Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News
Spacecraft Drama, Galactic Neighborhoods, and the Push for a Circular Space Economy
- Emergency Return of Shenzhou 20: China's Shenzhou 20 spacecraft is making an uncrewed emergency return to Earth after sustaining damage from a micrometeoroid, which caused a crack in its window. The crew safely returned on a different vessel, marking a significant first for China's space program.
- Galactic Neighborhoods Matter: The Deep Extragalactic Visible Legacy Survey (DEVELS) reveals that a galaxy's local environment significantly influences its evolution. Galaxies in crowded clusters exhibit slower star formation rates compared to isolated ones, providing crucial insights into cosmic evolution.
- Launch Week Extravaganza: This week sees 10 scheduled orbital launches, including five Starlink missions by SpaceX, South Korea's COMSAT 7 satellite launch by Arianespace, and Japan's H3 rocket carrying a critical GPS satellite, highlighting the rapid advancements in the global space industry.
- Ancient Mars Rivers: A new study identifies 16 massive ancient river drainage systems on Mars, suggesting a much wetter past. These findings offer promising locations for searching for signs of past Martian life, utilizing high-resolution data from Mars orbiters.
- Solar Activity Alert: The sun has unleashed a powerful X 1.9 class solar flare, causing radio blackouts and raising concerns about future solar activity. Forecasters are closely monitoring a larger sunspot region that could impact Earth with potential geomagnetic disturbances.
- Sustainable Space Practices: Experts advocate for a circular space economy to combat space debris, emphasizing the importance of designing durable, repairable satellites and creating multi-purpose space stations to ensure sustainable operations in orbit for future generations.
- For more cosmic updates, visit our website at astronomydaily.io. Join our community on social media by searching for #AstroDailyPod on Facebook, X, YouTubeMusic, TikTok, and our new Instagram account! Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- Thank you for tuning in. This is Avery and Anna signing off. Until next time, keep looking up and exploring the wonders of our universe.
Shenzhou 20 Emergency Return
[China National Space Administration](http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/)
DEVELS Survey Findings
[Astronomy Journal](https://www.astronomy.com/)
Launch Week Highlights
[NASA Launch Schedule](https://www.nasa.gov/launchschedule)
Mars River Systems Study
[Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter](https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/)
Solar Activity Reports
[NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/)
Circular Space Economy Initiatives
[Astroscale](https://astroscale.com/)
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This episode includes AI-generated content.
Other episodes of this podcast
Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News
The Evolving Enigma of Dark Energy and the Sun's Mysterious Past
An Australian-led team has rebuilt thirty years of supernova observations into one consistent catalogue — and it adds fresh weight to the idea that dark energy is not constant. We also ask whether the young Sun swallowed a super-Earth, find out why a quiet Sun is bad news at thirty-five thousand feet, and watch JWST run the most sensitive exomoon search ever attempted. Plus a Crew-13 update and a skywatch with a live aurora alert for both hemispheres. In this episode · Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four Type Ia supernovae, rebuilt from Pantheon+ and the Dark Energy Survey's full five-year sample into a single internally consistent catalogue by Ryan Camilleri and Professor Tamara Davis at the University of Queensland, with ANU, Swinburne and international colleagues. · On their own the supernovae give a matter density of 0.310 for flat ΛCDM. Combined with the CMB and baryon acoustic oscillations, a tension appears under constant dark energy — and eases when dark energy is allowed to evolve. Preference: 2.5–3.1 sigma. · Why that is interesting but not a discovery, and why a second independent line of evidence pointing the same way as DESI changes the shape of the argument. · Professor Mutlu Yildiz (Ege University) on whether the young Sun engulfed a planet of 5–10 Earth masses — and whether that single event explains both the solar sound-speed discrepancy and the Sun's missing lithium. · Yaniv, Yair and Price on six balloon flights to 35 km: cosmic radiation at cruising altitude runs 40–60% higher at solar minimum, with an anticorrelation of r = −0.71 against solar activity. · David Kipping stacks twelve JWST transits of LP 890-9c and excludes moons down to 0.1 Earth radii across the entire Hill region — the most sensitive exomoon search on record. · Crew-13 now targeting no earlier than late September after an oxidiser leak in Dragon's propulsion system. · Skywatch: a coronal-hole stream arriving today with aurora chances at both ends of the planet, Venus at greatest brilliancy on 18 September, Mars past Pollux, Saturn towards opposition, International Observe the Moon Night on the 19th, and the equinox on the 22nd. Sources · University of Queensland — 'Big supernova dataset challenges dark energy theory', 8 September 2026 · Camilleri, Lee, Davis, Rubin, Shah, Scolnic, Lidman et al., 'Supernovae Unite: Combining Pantheon+ and DES-SN5YR', Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia — arXiv:2609.05053; companion host-mass paper arXiv:2609.05321 · Royal Astronomical Society — ''Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet', 10 September 2026. Yildiz, MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1527 · Yaniv, Yair & Price, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, September 2026 — cosmic radiation at aviation altitudes across the solar cycle · Kipping, 'JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet', arXiv:2609.05301, 4 September 2026 · NASA Space Station blog — 'NASA, SpaceX Adjust Crew-13 Launch Date', 29 August 2026; Canadian Space Agency update, September 2026 · EarthSky sun news and NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center outlooks, 12–14 September 2026 · NASA Science — 'What's Up: September 2026 Skywatching Tips' Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support . Sponsor Details: Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN . To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn . You'll be glad you did! Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmail Become a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click Here This episode includes AI-generated content.
Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News
The Planet That Keeps Shrinking plus the Weekend Wrap
Today's episode — The Weekend Wrap, Saturday 12 September 2026: OUR LEAD: A SMALLER MERCURY Mercury has been contracting for four and a half billion years as its huge iron core cools, and it writes the record on its own surface — in long lobe-fronted cliffs called lobate scarps, where one slab of crust has ridden up over another. Add up all that shortening and you get the total contraction. The trouble was that the surface record always gave a smaller number than thermal models predicted. New work led by Gaku Nishiyama at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, published in Geophysical Research Letters and released by the American Geophysical Union on 10 September, explains the gap — and the explanation is beautifully simple. Impact debris buries the cliffs. Using MESSENGER imagery reworked with stereophotogrammetry, the team showed that the rougher the terrain, the fewer shortening structures you can find per unit area. Since faults don't know what the surface above them looks like, that correlation isn't geology — it's a detection limit. Correct for it and Mercury's total loss of diameter rises by 10–30%, from a range topping out near 16 km to as much as 23 km. That points to a larger metal core, fewer light elements in it, or a hotter start — and it closes the long-standing mismatch with the physics. BepiColombo is about ten weeks from gravity capture at Mercury, carrying a far better laser altimeter and a much less eccentric orbit. If Nishiyama is right, it should find the missing small scarps in exactly the rough ground where today's maps look suspiciously empty. Some of that data will come home through ESA's New Norcia station in Western Australia, run in partnership with CSIRO. THE WEEK THAT WAS · Monday — Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reached orbit from Andøya Spaceport in Norway on 5 September, the first vehicle ever to do it from Western European soil, carrying five university cubesats. · Tuesday — giant-impact simulations including temperature-dependent rock strength can produce an intact Moon in about five hours rather than a slowly accreting debris disc. A sensitivity result, not a new origin story. · Wednesday — Hubble and Webb together found 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects down to about 5 km, and the small ones keep the colours of their birth population rather than looking like collision fragments. · Thursday — 109 localised fast radio bursts were used to measure how far galactic feedback has smoothed the clumpiness of matter, finding more cool gas in big haloes than X-ray surveys see. · Friday — population synthesis suggests magnetars are roughly half of all neutron stars at birth, not one in a hundred, which doubles the Galactic supernova rate and makes magnetar central engines affordable. ALSO IN THIS EPISODE · The Sun's superflare potential — new work from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research with the University of Colorado, released 10 September. Scaling the 300 strongest modern solar flares against the size of their active regions, then applying that relation to the giant sunspot group of 1947 — the largest in four centuries of observation — gives a region with enough stored magnetic energy to power a superflare. Potential, not prediction: the caveats are covered properly on air. · Rocket Lab has filed a protest with the US Government Accountability Office over NASA's ~$700M Mars Telecommunications Network award to Blue Origin, on eligibility and technical-evaluation grounds. A GAO decision is due around mid-December. · Starship Flight 14 has slipped to no earlier than 18 September — and the tower catch of the ship is deferred to a later flight, which corrects how we framed it earlier this month. SKYWATCH — BOTH HEMISPHERES · The Moon and Venus about half a degree apart in front of Spica on the evenings of 13–14 September — Southern Hemisphere observers get the better geometry. · Venus reaches greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. · SN 2026aaiv, a Type Ia supernova in NGC 7331 in Pegasus, around magnitude 12 — the week's best observing target, and far easier from North America than from Sydney. · Saturn building towards its 4 October opposition, with Dione and Tethys events in the small hours for northern telescope owners. · Mars passing 6° south of Pollux pre-dawn on 18 September. · The zodiacal light — an evening object in the west from the Southern Hemisphere, a pre-dawn object in the east from the Northern. Best chance until early October. · Eye safety: never point binoculars or a telescope near the Sun when hunting daylight Venus or twilight Mercury. Solar filters must be certified to ISO 12312-2, fitted over the front of the instrument, and inspected every time. Links & sources · Mercury contraction — Geophysical Research Letters: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL124067 · Mercury contraction — AGU Newsroom release: https://news.agu.org/press-release/mercury-is-shrinking-more-than-we-thought · Superflares — Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research: https://www.mps.mpg.de/news · Superflares — release summary: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143231 · Rocket Lab GAO protest: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/rocket-lab-protests-nasas-decision-to-award-blue-origin-usd700-million-mars-orbiter-contract · Starship Flight 14 schedule: https://www.spacelaunchschedule.com/launch/starship-flight-14/ · SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331: https://www.rochesterastronomy.org/sn2026/sn2026aaiv.html · Magnetar fraction — Nature Astronomy: https://www.nature.com/natastron/articles?year=2026 · Sky this week: https://www.astronomy.com/the-sky-this-week/the-sky-this-week-from-september-11-to-18-2026/ · ESA deep space ground stations: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/New_era_for_New_Norcia_deep_space_antenna More at astronomydaily.io — full back catalogue, news feed, newsletter sign-up and listener contact form. Follow us: @AstroDailyPod Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support . Sponsor Details: Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN . To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn . You'll be glad you did! Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmail Become a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click Here This episode includes AI-generated content.
Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News
Half the Neutron Stars
Today's episode — S05E191, Friday September 11, 2026: Main story: A population-synthesis study published in Nature Astronomy on 10 September argues that magnetars make up roughly half of all neutron stars, not the one-in-a-hundred implied by the catalogues. Celsa Pardo-Araujo and Nanda Rea (Institute of Space Sciences, ICE-CSIC, Barcelona) with Michele Ronchi (ASTRON) and Vanessa Graber (Royal Holloway) modelled the whole isolated-neutron-star population as one family rather than four separate classes, evolving spin-down, magneto-thermal decay and Galactic dynamics together, then filtering the simulated population the way real surveys filter the sky. Of the 24 known neutron stars younger than 2,000 years, magnetars and central compact objects are about 59%; the derived birth fraction averages ~50% (40–70% or 30–50% depending on the assumed birth-field distribution, which peaks at 1–2.5 × 10^14 gauss). Two consequences: the Galactic core-collapse supernova rate has to be higher than assumed, around two per century, and magnetar central-engine models for superluminous supernovae, gamma-ray burst plateaus and fast radio bursts finally have the supply to work. Caveats: it is a model rather than a census, the anchor sample is 24 objects, and 'magnetar' is defined by a field threshold. Southern thread: the field began with SGR 0526−66 in the Large Magellanic Cloud on 5 March 1979, and the same Barcelona group modelled GLEAM-X J162759, found with the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia. The rest of the news: · Chariklo's rings: The first stellar occultation ever planned specifically for JWST — 18 October 2022 — has been published in Science Advances, led by Yücel Kılıç, Pablo Santos-Sanz and Celia Navas (IAA-CSIC) with Nicolas Rambaux, Bruno Sicardy and Josselin Desmars (LTE) and Damya Souami (LIRA). Against the 2017 ground-based occultations, the inner ring C1R is about 50% more opaque and the outer ring C2R about 60% less, with the ring positions unchanged. Chariklo is the largest known centaur at ~125 km radius; the rings sit at 390 and 405 km and are a few km wide. Candidate explanations: material loss from C2R, material arriving at or collisions grinding down C1R — or a wavelength effect, since infrared is being compared with visible light. The rings were discovered in 2013 by an occultation campaign across Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. · Mercury under bombardment: Kilpua et al. report in Nature Astronomy (8 September) that BepiColombo's fourth Mercury flyby in September 2024 — 165 km above the surface, closer than its eventual science orbit — coincided with a major solar particle eruption. The Finnish-built SIXS instrument watched energetic electrons and protons penetrate Mercury's magnetosphere and precipitate onto the surface over a wide area. That bombardment both sputters atoms off the surface and drives the X-ray fluorescence used to read its composition, and Mercury's small, weak magnetosphere makes it a stand-in for Earth during an extreme solar storm. The spacecraft separated its transfer module on 3 September; gravity capture is 21 November. · Europe buys a way home: ESA has awarded The Exploration Company a contract worth up to €760M under ALADDIN (Autonomous LEO Accelerated Demo Docking to ISS Node) — €310M for the demonstration mission, with ESA funding 60% and the company 40%, plus €450M in options for two further flights. The Nyx capsule flies on Ariane 6 and must dock with the ISS no later than Q2 2029, with up to €50M in additional incentive for using European launch vehicles. Europe has flown cargo up before, with the five ATVs, but