Anna: Last week, a rocket exploded on its launch
pad in Cape Canaveral. The fireball could be
seen from miles. This week, the CEO
of Blue Origin looked at the wreckage and
said, five, we will fly again
this year. That story, plus magnetic
fields discovered on distant worlds. A, uh,
space telescope moments from launch, and
the definitive answer to one of astronomy's
oldest questions. This is
Astronomy Daily.
Avery: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your
daily guide to the universe and everything in
it. I'm Avery.
Anna: And I'm Anna. It is Wednesday the 4th of
June, 2026, and we have an
exceptional episode lined up.
Avery: Today we do six stories
ranging from a dramatic comeback story in the
world of commercial spaceflight to a
scientific first that reshapes what we know
about planets beyond our solar system.
If you've been listening this week, you'll
know Blue Origin had a very bad Thursday.
We'll have a full update on what comes next,
but let's get into it.
Anna: Last Thursday night at Cape Canaveral, Blue
Origin's New Glenn rocket exploded on its
launch pad during a routine pre launch hot
fire test. The fireball engulfed Launch
Complex 36. Debris was found up
to half a mile away. It was the biggest and
most public failure in the company's history,
and many observers feared the road back could
take years.
Avery: But as of this week, Blue Origin CEO
Dave Limp is pushing back hard on that
narrative. He's saying the damage is far less
catastrophic than it looked.
Anna: Limp posted a, uh, detailed update on X in
which he said that now that teams have gained
full access to the pad, there's actually some
good news. The propellant storage
infrastructure, the oxygen tanks, the liquid
hydrogen storage, and the cryogenic methane
tanks all came through the blast in good
shape. He called that extremely fortunate
because those are very long lead items to
replace.
Avery: The water tower also survived. The main
support gantry is damaged, but crucially,
Limp says it can be repaired in place. It
doesn't need to be torn down and rebuilt from
scratch.
Anna: Perhaps most importantly, there are spare
assets. The previously flown New Glenn
Booster, nicknamed Never Tell Me the Odds,
along with three upper stages stored in a
neighboring integration facility, all appear
undamaged.
Avery: As for the cause of the explosion, there's
still no official word. The test was not
within the scope of FAA license activities,
so the FAA won't be leading the
investigation. Blue Origin is conducting its
own assessment.
Anna: Limp also used the moment to announce a
strategic pivot the company had already been
working on, eliminating the need for a
transporter erector, the massive structure
used to move and stand the rocket upright. He
said Blue Origin will now skip straight to an
alternative vertical launch concept, which
means they don't need to build a replacement
for the one destroyed during the explosion.
Avery: And he closed his statement with Blue
Origin's motto, gradatum ferociter,
which means step by step,
ferociously, and the declaration we
will fly again before the end of this year.
Anna: That's an aggressive timeline by any measure,
but it's the kind of defiant pledge
investors, customers and the broader space
industry needed to hear. Patrick Space Force
Base has cleared Blue Origin to begin its
full damage assessment of Launch Complex 36,
though the formal rebuilding process is now
underway.
Avery: We will of course, keep tracking this story
as it develops.
Anna: Now let's move from the dramatic to the
extraordinary. Scientists have just published
what they're calling the first direct
evidence that planets beyond our solar system
possess magnetic fields. And they found it
by studying the wind.
Avery: This is a remarkable piece of science. A team
of astronomers used two of the world's most
powerful ground based telescopes, the ESO's
Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Gemini
North Telescope in Hawaii, to measure wind
speeds on seven so called hot Jupiter
exoplanets.
Anna: Hot Jupiters are gas giants roughly the
size of Jupiter but orbiting extremely
close to their host stars, far closer than
Mercury is to our sun because they're
tidally locked, always showing the same face
to their star. One side is perpetually
scorching hot and the other is freezing
cold. That temperature difference creates
powerful winds that howl from the day side to
the night side.
Avery: The researchers measured those wind speeds
and found something totally counterintuitive.
On the hotter planets, the winds were
actually slower, and that is the opposite of
what standard physics would predict.
Anna: If you have more thermal energy, you'd expect
stronger winds. But these planets are pumping
the brakes. And the best explanation, the one
that actually fits the data, is magnetic
fields.
Avery: A magnetic field can interact with the
electrically charged gas in a planet's upper
atmosphere and slow those winds down. The
stronger the magnetic field, the greater the
braking effect. The team inferred magnetic
field strengths ranging up to four times that
of Saturn and up to about half the strength
of Jupiter's field.
Anna: The wind speeds themselves were
extraordinary. They ranged from around
7,000 km per hour up to more
than 25,000 km per hour.
For context, the fastest winds measured on
Jupiter reach about 1,500
kilometers per hour. These are winds on a
scale we simply don't see in our own solar
system.
