[00:00:00] This is Space Time series 29 episode 108, for broadcast on the 9th of September 2026. Coming up on Space Time, discovery of a new class of molten planet, ancient tree warnings about the next big solar storm, and two giant blobs of hot rock discovered on the Earth's core mantle boundary. All that and more coming up on Space Time. Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary.
[00:00:45] Astronomers have discovered a new type of molten planet beyond our solar system. The findings reported in the journal Nature Astronomy suggest this strange exoplanet stores large amounts of sulfur deep within a permanent ocean of magma. The exoplanet known as L9859D is about 1.6 times the size of the Earth and orbits a small red dwarf star about 35 light years away.
[00:01:11] Observations with NASA's Webb Space Telescope suggested something unusual. The planet had an especially low density given its size, and it pieced to contain significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide in its atmosphere. Until now, astronomers would have placed a planet like this into one of two very familiar categories. Either a rocky gas dwarf with an atmosphere of hydrogen, or a water world made up of deep oceans and ice. But the new findings show that L9859D fits neither description.
[00:01:41] Instead, it appears to belong to an entirely different class of planet, one containing heavy sulfur molecules. To try and work out what's going on, astronomers use computer simulations to try and reconstruct this strange world's evolution over the past 5 billion years. By directly linking telescope observations to these physical models of planetary interiors and atmospheres, the authors were able to determine what must be going on deep inside the planet.
[00:02:07] And their results revealed that the mantle of L9859D is likely molten silicate, similar to lava here on Earth, with a global magma ocean extending thousands of kilometers beneath. This vast molten reservoir allows the planet to store extremely large amounts of sulfur deep inside its interior, and maintain that over geologic timescales.
[00:02:30] The magma ocean also helps L9859D to retain a thick hydrogen-rich atmosphere containing sulfur-bearing gases like hydrogen sulfide. And normally this would be lost into space over time due to X-ray radiation produced by the host star. The study's lead author, Harrison Nichols from Oxford University, says the findings suggest that L9859D
[00:02:53] may be the first recognized member of a broader population of gas-rich sulfurous planets sustaining long-lived magma oceans. Now, if that's the case, it means the diversity of worlds within our galaxy, and the universe for that matter, may be even greater than previously imagined. Webb observations from 2024 pointed to the presence of sulfur dioxide among other sulfur gases high in L9859D's upper atmosphere.
[00:03:19] The new models show that these gases can be created when ultraviolet light from the host star, the red dwarf L9859, triggers chemical reactions. At the same time, the magma ocean below acts as a massive reservoir for buffering these volatile gases, storing and releasing them over billions of years after the planet was formed. This combination of deep volatile gases within its interior and ultraviolet-driven atmospheric chemistry explains the planet's notable properties.
[00:03:49] Now, according to the simulations, L9859D likely formed with a large amount of volatile material. It may once have looked more like sort of a large sub-Neptune planet. And over billions of years, it gradually shrank as it cooled and lost some of its atmosphere. Now, of course, magma oceans represent the universal initial states of all rocky planets, including planets like the Earth and Mars.
[00:04:13] So the new insights into magma ocean physics can inform scientists about our own world and its primordial history. This is space-time. Still to come, what ancient tree rings are telling us about the next big solar storm and two giant blobs of hot rock discovered on the Earth's core mantle boundary. All that and more still to come on Space Time.
[00:04:45] New evidence in tree ring records are warning scientists that our sun can become far more violent than previously thought. The findings, reported in the Journal of Communications, Earth and Environment, demonstrates how our local star can unleash a solar storm far larger than we've ever recorded. And a study of some of the planet's oldest trees suggested we could soon be due for one of these events. The first clear signs of exceptionally high solar activity came from Japanese cedar trees.
[00:05:13] In 2012, Fusumiaki was studying slices of ancient Japanese cedar taken from a tree filled in the 1950s. It had grown on Yakushima Island, a protected site famed for its long-lived trees, some of which have stood for millennia, laying down one ring of wood after another, year after year. Now these tree rings are not just markers of age. They're also annual records of the Earth's atmosphere, and studying them could help scientists predict and prepare for future disruptive solar storms.
