Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna.
Avery: And, um, I'm Avery. You're listening to
season five and today to episode
100.
Anna: 100 episodes this season. We
should probably pause for half a
Avery: second and just notice that half a
second starting now.
Anna: Done.
Back to the universe, which as usual hasn't
slowed down to let us catch
Avery: our breath, not, uh, even slightly. Today
we have a rocket heading to the International
Space Station literally tonight, a Mars
rover that accidentally picked up a rock and
couldn't put it down, a cosmic debate
that may finally be settled about our closest
galactic neighbor, and two extraordinary
findings from the James Webb Space Telescope
that are rewriting the early history of the
cosmos.
Anna: And we're closing with a planet that's. We're
just going to say it smells like rotten eggs.
It's a good one.
Avery: It really is. Let's go.
Anna: We're starting with news that is happening
today right now, in fact, as you're listening
to this, Face X and NASA are targeting
tonight for the launch of the 34th Commercial
Resupply Services mission to the
International Space Station CRS
34.
Avery: And this one's a big cargo run.
Anna: It is. A, ah, Falcon 9 rocket is standing at
Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral.
And the launch window opens at 7:16 this
evening Eastern Time. That's 9:16 if
you're on the east coast of Australia
Wednesday morning.
Avery: There's always a weather caveat with Florida
launches, always.
Anna: Forecasters are giving only about a 35%
chance of favorable conditions at liftoff. So
there's a real possibility it slips to the
backup window on Wednesday evening. But as of
right now, the mission is go.
Avery: What's on board?
Anna: About 6,500 pounds of cargo, crew,
supplies, station hardware, and several
science experiments that are genuinely
interesting. One investigation involves a
bone scaffold made from wood that researchers
hope could lead to new treatments for
osteoporosis. That's a disease that affects
bone density and it actually worsens in the
low gravity environment of space.
Avery: Which makes studying it in space especially
relevant.
Anna: Exactly. There's also a study looking at how
red blood cells and the spleen change during
extended spaceflight. And my personal
favorite, a new instrument called storie,
the Storm Time O ring Current
IMAG Evolution instrument. It'll monitor
the charged particle environment near Earth,
which is a real hazard for power grids and
satellites during solar storms.
Avery: The Dragon capsule on this mission is flying
for the sixth time and the booster will
attempt a return to launch site landing,
which never gets old to watch.
Anna: After launch, Dragon will spend about 38
hours in orbit, raising its altitude before
docking autonomously with the Harmony Module
on Thursday. Warning. We'll follow up on that
in tomorrow's episode.
Avery: From Cape Canaveral to the ISS in under
two days. Still extraordinary.
Anna: Now, Mars, and a story that is part
engineering drama, part slapstick, and
entirely endearing.
Avery: I love this one.
Anna: NASA's Curiosity rover, which has been
rolling across Mars since 2012, more
than 14 years now, recently had something
happen that had literally never happened
before in its entire mission. It drilled into
a rock and the rock wouldn't let go.
Avery: It just grabbed on and refused to release.
Anna: On April 25, Curiosity extended its
robotic arm and drilled into a rock that the
team nicknamed Atacama, after the Chilean
desert. When the rover tried to retract the
arm, the entire rock lifted off the
Martian surface. It had got, uh, lodged onto
the fixed sleeve surrounding the drill bit
and simply came with it.
Avery: How big was this rock?
Anna: About 45 cm across at its
base, around 15 cm thick
and roughly 13 kg, or about
4.5 kg on Mars due to the lower
gravity. A substantial chunky
rock dangling off the end of a Rover ARM
140 million km from the
nearest mechanic.
Avery: And the solution isn't as simple as just
shaking it off. Every command you send to
Curiosity takes up to 30 minutes to arrive,
which
Anna: is what made the next week so dramatic.
The engineering team spent several days
trying different approaches, repositioning
the arm, vibrating the drill, trying
different angles. For days, Atacama
refused to budge. They even watched the rock
slowly shed sand as the arm moved. But it
stayed put.
Avery: Finally, on May 1, the team went all in,
tilting the drill, rotating it, vibrating
it, and spinning the drill bit
simultaneously. They were prepared to try
multiple rounds. The rock came off on the
first
Anna: attempt and promptly shattered when it
hit the Martian ground.
Avery: Atacama's last stand.
Anna: NASA released the full camera sequence this
week. It's remarkable footage. And
Curiosity, for its part, is now happily back
to its regular science operations. Fourteen
years in, still finding new ways to surprise
us.
