Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily dose
of space and astronomy news. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm, um, avery. It's Thursday, the 16th
of July, 2026, and we have a
genuinely lovely lineup for you today,
including a story that's been 10 years in the
making, or more accurately, 10 years in the
hiding.
Anna: That's Our lead astronomers have finally
caught a planet that's been playing hide and
seek with them for over a decade. And it
turns out to be the faintest exoplanet ever
imaged from Earth. And it lives in a southern
constellation, which makes it feel just a
little bit like ours.
Avery: We've also got the completion of a nine year
project to build the sharpest radio map of
the entire sky. And the James Webb Space
Telescope catching a supermassive black hole
in the act of feeding itself.
Anna: Then it's a double bill from the outer solar
system. Landslides on Pluto spotted for
the first time, and evidence that Pluto's big
moon, Charon, once spun more than 10
times faster than it does today.
Avery: And we'll wrap the news with some sobering
numbers. SpaceX's Starlink satellites had
to dodge potential collisions more than
355,000 times
in the past year. We'll unpack what that
means for everyone's
Anna: orbit, plus your Southern hemisphere sky
watching for tonight. Let's get into it.
Avery, cast your mind.
Back in 2008, astronomers
directly imaged a planet around the young
star Beta Pictoris, one of the very first
exoplanets ever photographed. That was
Beta Pictoris B. A second planet
C followed. And ever since, there's been a,
uh, nagging suspicion that the system was
hiding
Avery: something more because of the disk. Right.
Beta Pictoris has this magnificent debris,
uh, disk. It's the poster child for planet
formation. And parts of it were warped and
sculpted in ways that two known planets
couldn't fully explain.
Anna: Exactly. And now we know why. In a
study published Wednesday in the
Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team using
the European Southern Observatory's Very
Large Telescope in Chile has confirmed a
third planet, Beta Pictoris D.
And here's the headline. It's roughly
100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris
B, which makes it the faintest exoplanet
ever directly imaged from Earth.
Avery: A hundred times fainter. To put that in
context for everyone, direct imaging means
actually capturing the planet's own light in
a photograph next to a star that's
overwhelmingly brighter. It's often compared
to spotting a firefly next to a lighthouse.
This is spotting a very Dim
firefly.
Anna: And the discovery itself was serendipitous.
Ben Sutliff at the University of Edinburgh
who co led the study, said they were
originally just going back to study the known
planet Beta Pictoris B to see how it
changed over time. But in their new images
from the VLT's Eris instrument, there was
something else. A faint point of light
separated from Planet B that sent them down
an entirely new path.
Avery: And this is where the hide and seek comes in.
Once they knew what to look for, they trawled
back through the archives. And there it was,
lurking. In more than a decade of old
observations from the VLT SPEAR instrument
and even in James Webb Space Telescope data,
the planet had been photographed for years.
Nobody had noticed.
Anna: Co author Jane Burkeby at Oxford put it
beautifully. Planet D has been playing hide
and seek with us for over a decade and now
we can say found you.
Avery: So what do we know about the world itself?
Anna: It's a gas giant about 2.4 times
the mass of Jupiter, which sounds big, but
is actually the lightweight of the family.
Planets B and c are each 10 Jupiter
masses. Planet D sits, um, much further out
from the star on a wide orbit, so it's cooler
and dimmer than its siblings, hence the
difficulty. And satisfyingly, its
presence helps explain that odd structure in
the debris disk that's puzzled astronomers
for years.
Avery: There's also a nice milestone tucked in here.
This makes Beta Pictoris only the second
planetary system after HR
8799, where more than two
planets have been directly. We're building
up actual family portraits of other solar
systems now.
Anna: And an independent team at the University of
California spotted the same object in their
own data at almost the same time, which gives
the detection real confidence. Now the
bit our audience will love. Beta Pictoris is
a southern star. It sits in the constellation
Pictor, the Painter's Easel, just next to
brilliant canopus. And at 63 light
years away, it's visible from Australia and
New Zealand. Though right now in July
it's low in our evening sky and best hunted
in the pre dawn hours later in
Avery: the year, a planetary system with three
photographed worlds sitting in our southern
sky. Not bad at all.