[00:05:43] The key is the relative proportion of carbon-14 in each tree ring. It reveals how active the sun was each year. While examining these ancient tree records, Miyake discovered that between the years 774 and 775, the amount of this isotope, carbon-14, in the cedar jumped by about 12 parts per thousand, roughly 20 times larger than the change expected from ordinary variations in the sun.
[00:06:09] The massive spike means Earth's atmosphere must have been hit by a sudden burst of unusually energetic particles, and the same signature was later identified in trees from North America and Europe. And the measurements of another radioisotope, beryllium-10, in ice core samples, further confirm the discovery. Now scientists initially speculated the cause may have been a nearby supernova explosion, a gamma-ray burst, or maybe a blast from a neutron star.
[00:06:37] Now these have all been ruled out because the nearest possible sources are far too distant. And that left solar flares from the sun as the most likely cause. Solar flares happen when magnetic energy that's been building up in the sun's atmosphere is suddenly released. In a matter of minutes, a patch of the sun can brighten violently, ejecting radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves to X-rays. Often these eruptions are accompanied by streams of high-speed charged particles
[00:07:05] and vast bubbles of magnetised plasma, known as coronal mass ejections. Scientists know unusually large solar flares have hit the Earth before, the most famous being the Carrington event in 1859. That eruption was so intense that telegraph lines across Europe and North America caught fire, telegraph operators suddenly got electric shocks, and auroral lights normally confined to polar latitudes were seen deep into the tropics.
[00:07:32] Ever since, Carrington has been the benchmark for solar violence. But the strange thing is, even Carrington wasn't powerful enough to leave a clear carbon-14 signature in tree rings. To do that, the sun would need to unleash a storm at least 10 times larger, a super flare. Now since Miyake's first discovery, scientists have found five more Miyake events, occurring roughly every 2,000 years.
[00:07:57] In 2013, Miyake's team found a second spike in cedar and cypress rings, confirmed in European oak and Siberian larch. Then using beryllium-10 measurements from Greenland ice cores, and matching the carbon-14 signatures in Polish oak, scientists were able to identify another in the year 664. In 2022, two more events were identified, followed by a fifth in subfossil Scots pine from the French Alps in 2023.
[00:08:24] That one dated back to a massive blast some 14,350 years ago. Although these super flares are rare, they still represent a challenge for science's understanding of solar physics. That's because stars like our sun aren't expected to produce events on this scale. However, the evidence is clear, they have happened in the past, and could happen again. To determine how likely these super flares are, scientists have been sifting through the records,
[00:08:52] combining high-resolution carbon-14 data from tree rings spanning almost an entire millennium. And they've now come up with eight more signatures, not quite as big as the Miyake super flares, but significant nevertheless. Five of these were newly measured in European oak, mainly from Germany and France, while three came from existing tree ring datasets. They then modeled Earth's carbon cycle to search for abrupt increases in carbon-14, finding four candidate intermediate events around the years 14,
[00:09:21] 553, 675 and 954, meaning a frequency of around one every 200 years. Benjamin Pope from Macquarie University says the exact nature of the danger posed by these intermediate-class events depends on what's actually causing them. Pope says if the culprit is a coronal mass ejection, the main threat would come from the way the event distorts Earth's magnetic field. It could trigger a geomagnetic storm,
[00:09:48] driving unwanted currents through power grids, pipelines and other long-conductive systems. The damage would be uneven, shaped by geography, geology and the layout of the infrastructure on the ground. Hope warns of a scenario in which an event may take out critical manufacturing capabilities. But interpreting solar events from carbon-14 can be complex. See, the carbon-14 spikes made high in the atmosphere. It then has to filter down into the air that the trees absorb.
[00:10:17] And by then, a tree may already be growing new wood using carbon stored from previous years. Wood that's formed at the start of the annual growth season could be especially prone to this blurring, while later growing wood may offer a clearer annual signal. Pope says some tree rings start growing around spring, but the carbon they use to grow that ring could be from previous years. The point of this work isn't only to work out how often civilization might be jolted by a super solar storm.
