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00:00:00 --> 00:00:02 Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy AstroDailyPod.
00:00:03 --> 00:00:06 It's Friday the 11th of, uh, September
00:00:06 --> 00:00:08 2026. This is series
00:00:08 --> 00:00:11 five, episode 191.
00:00:11 --> 00:00:12 And I'm Anna.
00:00:13 --> 00:00:14 Avery: And I'm Avery.
00:00:15 --> 00:00:18 Anna. Today's lead is a paper arguing that
00:00:18 --> 00:00:20 one of the rarest, strangest objects in the
00:00:20 --> 00:00:22 galaxy isn't rare at all.
00:00:23 --> 00:00:25 Anna: Magnetars. Neutron stars with
00:00:25 --> 00:00:28 magnetic fields so strong the number stops
00:00:28 --> 00:00:31 meaning anything. And we know of about 30 of
00:00:31 --> 00:00:34 them against a few thousand ordinary radio
00:00:34 --> 00:00:37 pulsars. So the picture has always been
00:00:37 --> 00:00:40 exotic, freakish. One in a hundred.
00:00:40 --> 00:00:42 A new paper in Nature Astronomy says that
00:00:42 --> 00:00:45 picture is a counting error and the real
00:00:45 --> 00:00:47 figure is closer to one in two.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:50 Avery: Half. Half of all neutron stars.
00:00:51 --> 00:00:54 Anna: Half. And if that's right, it doesn't just
00:00:54 --> 00:00:56 reshuffle a catalogue. It changes how many
00:00:56 --> 00:00:58 supernovae, uh, our galaxy has to be
00:00:58 --> 00:01:01 producing. And it quietly props up. The
00:01:01 --> 00:01:03 leading explanation for some of the most
00:01:03 --> 00:01:06 extreme events in the universe, including
00:01:06 --> 00:01:08 the fast radio bursts we spent yesterday's
00:01:08 --> 00:01:09 lead on.
00:01:09 --> 00:01:12 Avery: After that, the rings around a small
00:01:12 --> 00:01:15 icy body 2 billion kilometres away
00:01:15 --> 00:01:17 have changed. One thickened, one
00:01:17 --> 00:01:20 thinned in the space of five years. And the
00:01:20 --> 00:01:23 James Webb Space Telescope caught it by
00:01:23 --> 00:01:25 watching the thing pass in front of a star.
00:01:26 --> 00:01:28 Anna: A spacecraft skimming 165 kilometres
00:01:28 --> 00:01:31 above Mercury at the exact moment the sun
00:01:31 --> 00:01:34 let go of a burst of particles and measuring
00:01:34 --> 00:01:35 them landing on the surface.
00:01:36 --> 00:01:39 Avery: Europe writing a 760 million
00:01:39 --> 00:01:41 euro cheque for something it has never once
00:01:41 --> 00:01:44 been able to do. Bring cargo home
00:01:44 --> 00:01:45 from orbit.
00:01:45 --> 00:01:47 Anna: And a quick one on Parker solar probe
00:01:47 --> 00:01:50 checking in from its 29th trip through the
00:01:50 --> 00:01:51 sun's atmosphere.
00:01:51 --> 00:01:54 Avery: Plus the sky for both hemispheres. New
00:01:54 --> 00:01:57 Moon was this afternoon, so tonight is as
00:01:57 --> 00:01:59 dark as September gets. And there's a
00:01:59 --> 00:02:02 genuinely lovely pairing this weekend that
00:02:02 --> 00:02:05 the south gets the better view of. Let's get
00:02:05 --> 00:02:05 into it.
00:02:05 --> 00:02:06 Anna: Ready when you are.
00:02:07 --> 00:02:10 Avery: Start me at the beginning. What's a magnetar?
00:02:10 --> 00:02:13 Anna: Start one step further back. A neutron star.
00:02:14 --> 00:02:17 Take a star 8 to 20 something times the mass
00:02:17 --> 00:02:19 of the sun, magnifying, run it out of fuel
00:02:19 --> 00:02:21 and the core collapses in about a second.
00:02:22 --> 00:02:24 What's left is a ball roughly 20 kilometres
00:02:24 --> 00:02:27 across with more mass than the sun packed
00:02:27 --> 00:02:29 into it. A teaspoon of the material weighs
00:02:29 --> 00:02:31 about as much as a mountain range.
00:02:31 --> 00:02:34 Avery: And they come in flavours, that's the part
00:02:34 --> 00:02:35 that matters.
00:02:35 --> 00:02:37 Anna: Today we've catalogued them as separate
00:02:37 --> 00:02:39 species, largely because of how we found
00:02:39 --> 00:02:42 them. There are radio pulsars, the
00:02:42 --> 00:02:44 lighthouse ones, thousands of them, spinning
00:02:44 --> 00:02:47 fast and beaming. There are central compact
00:02:47 --> 00:02:50 objects sitting quietly inside supernova
00:02:50 --> 00:02:53 remnants Doing almost nothing. There are X
00:02:53 --> 00:02:55 ray dim isolated neutron stars, which
00:02:55 --> 00:02:58 are exactly as boring as they sound. And then
00:02:58 --> 00:03:01 there are magnetars, which are not
00:03:01 --> 00:03:03 boring. The opposite. A
00:03:03 --> 00:03:06 magnetar's magnetic field is somewhere around
00:03:06 --> 00:03:08 10 to the 14, 10 to the 15
00:03:08 --> 00:03:11 gauss. Earth's is about half a gauss.
00:03:12 --> 00:03:14 A hospital MRI about 15,
00:03:15 --> 00:03:17 so something like a quadrillion times Earth.
00:03:18 --> 00:03:20 And structurally, the key point is that a
00:03:20 --> 00:03:23 magnetar isn't powered by its spin the way a
00:03:23 --> 00:03:26 pulsar is. It's powered by that field
00:03:26 --> 00:03:29 decaying. The field is the fuel tank.
00:03:29 --> 00:03:31 Avery: What does that look like from the outside?
00:03:32 --> 00:03:34 Anna: Violence in short bursts. The
00:03:34 --> 00:03:37 crust is a rigid solid under enormous
00:03:37 --> 00:03:40 magnetic stress. And every so often it
00:03:40 --> 00:03:42 cracks a starquake and the object
00:03:42 --> 00:03:44 releases more energy in a fraction of a
00:03:44 --> 00:03:47 second than the sun manages in a hundred
00:03:47 --> 00:03:50 thousand years. In 2004,
00:03:50 --> 00:03:52 one of them put out a flare that measurably
00:03:52 --> 00:03:55 ionised Earth's upper atmosphere from 50
00:03:55 --> 00:03:56 light years away.
