Anna: Happy horse's birthday. Yes. Today the
1st of August, every horse in the Southern
hemisphere is officially a year older,
whether it was born yesterday or a decade
ago. And in the spirit of a fresh start,
our lead story today is a telescope that's
learning to drive itself.
Avery: A telescope that decides all on its own where
to point next. In real time, reading the
weather and the moonlight high in the Chilean
Andes, we'll get into exactly what that means
and whether we should be thrilled or a little
bit nervous about it on,
Anna: um, the three of the biggest stories from the
week just gone. Beetlejuice finally
caught with a companion. A bizarre three
lobed asteroid with its own little moon
and a black hole flexing its muscle across
300,000 light years.
Avery: And a, uh, look ahead at what is frankly a
blockbuster August in the sky. This is the
weekend wrap. Let's go.
Anna: So picture the job of an observing astronomer
for a moment. You've got one night on a world
class telescope. The clock is ticking and
every hour is precious. But the sky
doesn't sit still for you. Clouds roll in,
the moon rises and washes out the faint
stuff, the air steadies or turns
turbulent and you're constantly making
judgment calls. Point here now, save
that target for later. Skip this one
entirely. It's a balancing act astronomers
have honed over decades.
Avery: And it's exactly the kind of judgment we tend
to assume needs a human.
Which is what makes this story land. A team
from Northwestern University, the University
of Chicago and Firma Lab working through a
research center with the rather lovely name
of the AI Institute for the sky
sky, pronounced sky, have built a
deep learning system that makes those calls
itself in real time.
Anna: And they didn't test it on a toy. They put it
in charge of scheduling for the dark energy
camera. That's a 570
megapixel monster of an instrument
mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4 meter
telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter American
Observatory in Chile. That's one of the
great observing sites on Earth up in the
Andes, far from city light.
Avery: And this is the part I want to sit on because
it's the leap the, the AI didn't just
generate a plan for the night in advance and
hand it over. It adapted that plan on the
fly as uh, the conditions changed around it,
the weather shifts, the moonlight changes and
the system redecides where to look next.
Anna: They didn't sit down and program in. All the
rules astronomers have worked out over the
years. Don't point near the Moon, prioritize
this when the seeing is Good. And so on. They
let the model learn on its own. Alex
Drelica Wagner at UH UChicago, who co led
the project, described the method really
simply. They trained it on years of
historical observations from the Dark Energy
Survey, showing it where the telescope was
pointing at one moment and asking it to
predict
Avery: the next move and then correcting it.
So it's the classic learning loop guess
compared to what the human astronomers
actually did. Adjust. Do that across
years of real observing nights and you end up
with a system that's absorbed the craft
rather than being told the recipe and the
headline result.
Anna: Across two full observing runs, it
performed comparably to human schedulers.
It implicitly accounted for the atmospheric
conditions and the moonlight without anyone
ever writing those as explicit rules.
Drelika Wagner called it an important
milestone towards more autonomous
observatories and noted the real
achievement was setting up all the
infrastructure to actually deploy it on a
national observatory. That's the difference
between a nice demo and a working tool.
Avery: So let's talk about why this matters beyond
the neat M headline, because I think it's
genuinely a sign of where astronomy is
heading. We're entering the era of survey
astronomy at a scale that's honestly hard to
picture. The Vera Rubin Observatory, also
in Chile, is going to image the entire
southern sky every few nights, over, over and
over for a decade.
Anna: And the data volume from that is staggering.
The kind of fire hose where you simply cannot
have a human hand tuning every decision fast
enough to keep up. If you want to catch the
things that change. A supernova flaring, an
asteroid drifting through something that
wasn't there last night. The telescope has to
be nimble. It has to react.
Avery: Which is exactly what a self scheduling
system buys you. Speed and consistency
and the ability to respond to the sky as it
actually is on the night, rather than as you
guessed it would be a week ago when you wrote
your plan.
Anna: There's a workload angle too, and I don't
want to skate past it. Observing runs are
exhausting. Astronomers up all night making
hundreds of small decisions under pressure,
automating the routine scheduling frees
people up for the science, the
interpretation, the creative questions that
machines are nowhere near touching.
Avery: Now, the honest tension, because whenever we
say self driving anything, a reasonable
person's eyebrows go up. Are we handing the
keys to the machine? And I think the fair
answer here is not really. Not in the way
that phrase suggests. This is a system
deciding the order and targeting of
observations. Which patch of sky in which
filter when within goals that
humans set, the scientists still decide what
the survey is for.
Anna: That's the key distinction. The why
stays human. The where next right
now is what's being handed over. And it's
being handed over to something that learned
from the very astronomers it's now standing
in for. So it's less a replacement and more
a, uh, very fast, very tireless apprentice.
Avery: And for our listeners who observe themselves,
and I know a lot of you do, there's something
quietly relatable in this. Every one of you
has stood in the backyard doing this same
calculation. Is it worth setting up tonight?
Is that haze going to clear? Should I chase
the faint galaxy now or wait for it to climb
higher? This AI is doing your
backyard math just, uh, at 4 meters of
aperture and a few hundred megapixels.
Anna: And I love that it's happening in the
southern hemisphere at Cerro Tololo on a
telescope that's been a workhorse of southern
sky astronomy for decades. The Blanco helped
make the original dark energy discovery. Now
it's helping pioneer how the next generation
of telescopes will run themselves. That's a
nice bit of continuity.
Avery: It is. So the first self driving telescope
has gone stargazing, and it drove well. Keep
an eye on this one, because the observatories
of the2030s are going to be built around
exactly this idea.
