Artemis II Gets Its Launch Date: April 1 | Magnetar Born | Planets Collide | S05E62

Happy Friday the thirteenth, space fans, and if you're superstitious, I'm afraid We've got nothing but good luck today. That's right, We've got astronauts heading to the Moon, the birth of one of the most extreme objects in the universe, planets smashing into each other, an asteroid that buzzed right past us while we were sleeping, possible auroras tonight. And a neutrino so powerful that scientists have been trying to figure out where it came from for three years. They may finally have the answer. I'm Avery and I'm Anna. This is Astronomy Daily, your daily dose of what's happening in space and beyond. Let's get into it. Okay, let's start with the big one. After years of delays, setbacks, hydrogen leagues, and a very stressful few months of repairs, NASA has officially given Artemis two the green light to launch. The agency completed its flight readiness review on Thursday. That's the big final meeting where all the mission managers get together and essentially ask the question, are we ready to put four people on top of a rocket and send them around the Moon. And the answer was a unanimous yes. Every team voted go, no dissenting opinions, no last minute holdouts. The target launch date is April first, and no that's not a joke, with a window opening at six twenty four pm Eastern Time. They've also got backup windows on April second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and thirtieth if anything causes a delay. So for anyone who needs a refresher. Artemis two is the first crude flight of NASA Space Launch System, the SLS and the Orion capsule. It's going to carry four astronauts around the Moon in a figure eight loop and bring them back to Earth safely. The crew is Commander Red Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialists Christina Cock and Jeremy Hanson. Hanson is Canadian, so this will be the first time an American astronaut has traveled beyond low Earth orbit. The mission lasts ten days in total. They won't be landing on the Moon. This is a test flight proving that o'rian can handle deep space travel and bring its crew home safely. Specifically, the heat shield performance during reentry is one of the things are watching very carefully. So what caused all the holdups? The short version after the rocket's wet dress rehearsal, a full practice countdown and fueling test, engineers found a problem with helium flow in the upper stage. The whole stack had to be rolled back into the Vehicle assembly building for repairs. The good news is that problem has been fixed. It turned out to be a blocked seal and a cable connecting the rocket to the ground systems, a relatively small fix, but one that took time to diagnose and sort out. Bassa also confirmed they won't be doing another wet dress rehearsal before launch, so the rollback to the launch pad on March nineteenth will be the beginning of the final put now. There was also a notable update to the broader Artemis program during Thursday's press conference. Artemis three, which was previously going to attempt a lunar landing, is no longer doing that. Instead, it's going to focus on rendezvous and docking maneuvers, with the lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin. The actual first lunar landing has now moved to Artemis four, but NASA is still targeting twenty twenty eight for boots on the lunar surface, so the goal hasn't shifted, just the way they're getting there, and it's worth stepping back and appreciating what April first would mean if it all goes to plan. The last time humans left Low Earth orbit was December nineteen seventy two, the final apolloition. That's over fifty three years ago. Artemis two would be the first time humans have ventured beyond our planet's immediate neighborhood in more than half a century. April cannot come soon enough. Okay, let's talk about one of the most extreme objects in the universe, the magnetar. A magnetar is a type of neutron star, already one of the densest things that can exist, but with a magnetic field so powerful it makes normal neutron stars look mild. We're talking fields hundreds to one thousand times stronger than a regular neutron star, which is already billions of times stronger than anything we have on Earth. They're only about ten miles across, but they can spin more than a thousand times per second when they're young. They're also thought to be behind some of the most powerful and mysterious signals we see in the cosmos, including fast radio bursts, and. For the first time ever, a team of astronomers has actually watched one being born. The paper was published in Nature on Wednesday. The team was studying a supernova called SN twenty twenty four AFAV, discovered back in December twenty twenty four, located about a billion light years from Earth. It's what's called a super luminous supernova, at least ten times brighter than a typical stellar explosion, and it stays bright for much longer too. These super luminous supernovae have puzzled astronomers since the early two thousands. Normal supernovae are powered by the shockwave of a collapsing stellar core, but these things are just too bright for that explanation to work on its own. Back in twenty ten, a physicist at UC Berkeley named Dan Cassen proposed that a magnetar hiding at the center could be the power source. It's spinning magnetic field accelerating particles into the surrounding debris, keeping the whole thing lit up. It was an elegant theory, but there was no direct evidence to prove. It until now. Graduate student Joseph Farrah at UC Santa Barbara, working with a global network of telescopes at Los Cumbers Observatory