Webb’s Early-Universe Puzzle: A Radio First, New Glenn Hardware and Earth’s New Mini Moon

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01] Hello again, everybody. 13 billion years ago, the first galaxies were wrapped in fog, thick hydrogen, thick dust. And yet the James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding far more bright ones than anyone expected.

[00:00:12] [SPEAKER_00] Today, a team with deep Australian roots thinks it knows why. The stars blew the fog away using light itself as a leaf blower.

[00:00:20] [SPEAKER_01] Also on the show, the sharpest, deepest, low-frequency radial picture ever made, Blue Origin's new third stage and a brand new engine, and why aiming a nuclear blast at an asteroid matters far more than anyone thought.

[00:00:32] [SPEAKER_00] Plus, the space station's power upgrade is finished, the Sun fires off an M-class flare, and Earth has picked up a tiny passenger. I'm Anna. And I'm Avery. This is Astronomy Daily for Friday, the 6th of November, 2026. Let's get into it.

[00:00:48] [SPEAKER_01] Let's start with a problem that's been nagging astronomers since Webb opened its eyes. When it looks back to around four or five hundred million years after the Big Bang, it finds an overabundance of bright galaxies. More of them, and brighter, than our models said should exist that early.

[00:01:02] [SPEAKER_00] And there are a few candidate explanations floating around. Maybe stars formed more efficiently back then. Maybe the mix of stars was different, more heavyweights. Or maybe we're simply seeing more of the light than we expected to, because something cleared the view.

[00:01:16] [SPEAKER_01] That last option is where today's paper lives. And there's an important clue in what Webb has actually seen. In some of these early galaxies, especially the ones magnified by gravitational lensing, the star formation isn't spread out. It's packed into tiny, incredibly dense star clusters. One famous example is a lensed galaxy seen about 460 million years after the Big Bang, where Webb picked out several of these compact clusters.

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_00] Dense clusters, very little dust, lots of hydrogen. That combination turns out to matter a great deal.

[00:01:48] [SPEAKER_01] So here's the star of the story. It's a particular color of ultraviolet light called Lyman Alpha. It's what a hydrogen atom gives off when its electron drops from the second energy level down to the lowest one. Wavelength about 122 nanometers.

[00:02:03] [SPEAKER_00] And because hydrogen is everywhere, Lyman Alpha is everywhere too. Young hot stars ionize the gas around them, the electrons and protons recombine, and a big share of that energy comes back out as Lyman Alpha.

[00:02:15] [SPEAKER_01] Here's the twist. Most light, when it's absorbed, gets re-emitted at some other wavelength and moves on. Lyman Alpha doesn't. A hydrogen atom absorbs it and spits it straight back out at almost the same wavelength. So the photon gets caught bouncing from atom to atom over and over before it can escape.

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_00] Like a pinball machine that won't let the ball drain. And every bounce is a little push on the gas. Light carries momentum. Bounce the same photon thousands of times, and you can deliver thousands of times the push of a photon that just flies straight through.

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_01] Which is why people have suspected for a very long time that Lyman Alpha could be a powerful force. The catch is that all that bouncing is a nightmare to simulate. You're tracking photons scattering enormous numbers of times through a messy three-dimensional cloud. A lot of galaxy models simply leave it out.

[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_00] So the team, Chow Menon at the Flight Iron Institute in New York and Aaron Smith at the University of Texas at Dallas, took a clever shortcut. Rather than build Lyman Alpha into a full simulation from scratch, they took snapshots from existing radiation hydrodynamic simulations of dense star-cluster-forming clouds.

[00:03:24] [SPEAKER_01] Frozen in frames, if you like, of a cloud as it collapses and forms stars. Then they ran a specialized Monte Carlo code called COLT, short for Cosmic Lyman Alpha Transfer, through each frame. Firing virtual photons into the gas and following every bounce to work out how hard the Lyman Alpha would actually be pushing at each point.

