Tipsy Comet: Interstellar Visitor Loaded With Alcohol

Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily dose of what's happening out there in the cosmos. I'm Anna and I'm Avery. It is Thursday, the twelfth of March twenty twenty six, and today's show is a packed one. We've got an interstellar comment that's absolutely loaded with alcohol, a rocket that bounced back from an explosive year to nail its seventh flight, and the biggest NASA briefing in months, the Artemis two flight readiness review is happening right now as we record. We've also got some beautiful science from deep inside the Sun, a satellite that came home early thanks to the solar cycle, and the brand new gas cloud discovered swirling around the black hole at the heart of our Milky. Way Dick's stories, Let's get into it. Our first story is one of my favorites in a while because it involves an interstellar comment that's frankly a little bit drunk. You're going to milk that headline all episode, aren't you? Every chance? I get so? Three iatls. If you've been listening to us over the past several months, you'll remember this as only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected passing through our solar system. It came from somewhere out there, from a completely different planetary system, and it's been one of the most intensely observed objects in recent memory. And now astronomers using ALMA the ATACOMMA large millimeter submillimeter array in Chile have published new findings about its chemical makeup, and what they found is genuinely surprising. Using Alma's ATACOMMA compact array, researcher studied the coma that glowing halo of gas and dust around the comet's core as three IATLS was warming up on its approach towards the Sun in late twenty twenty five. They focused on the fingerprints of two molecules, methanol, which is a type of alcohol, and hydrogen cyanide, and. The results were extraordinary. In most Solar system comets, those two molecules show up in roughly comparable amounts. In three iatls, the ratio of methanol to hydrogen cyanide was between seventy and one hundred twenty to one. That's not just unusual, it places it among the most methanol rich comets ever studied. Period. Nathan Roth, the lead researcher from American University put it really beautifully. He said, observing three iatls is like taking a fingerprint from another solar system. The details reveal what it's made of, and it's bursting with methanol in a way we just don't usually see in comments from our own solar system. There's another fascinating detail here too. In most comments, hydrogen cyanide flows out from the nucleus the central core. Methanol usually does the same, but in three iatls, the methanol is coming from two places, the nucleus and from tiny icy grains drifting in the coma around the comet. Those grains are essentially acting like miniature comets of their own, releasing methanol as they warm up in sunlight. It's a level of structural complexity we haven't seen traced in an interstellar object before. What does all this methanol tell us It points to a comet that forms in an extremely cold environment, possibly a dark molecular cloud packed with carbon monoxide ice, and that its icy material was incorporated into the comet's nucleus with very little alteration. Essentially, this thing is a chemical time capsule from a distant planetary system, and it's older than our own Sun. And here's a fun watch this space moment. Three IATLS is currently about three point eight astronomical units from the Sun, roughly the distance between Mars and Jupiter, and heading outward at around twenty eight kilometers per second. On March sixteenth, just four days from now, it makes its closest approach to Jupiter, passing within about zero point three six AU. It's one of the last major milestones before this visitor disappears into interstellar space for good. It's been one of the most scientifically productive interstellar visitors we've ever had the luck to catch. Every observation has taught us something new about how planetary systems, not ours, form and evolve. Story two is a proper comeback story, and those are always fun to tell. Firefly Aerospace successfully launched its Alpha rocket last night, Wednesday the eleventh, from Vandenberg Space four space in California, and it was a mission called Stairway to seven Flight seven, and it absolutely nailed it. For context, Firefly had a rough twenty twenty five two major mishaps, a failed launch in April and then an explosive ground test in September. That destroyed a first stage. The rocket had been grounded for nearly eleven months, so this was a significant moment for them. The mission lifted off at five point fifty pm Pacific time, completed nominal stage separation, achieved orbital insertion, and delivered a demonstrator payload for Lockheed Martin. The second stage engine even performed a relight, a bonus milestone for validating new systems. And this wasn't just any flight. Spare Way to seven was the last flight of Alpha's Block one configuration. Firefly is now transitioning to Block two, which is an upgraded version of