Anna: The world's biggest rocket has a launch date,
a clean bill of health from the regulators,
and finally an explanation for what went
wrong last time.
Avery: Plus, a, uh, globular cluster hanging in your
southern sky right now has just given up the
first of its 10,000 missing black holes.
And astronauts have taken the first ever
medical X rays in space. With four hours of
training, all that,
Anna: A, uh, brand new crew on the space station,
dead stars hiding next door, and the darkest
skies of the month. This is Astronomy Daily.
Avery: Hello and welcome to Astronomy daily. It's
Wednesday the 15th of July, 2026.
This is series five, episode 141.
And I'm Avery.
Anna: And I'm Anna. We've got a packed one today.
Two big spaceflight stories, two genuinely
lovely deep sky discoveries, a, uh, first in
space medicine, and a sky watching window you
do not want to waste. Shall we get into it?
Avery: Let's do it.
Anna: So Avery, on Monday we previewed Starship
Flight 13 and told you it was penciled in for
today, Wednesday the 15th. Well,
the pencil has moved.
Avery: It has. SpaceX is now targeting Thursday
July 16th with a 90 minute launch
window opening at 6:45 in the evening
Eastern time, which for us here in Australia
is Friday morning, 8:45am on the
east Coast. So set your alarms for Friday
breakfast viewing.
Anna: But honestly, the launch date isn't even the
biggest news in this story because on Monday
the Federal Aviation Administration formally
closed its investigation into what went wrong
on Flight 12. And for the first time we got
the full picture.
Avery: And um, it's fascinating. Remember, Flight 12
back in May was the debut of the big version
three vehicle. And it mostly went well,
except the super heavy booster never made its
controlled splashdown in the Gulf. It just
didn't get there.
Anna: And now we know why. It comes down to
hot staging. That maneuver where the upper
stage lights its engines while it's still
attached to the booster. SpaceX changed the
ignition sequence of ship's engines on this
flight and that change pushed the Booster
into a 90 degree orientation error
right after separation.
Avery: So the booster comes out of staging pointing
the wrong way. And then to make matters
worse, when it tries its boost back burn,
five of its 33 raptor engines fail to
relight.
Anna: The FAA's report boiled it down to two
root causes heat effects on propulsion
components during ascent. And I love this
phrase, erroneous engine alarm settings.
Essentially the alarm thresholds were tuned
wrong for the multi engine flight
environment. Though engines were being shut
down that could have kept burning.
Avery: And SpaceX's fixed list covers all of it A,
uh, modified startup sequence for ship,
hardware updates on the booster and retuned
engine alarms and abort settings. The FAA has
accepted the corrective actions, so the
regulatory road is clear.
Anna: Which brings us to what Flight 13 actually
has to do. It's essentially a rerun of
Flight 12's objectives, but this time with
real cargo. 20 functional Starlink
V3 satellites, the first of their kind ever
to fly.
Avery: And these aren't the mass simulators from
Flight 12. These are working satellites.
They'll deploy solar arrays and antennas and
attempt to connect with a ground station in
South Africa and and with other starlinks.
Six of them even carry cameras to inspect
ship's heat shield from the outside.
Anna: The catch being it's a suborbital flight, so
those satellites get about 20 minutes of
glory before they re enter and burn up. It's
a test, not a delivery.
Avery: There's also an in space Raptor relight on
the checklist, which matters enormously for
the lunar Lander version of Starship that
NASA's Artemis program is counting on. And if
all of this goes to plan, Flight 14 could
see SpaceX attempt a first V3 catch
back at the
Anna: tower Friday morning, Australian time.
We'll have the full wrap on Saturday's show.
Either way.
Avery: From a rocket that's about to launch to one
that just did. On Tuesday. A Soyuz
2 1A lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome
in Kazakhstan carrying NASA astronaut Anil
Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov
and Anna Kikina.
Anna: And this was the express service, A two orbit
fast rendezvous. They docked with the
International Space Station's Pritchell
module just over three hours after liftoff.
Compare that to the two day chases of the old
days.
Avery: The 3O joins Expedition
7475 for a roughly an eight
month stay coming home in April 2027.
It's the second flight for both Dubrov and
Kikina, but the very first for Menin. And his
backstory is wonderful, it really is.
Anna: He's a physician, a former Air Force flight
surgeon who flew over a hundred sorties and
F15s, worked as a first responder after the
Haiti and Nepal earthquakes, and was actually
SpaceX's first ever flight surgeon before
NASA selected him as an astronaut in 2021.