Avery: The results were published in the journal
nature astronomy on June 2, and the
implications go well beyond just knowing that
Other planets have magnetic fields. Magnetic
fields are thought to play a critical role in
protecting planetary atmospheres from being
stripped away by stellar radiation, which is
one of the key factors in whether a planet
could over billions of years, be potentially
remain habitable.
Anna: As the lead researcher put it, this is a key
step toward ultimately understanding which
planets can stay alive, keep their water,
and perhaps even one day host life
as we know it.
Avery: A genuinely landmark result.
Anna: Our next story takes us to NASA's Goddard
Space Flight center in Greenbelt, Maryland,
where engineers have completed what they
describe as the last look humanity
will ever take on a critical piece of
hardware before it becomes the eyes of
humanity on the universe.
Avery: We're talking about the Nancy Grace Roman
Space Telescope and specifically its primary
mirror, a 2.4 meter
reflector that will be the heart of the
instrument once it launches into space.
Anna: On May 20th and 21st,
engineers performed a meticulous final
inspection. They tilted the entire
observatory onto its side, deployed the
protective hood that will be stowed during
launch, and used a high resolution camera
with a powerful zoom lens to do a thorough
multipurpose check, looking for any particles
that may have settled on the mirror surface
during testing and confirming that the
optical alignment hadn't
Avery: shifted it pass with flying colors.
No specs, no misalignment. The
mirror's silver coating, which is just
400nm thick, hundreds
of times thinner than a human hair, is
perfect.
Anna: The Roman telescope manager at Goddard, J.
Scott Smith, marked the moment beautifully.
He said the Roman engineering team laid
eyes on the telescope for the final time
before it in turn becomes the eyes of
humanity, revealing the wonders of the
cosmos. That's a sentence worth sitting with.
Avery: With this milestone complete, Roman will now
be shipped to Kennedy Space center in Florida
in preparation for its planned launch,
currently scheduled for as early as, ah,
September 2026.
Anna: Once in space, Roman will travel to the sun,
earth, Lagrange point 2, known as
L2, the same orbital neighborhood where the
James Webb Space Telescope operates. It will
join the most exclusive telescope real estate
in the solar system.
Avery: And Roman's scientific ambitions are
extraordinary. It will have a field of view
at least 100 times larger than the Hubble
Space Telescope, potentially measuring light
from a billion galaxies over its lifetime.
It will also be capable of directly imaging
exoplanets by blocking out starlight
and conducting a comprehensive statistical
census of planetary systems across our
galaxy.
Anna: We are getting very close to launch.
September can't come soon enough.
Avery: We'll be right back after this short break
for a word from our sponsors.
Anna: Stay with us and we're back three more
stories to go and they are all fascinating.
Avery: Space Force Has Made a Very large Investment
in SpaceX On May 29, the US
Space Force announced it had awarded Elon
Musk's company a $4.16
billion contract for a program called the
Space Based Airborne Moving Target
Indicator, or SBAMTI M.
Anna: In plain language, the goal is to build a
constellation of satellites that can track
and target airborne threats from orbit,
things like aircraft, cruise missiles and
other fast moving threats anywhere on Earth
at any time.
Avery: The satellites are designed to fill a gap
that currently exists in military
surveillance. Traditionally, the US
Military uses aircraft, particularly AWOKS
planes, to track airborne targets. But
satellites can reach areas where it's too
dangerous to fly and they can maintain
persistent coverage that aircraft simply
can't match.
Anna: The contract is part of the Trump
administration's broader Golden Dome Missile
Defense Initiative, which aims to build a
layered national defense system including
ground based interceptors, enhanced radar
networks, and now this space based tracking
layer.
Avery: SpaceX isn't the only company involved. Space
Force confirmed there are nine companies in
the SBA MTI vendor pool, though the
identities of the other eight have not been
made public for national security reasons.
More contracts are expected to be issued over
the coming year.
Anna: The goal is to have an initial operational
constellation of these satellites in place by
2028. This contract was also
accompanied by a separate $2.29
billion Space Force award to SpaceX
earlier in the week for a Space Data Network
backbone, a secure high speed military
communication system.
Avery: In total, SpaceX received over six and a half
billion dollars in Space Force contracts in a
single week. For a company that is also
preparing for what could be the largest IPO
in stock market history, it's been quite a
week in Hawthorne, California.
Anna: Now an update about a visitor that has
already left, but whose influence is still
being felt across the astronomy community.
Avery: 3i ATLAS, the third
interstellar object ever confirmed to pass
through our solar system. Discovered on July
1, 2025 by the Atlas Telescope Network in
Chile, it is now heading back out into the
deep Galaxy, never to return.
Anna: But the scientific conversation it sparked is
very much alive. A new analysis published
this week explores the way that 3i
atlas has prompted astronomers to
fundamentally update what they understand
not just about foreign solar systems, but
about our own.