the rocket, longer, more capable, with a new in house avionic suite and improved thermal protection. Those systems were tested in shadow mode on this flight and confirmed. Working FEO Jason Kim said the mission was quote flawlessly executed and while Alpha has now had full mission success just three times in seven attempts, the trajectory is clearly improving, and Firefly's lunar landing success with Blue Gost last year showed they can absolutely get the job done. The first Block two flight will carry a US Space Force mission called Victis Hayes jackaled for no earlier than the second quarter of this year. Firefly also as plans to expand Alpha operations to Wallops Island in Virginia and the s Range Space Center in Sweden. Good times ahead for this team. All right, story three, and this one is literally happening as we speak. NASA held its Artemis two flight readiness review today Thursday the twelfth, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with a press conference at three pm Eastern featuring NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. A flight readiness review is a critical milestone. It's the formal process where all the key mission stakeholders come together and evaluate whether every system, every procedure, and every person is ready to fly. It's one of the last major gates before a launch date gets set. To recap where we are. Artemis two is the first crude mission of the Artemis program. Four astronauts flying around the Moon and back inside the Orion spacecraft from Earth than any humans have ever traveled. The crew is Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cock and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The mission hit a snag in late February when a helium flow issue was found in the upper stage of the Space Launch System rocket after a wet dress rehearsal. The stack had to be rolled back into the vehicle assembly building for repairs. NASA has since identified and fixed to seal obstruction in the quick disconnect causing the problem, and technicians have been validating the repairs. The rocket is currently targeting a second rollout to the launch pad later this month, with an April launch window on the table. We'll have the outcome of today's press conference in our show notes. This story is moving fast and we'll be covering every step of it as we get closer. It has been over fifty years since humans flew beyond low Earth orbit. Artemis two is going to change that, and we are so close. Well, we certainly hope so. Story four is a beautiful piece of long game science. Researchers from the University of Birmingham and Yale University have published a study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that reveals something fundamental and surprising about our star. The Sun's internal structure shifts measurably from one solar cycle to the next. This might sound like it should be obvious of course, the Sun changes. But here's the thing. During solar minimum, the Sun is supposed to be at its calmest, fewer sun spots, weaker magnetic fields, a quieter, more uniform surface. The assumption had always been that these quiet periods were basically the same each time around. And they're not. The team used a network of six ground based telescopes called the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network BISON, which has been listening to the sun hum for over forty years. They analyze tiny vibrations inside the Sun, essentially sound waves trapped inside the star to infer what was happening beneath the surface. This field is called helio seismology and it's essentially the same principle as using seismic waves to map the interior of the Earth. They looked at four successive solar minima, the quiet periods between solar cycles twenty one and twenty five, and found that the minimum between cycles twenty three and twenty four, which fell in two thousand and eight to two thousand and nine, was structurally different from the other three. That minimum was already known to be one of the quietest and longest on record, but now they've shown it left a measurable internal. Fingerprint, specifically, a sound wave glitch caused by helium ionization just below the Sun's surface was significantly stronger than in the other three minima, and the speed of sound in the outer layers was slightly. Higher, suggesting subtly different gas pressures, temperatures, and magnetic field strengths deep inside the Sun. Why does this matter because how the Sun behaves during its quiet periods has a strong bearing on how active the next cycle will be. Better understanding solar minima means better space weather forecasting and space weather affects satellites, GPS, power grids, and communications infrastructure here on Earth. Professor Bill Chaplin from Birmingham summed it up perfectly. For the first time they've been able to clearly quantify how the Sun's internal structure shifts between one cycle minimum and the next, and the techniques used here could eventually be applied to other Sun like stars using esay's upcoming Plato mission. The Sun isn't just our star, it's our best laboratory for