[00:10:46] Mayaki events may be telling us something profound about the sun itself. Pope says the real question remains, when will the next big solar storm come and just how bad will it be? So there's this thing called radiocarbon dating, where you measure the content of carbon-14, an isotope that's radioactive compared to carbon-12, which is most of the carbon in the world, which is stable. And you measure the content of carbon-14 in something and you're able to tell how old it is, because carbon-14 is produced by radiation hitting the atmosphere.
[00:11:15] It filters through the atmosphere, the carbon cycle into plants and animals you and me, and we are all constantly being topped up with fresh carbon-14 from the air and from the things we eat. The thing is, though, when we die, which does happen to all of us, this top-up stops happening. And so it means that now the amount of carbon-14, which is radioactive and starts to decay, is like a clock that can tell you how old something is. So the thing you need to know in order to tell how old something is,
[00:11:44] is you measure the amount of radiocarbon in it and you compare it to the amount it should have started with. But here's your problem. How do you know how much it started with? And so there's actually a different amount of radiation striking the atmosphere every year, producing a different amount of radiocarbon. And so there's no really easy way to be able to say from physics or astronomy how much you should have started with and therefore how old the sample is. So what you've got to do is take advantage of another type of clock that nature's provided us with, that is tree rings.
[00:12:11] So every tree ring records a year of growth. You can see these in your hardwood table. And so the trick is that a good year and a bad year are usually the same good year and the same bad year for all the trees of the same species in the same region. And so what it means is that the pattern of long and short tree rings is really the same across all the different trees of the same species in the same region. I might mean all the Huon pines in Tasmania or all the oaks in Europe or something, right? So I mean quite a big region and quite a big species, right?
[00:12:41] And so what you can therefore do is you can read these like a barcode and say how old some tree rings are to the exact year. What you do is you start by dazing chaining them. You look at an old tree today and you know what the date is today and you count 200 years going back in time. But then you look at older trees. They might be in buildings or they might be fossilized in bulks or whatever. You look at these older trees and you try and say, okay, where do these barcodes overlap with the one we know? And so you can build up a library going back millennia sometimes for some species in some regions
[00:13:10] of these tree ring barcodes that allow you to do a science called dendrochronology, which is Greek for tree timing. It means you can find a sample of wood from any given year going all the way back to the Ice Age. And so it means that you can say, I know exactly how old this wood is and then I can measure the amount of radiocarbon in it and therefore I can tell how much radiocarbon it started with. And so scientists have been using this for decades in order to do archaeology better. They've also been interested in doing astronomy with these trees.
[00:13:38] So using the world's forests as the world's biggest telescope by saying, well, okay, we're interested not in the archaeology, though we might be, but specifically in how and why does the amount of radiation hitting the atmosphere vary from year to year? And so it turns out that this is basically related mainly to solar activity. So the sun waxes and wanes in strength in terms of its magnetic fields every 11 years. And so when the magnetic field's strong, it blocks out a lot of radiation from reaching the Earth. And when it's weak, a lot of radiation is let through. It's like a force field protecting us from cosmic rays.
[00:14:08] So I mean, sometimes you have more radiocarbon, sometimes you have less. So fast are good. And so there was a scientist, Fusa Miyake was her name, and we call them Miyake events for this reason, who went and took a bunch of tree rings from the 700s AD and she measured their radiocarbon content and found something shocking. There was a single year, huge influx of radiation about 774 AD, unlike anything that had previously been measured in these tree rings. And that was called the first Miyake event.
[00:14:36] After that, she took very precise measurements of a number of other such events, which were maybe a little bit smaller. And other scientists, including our team, have discovered other ones down the track. And so there's maybe half a dozen rock solid discoveries of Miyake events and maybe a half a dozen more where different groups of people dispute like, oh, I think there was a big radiation event in this year. So the critical thing is we don't know what they are. And these events happened all over the world. They weren't just in Japan or Australia. Absolutely. They're everywhere. So we know this was a global event. Absolutely.
