Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily
dose of the latest space and astronomy news.
I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm avery. It's Friday the 17th
of July, 2026, and honestly,
if you only listen to one episode of this
show all month, make it this one.
Anna: No pressure then, but Avery's not
exaggerating. Today we're leading with a
genuine milestone in the search for life
beyond Earth. The first atmosphere ever
detected on a rocky temperate planet
sitting in the habitable zone of.
Avery: We've also got last night's starship drama.
And there was drama, just not the kind
anyone had scripted. Plus, the meteorite
that smashed through a New Jersey bedroom
ceiling and turned out to be carrying the
chemical ingredients of life itself.
Anna: And later, the earliest evidence yet of a
galaxy building itself from the inside out.
Some gloriously strange metallic waves on
Mars. And as always, we'll close with what to
look for in tonight's southern skies. And
trust me, tonight you'll actually want to
step outside, buckle um in.
Avery: Let's get into it.
Anna: Avery.
Every so often a result comes along that
future textbooks will point back to. This
might be one of those. Astronomers have
detected an atmosphere around a rocky
temperate planet called LHS 1140
b. And that makes it the first rocky world in
a habitable zone anywhere beyond our solar
system confirmed to have air.
Avery: Lets set, uh, the scene, because context is
everything here. LHS 1140
B sits about 48 light years away,
orbiting a small, cool red dwarf star.
It's what we call a super Earth. Roughly five
and a half times the mass of our planet. And
crucially, it orbits inside the habitable
zone. That's the region where temperatures
allow liquid water to exist on a planet's
surface.
Anna: Now, detecting atmospheres on exoplanets
isn't new. We've been doing it for more than
two decades. But until now, essentially
every confirmed atmosphere belonged to big
gas, bloated giants, hot Jupiters,
planets. Nothing like our own. Small,
rocky planets are so much dimmer and smaller
than their stars that teasing out an
atmospheric signal has been fiendishly
difficult.
Avery: Which is what makes this such a big deal. The
team led by Colin Cherubim, who did this work
as a PhD student at Harvard, found a
signature of helium escaping from the
planet's atmosphere. The result has just been
published in the journal Science.
Anna: Helium might sound like an odd headline.
Gas. Nobody is imagining alien birthday
balloons. But it tells us something profound.
This planet has held onto an atmosphere
despite orbiting a red dwarf. And red
dwarfs are famously nasty neighbors. They
blast their planets with X rays and
ultraviolet Radiation that tends to strip
atmospheres entirely.
Avery: The modeling suggests
LHS1140B
is far enough from its star that it's managed
to keep a good chunk of the primordial helium
it gathered when it formed. And the
researchers think there's more to this world
than helium. Its density suggests
it's rocky, likely with an iron core.
And it probably holds a lot of water, too.
Anna: And here's the tantalizing bit. If the
atmosphere provides even a modest greenhouse
effect, and we now know there is an
atmosphere, then conditions on this planet
could plausibly support liquid water. A
rocky planet, an atmosphere, the right
temperature. That's the trifecta, uh,
astrobiologists have been chasing for 30
years now.
Avery: The discipline. The lead author has been very
clear that nobody is claiming this planet has
life. What they are claiming, and it's
remarkable enough, is the first direct
evidence that a rocky habitable zone planet
can hold an atmosphere at all. That's a
foundational question answered.
Anna: There's also a lovely thought buried in this
work. Researchers suspect that the very early
Earth might have gone through a phase with a
primordial atmosphere a bit like this one.
So in studying
HLS1140B, we
might be looking at an echo of our own
planet's infancy.
Avery: Expect a stampede of follow up observations.
Astronomers will want to know what else is in
that atmosphere and whether there's water.
LHS1140B just
became one of the most important addresses in
the galaxy.
Anna: 48 light years away, a small world is
holding its breath. Well, holding its
atmosphere. And for the first time, we can
say that with evidence from a world
Avery: with air to a rocket that never left the
ground.
Regular listeners know we've been tracking
Starship Flight 13 all week, and last
night was supposed to be the night.
Anna: Quick refresher for anyone just joining the
Ark. Flight 13 is the second outing for
Starship's version 3 hardware. And its
headline task is deploying 20 real
Starlink V3 satellites. Actual
functioning spacecraft, not the mass
simulators of earlier flights.
Avery: So Thursday evening, Texas time, the
countdown ran all the way down. The Raptor
engines on the super heavy booster began
igniting. And then everything stopped.
Several engines failed to start, and the
vehicle's automated systems triggered a
launch abort at T0.
