Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy daily for
Tuesday the 14th of July
2026. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm, um, Avery. Episode 140
of season five. And honestly, today's rundown
reads like someone dared us to pick the most
argument starting stories we could find.
Anna: It really does. Coming up, American
regulators have just approved the launch of
the first commercial space mirror, a
spacecraft designed to beam sunlight down to
Earth at night. And astronomers are,
let's say, not thrilled.
Avery: We've also got a newly revealed minefield of
invisible space junk in one of the most
valuable orbits around Earth with an
Australian telescope right in the middle of
the detective work. Plus, physicists and
Manhattan have recreated black hole energy
extraction in a lab. The biggest telescope
ever built just moved for the very first
time. And a new paper explains how the Square
Kilometer Array is about to turn cosmic
lightning flashes into a map of the invisible
universe.
Anna: And later, a quick update on Starship
Flight 13 and the story of the Harvard
astronomer who's just been handed the keys to
the White House's new UFO
Avery: Science Council told you argument
starting. Let's get into it.
Anna: Our lead story today. On 9 July,
the US Federal Communications Commission
formally authorized the launch of Earendil
1, a demonstration satellite from
California startup Reflect Orbital.
Once in orbit around 600 kilometers up,
it will unfurl a thin film reflector
18 meters on a side that's roughly
60ft and use it to bounce sunlight
down to specific spots on the ground for
several minutes at a time.
Avery: So to be clear for everyone, a giant
steerable mirror in space whose entire
job is to shine daylight onto the night side
of Earth.
Anna: That's exactly it. The company calls itself
the Sunlight Company and the pitch is
sunlight on demand. Lighting construction
sites so crews can work through the night,
illuminating search and rescue operations,
and boosting solar farms by extending their
generating hours past sunset.
Avery: The demonstration satellite weighs about
142kg and is due to launch
later this year. And here's the number that
makes this a much bigger story than one test
satellite. ReflectorBital has talked about
operating 50,000 or more of these
mirror craft in low Earth orbit by 2035,
which is why
Anna: the astronomy community has reacted the way
it has. The FCC application drew
nearly 1900 public comments, the
overwhelming majority critical. For
comparison, SpaceX's application for up to
a million orbital data center satellites drew
about 1500. The European southern
Observatory has described plans like these as
an existential threat to optical astronomy.
Avery: And it's not just professional observatories.
The American Astronomical Society Raised the
prospect of eye damage for amateur
astronomers. The company itself has
acknowledged there's a risk if someone
happened to catch the reflected beam through
a telescope with a large enough aperture.
Plus concerns about momentarily dazzling
pilots and about what artificial daylight
does to wildlife. Circadian rhythms are not
optional extras for most living things.
Anna: The FCC's answer to all of that was
essentially not our department. The
commission said concerns about optical
astronomy and the environment fall outside
its review, which is limited to radio
spectrum. It found the risks with a single
satellite unlikely to materialize, and said
testing novel technology is in the public
interest.
Avery: Which might be true for one satellite. One
mirror tested carefully with the light
contained, switchable and steered away from
observatories. That's a technology
demonstration. 50,000 of them is a
different planet to live on. And the
regulatory gap is the real story here. If the
agency licensing these satellites says
impacts on the sky aren't their job, then,
uh, whose job are they?
Anna: To be fair to the company, they say they're
trying to earn trust. The light is
contained within the target spot. It can be
switched off at any moment. And they'll avoid
sensitive areas like research
observatories and protected habitats.
Their co founders said this license is the
first step toward rigorously testing
both the technology and the safeguards.
Avery: And that test data, uh, will matter. But I
suspect this is one we'll be covering again
and again.
Anna: The satellites, named Earendil, by the way.
Tulkin fans, will recognize the mariner, who
sails the sky with a shining star on his
brow.
Avery: At least they've got good taste in names.
Whether the night sky agrees is another
matter. Okay.
From mirrors we can see, to junk
we can't. A new study led by the
University of Warwick has uncovered some of
the faintest space debris ever detected in
geosynchronous orbit. Fragments down to
about five centimeters across. That's
two inches. And here's the kicker.
Nearly 80% of the faint objects
they found don't appear in any publicly
available catalog.