Avery: We're going much, much further out now. Not
Mars, not even our galaxy. We're talking
about our galaxy's largest satellite, the
Large Magellanic Cloud, which you can
Anna: see beautifully from Australia, sitting low
in the southern sky on a clear night, looking
like a detached patch of the Milky Way.
Avery: And for a long time, astronomers assumed it
had been orbiting the Milky Way for billions
of years, making repeated passes, coming
close, swinging back out, a regular visitor.
New research published this week argues
something quite different. That, huh, this is
actually the Very first time the Large
Magellanic Cloud has ever approached our
galaxy.
Anna: A first invol?
Avery: Exactly. A team led by Scott Lucchini
and colleagues ran detailed hydrodynamic
simulations modeling the gas halo
surrounding both galaxies and compared that
with ultraviolet observations of the gas
clouds between them. They found the data is
consistent only with a first pass scenario.
If the cloud had been here before, the models
say, the gas halo just wouldn't look the way
it does.
Anna: What does it mean? If it's really a first
time visitor,
Avery: it has significant implications for how we
understand our galaxy's evolution. The Large
Magellanic Cloud is enormous. It has
billions of stars and a mass that's roughly
10% of the Milky Way. An object that
size, sweeping through on its first close
approach, causes disruptions. It
warps our dark matter halo, influences star
formation, tugs on the structure of the
galactic disk. If it's done this before,
those effects would have played out
repeatedly. If this is the first time, we're
watching something quite rare.
Anna: The team says their simulations provide, and
I like this phrase, definitive evidence.
Though they acknowledge there are some
tensions with other data sets that still need
to be resolved.
Avery: Science is rarely simple, but the weight of
this evidence is pointing one way. The Large
Magellanic Cloud is a newcomer and it's
heading our way.
Anna: Nothing to worry about. On a human timescale,
nothing dramatic happens. But on cosmic
time, fascinating.
Avery: Next time for the James Webb Space Telescope
and the saga of the little red Dots.
Anna: We've talked about these before. For
listeners who haven't heard, give us the
quick version.
Avery: The quick version. When JWST
began looking at the very early universe
galaxies that existed just a few hundred
million years after the Big Bang, they found
hundreds of strange, compact, faint red
objects that nobody expected and nobody can
fully explain. They became known as little
red dots. They're roughly 12 billion
light years away. They're intensely red,
they're tiny, and they have properties that
don't fit neatly into any existing category.
The debate has been raging for years. Are
they massive star forming regions, Ancient
black holes and thick dust cocoons, an
entirely new type of object?
Anna: And now there's a new twist.
Avery: There is. Astronomers have been studying an
unusual object that had been sitting
unnoticed in archival data from NASA's
Chandra X Ray Observatory for over a decade.
It's called the X ray dot, cataloged
as 3D HST
Aegis
12014. And it only revealed
its significance when JWST recently
observed the same patch of sky and showed
that this X ray source is sitting in exactly
the same location as one of the little red
dots.
Anna: Dots, a 10 year old clue hiding in plain
sight.
Avery: The team, led by researchers at Princeton,
believes this X ray dot may be what an older
little red dot looks like. In the current
theory, little red dots are young black holes
surrounded by dense clouds of gas that
they're consuming. And that gas absorbs the X
rays, which is why most little red dots don't
show up in X ray surveys. But as that gas
gets eaten or blown away, the X rays
start getting through.
Anna: So the X ray dot might be the same type of
object, just older and less shrouded?
Avery: Possibly. Or it might be something else
entirely. A black hole wrapped in exotic
dust, never previously observed. The team
says further observations are needed. But
either way, it's a piece of the puzzle, and
it's pointing us toward understanding one of
the strangest populations of objects ever
discovered.
Anna: Now, just quickly, before we move on to our
next story, a reminder that our sponsor this
week, NordVPN, has a great deal in place for
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Avery: Okay, moving on. We're staying with the James
Webb Space Telescope because it keeps
delivering, but now we're looking at a
completely different puzzle, and this one was
published yesterday hot
Anna: off the preprint server.
Avery: Literally. Astronomers have identified
two early universe galaxies named Kola
1 and Nepla 4, observed just
800 million years after the Big Bang. And
here's the strange Their black holes at the
centers of these galaxies are between 400
and 800 times more massive relative
to their host galaxies than black holes in
the modern universe.
