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00:00:00 --> 00:00:02 Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily dose
00:00:02 --> 00:00:05 of space and astronomy news. I'm Anna.
00:00:06 --> 00:00:08 Avery: And I'm, um, avery. It's Thursday, the 16th
00:00:08 --> 00:00:11 of July, 2026, and we have a
00:00:11 --> 00:00:14 genuinely lovely lineup for you today,
00:00:14 --> 00:00:17 including a story that's been 10 years in the
00:00:17 --> 00:00:19 making, or more accurately, 10 years in the
00:00:19 --> 00:00:20 hiding.
00:00:20 --> 00:00:23 Anna: That's Our lead astronomers have finally
00:00:23 --> 00:00:25 caught a planet that's been playing hide and
00:00:25 --> 00:00:28 seek with them for over a decade. And it
00:00:28 --> 00:00:31 turns out to be the faintest exoplanet ever
00:00:31 --> 00:00:33 imaged from Earth. And it lives in a southern
00:00:33 --> 00:00:36 constellation, which makes it feel just a
00:00:36 --> 00:00:37 little bit like ours.
00:00:37 --> 00:00:40 Avery: We've also got the completion of a nine year
00:00:40 --> 00:00:42 project to build the sharpest radio map of
00:00:42 --> 00:00:45 the entire sky. And the James Webb Space
00:00:45 --> 00:00:48 Telescope catching a supermassive black hole
00:00:48 --> 00:00:50 in the act of feeding itself.
00:00:50 --> 00:00:53 Anna: Then it's a double bill from the outer solar
00:00:53 --> 00:00:56 system. Landslides on Pluto spotted for
00:00:56 --> 00:00:59 the first time, and evidence that Pluto's big
00:00:59 --> 00:01:01 moon, Charon, once spun more than 10
00:01:01 --> 00:01:03 times faster than it does today.
00:01:04 --> 00:01:06 Avery: And we'll wrap the news with some sobering
00:01:06 --> 00:01:09 numbers. SpaceX's Starlink satellites had
00:01:09 --> 00:01:11 to dodge potential collisions more than
00:01:11 --> 00:01:14 355 times
00:01:14 --> 00:01:17 in the past year. We'll unpack what that
00:01:17 --> 00:01:18 means for everyone's
00:01:18 --> 00:01:21 Anna: orbit, plus your Southern hemisphere sky
00:01:21 --> 00:01:23 watching for tonight. Let's get into it.
00:01:23 --> 00:01:25 Avery, cast your mind.
00:01:25 --> 00:01:27 Back in 2008, astronomers
00:01:27 --> 00:01:30 directly imaged a planet around the young
00:01:30 --> 00:01:33 star Beta Pictoris, one of the very first
00:01:33 --> 00:01:36 exoplanets ever photographed. That was
00:01:36 --> 00:01:38 Beta Pictoris B. A second planet
00:01:38 --> 00:01:41 C followed. And ever since, there's been a,
00:01:41 --> 00:01:44 uh, nagging suspicion that the system was
00:01:44 --> 00:01:44 hiding
00:01:44 --> 00:01:46 Avery: something more because of the disk. Right.
00:01:47 --> 00:01:49 Beta Pictoris has this magnificent debris,
00:01:49 --> 00:01:51 uh, disk. It's the poster child for planet
00:01:51 --> 00:01:54 formation. And parts of it were warped and
00:01:54 --> 00:01:56 sculpted in ways that two known planets
00:01:56 --> 00:01:57 couldn't fully explain.
00:01:58 --> 00:02:01 Anna: Exactly. And now we know why. In a
00:02:01 --> 00:02:02 study published Wednesday in the
00:02:02 --> 00:02:05 Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team using
00:02:05 --> 00:02:08 the European Southern Observatory's Very
00:02:08 --> 00:02:11 Large Telescope in Chile has confirmed a
00:02:11 --> 00:02:13 third planet, Beta Pictoris D.
00:02:13 --> 00:02:16 And here's the headline. It's roughly
00:02:16 --> 00:02:19 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris
00:02:19 --> 00:02:22 B, which makes it the faintest exoplanet
00:02:22 --> 00:02:24 ever directly imaged from Earth.