00:03:56 --> 00:03:58 Avery: And we know of about 30.
00:03:59 --> 00:04:01 Anna: About 30 confirmed against several thousand
00:04:01 --> 00:04:04 radio pulsars. Which is where the counting
00:04:04 --> 00:04:06 error creeps in, because those two numbers
00:04:06 --> 00:04:08 are not measuring the same thing.
00:04:08 --> 00:04:09 Avery: Explain that.
00:04:10 --> 00:04:12 Anna: A radio pulsar is a long lived, steady
00:04:12 --> 00:04:15 beacon. It'll beam for tens of millions of
00:04:15 --> 00:04:18 years, and we've spent 60 years building
00:04:18 --> 00:04:21 surveys designed to catch exactly that. A
00:04:21 --> 00:04:23 magnetar is the opposite. Bright and obvious
00:04:23 --> 00:04:26 for a few thousand years, powered by a field
00:04:26 --> 00:04:29 that is actively destroying itself. And then
00:04:29 --> 00:04:30 it fades into something much harder to
00:04:30 --> 00:04:33 identify. So if you count what's in the
00:04:33 --> 00:04:35 catalogues, you're counting how long each
00:04:35 --> 00:04:37 type stays visible to the instruments we
00:04:37 --> 00:04:40 happen to have built, not how many get born.
00:04:41 --> 00:04:43 Avery: So how do you count births instead of
00:04:43 --> 00:04:44 sightings?
00:04:44 --> 00:04:47 Anna: You build the galaxy in a computer. That's
00:04:47 --> 00:04:49 this work. Celsa Pardo Araujo and
00:04:49 --> 00:04:52 Nanda Rea at the Institute of Space Sciences
00:04:52 --> 00:04:55 in Barcelona with Michelle Ronke at
00:04:55 --> 00:04:57 ASTRON in the Netherlands and Vanessa Graeber
00:04:57 --> 00:05:00 at Royal Holloway in London. Published this
00:05:00 --> 00:05:02 week in Nature Astronomy. It's a population
00:05:02 --> 00:05:05 synthesis. Assume a distribution of
00:05:05 --> 00:05:08 magnetic fields and spins at birth, then
00:05:08 --> 00:05:09 evolve the whole simulated population
00:05:10 --> 00:05:10 forward.
00:05:11 --> 00:05:11 Avery: Evolve how?
00:05:12 --> 00:05:14 Anna: Three things at once, which is the technical
00:05:14 --> 00:05:17 advance. The spindown, how the rotation
00:05:17 --> 00:05:20 bleeds away, the magnetothermal evolution,
00:05:20 --> 00:05:22 how the field decays and how the crust
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 coolswhich are coupled to each other and. And
00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 the galactic dynamics. These things get
00:05:27 --> 00:05:30 kicked at birth by the supernova and drift
00:05:30 --> 00:05:32 away from where they were born, which changes
00:05:32 --> 00:05:35 how far off and how obscured they look. Then
00:05:35 --> 00:05:37 you run the simulated population through the
00:05:37 --> 00:05:40 same detection filters as the real surveys
00:05:40 --> 00:05:43 and ask which starting assumption produces
00:05:43 --> 00:05:44 the sky we actually see.
00:05:44 --> 00:05:47 Avery: And the anchor is what? The full catalogue.
00:05:47 --> 00:05:50 Anna: The tightest anchor is the young end, and
00:05:50 --> 00:05:53 it's a small number. There are 24
00:05:53 --> 00:05:56 known isolated neutron stars in our galaxy
00:05:56 --> 00:05:59 younger than 2000 years. That's the sample
00:05:59 --> 00:06:02 where nothing has had time to fade. So it's
00:06:02 --> 00:06:04 the fairest census we've got. And in that
00:06:04 --> 00:06:07 sample, magnetars and central compact
00:06:07 --> 00:06:09 objects together make up about
00:06:09 --> 00:06:10 59%,
00:06:11 --> 00:06:13 Avery: nearly 6 in 10 of the young ones.
00:06:13 --> 00:06:16 Anna: They combine that with a volume limited
00:06:16 --> 00:06:18 sample of the x ray dim objects,
00:06:19 --> 00:06:21 and what comes out is a birth fraction for
00:06:21 --> 00:06:24 magnetars averaging around 50% of
00:06:24 --> 00:06:26 the entire neutron star population.
00:06:27 --> 00:06:29 The range depends on what you assume about
00:06:29 --> 00:06:31 the field distribution at birth.
00:06:31 --> 00:06:34 If it peaks around one times 10 to the 14
00:06:34 --> 00:06:36 gauss, you get 40 to 70%.
00:06:37 --> 00:06:39 If it peaks a bit higher, around two and a
00:06:39 --> 00:06:42 half times 10 to the 14, you get 30 to 50.
00:06:43 --> 00:06:45 Avery: So the headline number is about half with
00:06:45 --> 00:06:47 honest width on it.
00:06:47 --> 00:06:50 Anna: About half with width. And Pardo
00:06:50 --> 00:06:53 Araujo's own framing of why it took this long
00:06:53 --> 00:06:54 is worth quoting.
00:06:54 --> 00:06:56 She says it's essential to model the
00:06:56 --> 00:06:59 different types of isolated neutron star in a
00:06:59 --> 00:07:01 unified way, together with their possible
00:07:01 --> 00:07:04 evolutionary connections, because that's what
00:07:04 --> 00:07:06 lets you estimate consistently how many
00:07:06 --> 00:07:09 magnetars form. In other words, the
00:07:09 --> 00:07:12 mistake was treating four catalogues as four
00:07:12 --> 00:07:14 species instead of one population seen
00:07:14 --> 00:07:15 at different stages.
00:07:16 --> 00:07:19 Avery: Right. So what breaks if this is true?
00:07:19 --> 00:07:20 Anna: Two things.