Anna: Let's set the scene for anyone new to this
geosynchronous orbit is that special
band about
36,000km up where a
satellite circles the Earth, exactly in
step with our planet's rotation so it
hangs over the same spot. It's home
to the big, expensive workhorses.
Communications, broadcasting, weather,
monitoring, some of the most valuable real
estate in space.
Avery: And unlike low Earth orbit, there's no
cleanup service. Down low, the wisps of
atmosphere gradually drag debris down until
it burns up. At, uh, geo altitude, there
is essentially nothing. Whatever ends up
there, a dead satellite, a, uh, fragment from
a breakup stays there effectively
forever.
Anna: So how did they find pieces this small
at that distance?
Avery: Clever image processing rather than new
hardware. The team went back to archival
survey data from the Isaacman Newton
Telescope in the Canary Islands and applied a
technique called blind stacking, layering
many images along different possible
trajectories so that incredibly faint moving
objects rise up out of the noise. That
reprocessing revealed 25 debris track
lips the original analysis had completely
missed. And the brightness flickering of many
of these fragments shows their tumbling as a
drift.
Anna: And um, there's a lovely local connection in
this one. The follow up observing campaign
extended the survey to Siding Spring
Observatory here in Australia. Working with
the Australian National University plus
Japan's Bisei Space Guard center with
jaxa. Genuinely international
detective work, which makes sense because the
Geo Belt is a shared resource.
Avery: The study's lead author, Dr. James Blake,
pointed out that pieces of junk up there can
be moving at kilometers per second relative
to each other. So even a 5 centimeter
fragment carries enough energy to do serious
damage to a very expensive satellite. And
his co author, Dr. Stuart Eaves had the line
of the week. The debris in geosynchronous
orbit is a potential minefield. And
nobody in their right mind walks into a
minefield without a mine detector.
Anna: The constructive takeaway being we now
have the detection techniques. Beeper's
systematic surveys of the Geo Belt need
to become routine because there are
only so many orbital slots up there and
one bad debris event could poison a
chunk of that belt for generations.
M Now to a story that's been making headlines
this week, and it's a proper piece of physics
history. Researchers at the Advanced
Science Research center at the City
University of New York have recreated in
a laboratory the mechanism by which energy
can be extracted from a spinning black hole.
The papers in Nature.
Avery: Okay, walk me through the black hole part
first, because it's one of the great ideas of
20th century physics.
Anna: It goes back more than half a century. To Sir
Roger Penrose, A, uh, spinning black hole
drags the very fabric of space around with it
in a region called the Ergosphere.
Penrose realized that if a particle ventured
in there and split in two, one piece could
fall in while the other escaped, carrying
more energy than the original particle
arrived with energy stolen from the black
hole's rotation. The physicist
Yakov Zeldowicz then extended the
idea to bounce a wave off a, uh,
sufficiently fast rotating object and the
wave can come away amplified. That effect
is called super radiance.
Avery: And the problem for 50 odd years has been the
words sufficiently fast. You can't
mechanically spin anything quickly enough.
There were beautiful experiments with water
vortices in 2017 and a rotating
acoustic disc in 2020. But physically
spinning objects hit a heart
Anna: ceiling, which is where the New York team's
trick comes in. They call it synthetic
rotation. Instead of spinning anything at
all, they built a ring of electronic
resonators and rapidly modulated their
electrical properties in a timed sequence
running around the ring to an incoming
radio wave. The stationary device is
indistinguishable from something rotating
impossibly fast. The synthetic rotation
can even mimic motion faster than light,
which no physical object could ever achieve.
Avery: And it worked. The waves actually came out
stronger.
Anna: They did. The team measured genuine
amplification with waves extracting energy
from the synthetic rotation, exactly as
Penrose and Zeldewicz predicted. Nothing
moves. Yet the wave leaves with more energy
than it arrived with.
Avery: What I love about this one is that it cuts
both ways. It's a fundamental physics
validation, a 50 year old prediction about
black holes confirmed on a benchtop in
Manhattan. But it's also a brand new kind of
amplifier. With a team talking about
applications in wireless communications,
optics and quantum technologies.
Astrophysics as an engineering department.
Anna: Black holes inspiring better radios since
1969, who knew?