00:02:25 --> 00:02:27 Avery: A hundred times fainter. To put that in
00:02:27 --> 00:02:30 context for everyone, direct imaging means
00:02:30 --> 00:02:32 actually capturing the planet's own light in
00:02:32 --> 00:02:34 a photograph next to a star that's
00:02:34 --> 00:02:37 overwhelmingly brighter. It's often compared
00:02:37 --> 00:02:40 to spotting a firefly next to a lighthouse.
00:02:40 --> 00:02:43 This is spotting a very Dim
00:02:43 --> 00:02:43 firefly.
00:02:44 --> 00:02:47 Anna: And the discovery itself was serendipitous.
00:02:47 --> 00:02:50 Ben Sutliff at the University of Edinburgh
00:02:50 --> 00:02:52 who co led the study, said they were
00:02:52 --> 00:02:55 originally just going back to study the known
00:02:55 --> 00:02:57 planet Beta Pictoris B to see how it
00:02:57 --> 00:03:00 changed over time. But in their new images
00:03:00 --> 00:03:03 from the VLT's Eris instrument, there was
00:03:03 --> 00:03:05 something else. A faint point of light
00:03:05 --> 00:03:08 separated from Planet B that sent them down
00:03:08 --> 00:03:10 an entirely new path.
00:03:10 --> 00:03:12 Avery: And this is where the hide and seek comes in.
00:03:13 --> 00:03:15 Once they knew what to look for, they trawled
00:03:15 --> 00:03:17 back through the archives. And there it was,
00:03:17 --> 00:03:20 lurking. In more than a decade of old
00:03:20 --> 00:03:22 observations from the VLT SPEAR instrument
00:03:23 --> 00:03:25 and even in James Webb Space Telescope data,
00:03:25 --> 00:03:28 the planet had been photographed for years.
00:03:28 --> 00:03:30 Nobody had noticed.
00:03:30 --> 00:03:33 Anna: Co author Jane Burkeby at Oxford put it
00:03:33 --> 00:03:36 beautifully. Planet D has been playing hide
00:03:36 --> 00:03:38 and seek with us for over a decade and now
00:03:38 --> 00:03:40 we can say found you.
00:03:40 --> 00:03:42 Avery: So what do we know about the world itself?
00:03:43 --> 00:03:46 Anna: It's a gas giant about 2.4 times
00:03:46 --> 00:03:48 the mass of Jupiter, which sounds big, but
00:03:48 --> 00:03:50 is actually the lightweight of the family.
00:03:51 --> 00:03:54 Planets B and c are each 10 Jupiter
00:03:54 --> 00:03:57 masses. Planet D sits, um, much further out
00:03:57 --> 00:03:59 from the star on a wide orbit, so it's cooler
00:03:59 --> 00:04:02 and dimmer than its siblings, hence the
00:04:02 --> 00:04:04 difficulty. And satisfyingly, its
00:04:04 --> 00:04:07 presence helps explain that odd structure in
00:04:07 --> 00:04:09 the debris disk that's puzzled astronomers
00:04:09 --> 00:04:10 for years.
00:04:10 --> 00:04:13 Avery: There's also a nice milestone tucked in here.
00:04:13 --> 00:04:15 This makes Beta Pictoris only the second
00:04:15 --> 00:04:18 planetary system after HR
00:04:18 --> 00:04:20 8799, where more than two
00:04:20 --> 00:04:23 planets have been directly. We're building
00:04:23 --> 00:04:26 up actual family portraits of other solar
00:04:26 --> 00:04:26 systems now.