has never returned anything from orbit. CEO Hélène Huby: 'It is the first time in Europe that a five-year-old space startup wins a contract worth hundreds of millions of euros.' The company's Mission Possible capsule survived reentry in June 2025 but was lost before splashdown — a partial success in its own words. Thales Alenia Space Italy remains in a parallel tender. · Parker Solar Probe: NASA reports the spacecraft completed its 29th close approach on 4 September, again matching the record set on Christmas Eve 2024 — 430,000 mph and 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, for the eighth time. The encounter ran 30 August to 9 September with nine days of autonomous operation and a beacon tone on the 7th; this pass targeted structures near the Sun's north pole, sampling nearly 40% of the solar circumference in a day. Telemetry began flowing on 11 September, science data 13–27 September. The mission is extended through 2029. · Skywatch: New Moon on 11 September at 14:27 AEST makes tonight and tomorrow the darkest nights of the month. Southern Hemisphere — Venus low in the west after sunset, building to greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8, with a very thin crescent Moon sweeping past on the 13th and 14th (about half a degree apart on the 14th, near Spica); EarthSky notes the Southern Hemisphere gets the better view. Saturn rises soon after sunset heading for its 4 October opposition with the rings ~7° open, and the Milky Way core is still high in the early evening. The zodiacal light is an evening object here — 'false dusk' in the west after full darkness, through early November. North America — the zodiacal light is a pre-dawn object in the east ('false dawn'), well flagged around the 15th; Jupiter dominates the pre-dawn east closing on Regulus with Mars near Castor and Pollux; Saturn is ~50° up in the south after midnight, and early Saturday morning Dione transits Saturn's north polar region around 2:55 a.m. EDT with Tethys entering Saturn's shadow around 2:10 a.m. EDT. Space weather has eased to quiet-to-unsettled after two minor G1 storms on the 8th and 9th. Eye safety: never point optics near the Sun without a purpose-built front-mounted solar filter; eclipse glasses must be ISO 12312-2 certified and are for naked-eye use only, never with binoculars or a telescope. Links & sources · Pardo-Araujo, Rea, Ronchi & Graber, 'Magnetar fraction in Core-Collapse Supernovae', Nature Astronomy (10 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16159 · ICE-CSIC — Institute of Space Sciences, magnetar population release (10 Sept 2026) — https://www.ice.csic.es/ · Kılıç, Santos-Sanz, Navas, Rambaux, Sicardy, Desmars & Souami, 'JWST stellar occultation reveals unexpected changes in Chariklo's ring system', Science Advances (Sept 2026) — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh4794 · Observatoire de Paris / LTE — The James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Chariklo's Invisible Rings Are Changing (9–10 Sept 2026) — https://lte.observatoiredeparis.psl.eu/The-James-Webb-Space-Telescope-Reveals-That-Chariklo-s-Invisible-Rings-Are · Sky & Telescope — Webb Space Telescope Discovers Surprising Changes in an Asteroid's Rings (10 Sept 2026) — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/webb-space-telescope-discovers-surprising-changes-in-an-asteroids-rings/ · Kilpua et al., 'Planetary shielding and surface precipitation of solar energetic particles during BepiColombo's close Mercury flyby', Nature Astronomy (8 Sept 2026) — https://www.nature.com/natastron/research-articles · University of Helsinki / SIXS — BepiColombo measures Mercury's particle bombardment up close (10 Sept 2026) — https://phys.org/news/2026-09-bepicolombo-mercury-particle-bombardment.html · ESA — Press Release N° 47–2026: ESA awards service contract to The Exploration Company (10 Sept 2026) — https://www.esa.int/Newsroom/Press_Releases · European Spaceflight — ESA Awards The Exploration Company a €760M Space Station Cargo Contract (10 Sept 2026) — https://europeanspaceflight.com/esa-awards-the-exploration-company-a-e760m-space-station-cargo-contract · NASA — After Latest Swing Past Sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe Checks In (10 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/parker-solar-probe/ · EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ · EarthSky — Zodiacal light: everything you need to know — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-zodiacal-light-or-false-dawn/ · Astronomy.com — The Sky This Week from September 11 to 18 — https://www.astronomy.com/the-sky-this-week/the-sky-this-week-from-september-11-to-18-2026/ Follow us: @AstroDailyPod Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support . Sponsor Details: Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN . To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn . You'll be glad you did! Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmail Become a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click Here This episode includes AI-generated content.
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