[00:15:06] And so we don't know what they are. The fact that it was global probably tells you something that was astronomical, right? And the biggest sort of candidate for something that influences the radiation environment of the Earth is still the sun. So a few of us have looked at, is there any evidence for supernovae doing this? And the answer is basically no. We've measured across a whole bunch of supernovae years, no radiocarbon influence from the sort of the known supernovae. It really is probably something much more local.
[00:15:33] But what exactly the sun must be doing to cause these? Really up for debate. Is it possible that something other than the sun is causing these? I think most people don't think so, but certainly there are possibilities, I think. And these are fairly common. It depends what you mean by common. For astronomers, very common. You know, they happen once every thousand years. For you and me, when we take off our hats as astronomers, they're probably not that common. Once every thousand years isn't something I'm losing sleep over. The thing is, though, once every thousand years, they seem to happen at random. We haven't yet found any way of predicting them.
[00:16:02] And this is not a periodic once every thousand years. This is a random once a thousand years. And so it means, what's the chance of, say, in the next decade? That could be one chance. You're talking to an astronomer here who is waiting with bated breath for Etta Carina to explode and a bed will go to do its thing. I would love that. That's sort of where I'm coming from. So these are very exciting. I think if one of these things happened, I think we'd answer a whole lot of questions, but we'd also be pretty concerned. I think there'd be a lot of reasons to be worried.
[00:16:31] One of the reasons I'm doing this research is because there is a remote but not tiny possibility that one of these will happen in our lifetime. Lots of 1% probability things happen all the time. Insurance is what we do to deal with those. Eventually, problems come up. Now, the trouble is, if this is some kind of global event that brings in a lot of radiation, we don't really know what it is. How do you ensure against something you don't understand, but where there are certain possibilities, and let's talk about those, but there are certain possibilities where it could be catastrophic for us. Certain possibilities where it could be more benign and a lot in between.
[00:17:01] We need to understand these things so that we can sort of find ways of protecting ourselves against them. We've experienced the Carrington event, 1859. 1859. That caused problems, but we managed to survive that because we were only learning technology back then. It was telegraph operators and people like that who went up getting electrocuted. Oh, yeah. So for your listeners, yeah. So the Carrington event was the first recorded solar flare, and it was also the biggest ever recorded solar flare.
[00:17:25] That seems like a bit of a coincidence, but the trick was we weren't very good at finding solar flares back then, and so only unusually large ones would have been found. And so what it did was there was a huge coronal mass ejection. When mass from the corona of the sun, that is its sort of surroundings, gets ejected, that is thrown out into the solar system, as a huge blob of plasma, and that struck the Earth. The actual plasma directly isn't what caused problems on the Earth. It's that the plasma hit the Earth's magnetic field and got deflected. Sounds good, but it bent the magnetic field. You know what happens?
[00:17:55] When you move a magnetic field through a loop of conducting wire, you generate a current. And so what this did was it created a lot of currents in, say, telegraph systems on Earth. And even in the 1850s, when that was just getting going, that caused a huge loss of information, power, all these sorts of things, in this nascent communications and power grid that the Earth had. Now, this could be catastrophic if the Carrington event happened today. Yeah, in 1989, northeastern United States was hit, Quebec especially. Oh, yeah. Which isn't the United States, but close enough.
[00:18:24] They had huge blackouts. Absolutely. And just in the last year, we actually had blackouts in parts of Victoria as a result of a small solar flare hitting the Earth. And so, like, you know, power companies, satellite companies pay attention to either little ones if they sort of strike us in the wrong way. And so a Carrington event, if that hit the Earth today, what you'd be looking at is unless we took appropriate steps to mitigate it really quickly, you'd be looking at a catastrophic loss of a lot of satellites and the communications that depends on.
