Astronomy Daily, your weekend home, for the
biggest stories from the cosmos. I'm Anna.
Avery: And, um, I'm Avery. And what a week it has
been.
Anna: We've got two fresh stories to kick things
off, and then, as always on a Saturday, we're
bringing you our weekend wrap. The four
biggest space and astronomy stories from the
past seven days.
Avery: So let's not waste a second. Let's get into
it.
Anna: So this first story is about something that
has frustrated solar scientists for decades.
And honestly, it's about time it got sorted.
Avery: Oh, uh, I know what you're gonna say. The far
side.
Anna: The far side. Every 28 days, the
sun rotates all the way around, which means
anything happening on the side we can't see
from Earth. Sunspots, flares,
eruptionshas historically been a mystery
until it swings into view.
Avery: Um, and by that point, you might only have
days of warning before whatever's brewing
rotates directly toward Earth.
Anna: Exactly. Now, scientists have had a
technique called helioseismology for about
25 years, basically using sound waves
reverberating inside the sun to locate
where large active regions are forming on
that hidden side.
Avery: So a bit like using sonar to look for things
you can't directly see.
Anna: Great analogy. But here's the thing.
That technique could tell you that something
was there. What it could not tell you was the
polarity of those active regions.
Avery: So polarity matters because.
Anna: Because the polarity of a sunspot group,
which way the magnetic field is pointing, is
one of the most important factors in how
powerful an eruption might be. Get the
polarity wrong, and your forecast is
basically useless.
Avery: So what's changed?
Anna: A team led by solar physicist Almer Hamada
at the National Solar Observatory have
developed a new method using data NOAA's
Global Oscillation Network Group Gong A Ah,
network of robotic telescopes stationed
around the world that continuously records
the Sun's surface oscillations. They've found
a way to analyze phase shifts in the
helioseismic maps and assign actual
magnetic polarities to far side sunspot
regions.
Avery: So we're not just seeing where the sunspot
is. We're now getting information about how
dangerous it might be before it's even
visible.
Anna: And to put a very real world spin on this,
just two days ago, on May 7, a significant
solar flare erupted from the Sun's far side.
The event was partially blocked by the solar
horizon, so we don't even know how large it
really was. The question already being asked
is, what's
Avery: coming back around that's genuinely
exciting and a little unnerving.
Anna: Uh, the team's results have been published in
scientific reports and the findings are being
hailed as a breakthrough for full sun
magnetic mapping. The more we can see the
whole sun at once, the better we can protect
the satellites, power grids and astronauts
that rely on space weather forecasting.
Avery: Massive step forward. Love it.
Anna: Okay, story two comes from the James Webb
Space Telescope. And I have to be honest, I
feel like almost every week JWST
is breaking something. We thought we
understood this point. It's basically its
personality, right?
Avery: So this week, a team led by researchers at
the University of California, Davis, has
published findings in Nature Astronomy about
a galaxy called XMMVidon M
M2075.
And before you zone out at the name, here's
why it matters. This galaxy formed less
than 2 billion years after the Big Bang,
which in
Anna: cosmic terms is extremely young.
Avery: Extremely young. Now, according to everything
we understand about how galaxies form, young
galaxies should be spinning. Angular
momentum from inflowing gas, the influence of
gravity during formation. It all sets them
rotating over billions of years through
mergers and other processes. Some of them
eventually slow down and become these large
settled non rotating systems.
Anna: But that takes a very long time.
Avery: A, ah, very long time. And yet
XMMVID M M
2075 shows essentially
zero rotation. None. It has
already settled into that mature non
spinning state at an age when it should still
be churning away like a cosmic washing
machine.
Anna: So how is that even possible?
Avery: That's the big question. Some simulations do
allow for a very small number of these
objects in the early universe, but they're
predicted to be incredibly rare. Finding one
is already significant. The team is now
actively searching for more to understand
just how common or uncommon they might be.
Anna: And I understand this galaxy was already on
the radar as one of the most massive in the
early universe.