00:04:27 --> 00:04:29 Anna: And an independent team at the University of
00:04:29 --> 00:04:32 California spotted the same object in their
00:04:32 --> 00:04:34 own data at almost the same time, which gives
00:04:34 --> 00:04:37 the detection real confidence. Now the
00:04:37 --> 00:04:40 bit our audience will love. Beta Pictoris is
00:04:40 --> 00:04:43 a southern star. It sits in the constellation
00:04:43 --> 00:04:46 Pictor, the Painter's Easel, just next to
00:04:46 --> 00:04:48 brilliant canopus. And at 63 light
00:04:48 --> 00:04:51 years away, it's visible from Australia and
00:04:51 --> 00:04:53 New Zealand. Though right now in July
00:04:53 --> 00:04:56 it's low in our evening sky and best hunted
00:04:56 --> 00:04:58 in the pre dawn hours later in
00:04:58 --> 00:05:01 Avery: the year, a planetary system with three
00:05:01 --> 00:05:03 photographed worlds sitting in our southern
00:05:03 --> 00:05:05 sky. Not bad at all.
00:05:05 --> 00:05:08 Next, A, uh, project nine years in the
00:05:08 --> 00:05:11 making has just crossed the finish line. The
00:05:11 --> 00:05:14 U.S. national Science Foundation's National
00:05:14 --> 00:05:17 Radio Astronomy Observatory has announced
00:05:17 --> 00:05:20 that observations for the Very Large Array
00:05:20 --> 00:05:22 Sky Survey VLAS are
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 complete. It's the most detailed radio
00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 survey of the sky ever conducted.
00:05:28 --> 00:05:31 Anna: This is the VLA in New Mexico. The
00:05:31 --> 00:05:34 iconic Y shaped array of 27 dishes
00:05:34 --> 00:05:36 from every space documentary ever made.
00:05:36 --> 00:05:39 Avery: That's the one. From September 2017
00:05:39 --> 00:05:42 through February this year, the array
00:05:42 --> 00:05:45 repeatedly swept about 34
00:05:45 --> 00:05:48 square degrees. Essentially the whole sky
00:05:48 --> 00:05:51 visible from New Mexico and everything north
00:05:51 --> 00:05:53 of minus 40 degrees declination.
00:05:53 --> 00:05:56 That's roughly 80% of the entire
00:05:56 --> 00:05:59 celestial sphere. Mapped at a resolution
00:05:59 --> 00:06:02 of about 2 and a half arcseconds in the 2
00:06:02 --> 00:06:03 to 4 GHz band.
00:06:03 --> 00:06:05 Anna: And how does that compare to what came
00:06:05 --> 00:06:06 before?
00:06:06 --> 00:06:09 Avery: It's about 18 times sharper than the
00:06:09 --> 00:06:12 previous benchmark all sky radio survey from
00:06:12 --> 00:06:14 the 1990s. The numbers are
00:06:14 --> 00:06:16 staggering. Roughly six and a half thousand
00:06:17 --> 00:06:20 thousand observing hours. Half a petabyte of
00:06:20 --> 00:06:22 raw data. And the processed data products are
00:06:22 --> 00:06:25 expected to reach around 2 petabytes, the
00:06:25 --> 00:06:28 largest data volume the VLA has ever
00:06:28 --> 00:06:31 produced. They use a clever on the fly
00:06:31 --> 00:06:34 mosaicing technique where the antennas sweep
00:06:34 --> 00:06:36 continuously across the sky in a raster
00:06:36 --> 00:06:39 pattern rather than stopping to point at each
00:06:39 --> 00:06:39 field.
00:06:39 --> 00:06:42 Anna: And crucially, they surveyed the sky multiple
00:06:42 --> 00:06:45 times over those nine years. Which means VLAS
00:06:45 --> 00:06:48 isn't just a map, it's a movie. Comparing
00:06:48 --> 00:06:51 epochs revealed a dynamic radio sky.
00:06:51 --> 00:06:53 Sources that flare, fade or appear from
00:06:53 --> 00:06:56 nowhere. Exploding stars, feeding black
00:06:56 --> 00:06:58 holes, colliding neutron stars.
00:06:59 --> 00:07:01 Avery: Which brings us to the timing. And honestly,
00:07:01 --> 00:07:03 the timing is the best part of the story.
00:07:04 --> 00:07:07 Just over two weeks ago on June 30, the
00:07:07 --> 00:07:10 Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile began
00:07:10 --> 00:07:13 its decade long legacy survey of space and
00:07:13 --> 00:07:15 time, sweeping the southern optical sky
00:07:16 --> 00:07:18 every few nights. So for the first time in
00:07:18 --> 00:07:21 history, we have a complete high resolution
00:07:21 --> 00:07:24 radio map and a real time optical
00:07:24 --> 00:07:27 transient stream operating simultaneously.