Next, A, uh, project nine years in the
making has just crossed the finish line. The
U.S. national Science Foundation's National
Radio Astronomy Observatory has announced
that observations for the Very Large Array
Sky Survey VLAS are
complete. It's the most detailed radio
survey of the sky ever conducted.
Anna: This is the VLA in New Mexico. The
iconic Y shaped array of 27 dishes
from every space documentary ever made.
Avery: That's the one. From September 2017
through February this year, the array
repeatedly swept about 34,000
square degrees. Essentially the whole sky
visible from New Mexico and everything north
of minus 40 degrees declination.
That's roughly 80% of the entire
celestial sphere. Mapped at a resolution
of about 2 and a half arcseconds in the 2
to 4 GHz band.
Anna: And how does that compare to what came
before?
Avery: It's about 18 times sharper than the
previous benchmark all sky radio survey from
the 1990s. The numbers are
staggering. Roughly six and a half thousand
thousand observing hours. Half a petabyte of
raw data. And the processed data products are
expected to reach around 2 petabytes, the
largest data volume the VLA has ever
produced. They use a clever on the fly
mosaicing technique where the antennas sweep
continuously across the sky in a raster
pattern rather than stopping to point at each
field.
Anna: And crucially, they surveyed the sky multiple
times over those nine years. Which means VLAS
isn't just a map, it's a movie. Comparing
epochs revealed a dynamic radio sky.
Sources that flare, fade or appear from
nowhere. Exploding stars, feeding black
holes, colliding neutron stars.
Avery: Which brings us to the timing. And honestly,
the timing is the best part of the story.
Just over two weeks ago on June 30, the
Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile began
its decade long legacy survey of space and
time, sweeping the southern optical sky
every few nights. So for the first time in
history, we have a complete high resolution
radio map and a real time optical
transient stream operating simultaneously.
Anna: Though when Rubin flags something going bang
in the optical, astronomers can immediately
check what that patch of sky looks like and
looked like in the radio. The whole multi
wavelength discovery machine the community
has spent two decades building is now
switched on and the data's public.
Avery: Radio astronomers, multi wavelength folks,
citizen scientists. The radio sky now
belongs to everyone.
Anna: Now to a decades old mystery that may
finally have its answer. Avery, how do
supermassive black holes keep feeding?
Nearly every large galaxy hosts one of these
monsters. Millions or billions of times the
mass of the Sun. When they feed, they blast
out enormous energy, powerful jets that heat
the gas around them. And that's the paradox.
That heating should cut off the black hole's
own fuel supply. So why don't they starve?
Avery: The leading idea has been a kind of cosmic
recycling loop. The heated gas eventually
cools back down, condenses into long thin
streamers called filaments and rains back
towards the center. Self regulating
but Actually seeing the connection filament
to black hole has eluded astronomers for
decades.
Anna: Until now. An international team led by Julie
Hvlasic Lorando at the University of Montreal
pointed the James Webb Space telescope at
NGC 4696, the giant
elliptical galaxy at the heart of the
Centaurus cluster, about 145
million light years away. Their results were
published this week in the Astrophysical
Journal Letters.
Avery: And Centaurus, we should note, is a southern
constellation. This galaxy cluster rides high
in our winter sky right now, though you'll
need a decent telescope for the galaxy
itself.
Anna: White. Now, Hubble had previously
photographed a curious S shaped swirl of gas
near this galaxy's central black hole. But
Hubble could only show where the gas sat, not
how it moved. So the team gave Webb's
NIRSP instrument nearly eight hours on the
target and mapped the motion of the gas deep
inside the black hole's sphere of influence,
resolving features just 30 light years across
in a galaxy hundreds of thousands of light
years wide.