Anna: In the local universe, galaxies like our own,
the mass of a, uh, central black hole is
typically about a tenth to a half percent of
the total stellar mass of the Galax. These
two are nowhere near that ratio.
Avery: Their black holes weigh in at somewhere
between 170 and 190
million solar masses. The galaxies around
them are comparatively tiny. The black holes
appear to have grown first and fast while
their host galaxies were still in their
infancy.
Anna: Which raises the question how?
Avery: That's the core mystery. The standard model
of galaxy formation says black holes and
galaxies grow together in a kind of feedback
loop. The black hole influences star
formation, star formation influences the
black hole. These two objects suggest that in
the very early universe, that relationship
could be inverted. The black hole didn't
wait. It grew explosively, outpacing
its own galaxy by a huge Margin.
Anna: Astronomers have been finding over massive
black holes in the early universe regularly
now with jwst. Each new example adds
weight to the idea that our models of galaxy
formation in the first billion years need
significant revision.
Avery: And the early universe keeps revealing that
it was a far wilder, faster, more
extreme place than we imagined. These are
not gentle processes. This is cosmic
violence at a scale that's hard to
comprehend.
Anna: We're m closing today with a planet discovery
that is genuinely new and genuinely
strange. Strap in.
Avery: The headline said, uh, rotten eggs. I want to
hear about the rotten eggs.
Anna: We'll get there. Astronomers have been
studying an exoplanet called
L98.59D.
It sits just 35 light years away in the
southern constellation Volens, practically
next door by cosmic standards. And it's been
in their sights for a while. But new research
published this week in the journal Nature has
revealed just how unusual it is. This
planet doesn't fit any existing category.
Avery: What's it like?
Anna: Imagine a world where the entire surface
is an ocean, but not water. M
molten rock. A global magma
ocean stretching from pole to pole of
silicate material heated to temperatures that
would reduce anything we know to vapor.
Above this ocean sits a thick, dense
atmosphere. And that atmosphere is loaded
with sulfur
Avery: compounds, which is where the rotten eggs
come in.
Anna: Hydrogen sulfide. The same compound
responsible for that distinctive aroma.
The atmosphere traps heat so efficiently
that the magma ocean has been kept molten for
billions of years. A permanent planet
wide lava sea with a toxic sky above
it. The lead researcher, Dr. Harrison
Nichols from the University of Oxford puts it
perfectly. He says the categories
astronomers currently use to describe small
planets may simply be too simple.
Avery: How did they figure all of this out? You
can't exactly send the probe.
Anna: Advanced computer modeling combined with
observational data about the planet's mass,
size and density. The planet is less
dense than we'd expect for its size, which
gave the team the clue that the interior is
molten rather than solid. The co author,
Professor Raymond Peer Humbert described
being able to reconstruct the hidden interior
of a planet we will never visit. That's
extraordinary.
Avery: And the question it leaves you with what
other kinds of planets are out there waiting
to be discovered? Is a great one.
Anna: L98 59D
suggests we've barely scratched the surface
of planetary diversity Worlds with global
magma oceans, sulfur atmospheres,
permanent volcanic landscapes, and who
knows what else. The universe is endlessly
creative.
Avery: Just maybe don't plan a holiday there.
Anna: Before we go, a quick look at the southern
sky for the coming nights.
Avery: May is a spectacular month for sky watching
from Australia and New Zealand. Saturn is
well placed in the east before midnight and
Jupiter is becoming more prominent in the pre
dawn sky. The Milky Way is arcing
beautifully overhead in the evening hours. A,
uh, perfect time to look for the Large
Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud
low in the south. Just as we discussed today.
Anna: A pair of first time visitors right there
above you.
Avery: Exactly. And um, if you're under dark skies,
the Southern Milky Way through Centaurus and
Crux is extraordinary this time of year.
Anna: That's everything for episode 100. Thank
you genuinely for being part of this journey.
100 episodes means 100 days of
choosing to spend a few minutes thinking
about the universe, and we appreciate every
one of you who comes back each day.
Avery: If you're enjoying the show, please
subscribe, leave a review wherever you listen
and find us on all the
socials@astrodaily.pod. the website
is astronomydaily.IO.
Anna: we'll be back tomorrow with the outcome of
tonight's SpaceX CRS 34 launch
and whatever else the Cosmos has in store.
From all of us at Astronomy Daily,
Avery: keep looking up Astronomy Day.
The stories we told.
Anna: Love.