00:07:27 --> 00:07:29 Anna: Though when Rubin flags something going bang
00:07:29 --> 00:07:32 in the optical, astronomers can immediately
00:07:32 --> 00:07:34 check what that patch of sky looks like and
00:07:34 --> 00:07:37 looked like in the radio. The whole multi
00:07:37 --> 00:07:39 wavelength discovery machine the community
00:07:39 --> 00:07:42 has spent two decades building is now
00:07:42 --> 00:07:44 switched on and the data's public.
00:07:44 --> 00:07:47 Avery: Radio astronomers, multi wavelength folks,
00:07:47 --> 00:07:50 citizen scientists. The radio sky now
00:07:50 --> 00:07:52 belongs to everyone.
00:07:52 --> 00:07:55 Anna: Now to a decades old mystery that may
00:07:55 --> 00:07:57 finally have its answer. Avery, how do
00:07:57 --> 00:08:00 supermassive black holes keep feeding?
00:08:00 --> 00:08:03 Nearly every large galaxy hosts one of these
00:08:03 --> 00:08:06 monsters. Millions or billions of times the
00:08:06 --> 00:08:09 mass of the Sun. When they feed, they blast
00:08:09 --> 00:08:11 out enormous energy, powerful jets that heat
00:08:11 --> 00:08:14 the gas around them. And that's the paradox.
00:08:14 --> 00:08:17 That heating should cut off the black hole's
00:08:17 --> 00:08:19 own fuel supply. So why don't they starve?
00:08:20 --> 00:08:23 Avery: The leading idea has been a kind of cosmic
00:08:23 --> 00:08:25 recycling loop. The heated gas eventually
00:08:25 --> 00:08:28 cools back down, condenses into long thin
00:08:28 --> 00:08:31 streamers called filaments and rains back
00:08:31 --> 00:08:33 towards the center. Self regulating
00:08:34 --> 00:08:36 but Actually seeing the connection filament
00:08:36 --> 00:08:39 to black hole has eluded astronomers for
00:08:39 --> 00:08:40 decades.
00:08:40 --> 00:08:43 Anna: Until now. An international team led by Julie
00:08:43 --> 00:08:46 Hvlasic Lorando at the University of Montreal
00:08:46 --> 00:08:48 pointed the James Webb Space telescope at
00:08:48 --> 00:08:51 NGC 4696, the giant
00:08:51 --> 00:08:53 elliptical galaxy at the heart of the
00:08:53 --> 00:08:56 Centaurus cluster, about 145
00:08:56 --> 00:08:58 million light years away. Their results were
00:08:58 --> 00:09:00 published this week in the Astrophysical
00:09:00 --> 00:09:01 Journal Letters.
00:09:01 --> 00:09:04 Avery: And Centaurus, we should note, is a southern
00:09:04 --> 00:09:07 constellation. This galaxy cluster rides high
00:09:07 --> 00:09:09 in our winter sky right now, though you'll
00:09:09 --> 00:09:11 need a decent telescope for the galaxy
00:09:11 --> 00:09:11 itself.
00:09:12 --> 00:09:14 Anna: White. Now, Hubble had previously
00:09:14 --> 00:09:17 photographed a curious S shaped swirl of gas
00:09:17 --> 00:09:19 near this galaxy's central black hole. But
00:09:19 --> 00:09:22 Hubble could only show where the gas sat, not
00:09:22 --> 00:09:24 how it moved. So the team gave Webb's
00:09:24 --> 00:09:27 NIRSP instrument nearly eight hours on the
00:09:27 --> 00:09:29 target and mapped the motion of the gas deep
00:09:29 --> 00:09:32 inside the black hole's sphere of influence,
00:09:32 --> 00:09:35 resolving features just 30 light years across
00:09:35 --> 00:09:37 in a galaxy hundreds of thousands of light
00:09:37 --> 00:09:38 years wide.