[00:18:51] You'd be looking at power going out in a whole lot of high-latitude countries unless people had really good forewarning and were able to disconnect lots and lots of stuff. Now, this would be blowing out transformers. In high-latitude countries, you go, okay, well, maybe that wouldn't affect Australia directly too badly. It depends on the details. But the trouble is, you know, where's all the industry in the world? Were you thinking China, Japan, Europe, North America? That's all at high latitudes. All the really high-tech manufacturing. So you'd be losing so much of the world's supply chains.
[00:19:21] All this business is, you know, remember when the Suez Canal was blocked and all the terrible things happening in the Strait of Hormuz today? There'll be nothing in comparison to the supply chain losses you'd see here. And so that's really what I'm scared of, right? And these aren't just minor events that last a couple of days. It'll take decades to replace those transformers that blow. They don't keep a supply of 2,000, 3,000 transformers sitting there. They have to be built. Oh, yeah. No, we don't have stockpiles. We don't have stockpiles.
[00:19:47] You know, you'd really need to bring those factories back online immediately and start to roll them out and reinstall them across power grids everywhere. And, yeah, I mean, if we took appropriate action to have everything disconnected and to have repair kits and stockpiles, like, maybe it wouldn't be catastrophic. But it's the sort of thing we really need to be investing money and time into sort of preparing for. So that, remember when COVID happened and we all got vaccines within a year.
[00:20:11] In the same way, it's really important that we have a lot of science and technology rolled out to forecast what the sun could do to us and start to take steps to mitigate it. And so that instead of taking out civilization for a decade, causes some hiccups and some problems, which we get over. And we have no idea what's causing these things. They're not just unusually high climaxes of Solomax or anything like that. We don't really know. So the issue, right, is we don't see any radiocarbon signal from the Carrington event at all. It basically didn't affect anything that we can record in tree rings.
[00:20:41] So one interpretation of these Miyake events is that these are super-duper Carrington events. That is, they're really enormous coronal mass ejections, maybe 100 times bigger than Carrington, which is pretty scary. So if you get something 100 times bigger than Carrington, I don't know what you do. Like you're looking at satellites, a toast, a power grid, internet, God knows. That would be a global crisis. And yeah, there might be ways to avert it. But the best way to avert it is to understand the physics of what's going on.
[00:21:08] On the other hand, isn't it sus that there's very little radiocarbon signature of the biggest ever solar event? And that's because most of the particles from those CMEs don't actually reach the Earth. And so they don't produce radiation in the upper atmosphere that would produce this radiocarbon. So on the other hand, there's these other types of solar events called solar energetic particle events, SCP events or solar proton events, where the sun releases beams of high energy particles. And they can totally do this. And you and I don't notice that they're going on. They certainly cause problems for satellites.
[00:21:37] They don't do anything to the magnetic field really that would blow out power grids on the Earth though. And scientists would find that our instruments go completely crazy while it's happening. But otherwise, other than maybe damage to satellites, which could be quite serious, but on the ground, you're not going to see all the Transformers collapsing end of civilization. It probably wouldn't be great for us to have such an enormous solar energetic particle event. But we could probably cope with it other than the satellite system. You wouldn't want to be in the South Atlantic anomaly at the time, surely? Hell no, absolutely not.
[00:22:06] And you also wouldn't want to be in high altitude aircraft poles. I've seen papers saying that a sufficiently large solar energetic particle event occurring while there were aircraft over the poles, which is all the time, could actually have really serious health effects. Astronauts, they're not going to get better necessarily. There's one published just the other day pointing that out. And so, I mean, in terms of commercial flights, you do have a bunch of atmosphere protecting you, but it's not as much as you'd like. And so it could cause pretty serious illness, even death if it's a really, really, really big event.
[00:22:36] But astronauts, they don't have much protection at all. If you were in orbit or interplanetary space, good luck, mate. That's probably the end of you. Even these solar energetic particle events could be quite serious, but the sorts of things we worry about are probably more specialized and more detailed than with these enormous coronal mass ejections that some of these theories are putting out. There have been other things discussed. The idea that it might actually be the opposite is where the sun's magnetic field reduces a lot. People are sort of debating, Is it possible that a shutoff of that force field protecting us from cosmic rays
[00:23:04] could produce something like a nearchae event? And the answer is a solid maybe. I think people don't really think so, but some people have certainly argued that. That's Dr. Benjamin Pope from Macquarie University. And this is Space Time. Still to come, two giant blobs of hot rock discovered on Earth's core mantle boundary. Later in the science report, A new study suggests El Niño is intensifying as the planet warms. All that and more still to come on Space Time.