Avery: And the swirl turned out to be
Anna: a spinning disk of gas wrapped around
the black hole, nearly 800 light
years across, with material whipping around
at, uh, up to 600 kilometers per second.
And here's the money shot. That disk is
physically connected to one of the huge
infalling filaments stretching out into the
galaxy. They watched gas flowing along
the filament, pouring into the disk, and from
the disk falling onto the black hole.
Avery: The missing link caught on camera heat the
gas. The gas cools into filaments. The
filaments feed the disk. The disk feeds the
black hole. The black hole heats the gas.
Round and round it goes.
Anna: Havlasic Lorando said Webb is revealing that
black holes might be the ultimate cosmic
recyclers. And because this feeding loop
shapes when galaxies can and can't form
stars, understanding it is really
understanding how galaxies, including ours,
grow up.
Avery: Anna, uh, time for a double bill from the
outer solar system. Two stories,
one spacecraft, and a dwarf planet that
keeps on giving. First,
scientists have detected landslides on Pluto
for the very first time.
Anna: This is New Horizons data, isn't it? That
Flyby was 11 years ago this week.
Avery: It is, and that's the delightful part. A
paper in the journal Icarus, which has been
making headlines this week, reports that an
international team went back through the high
resolution images from New Horizons lorry
camera pictures showing Pluto's surface at
about 300 meters per pixel and found
six large landslides inside three impact
craters near Sputnik Planita. That famous
heart shaped nitrogen ice plane.
Anna: How do you recognize a landslide on a world
made of ice?
Avery: Same fingerprints as Earth. Crescent shaped
collapse scars near the crater rims. Huge
displaced blocks of ice and debris fanning
out across the crater floors. The team
measured them. These slides descend one and a
half to over two kilometers, run out as far
as 14 and a half kilometers and the largest
covers around 130 square kilometers.
Anna: And landslides are everywhere else, aren't
they? Earth, Mars, Ceres,
asteroids, even Pluto's moon Charon showed
evidence years ago Pluto itself was the odd
one out which was
Avery: genuinely puzzling because Pluto has steep
crater walls and rugged icy terrain. All the
right ingredients. Now the gap is filled and
it tells us gravity driven slope processes
are actively reshaping Pluto's frozen
surface. Even under gravity, a fraction of
ours. What triggered them is still open.
Possibilities range from tectonic activity to
meteoroid impacts.
Anna: A world we visited for a few hours in 2015,
still handing us firsts a decade later.
Avery: And um, it's not done because part two of
our Pluto double is about
Avery: the other half of that famous pair
Anna: of Charon, Pluto's enormous moon. So
big relative to Pluto that the two really
form a double world. And a study published
Tuesday in Nature Communications says
Charon's mountains have preserved a memory of
a wilder youth.
Avery: What kind of memory?
Anna: A record of despinning across the solar
system. Tidal forces gradually slow a body's
rotation and as ah, the spin slows the
body's shape relaxes stressing and
cracking the surface. The it's long been
theorized for Charon but clear geological
evidence was missing. So Han, Zeng Chin
and colleagues at ETH Zurich and
UCLA examined the orientations
and types of tectonic features, mountain
ranges and faults in Aus Terra
Sharon's northern rugged highlands. Again
using New Horizons flyby data.
Avery: And um, the tectonic pattern fits the de
spinning story beautifully.
Anna: Their modeling suggests Charon's rotation
period was once around 14.3 hours
and it has since slowed to today's roughly
153 hours locked in step with
its orbit around Pluto. That's more than a
tenfold slowdown and the stresses from that
transformation are etched into the mountains
we photographed in 2015.
Avery: Chen said the study drastically changed her
understanding of Charon's geologic history.
And there's a bonus finding, isn't there
about how Charon was born?
Anna: Yes, the way despinning and global
contraction evolved together favors
what's called a cold start for Charon, which
is a real clue to the early thermal history
of icy moons across the Outer solar system.
So between Pluto's landslides and charon's
slowing spin, one 11 year old dataset
gave us two papers in a week. Not a bad
return on a flyby.