00:07:21 --> 00:07:22 And the first is a lovely piece of
00:07:22 --> 00:07:25 arithmetic. If half of all neutron stars are
00:07:25 --> 00:07:28 magnetars, and magnetars are only visible
00:07:28 --> 00:07:31 for a couple of thousand years, then to keep
00:07:31 --> 00:07:33 the observed population topped up, the
00:07:33 --> 00:07:36 galaxy has to be making neutron stars faster
00:07:36 --> 00:07:39 than we'd assumed. They derive a core
00:07:39 --> 00:07:41 collapse supernova rate of about 2 per
00:07:41 --> 00:07:44 century. 2.01 with a
00:07:44 --> 00:07:46 generous error bar running from about 1 to
00:07:46 --> 00:07:49 nearly 4. And the old number,
00:07:49 --> 00:07:51 the conventional figure, has sat at roughly
00:07:51 --> 00:07:54 one to two per century for a long time.
00:07:54 --> 00:07:56 And estimates have often drifted towards the
00:07:56 --> 00:07:59 low end. So this pushes the galaxy's
00:07:59 --> 00:08:02 supernova rate up from a completely
00:08:02 --> 00:08:04 independent direction. That's the part I
00:08:04 --> 00:08:07 like. It's not a supernova paper and it still
00:08:07 --> 00:08:10 lands on the supernova rate. And the second
00:08:10 --> 00:08:12 thing, the second is bigger, and it's about
00:08:12 --> 00:08:15 the rest of the universe. There's a family of
00:08:15 --> 00:08:18 extreme events nobody can fully explain.
00:08:18 --> 00:08:21 Super luminous supernovae, ten to a
00:08:21 --> 00:08:23 hundred times brighter than a normal one. The
00:08:23 --> 00:08:26 long plateaus in gamma ray burst afterglows
00:08:26 --> 00:08:29 where something keeps injecting energy after
00:08:29 --> 00:08:31 the explosion should be over and fast.
00:08:31 --> 00:08:34 Avery: Radio bursts, which was yesterday's lead
00:08:34 --> 00:08:35 from
00:08:35 --> 00:08:37 Anna: the other end, a hundred and nine of them
00:08:37 --> 00:08:39 used to weigh the ordinary matter of the
00:08:39 --> 00:08:42 universe. And for all three, the
00:08:42 --> 00:08:44 leading explanation is the a
00:08:44 --> 00:08:47 newborn magnetar in the middle, dumping its
00:08:47 --> 00:08:50 magnetic energy into the debris. We know it's
00:08:50 --> 00:08:52 physically possible because in 2020, a
00:08:52 --> 00:08:55 magnetar in our own galaxy, SGR
00:08:55 --> 00:08:58 1935, 2154,
00:08:58 --> 00:09:00 produced a fast radio burst and settled that
00:09:00 --> 00:09:01 question.
00:09:02 --> 00:09:04 Avery: So what was missing was the supply.
00:09:04 --> 00:09:06 Anna: Exactly. The supply.
00:09:06 --> 00:09:08 A central engine model needs there to be
00:09:08 --> 00:09:11 enough engines. If magnetars were a 1%
00:09:11 --> 00:09:14 curiosity, then explaining a whole class of
00:09:14 --> 00:09:16 common extragalactic transients with them is
00:09:16 --> 00:09:19 a stretch. If they're half of all neutron
00:09:19 --> 00:09:22 stars, the budget works. The paper is
00:09:22 --> 00:09:24 explicit that this lends strong support to
00:09:24 --> 00:09:27 the models. It doesn't prove them, it makes
00:09:27 --> 00:09:28 them affordable.
00:09:28 --> 00:09:31 Avery: Caveats. Give me the honest ones.
00:09:31 --> 00:09:34 Anna: 3. First, this is a model, not a
00:09:34 --> 00:09:36 census. Nobody counted 50 million
00:09:36 --> 00:09:39 magnetars. It's a simulation tuned to
00:09:39 --> 00:09:42 reproduce what we see. And if the assumed
00:09:42 --> 00:09:43 shape of the birth field distribution is
00:09:43 --> 00:09:46 wrong, the answer moves. The paper
00:09:46 --> 00:09:49 is up front that the 50% depends on assuming
00:09:49 --> 00:09:51 a 2 peaked field distribution at birth.
00:09:52 --> 00:09:54 Second, the anchor sample is 24
00:09:54 --> 00:09:56 objects. 24.
00:09:56 --> 00:09:59 That's the tightest constraint they have. And
00:09:59 --> 00:10:01 it's also a very small number to hang a
00:10:01 --> 00:10:03 galaxy on. And third,
00:10:03 --> 00:10:06 magnetar here is defined by a threshold,
00:10:06 --> 00:10:09 a dipole field above about 10 to the
00:10:09 --> 00:10:12 13.5 gauss. And nature doesn't
00:10:12 --> 00:10:15 come with a threshold. Some objects sit right
00:10:15 --> 00:10:15 on the line.
00:10:16 --> 00:10:17 Avery: And where does the work go next?
00:10:18 --> 00:10:20 Anna: Ria's answer is the obvious one and also the
00:10:20 --> 00:10:23 right one tested outside our galaxy.
00:10:23 --> 00:10:25 A, uh, natural extension, she says, would be
00:10:25 --> 00:10:28 to cheque these results in an extragalactic
00:10:28 --> 00:10:30 context, which is exactly where the
00:10:30 --> 00:10:31 transients are.
00:10:31 --> 00:10:33 Avery: And there's a southern thread here, isn't
00:10:33 --> 00:10:34 there?
00:10:34 --> 00:10:36 Anna: There's a good one, and it's not decorative,
00:10:36 --> 00:10:37 it's foundational.
00:10:38 --> 00:10:40 The entire field of magnetars starts in the
00:10:40 --> 00:10:43 southern sky. On 5 March
00:10:43 --> 00:10:46 1979, a burst of gamma rays swept through
00:10:46 --> 00:10:49 the solar system so hard that it saturated
00:10:49 --> 00:10:52 instruments on nine separate spacecraft. And
00:10:52 --> 00:10:54 when it was traced back, it came from the
00:10:54 --> 00:10:56 N49 supernova remnant in the Large
00:10:56 --> 00:10:59 Magellanic Cloud, SGR
00:10:59 --> 00:11:01 0526 66,
00:11:02 --> 00:11:04 a southern sky object in a southern sky
00:11:04 --> 00:11:07 satellite galaxy. That event is the reason
00:11:07 --> 00:11:09 the word magnetar exists at all.
00:11:10 --> 00:11:11 Avery: And the modern end?