Anna: Which, let's be clear, is the system doing
exactly what it's designed to do. An abort at
ignition is undramatic by design. The
vehicle is safe, the pad is safe, and
everyone gets to try again.
Avery: Elon Musk weighed in shortly Afterwards,
confirming that some engines didn't start and
the automatic abort kicked in. And the fix is
already defined. Two Raptor engines will be
removed and replaced with the most likely new
launch window early next week.
Anna: And it's worth remembering the stakes riding
on this one. The FAA only closed out its
Flight 12 mishap investigation last week.
That flight lost the booster during its
landing burn and dropped an engine on ascent.
Flight 13 carries the fixes for all of
that, plus that first real payload
deployment.
Avery: And the bigger picture. SpaceX has filed
plans for a next Gener Starlink
constellation of up to 100,000 V3
satellites. A network that only works if
Starship becomes a reliable, high cadence
workhorse. Every one of these test flights is
a stepping stone toward that and toward
NASA's Artemis lunar landings, which depend
on Starship too.
Anna: So, a, uh, frustrating night at Starbase, but
a recoverable one. Two engines out. Two
engines in and we go again. We'll bring you
the launch, the actual launch. Fingers
crossed, as soon as it happens.
Now for my favorite story of the day. Cast
your mind back to 16th July,
2024. Two years ago this week, a
daytime fireball streaked across the skies of
the US East Coast. A sonic boom rattled
New York City. And in the town of
Hillsborough, New Jersey, a rock from space
punched straight through the roof of a house
and into a bedroom.
Avery: Imagine coming home to that, a hole in your
ceiling and sitting there among the
insulation, a stone reeking of sulfur.
That was quite recently in interplanetary
space.
Anna: And here's where the homeowner becomes the
hero of the story. Rather than putting it on
the mantelpiece, they acted fast, gathering
the fragments, sealing them in glass jars and
quickly contacting the American Meteor
Society. That speed mattered enormously
because meteorites start reacting with
Earth's moist atmosphere the moment they
land.
Avery: Two years of laboratory work later, the
results have just been published in Science
Advances, and the Hillsborough meteorite has
turned out to be a, uh, genuine treasure.
It's a carbonaceous chondrite, the carbon
rich family of meteorites that preserves
primitive material from before the planets
even finished forming. More than 4 1/2
billion years old.
Anna: But it gets rarer. CM M type
meteorites are usually classed as CM M1 or
CM M2, depending on how much ancient
water altered them while they were still part
of their parent. Hillsborough sits
right in between a cm um 1,
2. And it's only the second meteorite of
that intermediate type ever seen falling to
Earth. Thanks to that quick thinking
homeowner, it's the most pristine example we
have.
Avery: And the chemistry inside is the real
prize. The analysis found amino, uh,
acids, the building blocks of proteins, along
with carboxylic acids and a whole inventory
of organic compounds. Researchers at
NASA Goddard's astrobiology lab concluded
these molecules likely formed inside the
parent AstroDailyPod along by briny,
salty fluids.
Anna: Salty is the operative word. The team
found tiny salt rich fragments suggesting
this rock came from near the surface of its
parent asteroid, where liquid water
evaporated and concentrated salts,
essentially an asteroid with brine deposits.
They're now comparing those salts directly
with the samples returned from asteroids
Ryugu and Bennu.
Avery: And the big picture takeaway this
strengthens the idea that meteorites just
like this one delivered organic molecules,
the raw ingredients for life's chemistry, to
the early Earth. The stuff of
biology arriving by special
Anna: delivery fragments are now being curated at
the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City. And one of the scientists made the
point that if a meteorite ever visits your
house, you're not unlucky. You've been handed
a treasure. So maybe check your roof
insurance policy.
Avery: All the same, yesterday we looked at how
supermassive black holes feed themselves
today. A related question from the other
how do galaxies build their centers in the
first place? Astronomers at Durham University
have just found the earliest example of that
construction in action.
Anna: Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the
Durham led team studied a galaxy as it
appeared more than 9 billion years ago, when
the universe was well under half its current
age. And at its center they found something
never before seen at that distancea nuclear
Avery: disk, a nuclear disk being
and I love that astronomy makes this sound
more alarming than it is a compact,
dense rotating disk of stars right at a
galaxy's core. They're common in mature
galaxies near us today, but nobody had ever
caught one this far back in cosmic history.
