Anna: Picture the emptiest m place you can imagine.
No stars, no dust, not a
single atom. Now switch off the light
and empty space still isn't
empty. It seethes with particles that
flicker into being and vanish again faster
than any clock can catch them. For 90
years, that's been a prediction on a
chalkboard. This week, a dead star
with an absurd magnetic field may have let
us see it by bending starlight through the
vacuum itself. G' day and welcome
to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm avery. It's Friday 7th
August 2026, and there is a lot of very good
sky ahead of us.
Anna: There is coming up, NASA
rummages through the parts bin of a canceled
space station to help build a moon base.
Avery: Blue Origin finally says what blew up its big
rocket back in May. And a plucky little robot
fights the stop spinning long enough to
rescue a beloved NASA telescope.
Anna: And we finish where the whole world is
looking next week, the total solar eclipse on
the 12th paired with the best Perseids in
years, both hemispheres and the eye safety
rules that are absolutely non negotiable.
But, uh, we start with the physics of nothing
at all. Avery, want to set the scene?
Avery: Gladly. This is a genuine
fundamental physics lead and it's about a
lovely Australian thread running through it.
Anna: So on Wednesday, the journal Nature published
a result that's been decades in the making. A
team led by Rachel Stewart used NASA's
IXPE X ray telescope, that's
the Imaging X Ray Polarimetry Explorer,
to stare at a magnetar with the catchy name
1E
1547.0 to
5408. And they think
they've caught empty space, behaving
exactly as quantum theory says it should.
Avery: Lets define the star first because magnetars
are ridiculous objects.
Anna: They really are. A magnetar is a
neutron star, the collapsed core of a
massive dead star. A whole sun's
worth of mass crammed into a ball the size
of a city. But this particular
flavor has the strongest magnetic field
known anywhere in the universe. We're talking
a field around a thousand trillion times
stronger than Earth's. Roughly a, uh,
trillion times stronger than the beefiest
permanent magnet ever built in a lab.
Avery: And that monstrous field is the whole point
because of a prediction from 1936.
Anna: Right. This goes back to Werner Heisenberg
and his colleagues, one of the founders of
quantum mechanics. Quantum theory says the
vacuum isn't truly empty. It's a
boiling sea of virtual particles,
electrons and their antimatter twins,
positrons popping in and out of
existence and vanishing before you can ever
measure them directly.
Avery: Which sounds like philosophy until you add a
magnetic field.
Anna: Exactly. Turn on a strong enough
field and those flickering virtual particles
line up. And when they line up, the
empty vacuum starts to behave like a
piece of glass, or better, like a crystal.
It gains a grain. Light traveling
one way through it moves slightly differently
than light traveling another way. Physicists
call it vacuum birefringence.
Avery: Birefringence being the same trick a crystal
of calcite plays. Split a light ray in two.
Anna: The very same. The vacuum becomes a
prism made of nothing. The catch has
always been that you need a field so
absurdly strong to make the effect visible
that no laboratory on Earth can get
anywhere near it. Only a magnetar will
do. So we've had to wait for the universe
to build the experiment for us.
Avery: Enter ixpe. And, um, here's where it turns
into a proper international relay, with
Australia holding one of the batons.
Anna: This is my favorite part.
IXPE measures the polarization of
X rays. The direction the light waves are
wiggling. That's the fingerprint you need to
catch birefringence. But the team didn't
stop at one telescope. They ran
IXPE together with NASA's
NICER instrument on the space station and
crucially, the Parkes radio telescope in
central New South Wales.
Avery: Merjang the dish, our dish,
doing frontier quantum physics from a paddock
outside of Parkes.
Anna: And there's more homegrown talent in the
byline. Dr. Marcus Lower from
Swinburne University in Melbourne is on the
team alongside co lead Hoa Dinh
T at University in Houston.
So this is genuinely a NASA and Australia
result.
Avery: What did the numbers actually show?
Anna: Extraordinary polarization in the
soft X ray band, where you're seeing the
star's glowing surface. The light was
polarized at around 65%.
And at some points in the magnetar's
rotation, it climbed to nearly 80.
That's enormous. And the pattern shifts
smoothly as the star turns. According to the
team, you can't reproduce that combination,
the X rays and the radio behavior together
without the vacuum itself bending the light.
In their words, the signal requires vacuum
birefringence to be present now,
and I
Avery: think this is important for our listeners.
This is not case closed, is it?
Anna: No, and I'm glad you flagged it. The team is
careful. They call it the most definitive
signal to date. Not a confirmed detection.
And there's a genuine scientific argument
happening in real time. Back in April,
an independent group looked at the same
IXPE data with a different model of the
star's geometry and concluded it wasn't
compelling evidence yet. So there are two
honest readings on
Avery: the table, which is science working
exactly as it should.