00:09:38 --> 00:09:40 Avery: And the swirl turned out to be
00:09:41 --> 00:09:44 Anna: a spinning disk of gas wrapped around
00:09:44 --> 00:09:46 the black hole, nearly 800 light
00:09:46 --> 00:09:49 years across, with material whipping around
00:09:49 --> 00:09:52 at, uh, up to 600 kilometers per second.
00:09:52 --> 00:09:55 And here's the money shot. That disk is
00:09:55 --> 00:09:58 physically connected to one of the huge
00:09:58 --> 00:10:00 infalling filaments stretching out into the
00:10:00 --> 00:10:03 galaxy. They watched gas flowing along
00:10:03 --> 00:10:06 the filament, pouring into the disk, and from
00:10:06 --> 00:10:08 the disk falling onto the black hole.
00:10:09 --> 00:10:12 Avery: The missing link caught on camera heat the
00:10:12 --> 00:10:14 gas. The gas cools into filaments. The
00:10:14 --> 00:10:16 filaments feed the disk. The disk feeds the
00:10:16 --> 00:10:18 black hole. The black hole heats the gas.
00:10:19 --> 00:10:20 Round and round it goes.
00:10:20 --> 00:10:22 Anna: Havlasic Lorando said Webb is revealing that
00:10:22 --> 00:10:25 black holes might be the ultimate cosmic
00:10:25 --> 00:10:27 recyclers. And because this feeding loop
00:10:27 --> 00:10:29 shapes when galaxies can and can't form
00:10:29 --> 00:10:32 stars, understanding it is really
00:10:32 --> 00:10:35 understanding how galaxies, including ours,
00:10:35 --> 00:10:35 grow up.
00:10:35 --> 00:10:38 Avery: Anna, uh, time for a double bill from the
00:10:38 --> 00:10:41 outer solar system. Two stories,
00:10:41 --> 00:10:43 one spacecraft, and a dwarf planet that
00:10:43 --> 00:10:46 keeps on giving. First,
00:10:46 --> 00:10:49 scientists have detected landslides on Pluto
00:10:49 --> 00:10:50 for the very first time.
00:10:50 --> 00:10:53 Anna: This is New Horizons data, isn't it? That
00:10:53 --> 00:10:55 Flyby was 11 years ago this week.
00:10:55 --> 00:10:58 Avery: It is, and that's the delightful part. A
00:10:58 --> 00:11:00 paper in the journal Icarus, which has been
00:11:00 --> 00:11:03 making headlines this week, reports that an
00:11:03 --> 00:11:05 international team went back through the high
00:11:05 --> 00:11:08 resolution images from New Horizons lorry
00:11:08 --> 00:11:10 camera pictures showing Pluto's surface at
00:11:10 --> 00:11:13 about 300 meters per pixel and found
00:11:13 --> 00:11:16 six large landslides inside three impact
00:11:16 --> 00:11:19 craters near Sputnik Planita. That famous
00:11:19 --> 00:11:20 heart shaped nitrogen ice plane.
00:11:21 --> 00:11:23 Anna: How do you recognize a landslide on a world
00:11:23 --> 00:11:24 made of ice?
00:11:25 --> 00:11:27 Avery: Same fingerprints as Earth. Crescent shaped
00:11:27 --> 00:11:30 collapse scars near the crater rims. Huge
00:11:30 --> 00:11:32 displaced blocks of ice and debris fanning
00:11:32 --> 00:11:35 out across the crater floors. The team
00:11:35 --> 00:11:37 measured them. These slides descend one and a
00:11:37 --> 00:11:40 half to over two kilometers, run out as far
00:11:40 --> 00:11:42 as 14 and a half kilometers and the largest
00:11:42 --> 00:11:45 covers around 130 square kilometers.