00:11:11 --> 00:11:13 Anna: The modern end runs through Western
00:11:13 --> 00:11:16 Australia. In 2022, a survey with
00:11:16 --> 00:11:19 the Murchison Widefield Array at Inyarimanha
00:11:19 --> 00:11:21 Il Ghari Bundara, the same site that'll host
00:11:21 --> 00:11:24 Ska Lo turned up Gleam
00:11:24 --> 00:11:26 XJ16000 2759,
00:11:27 --> 00:11:29 an object switching on for a minute at a time
00:11:29 --> 00:11:32 every 18 minutes. Far too slow for anything
00:11:32 --> 00:11:34 we thought could produce radio emission like
00:11:34 --> 00:11:36 that. And the follow up that took that
00:11:36 --> 00:11:39 Australian discovery seriously as a possible
00:11:39 --> 00:11:42 ultra long period magnetar was led out of
00:11:42 --> 00:11:44 the same Barcelona group using the same
00:11:44 --> 00:11:46 magnetothermal machinery behind today's
00:11:46 --> 00:11:49 result, same tools, same people.
00:11:49 --> 00:11:52 Southern data, which is how this actually
00:11:52 --> 00:11:53 works.
00:11:53 --> 00:11:56 A wide field radio survey on Guadari
00:11:56 --> 00:11:59 country finds something nobody can classify.
00:11:59 --> 00:12:02 A theory group in Spain builds the model that
00:12:02 --> 00:12:05 might explain it. And four years later
00:12:05 --> 00:12:07 the model tells us we've been miscounting the
00:12:07 --> 00:12:08 whole population.
00:12:09 --> 00:12:12 Avery: Storey2 and it's small, distant and
00:12:12 --> 00:12:15 genuinely strange. Chariklo is
00:12:15 --> 00:12:18 a centaur, one of the icy bodies on
00:12:18 --> 00:12:20 unstable orbits between Jupiter and
00:12:20 --> 00:12:21 Neptune.
00:12:21 --> 00:12:24 In Chariklo's case, crossing between Saturn
00:12:24 --> 00:12:26 and uranus. It's about
00:12:26 --> 00:12:29 250 kilometres across, so a
00:12:29 --> 00:12:32 radius of roughly 125, which
00:12:32 --> 00:12:34 makes it the largest centaur we know of.
00:12:35 --> 00:12:38 And in 2013, it became the first object
00:12:38 --> 00:12:40 smaller than a planet ever found to have
00:12:40 --> 00:12:41 rings.
00:12:41 --> 00:12:44 Anna: Found how? You can't image something that
00:12:44 --> 00:12:45 small at that distance.
00:12:46 --> 00:12:49 Avery: You can't. You watch it pass in front of a
00:12:49 --> 00:12:51 star and time the shadow A, uh, stellar
00:12:51 --> 00:12:54 occultation. The star blinks out.
00:12:54 --> 00:12:57 You measure for exactly how long and from
00:12:57 --> 00:12:59 telescopes at different sites, you
00:12:59 --> 00:13:01 reconstruct the shape of whatever passed in
00:13:01 --> 00:13:04 front of. In 2013, a campaign
00:13:04 --> 00:13:07 strung across Chile, Brazil, Argentina
00:13:07 --> 00:13:10 and Uruguay caught Chariklo doing that.
00:13:10 --> 00:13:12 And the star didn't blink once.
00:13:13 --> 00:13:16 It blinked twice on the way in and twice on
00:13:16 --> 00:13:19 the way out. Rings, two
00:13:19 --> 00:13:21 of them sharp, narrow and a
00:13:21 --> 00:13:24 complete surprise. At the time, rings
00:13:24 --> 00:13:27 were something planets had. They sit about
00:13:27 --> 00:13:30 390 and 405
00:13:30 --> 00:13:32 kilometres from the centre, one a few
00:13:32 --> 00:13:33 kilometres wide each.
00:13:33 --> 00:13:36 And they've been called Chariklos pocket
00:13:36 --> 00:13:37 rings ever since.
00:13:37 --> 00:13:39 Anna: And Webb has now looked.
00:13:39 --> 00:13:42 Avery: Webb looked on 18 October
00:13:42 --> 00:13:45 2022, the first stellar occultation
00:13:45 --> 00:13:47 ever specifically planned for the telescope.
00:13:48 --> 00:13:51 The payoff is wavelength. Webb sees
00:13:51 --> 00:13:53 out to five microns in the infrared, which
00:13:53 --> 00:13:55 isn't available from the ground.
00:13:55 --> 00:13:57 And it resolved the rings to about a
00:13:57 --> 00:14:00 kilometre. Published this week in Science
00:14:00 --> 00:14:03 Advances, led by Yucel Kilitz,
00:14:03 --> 00:14:06 Pablo Santos Sanz and Celia Navis at
00:14:06 --> 00:14:08 the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia
00:14:08 --> 00:14:11 with Nicolas Rambo, Bruno Siccardi and
00:14:11 --> 00:14:13 Jocelyn Demars in Paris.
00:14:14 --> 00:14:15 Anna: And what changed?
00:14:15 --> 00:14:18 Avery: Both rings in opposite directions.
00:14:18 --> 00:14:20 Compared with the ground based occultations
00:14:20 --> 00:14:23 of 2017, the inner ring
00:14:25 --> 00:14:27 is now about 50% more opaque.
00:14:28 --> 00:14:31 The outer ring, C2R, has gone
00:14:31 --> 00:14:34 the other way. Its opacity has dropped by
00:14:34 --> 00:14:36 around 60% and the positions
00:14:36 --> 00:14:39 haven't moved at all. The rings are where
00:14:39 --> 00:14:42 they were. It's the material in them that's
00:14:42 --> 00:14:43 different.
00:14:43 --> 00:14:44 Anna: In five years.
00:14:45 --> 00:14:47 Avery: In five years around an object that takes
00:14:47 --> 00:14:50 63 years to go round the sun.
00:14:50 --> 00:14:53 That's the finding. These are not static
00:14:53 --> 00:14:56 structures you can photograph once and file
00:14:56 --> 00:14:58 away. They're dynamically active on a
00:14:58 --> 00:15:01 timescale a human being can sit through.
00:15:01 --> 00:15:02 Anna: What would do that?
00:15:02 --> 00:15:05 Avery: Nobody knows yet, and the paper says so.