Avery: It was. Previous observations confirmed it
already had several times as many stars as
our entire Milky Way and had stopped forming
new stars. Both traits of a much older
evolved system. JWST was then
used to measure how material was actually
moving inside it. And the result was
it basically wasn't,
Anna: shouldn't exist, but it does. That's
JWST in a nutshell.
Avery: Every week. Every single week.
Anna: Alright, time for our weekend wrap. Four
stories. The biggest space in astronomy news
from the past seven days. Avery, set it up.
Avery: Let's do it. This week we have a cosmic odd
couple that shouldn't be together. A quarter
million citizen scientists who've quietly
doubled the book of brown dwarfs. A NASA
mission that's about to launch inside a space
donut. And the Webb first that nobody has
done before. Big week.
Anna: A space donut. We'll get to that.
Let's start with rap story number one. A
planetary pairing that MIT scientists are
calling one of the rarest architectures
astronomers have ever found. It involves a
hot Jupiter and a mini Neptune,
190 light years from Earth, orbiting the same
star. And according to everything we know,
one of them should not still be there.
Avery: Hot Jupiters are legendary bullies.
Anna: They really are. They're massive gas giants
that orbit very close to their star. And
their gravity is so intense that any planet
daring to share the neighborhood normally
gets flung away into deep space. Hot
Jupiters are almost always found alone,
Avery: except in this system toi 1130,
where a, uh, mini Neptune is not only
surviving, but orb even closer to the star
than the hot Jupiter, which has
Anna: been puzzling scientists since the system was
first discovered in 2020. Now a team at
MIT has used James Webb to actually read the
atmosphere of the mini Neptune for the first
time. And what they've found is a heavy
water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur
dioxide, and hints of methane.
Avery: And that heavy atmospheric chemistry is the
clue.
Anna: Exactly. If this planet had formed where it
currently sits close to its star, it would
have a light atmosphere dominated by hydrogen
and helium. Instead, it's dense with
molecules that point to formation in the
cold, icy outer reaches of the protoplanetary
disk, what astronomers call beyond the frost
line, which suggests
Avery: both planets formed far out and then migrated
inward together, maintaining their
atmospheres as they went.
Anna: This is actually the first measurement ever
made of the atmosphere of a mini Neptune
sitting inside a hot Jupiter's orbit.
Genuinely unprecedented. Published this week
in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Avery: Two planets that shouldn't coexist. And yet
they do, in perfect, if bewildering,
harmony.
Anna: Rap Story 2, and I love this one because it's
a reminder that some of the most significant
contributions to astronomy right now are
being made by ordinary people sitting at home
with a laptop.
Avery: NASA's Backyard World's Planet Nine project?
Anna: The very same. So for those who haven't heard
of it, this is a citizen science program
where volunteers sift through infrared data
from NASA's retired WISE satellite, looking
for objects that move. Stars move slightly
against the background. Over time. Brown
dwarfs move. Planet nine, if it exists, would
too.
Avery: And along the way, the volunteers have been
finding brown dwarfs in remarkable numbers.
Anna: Remarkable doesn't cover it. A new
paper published this week in the astronomical
journal with 75 authors,
61 of whom are volunte announces
that the project has discovered more than
3,000 brown dwarfs over its first 10
years, essentially doubling the known
population.
Avery: For listeners unfamiliar with brown dwarfs,
they're often called failed stars. Too
massive to be a planet, not massive enough to
ignite nuclear fusion like a true star.
They're about the size of Jupiter, they glow
faintly in infrared, and they're surprisingly
common. About one for every three or four
stars near our Sun.
Anna: But because they're so dim, they've always
been hard to find. Until now.
Avery: The discoveries include objects never seen
before, extreme T subdwarfs,
ultra cool objects, and apparently one brown
dwarf that may even have aurorae
orrore on a brown dwarf
Anna: a million times brighter than the northern
lights on Earth, if you could see them. The
project is still working through more than 2
billion sources in the WISE data, so there
are almost certainly more finds to come.