Now into our three highlights from the week.
And if you missed Wednesday's episode, this
was a big one. Betelgeuse, that famous red
orange shoulder of Orion, turns out not to be
alone.
Anna: And for a century, people have suspected a
companion star tugging at it. Because
Betelgeuse has this long, slow rhythm in its
brightness that a single star struggles to
explain. But nobody had ever seen the
companion directly. It's lost in the glare of
a supergiant that could swallow the orbit of
Jupiter.
Avery: Until now, a team led by Miguel
Montajes, using the European Southern
Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile,
got the clearest image yet of what's very
likely Betelgeuse B, a faint
companion riding close. Montarge called it,
uh, the conclusion of a century long quest,
which is not a phrase astronomers throw
around lightly.
Anna: And it's a lovely reminder that even the
stars we think we know best still have
secrets. Betelgeuse is one of the most
studied stars in the sky, and it was quietly
hiding a partner in plain sight. If you want
the full detail, it's all in Wednesday's
episode 153. Highlight 2. And this
one's brand new. We ran it just yesterday.
Say hello to asteroid 44 Nisa,
which has turned out to be genuinely strange
in the best way.
Avery: Strange how? Give people the picture.
Anna: So most asteroids we imagine as a single
lump or maybe a two part contact binary,
like a peanut. NISA is the first
known tri lobe asteroid. Three
distinct lobes joined together by narrow
necks, three connected blobs, and
sophisticated high contrast imaging from the
Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and the
VLT in Chile is what pulled the shape out of
the glare.
Avery: And it's not traveling alone either, is it?
Anna: Uh, it is not. They also spotted a small
moon roughly a kilometer across,
orbiting it. And that little moon is
scientifically gold because watching how it
orbits lets you weigh the asteroid. You get
its mass, and from the shape, you get its
volume. And together those give you density,
which tells you what it's actually made of.
So a weird shape plus a handy moon equals
a real physics windfall. Full stories in
yesterday's episode 155 and
Avery: highlight three takes us right up in scale
from a kilometer wide moon to something
spanning 300,000 light years. On
Thursday, we covered new X ray observations
of a quasar called H
1821643
Anna: and a quasar for anyone just joining us
is a supermassive black hole in the middle of
a galaxy, feeding so voraciously that the
surrounding material blazes brighter than the
whole galaxy around it.
Avery: Exactly. And using the Xrism M X
ray telescope, astronomers traced winds
driven by that black hole, reshaping the gas
across an entire galaxy cluster.
Turbulence stirred up over hundreds of
thousands of light years. One black hole at
the center, setting the weather for a whole
cluster of galaxies.
Anna: It's one of those numbers that resets your
sense of scale. The reach of a single
object from a point out across a distance
that three times the width of our entire
galaxy. And it's a nice
Xrism callback. That telescope
keeps earning its keep. That was Thursday's
episode 154. Quick Community
Note before we look up. If you're enjoying
the wrap, the new astronomydaily
IO is the place to live. The full back
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day's stories land in your
Avery: inbox and it's a contact facility on the site
now. So if there's a story you think we've
missed or a bit of sky you want us to talk
about, tell us directly. We do read them.
And that brings us to the sky. And August is
a genuine blockbuster. So this is a preview
of the whole month, not just tonight.
Anna: Start with a comet. Comet 10P
Tempel 2 reaches perihelion its
closest approach to the sun on 2 August,
and it's near its peak brightness in early
August. It's a binocular object rather than a
naked eye showpiece. So find dark sky and
sweep for it for us in the Southern
Hemisphere. It's reasonably placed Northern
Hemisphere observers. You can catch it too,
just lower. Check a sky app for your exact
Avery: local rise time and the headline event of the
month. And it's a northern hemisphere one. A
uh, total solar eclipse on the 12th of
August. The path of totality crosses
Greenland, Iceland, Spain and Portugal.
If you're anywhere in Europe, you'll likely
get at least a partial. And I have to say it
every single time, never look at the sun
without proper certified eclipse glasses.
No exceptions.
Anna: And here's the beautiful coincidence. That
Same night, the 12th into the 13th, the
Perseid meteor shower peaks. And this year it
peaks under a new moon. No moonlight to wash
them out at a good dark site. The Perseids
enthro well over 100 meteors an hour at
their best with bright fireballs.
Avery: Now the honest Southern hemisphere notes
because we always give it to you straight,
the Perseids are a northern hemisphere
shower. The radiance up in Perseus
barely clears the horizon for much of the
south, so we get far fewer. The
Northern hemisphere gets the real show this
time our northern listeners get to dark
sky after Midnight on the 12th. Look up,
be patient and let your eyes adapt.
Anna: And building through the month. A six planet
lineup strung along the sky. A lovely
reason to learn the ecliptic. The best
pairings shift week to week. The pre dawn
sky is where a lot of the action is with the
brighter planets. We'll give you the night by
night detail in the daily episodes as each
event sharpens up.
Avery: So a comet at the start, an eclipse and
meteor double bill in the middle. Planets all
month. Whichever hemisphere you're in, August
has something for you.
Anna: That's the weekend wrap for Saturday 1st
August. A self driving telescope in the
Andes. A companion for Beetlejuice. A
three lobed asteroid with a moon and a
black hole reaching across a cluster.
Not a bad week.
Avery: We're back Monday with a fresh episode. Until
then, from Anna and me and happy birthday to
every horse listening.
Anna: Clear skies,
Wow.
Avery: Story soul.