Anna: It is to nail it down, you'd want a
stronger dip at the specific energy where the
effect should bite. Or the same signature
from a whole family of magnetars, which or
the dream, a lab experiment on Earth
that corroborates it. None of those is in
hand yet. But think about what's being
claimed that we watched the empty vacuum
of space act on light using a
dead star as the apparatus and a radio
dish in the central west as one of the ears.
Avery: The emptiest thing there is finally showing
its grain.
Anna: That's a lead from the very big
physics let's come back down to the moon
where Avery someone's been raiding the parts
bin.
Avery: They have. Longtime listeners will remember
that back in the autumn NASA paused the Lunar
Gateway, the small space station that was
meant to orbit the moon, and pivoted to
putting infrastructure straight onto the
surface instead. This week we learned what
happens to the hardware that was already
built.
Anna: It doesn't go in a museum.
Avery: It goes to the moon by another route.
NASA and Northrop Grumman announced on
Tuesday that the guts of Halo, that's the
habitation and logistics outpost, the crew
module that was going to be the heart of
Gateway, will be repurposed into three
robotic missions called Lunar Infrastructure
Demos Lid 1, Lid 2
and Lid 3.
Anna: So the power systems, the avionics, the data
plumbing, all the expensive already flight
Avery: ready bits get reused on the
surface instead of in orbit. And the job
they're being pointed at is the single
hardest problem of living at the lunar South
Pole. Surviving the night.
Anna: The two week night, a uh, night
Avery: that lasts about 14 Earth days, where the
temperature at the pole can swing wildly and
plunge to well below minus 200
degrees Celsius and where your solar panels
do precisely nothing for a fortnight. If
you want astronauts to stay for more than one
lunar day, you have to keep the lights and
the heaters on through that. These demos are
meant to prove the power, thermal and
avionics kit that makes a persistent base
even thinkable.
Anna: And the reasoning behind reusing Halo is
basically don't reinvent the wheel.
Avery: Northrop Grumman's framing is that the
hardware is ready to fly, so it lets NASA
move faster and start gathering real
performance data on the surface sooner. It
was part of a broader moon base update too.
Four different commercial landers all
reaching final qualification testing at once,
which is its own milestone.
Anna: It's a very North American story.
Basa, Northrop Grumman, the whole
Artemis push. But it lands for everyone
because the South Pole and its water ice is
where the whole world's lunar plans are
converging.
Avery: Waste not, want not in space.
Anna Speaking of things that ah, didn't go to
plan.
Anna: Yes, some closure on a big bang from
earlier this year. Cast your mind back to
28 May. Blue Origin was running a
routine engine test of a new Glenn booster on
the pad at Cape Canaveral and it exploded
spectacularly. It destroyed the rocket
and did serious damage to the launch complex
and until
Avery: this week we didn't officially know why.
Anna: Now we do. On Tuesday, Blue
Origin's chief executive Dave Limp gave the
first real update on the investigation. The
culprit? The main oxygen valve on one of the
rocket's seven BE4 engines. They
traced it there, then confirmed it by
recovering and inspecting the hardware.
Avery: One valve on one of seven
engines, One valve.
Anna: That's the thing about rockets, they're
thousands of parts that all have to behave
and any one of them can ruin your day. The
valve controls the flow of liquid oxygen into
the engine and something about it initiated
the anomaly. Limp said they've run extensive
component level and engine hot fire tests to
understand the failure mode and the fix is
Avery: a redesign everything situation or a
tweak.
Anna: Encouragingly, a tweak. They're making small
modifications to the valve that can be
retrofitted to engines that already exist
rather than starting from scratch. Blimp's
line was simply the path forward is clear
with updated hardware coming in the near term
and a return to flight still targeted before
the end of the year.
Avery: There's a wider ripple here too. The BE4
doesn't only fly on New Glenn.
Anna: Good point. The same engine powers United
Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket. So the
industry will be watching how this valve
story plays out beyond Blue Origin. But
the headline for today is a good one. They
found it, they understand it and they think
it's fixable. That's how you turn a very bad
day into a flying rocket again.
Avery: From M, a rocket that needs to fly again to a
robot that just needs to stop spinning. This
one's a nail biter.
Anna: Nothing unusual in that though.
Avery: In space it genuinely is. We've
been following this since the launch scrubs
back at the start of July. So let me bring
everyone up to speed. NASA's Neil Gerald
Swift Observatory, a much loved telescope
that's been catching gamma ray bursts since
2004 is slowly sinking.
Its orbit is decaying and without a boost it
will re enter and burn up later this year.
Anna: And the cavalry is a robot.
Avery: The cavalry is a robot called Link, built by
a company called Catalyst Space out of
Flagstaff, Arizona. They're billing it as
America's first commercial space robot.
Designed, built and launched in under a year.
And its job is to fly up, grab Swift
and gently boost it to a higher, safer
orbit. It launched on 3 July on an air
launched Pegasus rocket.
Anna: So what went wrong?