[00:23:49] Scientists have discovered two immense ultra-hot rock structures located at the base of the Earth's mantle, some 2,000 nanokilometres beneath Africa and the Pacific, which are affecting the underlying liquid outer core. The findings, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, show that these enormous blobs of solid superheated material, encircled by a pole-to-pole ring of cooler rock, have been shaping Earth's magnetic field for millions of years. While we've travelled 25 billion kilometres into space,
[00:24:19] the deepest we've ever gone below our feet is just over 12 kilometres. Consequently, little is known about conditions at the core mantle boundary, where the base of the mantle meets the top of the outer liquid core. It's the most significant interface in the Earth's interior, and the region where new research has now uncovered exciting magnetic activity. Both measuring ancient magnetic fields, and simulating the processes that generate them, are technically demanding.
[00:24:46] To investigate these deep Earth features, scientists need to combine paleomagnetic observations with advanced computer simulations of the geodynamo, that's the flow of liquid iron in the outer core which generates Earth's magnetic field. Numerical models enabled the authors to reconstruct key observations of the behaviour of the magnetic field seen over the past 265 million years. The results revealed that the article's upper boundary is far from uniform in temperature.
[00:25:15] Instead, it displays strong thermal contrasts, with localised hot regions capped by these continent-sized rock structures. It also showed that some parts of the magnetic field appear to have remained relatively stable for hundreds of millions of years, while others have changed significantly through time. One of the study's authors, Andy Biggin from the University of Liverpool, says the findings suggest there are strong temperature contrasts in the rocky mantle just above the core, and that beneath the hotter regions,
[00:25:43] the liquid iron in the core may stagnant rather than participate in the flows seen beneath the cooler regions. These findings have important implications for the questions surrounding ancient continental configurations, such as the formation and breakup of Pangaea, and it may help resolve long-standing uncertainties in ancient climate, paleobiology, and the formation of natural resources. These areas have always assumed that Earth's magnetic field, when averaged over long periods,
[00:26:10] behaves as a perfect bar magnet aligned with the planet's rotational axis. However, these new findings suggest that may not necessarily be the case. This is Space Time. And time now to take another brief look at some of the other stories
[00:26:39] making news in science this week with a science report. A thousand-year record of sea surface temperatures reconstructed from Galapagos corals suggest El Nino is intensifying as the planet warms, with the El Nino Southern Oscillation Enzo variability in the eastern Pacific roughly 35% higher now compared to pre-industrial times. The findings, reported in the journal Science, used high-resolution measurements of modern and fossilized Galapagos corals
[00:27:06] to reconstruct sea surface temperatures in the region over the past millennia, and then compared those with climate simulations to find out if the changes in Enzo were impacted by global warming. They found that variability in Enzo has seen an unusually strong shift in the past 40 years, with modern variability nearly 37% higher than the pre-industrial record. Scientists have discovered that some centenarians may host rare cancer-killing cells.
[00:27:35] The findings, published in the journal Cell Reports, claim this rare type of immune cell starts expanding and cloning itself in people who live past 100, which they say could be helping preserve their longevity by killing cancers before they grow. The cells are CD4 cytotoxic T lymphocytes, which are already known to kill some cancers, and they appear to be more common in humans above the age of 100. To better understand them, the authors analyzed the blood of 28 people
[00:28:02] aged either 70 to 99, 100 to 109, or over 110. In these groups, the authors say the proportion of CD4 cytotoxic T lymphocytes had a median percentage of 4, 9.6, and 17.6 respectively, suggesting a real expansion past the age of 100. A new study has flipped the historic narrative about Australia's thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, fighting the native apex predator,
[00:28:30] was significantly different from the wolves and wild dogs it was likened to before being hunted to extinction. A report in the journal Nature Communications claimed scientists from Flinders University examining thylacine skulls found their jaws were probably unsuited for holding down large animals like sheep. Instead, their long, deep jaws with powerful snapping bites would have been more suited to subdue relatively small prey. Meanwhile, a report in the journal Biomed Central Ecology and Evolution
[00:29:00] claims Tasmanian tigers hunted more like foxes. The authors from the University of the Sunshine Coast base their findings on a comparison of thylacines with 48 living and extinct predatory mammal species from domestic dogs through to African wildcats. A new study has found that the use of artificial intelligence large language models are making writing styles more similar in the process losing the individual identity and personality behind the work.