00:11:45 --> 00:11:48 Anna: And landslides are everywhere else, aren't
00:11:48 --> 00:11:50 they? Earth, Mars, Ceres,
00:11:50 --> 00:11:53 asteroids, even Pluto's moon Charon showed
00:11:53 --> 00:11:56 evidence years ago Pluto itself was the odd
00:11:56 --> 00:11:57 one out which was
00:11:57 --> 00:12:00 Avery: genuinely puzzling because Pluto has steep
00:12:00 --> 00:12:02 crater walls and rugged icy terrain. All the
00:12:02 --> 00:12:05 right ingredients. Now the gap is filled and
00:12:05 --> 00:12:08 it tells us gravity driven slope processes
00:12:08 --> 00:12:10 are actively reshaping Pluto's frozen
00:12:10 --> 00:12:13 surface. Even under gravity, a fraction of
00:12:13 --> 00:12:15 ours. What triggered them is still open.
00:12:15 --> 00:12:18 Possibilities range from tectonic activity to
00:12:18 --> 00:12:19 meteoroid impacts.
00:12:19 --> 00:12:22 Anna: A world we visited for a few hours in 2015,
00:12:23 --> 00:12:25 still handing us firsts a decade later.
00:12:26 --> 00:12:28 Avery: And um, it's not done because part two of
00:12:28 --> 00:12:30 our Pluto double is about
00:12:30 --> 00:12:32 Avery: the other half of that famous pair
00:12:32 --> 00:12:35 Anna: of Charon, Pluto's enormous moon. So
00:12:35 --> 00:12:38 big relative to Pluto that the two really
00:12:38 --> 00:12:40 form a double world. And a study published
00:12:41 --> 00:12:43 Tuesday in Nature Communications says
00:12:43 --> 00:12:46 Charon's mountains have preserved a memory of
00:12:46 --> 00:12:47 a wilder youth.
00:12:47 --> 00:12:48 Avery: What kind of memory?
00:12:49 --> 00:12:52 Anna: A record of despinning across the solar
00:12:52 --> 00:12:54 system. Tidal forces gradually slow a body's
00:12:54 --> 00:12:57 rotation and as ah, the spin slows the
00:12:57 --> 00:13:00 body's shape relaxes stressing and
00:13:00 --> 00:13:02 cracking the surface. The it's long been
00:13:02 --> 00:13:05 theorized for Charon but clear geological
00:13:05 --> 00:13:08 evidence was missing. So Han, Zeng Chin
00:13:08 --> 00:13:10 and colleagues at ETH Zurich and
00:13:10 --> 00:13:13 UCLA examined the orientations
00:13:13 --> 00:13:16 and types of tectonic features, mountain
00:13:16 --> 00:13:18 ranges and faults in Aus Terra
00:13:18 --> 00:13:21 Sharon's northern rugged highlands. Again
00:13:21 --> 00:13:23 using New Horizons flyby data.
00:13:24 --> 00:13:26 Avery: And um, the tectonic pattern fits the de
00:13:26 --> 00:13:27 spinning story beautifully.
00:13:28 --> 00:13:30 Anna: Their modeling suggests Charon's rotation
00:13:30 --> 00:13:33 period was once around 14.3 hours
00:13:33 --> 00:13:36 and it has since slowed to today's roughly
00:13:36 --> 00:13:39 153 hours locked in step with
00:13:39 --> 00:13:41 its orbit around Pluto. That's more than a
00:13:41 --> 00:13:44 tenfold slowdown and the stresses from that
00:13:44 --> 00:13:46 transformation are etched into the mountains
00:13:46 --> 00:13:48 we photographed in 2015.
00:13:48 --> 00:13:51 Avery: Chen said the study drastically changed her
00:13:51 --> 00:13:53 understanding of Charon's geologic history.
00:13:53 --> 00:13:55 And there's a bonus finding, isn't there
00:13:55 --> 00:13:57 about how Charon was born?
00:13:57 --> 00:14:00 Anna: Yes, the way despinning and global
00:14:00 --> 00:14:02 contraction evolved together favors
00:14:02 --> 00:14:05 what's called a cold start for Charon, which
00:14:05 --> 00:14:08 is a real clue to the early thermal history
00:14:08 --> 00:14:11 of icy moons across the Outer solar system.
00:14:11 --> 00:14:14 So between Pluto's landslides and charon's
00:14:14 --> 00:14:17 slowing spin, one 11 year old dataset
00:14:17 --> 00:14:19 gave us two papers in a week. Not a bad
00:14:19 --> 00:14:21 return on a flyby.