Avery: Next to a mountaintop in Chile's Atacama
Desert, where the biggest optical telescope
humanity has ever attempted just did
something for the very first time, it moved.
Anna: This is the European Southern Observatory's
Extremely Large Telescope, the
elt, under construction on Cerro
Armazonis. Crews rotated the
telescope's entire structure around its
vertical axis for the first time. And in the
most charming detail of the week, they
started by pushing it by hand a few
centimeters before completing a full
rotation with auxiliary motors. Eso
captioned the release. And yet it moves,
which Galileo would surely have appreciated.
Avery: Now, let's put numbers on why hand pushing
this thing is remarkable. The structure
currently weighs about three and a half
thousand tons. Once the mirrors and
instruments go in, it climbs to around 4,600
tons. And the whole assembly floats on a film
of oil just 80 microns thin,
roughly the width of a human hair. That's how
a handful of people can start 10 million
pounds of telescope turning.
Anna: And this wasn't ceremony. It was a critical
engineering test. That rotation is how the
ELT will point anywhere in the southern
sky. So proving the motion is smooth is a
genuine milestone on the road to first light.
When it's complete, the ELT's segmented
primary mirror will stretch 39 meters
across, built from 798
hexagonal segments. Working as one,
it'll gather more light than any optical
telescope in history.
Avery: ESO's program manager, Roberto Damai, said
it beautifully that it's a reminder of what
can be achieved when people push in the same
direction, literally and figuratively.
Anna: And for our listeners. Remember, this giant
lives under southern skies, the Magellanic
Clouds, the galactic center overhead. The
ELT will see the same sky you do from
your backyard, just 40 million times
better.
Avery: Rude, frankly, but we'll allow it.
Anna: Sticking with giant instruments and southern
skies. A new paper doing the rounds this
week lays out how the Square Kilometer
Array is going to use one of the most
violent phenomena in the cosmos to
map things, things no telescope can see.
And the lead author is Dr. Manisha Caleb
of the University of Sydney Home, UM team.
Avery: All right. The violent phenomenon in
question being fast radio bursts.
Anna: Fast radio bursts. Flashes of radio
energy from other galaxies that last about
a millisecond, a hundred times quicker than a
blink, yet carry enormous energy.
And they're useful precisely because of what
happens to them on the way here. As a
burst crosses billions of light years, the
plasma it passes through disperses it,
stretching the signal out by frequency. And
magnetic fields twist its polarization
through an effect called Faraday rotation.
Every burst arrives carrying a record of
everything it traveled through.
Avery: So each one is like a core sample drilled
through the universe. The gas between
galaxies barely emits any light, and
magnetic fields emit none at all. But you can
read both from what they've done to the burst
along the way.
Anna: Exactly. And the paper's argument is
about scale. We've caught FRBs by
the hundreds so far. The SKA, with
SKA low being commissioned right now
in Western Australia alongside the Dish
Array in South Africa, is expected to
detect them in the thousands upon thousands.
At those numbers, the team argues, frbs
graduate from curiosities into a
genuine cosmological survey tool,
tracing where the universe's missing ordinary
matter is hiding, mapping cosmic
magnetic fields, probing the universe's
expansion, even testing fundamental
physics, like whether photons have any
mass at all.
Avery: And the poetry of it is that we still don't
fully know what makes a fast radio burst.
Magnetars are the leading suspects, but the
case is enclosed. So the SKA
gets to work the mystery from both ends,
using the bursts as tools while
simultaneously figuring out what they are.
Anna: A telescope, partly in our own backyard,
using millisecond flashes from across the
universe to weigh the invisible. The next
few years of this are going to be something
special Next up
Avery: a, uh, quick update on Starship Flight 13. We
gave you the full preview in yesterday's
episode. So just the new developments today.
First, the launch date has slipped. SpaceX
is now targeting no earlier than Thursday
16th July at 6:45
in the evening US Eastern Time. That's
8:45 Friday morning for those of us on
Australia's east coast.
Anna: And second, the good news that came with the
slip. Basex has completed a, uh, full
static fire of the super heavy Booster,
lighting all 33 Raptor engines on the
pad. That's the final major test before
flight.
Avery: The mission itself is unchanged from what we
covered yesterday. The second flight of the
version 3 vehicle carrying the first
genuinely functional Starlink V3
satellites rather than mass simulators.