00:15:05 --> 00:15:07 The outer ring thinning could be
00:15:07 --> 00:15:10 straightforward material loss. The inner
00:15:10 --> 00:15:13 one thickening could be material arriving or
00:15:13 --> 00:15:15 collisions grinding larger particles into
00:15:15 --> 00:15:18 finer grains, which are more opaque per
00:15:18 --> 00:15:21 kilogramme. And the team adds a third
00:15:21 --> 00:15:23 possibility that isn't astrophysics at all.
00:15:24 --> 00:15:26 They're comparing infrared measurements with
00:15:26 --> 00:15:28 older visible light ones.
00:15:28 --> 00:15:30 So some of the difference could be about what
00:15:30 --> 00:15:33 each wavelength is sensitive to, rather than
00:15:33 --> 00:15:35 the rings actually changing.
00:15:35 --> 00:15:38 Anna: So the result is a real change, a
00:15:38 --> 00:15:41 suspected cause and an unresolved
00:15:41 --> 00:15:42 confound.
00:15:43 --> 00:15:45 Avery: That's a fair summary. And it's why the next
00:15:45 --> 00:15:48 occultation matters more than this one.
00:15:48 --> 00:15:49 The southern hemisphere.
00:15:49 --> 00:15:52 Point here is that this whole technique is
00:15:52 --> 00:15:54 ours by geography and by habit.
00:15:54 --> 00:15:57 Chariklos rings were discovered from South
00:15:57 --> 00:16:00 American soil. Occultation chasing is
00:16:00 --> 00:16:02 a discipline where a well placed amateur
00:16:02 --> 00:16:05 telescope in rural Australia or New Zealand
00:16:05 --> 00:16:08 can contribute real data. And the shadow
00:16:08 --> 00:16:11 tracks fall where they fall, which is often
00:16:11 --> 00:16:13 down here, storey three.
00:16:13 --> 00:16:15 Anna: And it's a piece of luck that turned into a
00:16:15 --> 00:16:15 result.
00:16:16 --> 00:16:18 BepiColombo, the joint European and
00:16:18 --> 00:16:21 Japanese mission to Mercury, which we've been
00:16:21 --> 00:16:24 following as it comes in to arrive, made its
00:16:24 --> 00:16:26 fourth flyby of the planet in September 2024
00:16:27 --> 00:16:30 and it came in low, 165
00:16:30 --> 00:16:32 kilometres above the surface, which is closer
00:16:32 --> 00:16:34 Avery: than it'll be when it's actually in
00:16:34 --> 00:16:36 Anna: orbit, closer than the science orbit, which
00:16:36 --> 00:16:39 is the point the team keeps making. And at
00:16:39 --> 00:16:42 the exact moment it was down there, the sun
00:16:42 --> 00:16:45 let go of a major eruption of energetic
00:16:45 --> 00:16:48 particles. The lead author, Kilpua
00:16:48 --> 00:16:50 at the University of Helsinki, puts it
00:16:50 --> 00:16:50 plainly.
00:16:51 --> 00:16:54 The fourth flyby was unique. The spacecraft
00:16:54 --> 00:16:56 was much closer to the surface than it will
00:16:56 --> 00:16:58 ever be in its final orbit. And they were
00:16:58 --> 00:17:01 lucky that a major particle eruption happened
00:17:01 --> 00:17:03 on the sun at precisely that moment.
00:17:03 --> 00:17:05 Avery: So what did it see?
00:17:05 --> 00:17:06 Anna: It watched.
00:17:06 --> 00:17:08 The particles get through. High energy
00:17:08 --> 00:17:10 electrons and protons penetrated Mercury's
00:17:10 --> 00:17:13 magnetic field and precipitated onto the
00:17:13 --> 00:17:15 surface across a wide area. The instrument is
00:17:15 --> 00:17:18 called sixis, the Solar Intensity X
00:17:18 --> 00:17:21 Ray and Particle Spectrometer, designed and
00:17:21 --> 00:17:23 built in Finland, and the work has just been
00:17:23 --> 00:17:25 published in Nature Astronomy.
00:17:25 --> 00:17:28 Avery: Why does it matter where particles land?
00:17:28 --> 00:17:29 Anna: Two reasons.
00:17:29 --> 00:17:31 And the first is practical. When energetic
00:17:31 --> 00:17:34 particles hit an airless surface, they knock
00:17:34 --> 00:17:36 atoms and molecules off it and they make the
00:17:36 --> 00:17:39 surface fluoresce in X rays. That
00:17:39 --> 00:17:41 fluorescence is exactly how you read the
00:17:41 --> 00:17:42 chemical composition of a planet you can't
00:17:42 --> 00:17:45 land on. So if you want to map what Mercury
00:17:45 --> 00:17:47 is made of, you need to know what's
00:17:47 --> 00:17:49 bombarding it and where. This is calibration
00:17:49 --> 00:17:51 for the mission's own science.
00:17:52 --> 00:17:52 Avery: And the second?
00:17:52 --> 00:17:55 Anna: The second is that it's weathering over
00:17:55 --> 00:17:58 geological time. That bombardment is one
00:17:58 --> 00:18:01 of the things reworking the surface, along
00:18:01 --> 00:18:04 with the solar wind and micrometeorites.
00:18:04 --> 00:18:07 And there's a third payoff that reaches back
00:18:07 --> 00:18:10 here. Rami Vainio at the University
00:18:10 --> 00:18:13 of Turku, the CO investigator, makes
00:18:13 --> 00:18:15 the point that Mercury has a real magnetic
00:18:15 --> 00:18:18 field, but a small, weak
00:18:18 --> 00:18:21 magnetosphere, which makes it a natural
00:18:21 --> 00:18:23 stand in for what Earth looks like during an
00:18:23 --> 00:18:25 extreme solar solar storm.
00:18:26 --> 00:18:29 Mercury is the experiment we can't run on
00:18:29 --> 00:18:29 ourselves.
00:18:30 --> 00:18:32 Avery: And where is the spacecraft now?
00:18:33 --> 00:18:35 Anna: In the middle of the most interesting stretch
00:18:35 --> 00:18:38 of its life, it separated its transfer
00:18:38 --> 00:18:41 module, the big electric propulsion stack
00:18:41 --> 00:18:43 that's been doing the work for eight years.
00:18:44 --> 00:18:46 On the 3rd of September, eight days ago,
00:18:46 --> 00:18:49 gravity capture at Mercury is on the 21st of
00:18:49 --> 00:18:52 November. The Japanese orbiter
00:18:52 --> 00:18:54 gets released around the 9th or 10th of
00:18:54 --> 00:18:55 December.