tracked SN twenty twenty four AFAV for over two hundred days, and they noticed something very strange. Instead of fading smoothly, the supernova's light oscillated on its way down, not just one or two bumps, four of them, and crucially, the time between each bump got shorter and shorter. The team called it a chirp, and it's the same word used for the signal from merging black holes detected by gravitational wave observatories. The explanation that fits perfectly is a magnetar with a wobbling accretion disc around it. Some of the material from the explosion fell back towards the newborn magnetar, forming an asymmetric disc. Because a magnetar is spinning so fast and is so massive, it warps spacetime around it, an effect predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity called lens fearing precession, causing the disc to wobble. As a disc spirals inward and shrinks, the wobble gets faster and the light pulses speed up. That's your chirp. The team estimates the mag natar's spin period at four point two milliseconds, meaning it's spinning about two hundred and forty times per second, and its magnetic field at around three hundred trillion times that of Earth. Both of those are classic magnetar signatures. Joseph Farah put it brilliantly, this is the science I dreamed of as a kid. It's the universe telling us out loud and in our face that we don't fully understand it yet. This is also the first time that general relativity has been needed to explain the mechanics of a supernova. That's a remarkable statement. Einstein's equations, written over a century ago describing something happening a billion light years away and a billion years in the past. Science is genuinely incredible, sometimes, from the. Death of a star to the death of two planets. This week, astronomers published evidence of watching two worlds smash into each other in real time eleven thousand light years from Earth. This one comes from the University of Water Washington. Doctoral candidate Anastasios to Zanidyx was combing through archival telescope data when he noticed a star called Gaya twenty EHK, a perfectly ordinary, stable sun like star, doing something very strange. From about twenty sixteen, the star showed three dips in brightness, unusual but not completely unheard of. Then around twenty twenty one, its light output went haywire. As to Xanadix himself put it, stars like our sun don't do that. So when we saw this one, we were like, hello, what's going on here? What was going on was an enormous cloud of rocks and dust passing in front of the star from our line of sight, atchually blocking its light, and the source of all that debris a catastrophic collision between two planets. The analysis suggests the two worlds have been spiraling towards each other for years. Those initial dips in brightness from twenty sixteen were likely caused by a series of grazing impacts, like two ships sideseswiping each other at increasing speed. Then around twenty twenty one they had their final catastrophic collision, and the infrared signature from all that superheated debris lit up. Here's a part that really captures the imagination. The debris cloud is orbiting Gaya twenty ehk at roughly one astronomical unit, the same distance as Earth is from our Sun, and at that distance over millions of years, that material could cool and solidify into new planetary bodies, possibly something resembling an Earth Moon system. Because that's how our moon was thought to have formed. A planetary body about the size of Mars struck the early Earth, and the resulting debris eventually coalesced into our Moon. The collision around Gaya twenty ehk may be the closest real time analog we've ever observed. The paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on Wednesday. The research note that while these collisions are probably common in the early stages of Solar system formation, catching one in the act requires a very specific alignment and a lot of patients. Their hope is that the VERA Reuben Observatory, which has just come online, could find as many as one hundred more such events over the next decade. How rare is the event that created the Earth and Moon? That question is fundamental to understanding whether life is we know it could exist elsewhere. Every collision like this one brings us a little closer to the answer. Right, So, while you were asleep last night, a bus size asteroid flew closer to Earth. Than the Moon, completely harmless, but The timing and the discovery circumstances are what make this story interesting. Asteroid twenty twenty six EG one, that's its official designation, made its closest approach to Earth at eleven twenty seven pm Eastern Time last night, passing about one hundred ninety seven thousand miles away. The Moon sits at roughly two hundred thirty nine thousand miles, so this thing flew inside the Moon's orbit. It was traveling at around twenty one thousand, five hundred miles per hour and is estimated to be somewhere between thirty two and seventy two feet across, roughly the size of a bus or small lorry. At that size, even if it had hit Earth, it would have mostly burned up in the atmosphere. No global catastrophe, but it's a reminder that space is a busy place and these things happen regularly. What's particularly noteworthy is how recently it was discovered. Astronomers first spotted twenty twenty six EG one on March eighth, just five days before it flew past. That's an incredibly short warning window, and it illustrates a real challenge in planetary defense. Small, fast moving objects can be very hard to detect until they're almost upon us. NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies has confirmed