Avery: And here's the bit I love. His wife, Anna
Menon, has already been to space. She flew on
the Polaris dawn mission in 2024, the one
with the first commercial spacewalk. So
they're now officially a two astronaut
Anna: household with two kids who presumably win
every what do your parents do? Conversation
at school. Forever.
Avery: Forever. And there was a diplomatic first
at the launch, too. NASA administrator Jared
Isaacman was at Baikonur in person, meeting
Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov face to face
for the first time. Isaacman and Menon are
close friends. Annamin flew on Isaacman's own
Polaris dawn mission.
Anna: As for the work, Menon's eight months are
heavy on the science that suits a doctor.
They'll be refining in space production of
semiconductor crystals. And this ties
beautifully into our next but one story
performing ultrasound using augmented reality
and AI techniques that could remove the need
for medical support from Earth on deep space
missions.
Avery: A doctor testing the Future of Space
Medicine launched the same week the first
space X rays are published.
Anna: Hold that thought now, Avery.
If you step outside tonight, anywhere in
Australia or New Zealand, and look up at the
constellation Centaurus riding high in our
winter sky, there's a soft, fuzzy star you
can see with your naked eye from a dark
sight.
Avery: That's Omega Centauri, the greatest
globular cluster in the sky. 10 million
stars packed into a ball about 18,000
light years away. And an object that has
puzzled astronomers for decades because,
according to the models, it should be teeming
with black holes. Around 10,000 stellar
mass black holes left behind by exploded
stars.
Anna: And until this week, astronomers had found
none of them. Evidence for an intermediate
mass black hole lurking at the center? Yes.
But that missing population of 10,000 smaller
ones? Silence.
Avery: Until now. In a paper published Monday in the
Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by
Matthew Whitaker at the University of Utah
announced the first first stellar mass black
hole ever detected in Omega Centauri. It's
been dubbed Omega Cat BH2, and
Anna: the way they found it is the real star of
this story. Not X rays, not radio emission
astronomy measuring the positions of stars
so precisely over such a long time that you
can watch one being swung around by something
invisible.
Avery: They sifted through nearly 20 years of
Hubble archival data observations running
from 2003 to 2023, and
added recent James Webb data to sharpen the
measure. It was a star with about
78% the mass of our sun, orbiting
something massive and utterly dark.
Anna: The team said, uh, the precision comes down
to a fraction of a pixel on Hubble and Webb's
detectors. It simply would not have been
possible without both telescopes working
together.
Avery: And BH2 turns out to be a rule
breaker. Its mass is lower than expected, and
the star that orbits it takes 94 years
to go around, which Makes this the widest,
longest period stellar mass black hole binary
ever found.
Anna: One black hole down, roughly
9,999 to go.
But the astronomers suspect this first
detection opens the floodgates. Now they
know exactly what signature to look for.
Avery: And for our southern listeners, that cluster
is up there right now in your July evening
sky. Ten million stars, an
intermediate mass black hole at the middle,
and at least one newly unmasked stellar mass
black hole. Go out and look at it tonight.
You'll never see it the same way again. Okay,
Anna.
Space uh, medicine. As promised, the
Radiological Society of North America has
just published results confirming a genuine
first diagnostic X ray images taken
in orbit.
Anna: And the mission behind it was Fram 2, the
private SpaceX crew Dragon flight from
March 2025. The first crew ever
to fly a polar orbit. Four first time
astronauts, none of them medical experts.
Three and a half days in space before launch.
Avery: They got just four hours of training on a
commercial off the shelf portable X ray
system. Then in orbit with no guidance from
ground control, they X rayed a calibration
phantom. A smartwatch, a hand, a
forearm, an abdomen, a pelvis and a
chest.
Anna: And here's the result that matters. Back on
Earth, three independent medical experts
compared the in flight images with X rays
taken before launch. The ground images were
better quality, but the space images were
good enough to diagnose injuries like broken
bones.
Avery: Which is a conceit Buster, as Dr. Shaina
Gifford of the Mayo Clinic put it. The
assumption has always been that because
everything in space is constantly moving,
getting a diagnostic image in orbit was just
too technically challenging.
Anna: Not anymore. And the applications go well
beyond broken bones. That smartwatch X
ray was the proof of concept for non
destructive testing. Inspecting spacecraft,
hardware, satellites, even spacesuits for
hidden damage without taking anything apart.