Avery: Our final story today, Anna, uh, comes with
some genuinely eye widening numbers.
SpaceX has filed its latest semi annual
constellation status report with the U.S.
federal Communications Commission. And
according to coverage of the filing, StarLink
satellites performed
207,152
collision avoidance maneuvers between
December 2025 and
May 2026.
Anna: 207,000 in six months,
up nearly 60,000
Avery: on the previous half year. Put the two
periods together and the constellation made
over 355,000
dodges in 12 months. More
than triple what it performed in all of
2024. At uh, on average,
each Starlink satellite now swerves more
than 40 times a year. That's nearly a
dodge a week per satellite.
Anna: Let's be fair to SpaceX for a moment though.
These maneuvers are the system working as
designed, aren't they?
Avery: They are. The satellites dodge
autonomously whenever the predicted collision
probability exceeds 3 in 10 million,
an extremely conservative threshold, far
tighter than the industry standard. Experts
consistently credit SpaceX with managing its
traffic well and being transparent with the
data. The concern is the trendline,
not the competence.
Anna: Because the numbers compound. More
satellites means more close approaches means
more maneuvers means more residual risk
that never quite goes to zero.
Avery: Exactly the point Huw Lewis makes. He's the
University of Birmingham um, astronautics
professor who's tracked these reports for
years. Each maneuver cuts the collision odds
to about one in a million, which sounds
negligible, but as he puts it, if you make
a million maneuvers with a one in a million
residual, you end up with an aggregate risk
across the Constellation that you simply
can't get rid of. His blunt assessment,
he thinks we're heading towards a situation
where there will be a collision involving an
operational satellite in the Constellation.
Avery: And the projections on current growth
Starlink passes. A million total avoidance
maneuvers by mid2027. And by
2030 the constellation could be making more
than a million maneuvers every single year.
Remember too, and regular listeners will.
SpaceX has applied to the FCC to grow
Starlink toward 100,000 satellites,
a story we covered a couple of weeks back.
And it's not alone up there. Amazon's
Constellation and China's Qian Fan are
actively deploying as well.
Anna: The number of operational spacecraft in orbit
has gone from about 10,000 to about
16,000 in just a year. Other
experts are calling for operators to disclose
predicted maneuver counts before
Constellations are even approved. Though
regulators know whether the satellites can
Avery: actually keep up, low Earth orbit is a
shared resource. And this is the traffic
report. We'll keep watching the numbers
because everyone from astronomers to airlines
to your GPs depends on that neighborhood
staying safe.
Anna: Time now for tonight's skywatching. And for
our Southern Hemisphere friends, the news is
good. The Moon is a waning crescent rising in
the small hours, so evenings this week are
dark and glorious, which means
Avery: the winter Milky Way at its absolute best
face south after dinner. And the galactic
core in Sagittarius and Scorpius is almost
directly overhead from most of Australia and
New Zealand dust lanes. Star clouds, the
lot. If you can get away from city lights
this week, do it while you're there.
Anna: Sweep up Omega, uh, Centauri and the Southern
Cross riding high. And if you've got
binoculars, the star fields between
Scorpius's tail and the teapot of Sagittarius
will keep you busy all evening. Saturn
is climbing in the east by mid evening for a
late night treat. And dazzling Venus still
rules the early evening western sky.
Avery: And one for the launch watchers. SpaceX's
Starship Flight 13 window opens tonight,
US time. That's tomorrow morning for us
from about 8:45 aesthetic.
So pour a coffee and watch this space. We'll
have the full story in Saturday's weekend
wrap.
Anna: That's it for today's episode. Thanks for
joining us. You can find show notes, links to
every story and our back catalog@ah,
astronomydaily.IO and we're astronomy
Daily Pod on all the socials.
Avery: Astronomy Daily is part of the bytes.com
podcast network. I'm um, Avery.
Anna: And I'm Anna. We'll see you tomorrow. Until
then, clear skies.