that no major where asteroid strikes capable of causing serious damage are expected in the next one hundred years, but major is doing a lot of work. In that sentence, small objects like this one pass close to Earth all the time. The silver lining here is that the VERA. Reuben Observatory, which his name is coming up a lot in space news right now and rightly so, has already discovered two thousand previously unknown Solar System bodies since beginning operations. It's going to transform our ability to find these things early. There are currently forty one thousand near Earth asteroids being tracked by NASA and its partners, and that number is only going to grow. So the good news is we're getting better at it. The slightly unsettling news is there's still plenty we're not seeing yet, but. Rest assured we are getting better at it. Now for something a little more immediate and potentially beautiful, If you live at a higher latitudes and you're listening to this before tonight, you might want to look up. A stream of fast moving solar wind from a large coronal hole on the Sun is expected to reach Earth today around midday UTC, and that arrival could trigger minor geomagnetic storm conditions what's classified as a G one. Storm great question. Coronal holes are regions in the Sun's outer atmosphere where the magnetic field lines open out into space rather than looping back. Through these openings, the solar wind streams out much faster and more concentrated than usual. When a coronal hole faces Earth, as the Sun rotates, that fast moving stream of charged particles heads our way. It typically takes two to three days to arrive after the coronal hole aligns with Earth, and this one has been tracking in our direction for the past few days. During g one conditions, auroras can become visible from higher latitude locations. We're talking places like Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands, Reikyevik, northern Scandinavia, Seattle, Minneapolis, and in the southern hemisphere Hobart in Tasmania. If you're in or near any of those areas tonight, get away from city lights, find a dark spot with a clear northern or southern horizon, depending on where you are, and give your eyes about twenty minutes to adjust. The best of reviewing is usually in the hours around local midnight. There's also a handy detail here for sky observers. The moon is currently a waning crescent at about thirty four percent illumination, so it won't be washing out the sky for most of the night. Conditions could be pretty good, and. Even if the geomagnetic activity stays mild and the auroras don't materialize, Europa is currently transiting Jupiter. You can catch the little moon crossing the face of the giant planet through a telescope this week. There's always something to see up there. And finally, to close out what has been a genuinely extraordinary news day, we're going to the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. There's a detector down there called KM three and NET, which sits off the coast of Sicily. It's built to catch neutrinos, those ghostly near massless particles that barely interact with anything passing through the Earth as if it weren't there. Three years ago, KM three NET recorded a neutrino with more energy than any of its kind ever detected before, a genuinely extraordinary particle. The question was where on Earth, or rather where in the universe did it come from? Scientists have been puzzling over that ever since Neutrinos travel in straight lines and aren't deflected by magnetic fields the way charged particles are, so, in principle, you can trace their path back to the source. The challenge is correlating that direction with known objects in the sky. The team now believes the most likely source is a population of blazars. A blazar is a type of galaxy with a super massive black hole at its center that is actively firing a jet of plasma directly towards Earth. They're among the most violent and energetic objects in the observable universe. The idea is that as particles get accelerated to extreme velocities in these jets, they can produce neutrinos with truly staggering energies, energies that dwarf anything we can achieve in the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth. Now, the team is being careful to say this is the most likely explanation rather than a confirmed one. Penning down the exact source of a single particle is a fiendishly difficult problem, but the correlation between the neutrino's arrival direction and known blazar positions is compelling. It's a beautiful example of multi messenger astronomy using different types of signals, in this case particle physics and traditional light based observations to build up a picture of what's happening in the most extreme environments in the cosmos. From the bottom of the sea to the edge of the observable universe. Never a dull day in astronomy. That is your Astronomy Daily for Friday, March thirteenth, twenty twenty six. What a lineup. Artemis two cleared for launch on April first, the first observed birth of a magnetar, two planets caught in the act of colliding, an asteroid buzzing past in the night, potential auroras tonight, and a record breaking neutrino traced back to some of the most violent objects in the universe. If you want to go deeper on any of today's stories, the links are all in the show notes, and if you saw any auroras tonight, we want to know. Tag us on social media as at Astro Daily. Pod, new episodes every weekday and Saturdays. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you back here tomorrow Until then keep looking up clear skies. Everyone, Sunday. Star is. The story is. The Soul Store is control H