00:18:55 --> 00:18:58 And the European orbiter reaches its final
00:18:58 --> 00:19:00 science orbit in March, with routine science
00:19:00 --> 00:19:03 from April. So this flyby result is arriving
00:19:03 --> 00:19:06 as a kind of advanced sample of what the
00:19:06 --> 00:19:08 mission is about to start doing properly.
00:19:10 --> 00:19:13 Avery: And it's money rather than physics, but it's
00:19:13 --> 00:19:15 the kind of money that changes what's
00:19:15 --> 00:19:17 possible. Yesterday, the European Space
00:19:17 --> 00:19:20 Agency awarded a contract worth up to
00:19:20 --> 00:19:23 760 million euros to a
00:19:23 --> 00:19:26 German startup called the Exploration Company
00:19:26 --> 00:19:29 to build a spacecraft that can carry cargo to
00:19:29 --> 00:19:32 the International Space Station. And
00:19:32 --> 00:19:34 this is the part Europe has never done.
00:19:35 --> 00:19:36 Bring it back.
00:19:36 --> 00:19:39 Anna: Never. Europe flew cargo to the station for
00:19:39 --> 00:19:39 years.
00:19:40 --> 00:19:43 Avery: Flew it up, yes. The ATVs,
00:19:43 --> 00:19:45 five of them, big and successful.
00:19:46 --> 00:19:48 Every one of them was then deliberately
00:19:48 --> 00:19:51 destroyed on the way down. Europe has
00:19:51 --> 00:19:53 never returned anything from orbit to the
00:19:53 --> 00:19:56 ground. That capability belongs to the United
00:19:56 --> 00:19:59 States, Russia and China. And
00:19:59 --> 00:20:01 it's the difference between shipping and
00:20:01 --> 00:20:04 shipping, both ways. Experiments, you
00:20:04 --> 00:20:07 can actually get back, Hardware you can
00:20:07 --> 00:20:09 inspect, samples that survive.
00:20:10 --> 00:20:11 Anna: What's the shape of the deal?
00:20:12 --> 00:20:14 Avery: It runs under a programme ESA calls
00:20:14 --> 00:20:17 Aladdin. And the structure is
00:20:17 --> 00:20:19 310 million euros for the
00:20:19 --> 00:20:22 demonstration mission, with ESA covering
00:20:22 --> 00:20:25 60% of that and the company funding the
00:20:25 --> 00:20:27 other 40, plus
00:20:27 --> 00:20:30 450 million in options for
00:20:30 --> 00:20:33 two further missions. The vehicle is called
00:20:33 --> 00:20:36 Nix. It flies on Ariane 6
00:20:36 --> 00:20:39 and it has to dock with the space station no
00:20:39 --> 00:20:42 later than the second quarter of 2029.
00:20:42 --> 00:20:45 There's also up to 50 million euros in
00:20:45 --> 00:20:48 additional incentive for flying on European
00:20:48 --> 00:20:51 launch vehicles, which tells you what else
00:20:51 --> 00:20:52 this contract is really for.
00:20:53 --> 00:20:54 Anna: And the company is how old?
00:20:55 --> 00:20:58 Avery: Founded in 2021. Their chief executive,
00:20:58 --> 00:21:01 Ellen Huby, is quite direct about how
00:21:01 --> 00:21:03 unusual that is. She says it's the first
00:21:03 --> 00:21:06 time in Europe that a five year old space
00:21:06 --> 00:21:08 startup has won a contract worth hundreds of
00:21:08 --> 00:21:10 millions of euros.
00:21:10 --> 00:21:13 ESA's Daniel Neuenschwander frames it
00:21:13 --> 00:21:15 as getting Europe one step closer to a
00:21:15 --> 00:21:18 capability only a handful of nations have
00:21:18 --> 00:21:21 mastered. And it's worth noting ESA
00:21:21 --> 00:21:23 hasn't closed the door on the alternative.
00:21:23 --> 00:21:26 Thales Alenius Space in Italy is
00:21:26 --> 00:21:28 still in a parallel tender.
00:21:28 --> 00:21:30 Anna: Has the company flown anything?
00:21:30 --> 00:21:31 Avery: It has.
00:21:31 --> 00:21:34 And this is the honest caveat. In
00:21:34 --> 00:21:36 June 2025, they flew a small
00:21:36 --> 00:21:39 reentry capsule called Mission Possible. As a
00:21:39 --> 00:21:42 rideshare, it launched, it operated in
00:21:42 --> 00:21:45 orbit, it survived reentry and then
00:21:45 --> 00:21:48 contact was lost shortly before splashdown
00:21:48 --> 00:21:51 and the capsule was not recovered. The
00:21:51 --> 00:21:53 company called it a partial success, which is
00:21:53 --> 00:21:56 fair in both directions. So the jump
00:21:56 --> 00:21:58 from that to docking with the space station
00:21:58 --> 00:22:01 and returning intact is a very large one
00:22:01 --> 00:22:03 on a fixed timeline.
00:22:03 --> 00:22:04 Anna: And the strategic read?
00:22:05 --> 00:22:07 Avery: It's the same thread we were pulling on six
00:22:07 --> 00:22:10 days ago. With Isar Aerospace reaching orbit
00:22:10 --> 00:22:13 from Norway within one fortnight,
00:22:13 --> 00:22:15 Europe has launched to orbit from its own
00:22:15 --> 00:22:18 soil for the first time and bought itself a
00:22:18 --> 00:22:21 route home. The target isn't really the space
00:22:21 --> 00:22:24 station either. The ISS has a
00:22:24 --> 00:22:25 handful of years left.
00:22:26 --> 00:22:28 It's whatever commercial stations replace it.
00:22:28 --> 00:22:30 And who gets to service them?
00:22:30 --> 00:22:33 Anna: One quick one before the sky. NASA's Parker
00:22:33 --> 00:22:36 Solar Probe has reported in after its 29th
00:22:36 --> 00:22:38 close approach to the sun, which it made on
00:22:38 --> 00:22:41 4 September. Still holding the record,
00:22:42 --> 00:22:43 still holding it.
00:22:43 --> 00:22:45 And that's now the eighth time it has
00:22:46 --> 00:22:49 430 miles an hour, about
00:22:49 --> 00:22:52 690 kilometres an hour, and
00:22:52 --> 00:22:54 3.8 million miles from the surface,
00:22:55 --> 00:22:56 which are exactly the numbers it set on
00:22:56 --> 00:22:59 Christmas Eve 2024. It's not going
00:22:59 --> 00:23:02 faster or closer. It's repeating the same
00:23:02 --> 00:23:05 extraordinary pass over and over, which is
00:23:05 --> 00:23:06 the whole design.