00:14:21 --> 00:14:23 Avery: Our final story today, Anna, uh, comes with
00:14:23 --> 00:14:26 some genuinely eye widening numbers.
00:14:26 --> 00:14:29 SpaceX has filed its latest semi annual
00:14:29 --> 00:14:32 constellation status report with the U.S.
00:14:32 --> 00:14:34 federal Communications Commission. And
00:14:34 --> 00:14:37 according to coverage of the filing, StarLink
00:14:37 --> 00:14:38 satellites performed
00:14:38 --> 00:14:42 207
00:14:42 --> 00:14:44 collision avoidance maneuvers between
00:14:44 --> 00:14:46 December 2025 and
00:14:46 --> 00:14:48 May 2026.
00:14:48 --> 00:14:51 Anna: 207 in six months,
00:14:51 --> 00:14:53 up nearly 60
00:14:53 --> 00:14:55 Avery: on the previous half year. Put the two
00:14:55 --> 00:14:58 periods together and the constellation made
00:14:58 --> 00:15:00 over 355
00:15:00 --> 00:15:03 dodges in 12 months. More
00:15:03 --> 00:15:05 than triple what it performed in all of
00:15:05 --> 00:15:08 2024. At uh, on average,
00:15:08 --> 00:15:11 each Starlink satellite now swerves more
00:15:11 --> 00:15:14 than 40 times a year. That's nearly a
00:15:14 --> 00:15:16 dodge a week per satellite.
00:15:16 --> 00:15:18 Anna: Let's be fair to SpaceX for a moment though.
00:15:19 --> 00:15:21 These maneuvers are the system working as
00:15:21 --> 00:15:22 designed, aren't they?
00:15:22 --> 00:15:24 Avery: They are. The satellites dodge
00:15:24 --> 00:15:27 autonomously whenever the predicted collision
00:15:27 --> 00:15:30 probability exceeds 3 in 10 million,
00:15:30 --> 00:15:33 an extremely conservative threshold, far
00:15:33 --> 00:15:36 tighter than the industry standard. Experts
00:15:36 --> 00:15:38 consistently credit SpaceX with managing its
00:15:38 --> 00:15:41 traffic well and being transparent with the
00:15:41 --> 00:15:44 data. The concern is the trendline,
00:15:44 --> 00:15:45 not the competence.
00:15:45 --> 00:15:47 Anna: Because the numbers compound. More
00:15:47 --> 00:15:50 satellites means more close approaches means
00:15:50 --> 00:15:53 more maneuvers means more residual risk
00:15:53 --> 00:15:55 that never quite goes to zero.
00:15:55 --> 00:15:58 Avery: Exactly the point Huw Lewis makes. He's the
00:15:58 --> 00:16:00 University of Birmingham um, astronautics
00:16:00 --> 00:16:02 professor who's tracked these reports for
00:16:02 --> 00:16:05 years. Each maneuver cuts the collision odds
00:16:05 --> 00:16:08 to about one in a million, which sounds
00:16:08 --> 00:16:11 negligible, but as he puts it, if you make
00:16:11 --> 00:16:13 a million maneuvers with a one in a million
00:16:13 --> 00:16:16 residual, you end up with an aggregate risk
00:16:16 --> 00:16:18 across the Constellation that you simply
00:16:18 --> 00:16:21 can't get rid of. His blunt assessment,
00:16:21 --> 00:16:23 he thinks we're heading towards a situation
00:16:23 --> 00:16:26 where there will be a collision involving an
00:16:26 --> 00:16:28 operational satellite in the Constellation.
00:16:29 --> 00:16:32 Avery: And the projections on current growth
00:16:32 --> 00:16:35 Starlink passes. A million total avoidance
00:16:35 --> 00:16:37 maneuvers by mid2027. And by
00:16:37 --> 00:16:40 2030 the constellation could be making more
00:16:40 --> 00:16:42 than a million maneuvers every single year.
00:16:43 --> 00:16:46 Remember too, and regular listeners will.