understanding stars everywhere. Following up on a story we brought you a couple of days ago, you could say story five has a certain poetic quality to it. Yesterday morning, Wednesday, the eleventh NASA's Van Allen Probe A re entered Earth Earth's atmosphere and burned up over the eastern Pacific Ocean, ending a mission that launched back in August twenty twelve, nearly fourteen years in space. The Van Allen Probes, there were two of them, A and B, were built to study Earth's radiation belts. Those are the two massive donut shaped zones of high energy charged particles trapped by our planet's magnetic field. They're named for physicist James Van Allen, who discovered them in the late nineteen fifties. Understanding these belts is critical because they shield Earth from cosmic radiation and solar wind, but they can also be brutal on satellites and spacecraft passing through them. The probes were originally designed for a two year mission, they ran for nearly seven During that time, they made a series of landmark discoveries, including the first confirmed observation of a transient third radiation belt, which can formed during periods of intense solar activity. The spacecraft ran out of fuel in twenty nineteen and have been drifting in orbit ever since. Here's what made yesterday's re entry newsworthy beyond the usual satellite farewell. NASA had originally calculated that Probe A wouldn't re enter until twenty thirty four, eight years later than it actually did. The culprit the current solar cycle. We're in a particularly active phase right now, and increased solar activity heats and expands Earth's upper atmosphere, which creates more drag on satellites and low to medium orbit, pulling them down faster than expected. The six hundred kilogram spacecraft mostly burned up on re entry, as expected, with a one in four thy two hundred chance of any surviving debris causing harm to anyone on the ground. The US Space Force confirmed re entry at six thirty seven am Eastern Time over the Eastern Pacific. No injuries or debris impact reported, but. Is still up there and its re entry isn't expected before twenty thirty, though given what just happened, we might want to keep an eye on that estimate too. The Sun has a way of accelerating things. And our final story brings us right to the heart of our own galaxy and the super massive black holes sitting there. Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have discovered a new gas cloud orbiting Sagittarius A star, the four million solar mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way, about twenty seven thousand light years from Earth. The new cloud is called G two T, and it was found using the ERIS instrument, the Enhanced Resolution Imager and spectrograph mounted on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Two previous clouds, known as G one and G two, had been observed orbiting Sagittarius A star for years, but their true nature was still hotly debated. Were they pure gas clouds or were they hiding stars inside them? The discovery of G two T turns out to be the key that helps answer that question. Because the three clouds don't just share the same general neighborhood. Their three d orbits are almost identical, just rotated slightly with respect to each other. And here's why that's a big deal. If G one, G two, and G two T each contain the hidden star at their core, you'd expect those stars to have very different orbital histories. The odds of three independent stars settling into nearly identical orbits around the super massive black hole are extraordinarily slim, so the matching orbits strongly rule out the hidden star hypothesis. Instead, the astronomers believe all three clouds likely share a common origin, a massive binary star system called IRS sixteen s W, which is in that region and is known to be expelling enormous amounts of gas. The three clouds may have been shed from that pair of stars at different times, drifting into similar orbits as they interact with the extreme gravitational environment near Sagittarius, a star. The galactic center is one of the most extreme environments in the universe. Stars and gas clouds hurtling around the black hole at tremendous speeds, and yet we're still finding brand new objects there after decades of observation. It's a reminder that our own cosmic backyards still hold secrets, extraordinary ones. That's all six stories for today. What a show, A tipsy interstellar comet, a triumphant rocket comeback, the imminent Moon mission update, the Sun's inner life, a satellite's fiery farewell, and a new discovery at the very heart of our galaxy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share us with someone who loves space. You can find us at Astronomy do io and on all the major platforms at at astro Daily Pod. And keep watching the skies. Jupiter's about to get a very unusual close visitor. In just four days three I Atlas making its last big swing before heading back to the stars. From Anna and me, thanks for listening to Astronomy Daily. We'll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, keep looking up Sunday Stars start