00:23:06 --> 00:23:08 Avery: And it goes silent while it does it
00:23:09 --> 00:23:10 completely.
00:23:10 --> 00:23:12 Anna: The encounter ran from the 30th of August to
00:23:12 --> 00:23:15 the 9th of September, and for nine days of
00:23:15 --> 00:23:18 that it's on its own with no contact too
00:23:18 --> 00:23:19 close to the sun to talk.
00:23:19 --> 00:23:22 It sent a beacon tone on the seventh to say
00:23:22 --> 00:23:24 it was healthy. This particular pass was
00:23:24 --> 00:23:26 aimed at the north pole of the sun, looking
00:23:26 --> 00:23:29 at structures and activity up there, and in
00:23:29 --> 00:23:32 one day it sweeps through nearly 40% of the
00:23:32 --> 00:23:33 solar circumference.
00:23:33 --> 00:23:35 Avery: When do we see anything?
00:23:35 --> 00:23:38 Anna: Telemetry started flowing today and the
00:23:38 --> 00:23:40 science data comes down between the 13th and
00:23:40 --> 00:23:43 the 27th. And the mission itself has been
00:23:43 --> 00:23:46 extended through 2029 and after this
00:23:46 --> 00:23:47 year's Heliophysics review.
00:23:48 --> 00:23:49 So there's plenty more of this to
00:23:49 --> 00:23:52 Avery: come and to the sky. And this is a good
00:23:52 --> 00:23:55 weekend for a simple reason. New
00:23:55 --> 00:23:58 Moon fell this afternoon, Sydney time
00:23:58 --> 00:24:01 at 27 minutes past 2. Which
00:24:01 --> 00:24:03 means tonight and tomorrow night are the
00:24:03 --> 00:24:04 darkest of the month.
00:24:05 --> 00:24:08 And the moon comes back as a thin evening
00:24:08 --> 00:24:10 crescent just in time to do something pretty.
00:24:11 --> 00:24:12 Anna: Southern hemisphere first.
00:24:13 --> 00:24:16 Avery: From Sydney and similar latitudes, Venus
00:24:16 --> 00:24:19 is the evening object and it wants dealing
00:24:19 --> 00:24:22 with promptly. Low in the west after
00:24:22 --> 00:24:24 sunset and setting quickly. So the window
00:24:24 --> 00:24:27 is the first 45 minutes once the sky
00:24:27 --> 00:24:28 darkens.
00:24:29 --> 00:24:31 Worth the trouble because it's building
00:24:31 --> 00:24:33 towards greatest Brilliancy on the 18th
00:24:33 --> 00:24:36 at magnitude -4.8,
00:24:36 --> 00:24:39 about as bright as Venus ever gets.
00:24:40 --> 00:24:42 Anna: And the pairing you mentioned, Sunday
00:24:42 --> 00:24:43 and
00:24:43 --> 00:24:45 Avery: Monday evening, the 13th and
00:24:45 --> 00:24:48 14th, a very thin waxing
00:24:48 --> 00:24:51 crescent sweeps past Venus and on the
00:24:51 --> 00:24:53 14th they're about half a degree apart.
00:24:54 --> 00:24:57 That's a moon width. Spica is right
00:24:57 --> 00:24:57 there too.
00:24:57 --> 00:25:00 So there's a third point in the picture and
00:25:00 --> 00:25:03 this one is genuinely ours. Earth
00:25:03 --> 00:25:05 Sky's own note is that the southern
00:25:05 --> 00:25:08 hemisphere gets the better view. Find a
00:25:08 --> 00:25:11 clear low western horizon and look
00:25:11 --> 00:25:13 as soon as the sky starts to colour.
00:25:14 --> 00:25:15 Anna: Saturn.
00:25:16 --> 00:25:18 Avery: Saturn is the reliable one for everybody.
00:25:18 --> 00:25:21 Rising in the east not long after sunset,
00:25:21 --> 00:25:24 well up by mid evening, heading for
00:25:24 --> 00:25:26 opposition on the 4th of October. With the
00:25:26 --> 00:25:29 rings about 7 degrees open and
00:25:29 --> 00:25:32 with no moon in the sky, the core of the
00:25:32 --> 00:25:35 Milky Way is still high after dark down
00:25:35 --> 00:25:37 here. Sagittarius and Scorpius
00:25:37 --> 00:25:40 overhead in the early evening. The best
00:25:40 --> 00:25:43 naked eye view in the sky and ours
00:25:43 --> 00:25:44 for a few more weeks.
00:25:45 --> 00:25:47 Anna: There's one more southern thing, and it's
00:25:47 --> 00:25:48 subtle.
00:25:48 --> 00:25:51 Avery: The zodiacal light sunlight scattered
00:25:51 --> 00:25:54 off dust in the plane of the solar system,
00:25:54 --> 00:25:57 looking like a faint pyramid leaning up from
00:25:57 --> 00:25:59 the horizon. It's an equinox
00:25:59 --> 00:26:01 phenomenon. And right now in the southern
00:26:01 --> 00:26:04 hemisphere it's an evening object. Look
00:26:04 --> 00:26:07 west after true darkness and it's often
00:26:07 --> 00:26:10 called the false dusk. You need a
00:26:10 --> 00:26:13 properly dark sight and no moon, which
00:26:13 --> 00:26:15 is precisely what this week gives you.
00:26:15 --> 00:26:17 It runs through to early November
00:26:18 --> 00:26:19 North
00:26:19 --> 00:26:22 Anna: America your turn and you get the same
00:26:22 --> 00:26:23 thing at the other end of
00:26:23 --> 00:26:26 Avery: the night you do for the
00:26:26 --> 00:26:28 northern hemisphere in September the zodiacal
00:26:28 --> 00:26:31 light is a pre dawn object. Look
00:26:31 --> 00:26:34 east in the couple of hours before sunrise
00:26:34 --> 00:26:36 and it's called the false dawn for the
00:26:36 --> 00:26:39 obvious reason. Around the 15th
00:26:39 --> 00:26:40 is well flagged.
00:26:41 --> 00:26:44 Same dust, same geometry, opposite
00:26:44 --> 00:26:44 end of
00:26:44 --> 00:26:47 Anna: the night and the planets from the north.