Anna: And this one is busy. It's compact,
rich in young stars, and showing all the
signs of organized, orderly growth. The
galaxy also hosts a long stellar bar,
one of those elongated structures of stars
that rotate as a single unit, which is
thought to funnel gas inward and feed the
disk's construction. The paper is out in the
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society.
Avery: The lead author, Zoe Leconte, called it a
remarkable and unexpected find, one that
will push astronomers to rethink galaxy
evolution and the role of stellar bars in the
early universe. It's another entry in what's
becoming Webb's signature discovery.
Mature looking galaxies showing up far
earlier than anyone predicted.
Anna: And there's a black hole connection here,
too. Nuclear disks are Believed to act
as reservoirs, storing gas that can
eventually spiral down to feed a, uh,
galaxy's central supermassive black hole.
So finding 1,9 billion years back may
help explain how black holes bulked up during
the universe's most hyperactive era.
Avery: The team's next step is follow up
observations to map how the stars and gas
actually move within this distant galaxy.
Watch this space, quite literally.
Anna: Next up, time for something purely
gloriously visual. The European
Space Agency has released a new image
from its veteran Mars Express
orbiter. And it shows what looks for all
the world like an ocean of frozen metal
on the Red planet.
Avery: The scene is Keizer Crater, a huge impact
basin about 180km across
and a couple of kilometers deep, sitting in
Noassus Terra, one of the oldest, most
battered landscapes on Mars, pummeled by
impacts for the past 4 billion years.
Anna: And across the crater floor, waves
dark, sinuous, almost shiny ridges
that genuinely look carved from polished
metal. They're sand dunes,
enormous ones, some towering more than a
hundred meters above the surrounding terrain.
That's a dune taller than a 30 story
building.
Avery: The metallic sheen has a lovely explanation.
Bright frost deposits clinging to the dune's
south facing slopes, catching the light. Dark
volcanic sand below. Glittering frost on
top. Mars doing its best impression of a
sculpture garden.
Anna: The winds in this region blow predominantly
from the west, herding the sand into those
distinctive crests. Some standing alone,
others merging into a continuous dune field
stretching for kilometers. It's a reminder
that Mars is not a static museum piece.
It's a working windy world where landscapes
are still being shaped today.
Avery: The image comes from the orbiter's high
resolution stereo camera, captured last
October and released this week. Mars Express,
remember, has been at Mars since 2003.
23 years of service and still sending
back postcards like this. We'll pop the link
in the show notes. It's worth a proper look
on a big screen.
And so to the skies above us and tonight's
Southern hemisphere friends, you get the good
stuff. Without even staying up late, head out
Anna: just after sunset and look to the western
sky. There you'll find a beautifully
thin crescent moon, only a few days
past noon, hanging near brilliant
Venus, with the bright star Regulus, the
heart of Leo the lion, completing the trio.
Avery: This is the meeting we flagged earlier in the
week, and tonight's the night. A crescent
moon and Venus together in twilight is one of
the most photogenic sights in all of sky
watching. No telescope required, though.
Binoculars will show you Earthshine glowing
softly on the moon's nightside.
Anna: And because the Moon is still such a slim
crescent, dark sky conditions continue this
weekend from southern latitudes. The Milky
Way core is riding gloriously high in the
evening. Sagittarius and Scorpius
overhead, dust lanes and star clouds on
full display. If you can get away from city
lights, this is prime time.
Avery: One diary note before we go. Exactly one
month from now, on the 12th of August, a
total solar eclipse sweeps across the Arctic,
Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain. It's
a Northern Hemisphere show this time, but if
you're one of our listeners traveling for it,
safe journeys, pack your eclipse glasses and
we want a full report.
Anna: Dallas, of the eclipse chasers. But tonight's
Moon Venus pairing is our consolation price.
And it's a lovely one.
Avery: And that's Astronomy Daily for Friday,
17 July. A first atmosphere
on a habitable zone. Rocky world starship
stopped at zero. A bedroom meteorite
carrying life's ingredients. A, uh, galaxy
growing up fast. Metal waves on Mars and
a date with the Moon and Venus tonight.
Anna: Not a bad Friday. For all of today's stories
and links, head to astronomydaily
IO and find us everywhere.
AstroDailyPod if today's
lead story gave you goosebumps, share the
episode with someone who needs goosebumps,
too.
Avery: The weekend news wrap is tomorrow, and if a
certain rocket flies early next week, you
know where to hear about it first. Until
then, I'm Avery.
Anna: And I'm Anna. Thanks for listening. And as
always, clear skies Astronomy
Day stories.
Love.