00:16:46 --> 00:16:49 SpaceX has applied to the FCC to grow
00:16:49 --> 00:16:51 Starlink toward 100 satellites,
00:16:51 --> 00:16:53 a story we covered a couple of weeks back.
00:16:54 --> 00:16:56 And it's not alone up there. Amazon's
00:16:56 --> 00:16:58 Constellation and China's Qian Fan are
00:16:58 --> 00:17:00 actively deploying as well.
00:17:00 --> 00:17:03 Anna: The number of operational spacecraft in orbit
00:17:03 --> 00:17:05 has gone from about 10 to about
00:17:05 --> 00:17:08 16 in just a year. Other
00:17:08 --> 00:17:10 experts are calling for operators to disclose
00:17:10 --> 00:17:12 predicted maneuver counts before
00:17:12 --> 00:17:15 Constellations are even approved. Though
00:17:15 --> 00:17:17 regulators know whether the satellites can
00:17:17 --> 00:17:19 Avery: actually keep up, low Earth orbit is a
00:17:19 --> 00:17:22 shared resource. And this is the traffic
00:17:22 --> 00:17:24 report. We'll keep watching the numbers
00:17:24 --> 00:17:27 because everyone from astronomers to airlines
00:17:27 --> 00:17:29 to your GPs depends on that neighborhood
00:17:29 --> 00:17:30 staying safe.
00:17:30 --> 00:17:33 Anna: Time now for tonight's skywatching. And for
00:17:33 --> 00:17:35 our Southern Hemisphere friends, the news is
00:17:35 --> 00:17:38 good. The Moon is a waning crescent rising in
00:17:38 --> 00:17:40 the small hours, so evenings this week are
00:17:40 --> 00:17:43 dark and glorious, which means
00:17:43 --> 00:17:46 Avery: the winter Milky Way at its absolute best
00:17:46 --> 00:17:48 face south after dinner. And the galactic
00:17:48 --> 00:17:51 core in Sagittarius and Scorpius is almost
00:17:51 --> 00:17:54 directly overhead from most of Australia and
00:17:54 --> 00:17:57 New Zealand dust lanes. Star clouds, the
00:17:57 --> 00:17:59 lot. If you can get away from city lights
00:17:59 --> 00:18:01 this week, do it while you're there.
00:18:01 --> 00:18:04 Anna: Sweep up Omega, uh, Centauri and the Southern
00:18:04 --> 00:18:06 Cross riding high. And if you've got
00:18:06 --> 00:18:08 binoculars, the star fields between
00:18:08 --> 00:18:11 Scorpius's tail and the teapot of Sagittarius
00:18:11 --> 00:18:14 will keep you busy all evening. Saturn
00:18:14 --> 00:18:16 is climbing in the east by mid evening for a
00:18:16 --> 00:18:18 late night treat. And dazzling Venus still
00:18:18 --> 00:18:21 rules the early evening western sky.
00:18:21 --> 00:18:24 Avery: And one for the launch watchers. SpaceX's
00:18:24 --> 00:18:27 Starship Flight 13 window opens tonight,
00:18:27 --> 00:18:29 US time. That's tomorrow morning for us
00:18:30 --> 00:18:32 from about 8:45 aesthetic.
00:18:33 --> 00:18:35 So pour a coffee and watch this space. We'll
00:18:35 --> 00:18:37 have the full story in Saturday's weekend
00:18:37 --> 00:18:38 wrap.
00:18:38 --> 00:18:40 Anna: That's it for today's episode. Thanks for
00:18:40 --> 00:18:43 joining us. You can find show notes, links to
00:18:43 --> 00:18:45 every story and our back catalog@ah,
00:18:46 --> 00:18:48 astronomydaily.IO and we're astronomy
00:18:48 --> 00:18:50 Daily Pod on all the socials.
00:18:51 --> 00:18:53 Avery: Astronomy Daily is part of the bytes.com
00:18:53 --> 00:18:55 podcast network. I'm um, Avery.
00:18:55 --> 00:18:58 Anna: And I'm Anna. We'll see you tomorrow. Until
00:18:58 --> 00:19:00 then, clear skies.