Avery: During commissioning, Link got into trouble.
It ended up in a multi axis tumble, spinning
at about 9 degrees per second, which caused
it to drop in and out of communication. And
the cause was nasty. Two of its three
reaction wheels, the spinning disks a
spacecraft uses to point itself while, were
knocked out by a fault in the power system
upstream of them.
Anna: Losing your steering while you're tumbling,
that's the stuff of nightmares.
Avery: It is. But here's the clever bit. With the
reaction wheels down, the team improvised.
They used Lynx electric propulsion thrusters,
the gentle ion drive meant for the long
cruise to Swift, mounted on a gimbal and
fired them to cancel the spin. And it's
working. They've brought the Tumble down from
9 degrees per second to 4, and now to
about 1 and a half. All of it using less than
a hundred grams of propellant. So they're not
eating into the fuel they need for the rescue
itself.
Anna: A hundred grams, That's a small chocolate
bar's worth of fuel to tame a tumbling
spacecraft.
Avery: Beautifully economical. And the next step is
a big flight software upload in the coming
days. New control code written specifically
for the wounded spacecraft, which should hand
full pointing control back to the team. After
that, Link can start. The slow orbital dance
to line up with Swift Rendezvous has slipped
to around the end of August.
Anna: There's a lovely echo here with our lead.
Actually, our top story was about reading a
magnetar with X ray telescopes. And Swift
is itself an X ray and gamma ray observatory.
A robot fighting to save one of the very
instruments we use to do this kind of
science.
Avery: Fingers crossed for that software upload.
We'll keep watching the dashboard.
Anna, take us to the sky.
Anna: With pleasure, because next Wednesday 12th
August, as we've mentioned before, is one of
the biggest sky days of the year. Two
headline events in 24 hours, a total solar
eclipse and the peak of the Perseid meteor
shower under a beautifully dark moonless
sky.
Avery: Let's do the eclipse first and let's do it by
hemisphere. The path of Totality, where the
moon completely covers the sun, sweeps across
northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland and
northern Spain, clipping a tiny corner of
Portugal for mainland Europe. It's the first
total solar eclipse since 1999.
If you're lucky enough to be in Spain,
totality comes late in the day,
Anna: low and golden for our North American
listeners, our largest audience. You don't
get totality this time, but the Northeast
does get a partial. It's an afternoon event.
The rule of thumb. You'll see more than a 10%
bite only if you're northeast of a line
running roughly from New York City up through
Rock Rochester, or east of about mid
Ontario in Canada.
Avery: And the further into Atlantic Canada you go,
the better it gets. Around half the sun
covered at maximum. New England and the
northeastern states get a smaller nibble.
NASDAQ will stream the whole thing live from
1:15 in the afternoon Eastern time. If your
local sky won't play along.
Anna: Now, the non negotiable bit. And we say this
every single time for a reason.
Avery: In every partial phase, you must protect your
eyes. Use only eclipse glasses or handheld
solar viewers certified to the ISO
123122 safety
standard. Ordinary sunglasses are not
safe, no matter how dark they look. And
never point a camera, telescope or binoculars
at the sun while wearing eclipse glasses. The
optics will concentrate the light and burn
straight through the filter and into your
eye.
Anna: If you saved your glasses from a previous
eclipse, check them for scratches and
pinholes. Before you trust them in doubt,
throw them out.
Avery: And for the southern hemisphere, Anna. Uh,
the honest word.
Anna: The honest word is that here in Australia, we
miss this one entirely. The eclipse isn't
visible from our part of the world, and the
Perseids are stubbornly a northern hemisphere
shower. Their radiant point barely clears our
northern horizon, so at best you might catch
a stray one or two very low in the couple
of hours before dawn on the 13th.
Avery: But we're not left out. What Sydney can do
next week is beautiful in its own right.
Anna: It is. Get up before dawn and
look for the lineup of planets stretched
across the eastern sky. And keep an eye on
Venus, which is climbing back into view. Add
the winter Milky Way arching overhead from a
dark site and you've got a genuinely lovely
pre dawn show. No eclipse glasses
required.
Avery: And for our, uh, northern friends, chasing
meteors, the Perseids peak the night of the
12th into the pre dawn of the 13th with a
new moon. Conditions are about as good as
they get. From a dark rural site, you could
see up to a hundred an hour, many of them
bright fast and trailing. Get away from city
lights. Give your eyes 20 minutes to adjust.
Look up and be patient.
Anna: That's the show. The vacuum of space
showing its colors. A moon base built from
spare parts. Earth. A rocket mystery solved.
And a little robot fighting to save a
telescope.
Avery: All the links and sources are in your show
notes and over at astronomydaily IO,
where you can also grab the newsletter and
drop us a line.
Anna: For Avery, I'm Anna. Look after those eyes.
Avery: Next Wednesday and until next time.
Anna: Clear skies.
The stories.
Avery: Were told.