Avery: Let's do a quick recap for listeners who may
have joined us since the main 3i Atlas
coverage last year. This was an extraordinary
object. It was only the third interstellar
visitor ever confirmed after 1i
Oumuamua, um, in 2017 and
2i Borisov in 2019.
But unlike those, 2 3i Atlas
was clearly an active comet, releasing dust
and gas with multiple tails and a nucleus
estimated at somewhere between a few hundred
meters and several kilometers across.
Anna: It passed closest to the sun in late October
2025, then flew by Mars, then
Jupiter, in March 2026, and is now
departing. But even as it fades, the data it
generated continues to be analyzed.
Avery: One of the most striking findings came from a
University of Michigan study that examined
the water ice in 3i atlas
and found it contained an extraordinarily
high concentration of deuterium heavy
isotope of hydrogen that is far less common
in comets from our own solar system.
Anna: That suggests three I ATLAS
formed in an environment that was
dramatically colder and more isolated than
the conditions that shaped our solar system's
comets. Researchers have since traced its
likely origin to a cold, dark corner of the
Milky Way that had not yet fully assembled
into a planetary system when this object
formed, potentially making it up to 11
billion years old, more than twice the age of
our Sun.
Avery: What does all of this teach us? Quite a lot,
as it turns out. It tells us that the
chemical signatures of comets vary
dramatically across the galaxy, meaning the
building blocks of planetary systems,
including the water and organics that may
seed life differ significantly from one
stellar neighborhood to another.
Anna: It also demonstrates how much we can learn
from fleeting cosmic visitors, and if we have
the tools to observe them quickly. The
Veracruz Rubin Observatory in Chile, which
released its first images in June, is
expected to dramatically increase the rate at
which we detect future interstellar objects,
which could let astronomers determine whether
three I Atlas unusual
properties are rare or commonplace.
Avery: A visitor that has left the building but
whose lessons will be with us for years to
come.
Anna: Our final story today answers a question that
astrophysicists have been wrestling with for
at what exact mass does a neutron star
collapse into a black hole?
Avery: This is one of those wonderfully fundamental
questions in physics. We know that when a
massive star dies, it can leave behind either
a neutron star or a black hole, depending on
how massive the original star was. But the
precise boundary between those two fates has
never been defeated definitively pinned down
until now.
Anna: Researchers at the Hun Ren Wigner Research
center for Physics in Hungary have published
what they describe as a definitive answer.
The boundary falls between 2.2 and
2.3 solar masses.
Avery: To unpack that a neutron star is one of
the most extreme objects in the universe,
imagine taking the mass of two suns and
compressing it into a sphere about the size
of a city. A teaspoon of its material would
weigh billions of tons. These are
objects so dense that the neutrons themselves
are packed together like one giant atomic
nucleus.
Anna: But there's a limit to how much mass a
neutron star can hold before gravity wins
and the whole thing collapses inward to form
a black hole. That limit, the Tolman,
Oppenheimer, Volkov limit, has previously
been estimated to be somewhere between two
and three solar masses. Depending on the
assumptions used, this new
Avery: work narrows that window considerably,
placing the critical threshold between 2.2
and 2.3 solar masses.
Beyond that, a neutron star simply cannot
support itself against gravity, and the black
hole is born.
Anna: Why does this matter? Because it gives
astronomers a clearer tool to classify
compact objects they observe. When we detect
something via, uh, gravitational waves or X
ray observations, knowing the precise mass
boundary between neutron stars and black
holes helps us identify what we're actually
looking at.
Avery: It also feeds into our understanding of what
happens in neutron star m mergers, the
cataclysmic collisions that produce
gravitational wave signals, and some of the
most energetic explosions in the universe.
Anna: A beautifully precise answer to one of the
universe's most extreme questions.
Avery: Before we go, a quick look at the June sky
for our listeners in Australia, New Zealand,
and across the Southern hemisphere.
Anna: June is a wonderful month for southern
observers. We're heading toward the winter
solstice on June 21, which means longer
nights, prime time for stargazing.
Jupiter and Venus are currently visible in
the western sky after sunset, and on June
9, they'll appear at their closest to each
other, a spectacular conjunction worth
getting outside for.
Avery: The Milky Way core is also rising in the
evening sky from the Southern hemisphere
right now, beautifully positioned for
photography and naked eye observation in dark
sky locations away from city lights.
Anna: That is all from us for today. Six stories,
and every one of them a reminder that the
universe is never standing still.
Avery: From blue origin's defiant pledge to rise
from the ashes to magnetic fields discovered
on distant worlds, it has been a remarkable
day to cover space.
Anna: If you enjoyed today's episode, please
subscribe, leave us a review, and tell a
fellow space lover about the show. Find us on
Instagram, Facebook, and x@, uh,
astrodaily pod
and@astronomydaily.IO.
Avery: i'm Avery.
Anna: And, uh, I'm Anna. We'll see you tomorrow.
And until then, keep looking up.
Avery: Sam.