00:26:47 --> 00:26:49 Avery: The morning sky is where your action is.
00:26:50 --> 00:26:53 Jupiter dominates the pre dawn east and is
00:26:53 --> 00:26:56 closing on Regulus with Mars nearby
00:26:56 --> 00:26:59 high in the east near Castor and Pollux
00:26:59 --> 00:27:02 shortly before sunrise. Saturn is
00:27:02 --> 00:27:04 your evening and overnight object too.
00:27:05 --> 00:27:08 Around 50 degrees up in the south after
00:27:08 --> 00:27:10 midnight. The best it's looked all year.
00:27:10 --> 00:27:13 And for telescope owners there's a nice
00:27:13 --> 00:27:15 Saturn event early Saturday morning.
00:27:16 --> 00:27:19 Dione transits the north polar region around
00:27:19 --> 00:27:22 2:55am M Eastern and
00:27:22 --> 00:27:25 Tethys slides into Saturn's shadow around
00:27:25 --> 00:27:27 2:10. Space weather
00:27:28 --> 00:27:29 quieter than it was.
00:27:30 --> 00:27:32 The convoy of coronal mass ejections From
00:27:32 --> 00:27:35 Active Region 4524
00:27:35 --> 00:27:38 produced a couple of minor G1 storms on
00:27:38 --> 00:27:41 the 8th and 9th and conditions have eased
00:27:41 --> 00:27:44 back to quiet to unsettled as those effects
00:27:44 --> 00:27:47 fade. No storm watch running.
00:27:47 --> 00:27:50 If more arrives it'll be the northern tier of
00:27:50 --> 00:27:53 the United States. The UK and northern
00:27:53 --> 00:27:55 Europe first and Tasmania and the
00:27:55 --> 00:27:58 south island of New Zealand down here.
00:27:59 --> 00:28:00 Anna: Safety passage.
00:28:01 --> 00:28:03 Avery: Yes, and it's in every episode for a
00:28:03 --> 00:28:06 reason. Venus at minus
00:28:06 --> 00:28:09 4.8 is bright enough to find in broad
00:28:09 --> 00:28:12 daylight, which is a real and rewarding thing
00:28:12 --> 00:28:14 to do. And it is also the one
00:28:14 --> 00:28:17 hobby that puts you in the habit of sweeping
00:28:17 --> 00:28:19 the sky near the sun. So
00:28:20 --> 00:28:22 never point binoculars or a telescope
00:28:22 --> 00:28:25 anywhere near the sun without a purpose built
00:28:25 --> 00:28:28 properly fitted solar filter over the front
00:28:28 --> 00:28:31 of the instrument. Eclipse glasses must
00:28:31 --> 00:28:33 be certified to ISO
00:28:33 --> 00:28:35
00:28:36 --> 00:28:37 and even certify.
00:28:37 --> 00:28:40 Glasses are for naked eye use only.
00:28:41 --> 00:28:44 They are not a filter for optics. Putting a
00:28:44 --> 00:28:46 telescope behind them concentrates the light
00:28:46 --> 00:28:48 and they fail instantly.
00:28:49 --> 00:28:52 Anna: And looking ahead, the equinox on
00:28:52 --> 00:28:52 the
00:28:52 --> 00:28:55 Avery: 22nd, spring for us, autumn for
00:28:55 --> 00:28:55 the north.
00:28:56 --> 00:28:58 The harvest moon sits near Saturn in the
00:28:58 --> 00:29:01 Evening sky on the 26th. Then
00:29:01 --> 00:29:04 Saturn's opposition on the 4th of October
00:29:04 --> 00:29:07 and two nights later on the 6th, Saturn. The
00:29:07 --> 00:29:10 pre dawn lunar occultation of Jupiter
00:29:10 --> 00:29:13 which is being billed as the spectacular
00:29:13 --> 00:29:16 event of the year. We'll be building up to
00:29:16 --> 00:29:17 that one properly.
00:29:17 --> 00:29:20 Anna: That's Astronomy daily for Friday, 11
00:29:20 --> 00:29:23 September Magnetars may be half of all the
00:29:23 --> 00:29:25 neutron stars in the galaxy rather than one
00:29:25 --> 00:29:28 in a hundred, which raises the supernova rate
00:29:28 --> 00:29:30 and makes the magnetar engine explanation for
00:29:30 --> 00:29:33 fast radio bursts and super luminous
00:29:33 --> 00:29:34 supernovae affordable.
00:29:34 --> 00:29:37 For the first time. Chariklo's two
00:29:37 --> 00:29:39 tiny rings have changed in opposite
00:29:39 --> 00:29:42 directions in five years. BepiColombo
00:29:42 --> 00:29:45 caught the sun bombarding mercury from 165
00:29:45 --> 00:29:46 kilometres up.
00:29:46 --> 00:29:49 Avery: Europe has bought itself a way home from
00:29:49 --> 00:29:52 orbit for the first time. Parker solar
00:29:52 --> 00:29:54 probe has checked in from its 29th pass
00:29:54 --> 00:29:57 through the sun's atmosphere and there's a
00:29:57 --> 00:30:00 moon and Venus pairing this weekend that the
00:30:00 --> 00:30:02 southern half of the world gets the better
00:30:02 --> 00:30:03 seat for.
00:30:04 --> 00:30:06 Anna: Everything we covered with links to the
00:30:06 --> 00:30:08 papers and the source releases is in the show
00:30:08 --> 00:30:11 notes and at astronomydaily IO,
00:30:12 --> 00:30:13 where you'll also find the full back
00:30:13 --> 00:30:15 catalogue and the newsletter.
00:30:15 --> 00:30:17 Avery: And the contact form on the site is real and
00:30:17 --> 00:30:20 we read it more than one storey in the past
00:30:20 --> 00:30:22 fortnight. Started as a listener question.
00:30:24 --> 00:30:26 You'll find us on X at astrodaily.
00:30:26 --> 00:30:29 Pod Astronomy AstroDailyPod is part
00:30:29 --> 00:30:32 of the bytes.com podcast network.
00:30:33 --> 00:30:33 Anna: I'm Anna.
00:30:33 --> 00:30:36 Avery: And I'm Avery. Clear skies and if
00:30:36 --> 00:30:39 you can get away from the lights tonight, do
00:30:39 --> 00:30:41 it doesn't get darker than this.