Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News

Artemis 4: The Moon's Tiebreaker Awaits - The Weekend Wrap

Show notes NASA lays out Artemis III day by day: fourteen days in Earth orbit, two rival landers, one Orion. Plus the week that was, Swift's final bow, and Venus changing

Starry Nights and Cosmic Insights: Van Gogh's Real Sky Revealed

Show notes Astronomers argue The Starry Night shows a real pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy around 22 July 1889; Roman enters science commissioning; Rubin's test camera and t

From Solar Storms to Martian Canyons: The Latest in Space News

Show notes Last November the Sun produced its strongest radiation storm in almost twenty years, and this time scientists were ready: neutron monitors from Cornwall to She

Born Thick, Settled Thin

Show notes The Milky Way's disc settled in two stages; metal-rich gas around Sgr A*; two mirror-image simulated universes; shadows in the Orion Bar; quick hits on Hera, U

Cracking the Moon's Secrets: New Findings on Lunar Shrinkage

Show notes The Moon Is Still Shrinking Watters, Banks, Nypaver and Robinson (Planetary Science Journal, 14 Oct 2026) map more than 10,000 young thrust faults — ~8,900 lob

A Round Trip to Phobos Underway

MMX: A Round Trip to Phobos JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration mission launched on schedule on H3 Flight No. 10 at 04:41:03 JST on 20 October 2026 (19:41 UTC 19 Oct; 06:41

Time's Tipping Point: The End of Leap Seconds and a Lunar Clock Revolution

Show notes Time Lets Go of the Sky On 15 October 2026 the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles adopted Resolution 5: UTC becomes continuous on 20

Stellar Breakthroughs: The Discovery of Deuterated Methanol and the First Green Star

Show notes Episode 206 opens with the first results from ALMA's COMPASS survey: the first detection anywhere in interstellar space of fully deuterated methanol, and metha

Martian Mystery: Unveiling the Secrets of Arsia Mons' Elusive Clouds

Show notes A cloud on Mars that forms only if textbook-theoretical physics really happens; Webb maps a hot Jupiter's edge angle by angle; multi-planet systems turn out to

Cosmic Revelations: Artemis 2's Historic Observations and the Case of Hypernovae

Show notes Six months after Artemis II swung around the far side of the Moon, NASA has published what the crew saw, said and sketched — including five faint impact flashe

HERA's Grand Maneuver: Braking for Didymos and the Future of Planetary Defence

Show notes Hera Hits the Brakes ESA's Hera spotted its target asteroid for the first time last week and fires its first braking burn on Thursday — 93 minutes of thrust to

Cloudy with a Chance of Water: The Mysteries of WISE 0855 Unveiled

The coldest brown dwarf we know has weather. JWST watched water clouds thicken and thin on WISE 0855, a sunless world seven and a half light-years away — plus a star slow

A Nobel in Ice: Unveiling the Secrets of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Show notes We're back after a short break! Today: the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Francis Halzen for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory — a cubic kilometre of Antar

The Great Water Mystery: Jezero Crater and the Hunt for Mars' Hidden History

Perseverance drove to the edge of an ancient Martian lake expecting a beach and found the inside of a volcano — rock that water has been through at least three separate t

What Keeps a Galaxy Churning: Andromeda's Supernova Secrets Revealed

Supernovae keep galaxies churning A new study led by Fan Yi Meng from Tsinghua University provides the first comprehensive census of superbubbles in the Andromeda Galaxy,

The Unifying Mystery of Black Hole Jets: Stellar and Supermassive Connections

SHOW NOTES Black hole jets follow one universal rule Adelle Goodwin (Curtin University / ICRAR, Forrest Research Foundation Fellow) and Andrew Mummery (Institute for Adva

The Youngest Planet Ever Found

Astronomers have confirmed the youngest planet ever found - Elias 2-24 b, less than a million years old, sitting inside a gap it is carving in its own birth disc 450 ligh

Roman Opens Its Eye

First starlight from Roman, a shorter fuse on the Solar System, weapons in orbit, and a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Roman opens its eye — and finds it has twi

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 con

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 iro