Avery: And think about where humanity is headed. A
lunar outpost is days from a hospital. Mars
is months. If you're going to break an arm
240,000 miles from the nearest radiology
department, you want the radiology department
to come with you.
Anna: The device even survived the trip home.
Superficial scuffs on the exterior internals.
Fine. As Dr. Gifford put it, the sky
is not the limit when it comes to X rays in
space.
Now for a story about the neighbors we never
knew we had. Astronomers at the University
of Warwick and the University of Colorado
Boulder have found four white dwarfs hiding
within 65 light years of Earth.
Avery: Which sounds impossible, doesn't it? We've
been surveying the solar neighborhood in
exhaustive detail for decades. How do you
miss four entire dead Stars on your own
street.
Anna: Because they had accomplices. Each of these
four white dwarfs orbits a, ah, red dwarf
companion, a, uh, bigger, brighter star whose
glare completely drowned them out in visible
light. To every survey, these looked like
perfectly ordinary single stars.
Avery: The giveaway was the wobble. Each red dwarf
showed a substantial radio wobble, the
telltale sign of a massive unseen companion
tugging on it. So the team went hunting with
the Hubble Space Telescope's imaging
spectrograph in near ultraviolet light, where
white dwarfs shine and red dwarfs fade.
Anna: And there they were, four hidden white dwarfs
unmasked. Lead author Dr. Mayrey O'
Brien put it beautifully. It's a reminder
that even in our own cosmic neighborhood, we
can still find surprises if we look in the
right way at the right wavelength.
Avery: The headliner of the four is a system called
G203 47, only
about 25 light years away, which makes its
white dwarf the ninth closest known to the
Sun. And finding it closed a mystery that had
been open for 27 years, ever since that
unexplained wobble was first spotted.
Anna: But G2O3 47
replaces one mystery with another. The
red dwarf orbits its white dwarf every
14.9 days, but rotates on
its axis only once every 100 plus days.
In systems like this, tides should have
locked those two motions together long ago.
The M way. The Moon always shows Earth the
same
Avery: face, so the fact that it isn't locked
tells us these four binaries had very
different life stories. Some went through
violent, prolonged interactions that
synchronized them. While
G20347 seems to have
had a gentler, briefer encounter.
Anna: Four new entries in the local census
published in the monthly notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society. And a strong hint
there are more dead stars hiding in plain
sight around familiar stars.
Avery: And so to the sky itself. Anna
uh, the Moon hit New Moon on Tuesday, which
means right now we're in the darkest skies of
the month.
Anna: And for those of us in Australia and New
Zealand, mid July New Moon is as good
as it gets. The Milky Way core,
Sagittarius Scorpiusthat great
glowing heart of the galaxy is essentially
overhead in the evening. If you've been
meaning to get out of the city for a proper
dark sky night, this week is the week.
Avery: It's also the week to hunt a Comet. Comet
10P Tempel 2 is brightening as it heads
towards perihelion in early August, currently
sitting around magnitude 7. 8 in the evening
sky.
Anna: Now, that's not naked eye territory. You'll
want binoculars at minimum. Ideally a
telescope. Look for a soft, fuzzy,
grayish patch the comet's glowing
coma. And here's the nice bit for us
Southern Hemisphere observers get a slightly
higher altitude view than our northern
friends, a
Avery: dark sky, the galactic core overhead,
and a comet on the rise. Sometimes the
universe just hands you the itinerary.
Anna: And for the early risers, Mars is currently
drifting through Taurus near the red giant
Aldebaran. In the pre dawn sky, two
red beacons side by side. Worth a look with
your morning cuppa.
Avery: Uh, and that's our journey around the cosmos
for today. Starship cleared and counting down
to Friday morning our time, a new crew
safely aboard the station, a black hole
unmasked in Omega Centauri, the first
X rays in orbit, four hidden white dwarfs
and a dark sky waiting for you tonight.
Anna: If you enjoyed the show, share it with a
fellow Stargazer. It genuinely helps.
All our episodes show notes and links are at
astronomydaily IO and you'll find
us on all the Socials astrodaily
Pod.
Avery: We'll be back tomorrow with more space and
astronomy news. Until then, I'm Avery.
Anna: And I'm Anna. Thanks for listening and as
always, keep looking up.
Avery: Clear skies, everyone.