Avery: Science powered by people. I'll never stop
finding that inspiring before
Anna: we head into our next story, the donut I
mentioned earlier, I'd like to take a moment
to remind you about our sponsor, NordVPN.
As I keep saying, when you're ready to secure
your online life, get the best and help
support the show while saving a heap of
money. We use NORDVPN and reckon you
should too. To get our special no Risk deal,
just click on the link in the show notes.
Thank you.
Avery: Amen to uh, that.
Anna: Okay, wrap story three and this one
is timely because it's happening in three
days. On Tuesday, May 12,
SpaceX launches the 34th cargo
resupply mission to the International Space
Station. And among the 6,500
pounds of cargo heading to orbit is something
rather unusual.
Avery: Tell em about the donut.
Anna: The donut so surrounding
our planet within Earth's magnetic field is
a structure called the ring current. It's an
invisible donut shaped region where charged
particles from space get trapped and flow in
opposite directions. Positive particles one
way, negative the other, creating actual
electrical currents.
Avery: And this ring current matters because during
solar storms it can intensify dramatically.
Anna: When that happens, those electrical currents
can induce magnetic fluctuations that
ripple down to the ground, disrupting power
lines, pipelines, satellite signals and
GPS systems. We've always known the ring
current matters for space weather. What we've
never had is a proper inside out view of it
until storey storey
storm time O Ring Current
Imaging Evolution, a joint NASA and
U.S. space Force mission that will be
robotically mounted on the outside of the ISS
after Tuesday's launch. Rather than looking
at the ring current from a distance, story
sits within it and images outward,
capturing One slice at
Avery: a time, every 90 minutes as a station
orbits, building up a complete picture of the
full ring current over its
Anna: six month mission, it will track how the ring
current grows and shrinks during solar storms
versus quiet periods. And try to answer a,
uh, question scientists have long
where exactly do these trapped particles come
from? The solar wind or from Earth itself?
Avery: The answer has real world implications for
how we predict and prepare for space weather
events.
Anna: Keep an eye on the skies and the news on
Tuesday night.
Avery: And our final wrap story for the week,
another JWST milestone and
genuinely a, uh, planetary science first.
Anna: Go on.
Avery: So up until now, when we studied exoplanets
with James Webb, we've been studying their
atmospheres the way starlight filters through
a planet's air as it passes in front of its
star. That's transmission spectroscopy,
and it's transformed what we know about
worlds beyond our solar system.
Anna: But this week, the telescope went a step
further.
Avery: For the first time, JWST has
directly analyzed the surface of an
exoplanet. The target is a super
Earth, just 48 light years away,
relatively close by by cosmic standards. And
what the telescope found is a dark, airless
world, no atmosphere, geologically
ancient. The researchers are describing it as
a
Anna: Mercury like rock, which is actually
fascinating in its own right. A scorching,
barren super Earth with a surface you could
in theory, characterize directly.
Avery: The significance here is the technique. We've
gone from studying what surrounds a planet to
studying the planet itself directly reading
the surface chemistry from light alone.
Anna: That opens a completely new chapter in how we
investigate rocky worlds. The next step,
presumably, is applying this to planets in
habitable zones, worlds where you might
expect the surface to be far more
interesting.
Avery: One more extraordinary week for the most
extraordinary telescope ever built.
Anna: And that is your Astronomy Daily weekend wrap
for Saturday. May 9th. The Sun's Hidden
face finally mapped a galaxy from the dawn
of time that forgot how to spin a planetary
odd couple. Defying the rules,
200,000 volunteers who doubled the
cosmic catalog, a mission launching Tuesday
to study our planet's space weather. Donut
and Webb, once again doing something
nobody has ever done before.
Avery: Not a bad week for a universe that's just
sitting there doing its thing.
Anna: On behalf of Avery and the whole Astronomy
Daily team, thanks so much for spending part
of your weekend with us. We'll be back Monday
with the Daily Edition. Until then, keep
looking up and stay curious. Everyone.