[00:29:27] The findings reported in the journal Nature Human Behaviour are based on an analysis of more than 880,000 texts across different writing types. The authors suggest this could make it more difficult to identify important clues about aspects of a person's identity, personality and even mental health from their language. They analysed Reddit stories, news articles, academic papers, essays, social media posts and political speeches over time to see how the rise of widespread chatbot usage
[00:29:57] has changed writing style. And they found evidence of both an intermediate shock where the introduction of chat GPT coincided with a sharp drop in variability and a sustained effect in which higher levels of AI usage have continued to reduce the complexity of language over time. Apple's new iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max and Fold Ultra have just been released and fans are growing wild. Needless to say,
[00:30:24] the long-awaited new passport-sized Fold Ultra heads the line-up. But the conventional flagship 18 Pro Max won't be left out. It features a larger battery, smaller dynamic island, a 2nm A20 chipset, variable aperture main camera and a triple 48-megapixel rear camera system. Of course, price will be a big factor this year with a 12GB RAM and 2TB model costing just over $4,000. With the details, we're joined by technology editor Alex Sahar-Ovroyd
[00:30:54] from techadvice.live. We've got the iPhone 18 Pro, the Pro Max, but of course the big one that everyone's talking about is the iPhone Fold. Now this promises to have the most crease-free display ever because they're talking about a piece of ultra-thin glass on top, the OLED in between, and then a second piece of glass on the bottom with a liquid metal hinge. Samsung has only got one piece of glass on top and then it's got titanium on the bottom. Now you can still see the crease on Samsung Fold 8, but you can barely feel it.
[00:31:23] And I've got a Google Pixel Fold 11 Pro and you can feel the crease. It sort of feels a bit deep, but on the Samsung, it's virtually not there. But the expectation is that Apple's is going to either not be there at all or it's going to be the flattest crease of all time, which is incredible and I can't wait to see it. And you are right. They've gone with a passport size rather than the full size. We officially don't know, but I mean the rumors are so strong. People have got millions of videos of a dummy unit. If Apple doesn't come out with the folding phone, it's going to be a big, massive disappointment for people.
[00:31:52] The share price will crater. But look, it's also going to be the first Apple keynote with its new CEO in 15 years, John Turnus, an engineer who has been with the company for 25 years, worked on iPhones, iPads, AirPods, you know, Vision Pro, everything. And this is effectively the start of a brand new era with what should be Apple's most successful, popular and AI-enabled iPhones yet. And Tim Cook is now the chairman, of course, and still got his hand on the tiller. He's still the mentor that's there doing all the international relations and the things that
[00:32:22] the chairman of the board does. But John Turnus is now firmly in command. We will see what sort of performance he gives. Of course, Apple no longer does live keynotes, unlike what Google or Samsung do. But look, Apple is Apple. I'm expecting great things. And, you know, will we see hints of new touchscreen Macs and other things? I don't think so. It's the iPhone event. They're going to be all hands on deck for that. There'll be more announcements later in the year for first touchscreen Macs. And of course, we'll have an event next year by the end of the first quarter where we'll have the iPhone 18s, the regular ones, plus also the iPhone 18e,
[00:32:51] which will be the low-cost one and the iPhone 18 Air, most likely, although it might come this week. We shall see. That's Alex Zaharov-Royd from techadvice.life. And this is Space Time. And that's the show for now.
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