If the schedule holds, we'll have the full
story in Friday's episode.
Anna: Set those alarms, Australia. A Friday
breakfast launch is the civilized way to
watch Starship fly.
Now, in case you missed it over the past
couple of weeks, and because it's simply too
interesting to leave on the shelf, Harvard
astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been
appointed to chair a brand new White House
UAP Science Advisory Council, a
scientific panel tasked with investigating
unidentified anomalous phenomena.
That's the current official term for what
everyone still calls UFOs, covering
objects in the air, in space or even
underwater.
Avery: And for listeners who know the name, yes,
that Avi Loeb, former chair of
Harvard's Astronomy Department, hundreds of
papers on black holes and the early universe,
and in recent years, the most famous or
infamous advocate for taking the possibility
of alien technology seriously. He's the one
who suggested the interstellar object
Oumuamua might have been an artificial light
sail back in 2017.
Anna: The setup the council was established under
the Trump administration's transparency push
on uap alongside agencies
including the Pentagon's Anomaly Resolution
Office, Office of the Director of National
Intelligence and the FBI.
Loeb's team reports to a new UAP
governance board overseen by the intelligence
community. And after its first meeting, the
council requested more than 50 videos,
images and documents from the Pentagon tied
to known incidents, including the so called
orb sightings reported by military personnel.
Avery: Now the scientific community's reaction has
been divided is the polite word.
John Kirkpatrick, who used to run the
Pentagon's own UAP investigations, said
Loeb is not viewed favorably by much of the
scientific community and lacks national
security experience. Critics point to his
hand picked counsel, including not just data
scientists and oceanographers, but also
figures who've openly claimed the US has
recovered non human craft and
Anna: in fairness, here's the other side of the
ledger. Loeb himself says he's starting from
the assumption these objects are human made
and treating it as a national security
question. He says the government is genuinely
baffled by some of what it's seen, and his
argument is that the fact these cases are
being open to scientists at all suggests
officials aren't confident they're
conventional. His stated focus is
instrumentation, data standards and
rigorous collection. In his words, better
data could settle the alien debate once and
for all.
Avery: And that's the version of this I can
genuinely get behind. The worst outcome for a
question like this is that it stays in the
realm of blurry footage and anecdote forever.
If this council produces calibrated
instruments and open data, that's a win,
regardless of what the answer turns out to
be. If it produces headlines instead of data,
well, we'll report that too.
Anna: His own line on it Keep our eyes on the
orbs, not the social media.
Avery: On, um, this show, we keep our eyes on both
strictly professionally Time for
Anna: your skywatch, and Tonight is genuinely one
to circle. 14 July brings a
super new moon, which means the darkest
skies of the entire month. And for those of
us in Australia and New Zealand, that's a
standing invitation. The Milky Way's core
is riding high through the evening, with
Scorpius and Sagittarius nearly
overhead. If you've been meaning to get
somewhere dark and see our galaxy properly
tonight and the next few nights are the
Avery: time while you're out there, look west after
sunset for Venus, absolutely blazing at
around magnitude -4 in LEO. You
can't miss it. And here's one for your diary.
On Thursday and Friday evening, the 16th
and 17th, a slender young crescent
moon slides up past Regulus and then Venus,
low in the western twilight.
Anna: A beautiful photo opportunity for the early
risers. The pre dawn east is where the
planets are congregating. Saturn is up after
midnight and high before dawn with its rings
tilted nicely for small telescopes. And
Mars is gliding right past Aldebaran in
Taurus this very morning. Two reddish
points of similar brightness about 5 degrees
apart. A lovely color comparison with just
your eyes.
Avery: Dark skies, a brilliant evening star, and
a red planet racing a red star. Not a
bad week's programming from the universe.
Anna: And that's Astronomy daily for Tuesday
14th July. All our episodes,
show notes and the newsletter are
@astronomydaily IO and you'll
find us across social media.
Avery: Astrodaily pod if
today's episode sparked an opinion and let's
face it space mirrors and UFO councils will
do that. Come tell us about it. We read
everything. I'm Avery.
Anna: And I'm Anna. Thanks for spending part of
your day with us. Until tomorrow.
Avery: Clear skies.