[00:03:46] [SPEAKER_00] And they did it across a range of dust levels because dust eats Lyman Alpha. Less dust and the photons survive long enough to keep pushing.

[00:03:53] [SPEAKER_01] The answer comes in two halves. And both matter. Burst in the densest parts, the thick filaments where stars are actually being born, gravity wins. Lyman Alpha isn't strong enough to blow that gas apart. So star formation in those dense clusters keeps going, efficiently.

[00:04:11] [SPEAKER_00] That's important because it means this isn't a break on star formation. If anything, the picture is of clusters forming stars very efficiently in short bursts.

[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_01] The second half is the leaf blower. Outside those dense filaments, in the thinner gas that fills the space between them, Lyman Alpha winds easily. It shoves that diffuse gas and dust out, fast enough to launch winds that can carry material right out of the galaxy.

[00:04:35] [SPEAKER_00] Manon put it nicely. He said the radiation can sort of clear the fog, letting us see the stars much more clearly than we otherwise would.

[00:04:43] [SPEAKER_01] And in low-dust conditions, which is exactly what you'd expect in the young universe, they found Lyman Alpha pushing harder than ordinary ultraviolet light or infrared radiation by factors ranging from about three to about 500.

[00:04:57] [SPEAKER_00] So you get dense clusters busily making stars, and the haze around them swept away. From our point of view, 13 billion years later, that galaxy looks brighter. Not because there's more in it, but because less of it is hidden.

[00:05:11] [SPEAKER_01] It's worth dwelling on that dust point because it's really the dial that controls this whole effect. Dust is made of heavier elements, carbon, silicon, iron, forged inside earlier generations of stars. In today's Milky Way, there's plenty of it. So Lyman Alpha photons get soaked up by dust grains after a handful of bounces, and the push never builds.

[00:05:30] [SPEAKER_00] But in the first few hundred million years, there simply hadn't been enough time to make much dust. The paper's sweet spot is dust levels around a tenth of what we see locally, or less. Exactly the conditions Webb is peering into.

[00:05:44] [SPEAKER_01] So the same physics that's negligible in the Milky Way today could have been one of the most important forces in the infant universe. That's a theme that keeps coming up in this field. The early universe isn't just a younger version of ours. It can play by noticeably different rules.

[00:05:57] [SPEAKER_00] And this is testable. If Lyman Alpha winds are clearing gas out of these young galaxies, Webb should see the signs. Gas moving outward fast in the spectra. And more ultraviolet light escaping than you'd otherwise expect.

[00:06:09] [SPEAKER_01] That last part connects to a much bigger question, too. How the universe went from opaque to transparent. The era called reionization. Clear the gas around a cluster and ionizing light can escape into intergalactic space more easily. So a mechanism that makes early galaxies look brighter could also help explain how they lit up the cosmos.

[00:06:30] [SPEAKER_00] Now, I'm sensing you have a big honest part for us.

[00:06:33] [SPEAKER_01] I do. This is post-processing. They calculated the force on frozen snapshots. They didn't let the gas respond to that force as the simulation ran. The authors are clear that the next step is simulations that include Lyman Alpha, the gas flows and the star formation all together, self-consistently, and then compare those with Webb.

[00:06:52] [SPEAKER_00] And it's one contributor to the bright galaxy puzzle, not the whole answer. Star formation efficiency and the mix of stars are still very much in play.

[00:07:02] [SPEAKER_01] One disclosure too. The paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal this week, on the 4th, but a preprint version has been public since May. So it's newly published, not brand new work.

[00:07:12] [SPEAKER_00] Here's the part I love. Sean Menon did his PhD at the Australian National University, finishing in 2023, supervised by Christoph Federath and Mark Krumholz at Mount Stromlo. His thesis was recognized as the most outstanding astronomy PhD in Australia for 2023 to 2024.

[00:07:30] [SPEAKER_01] And it was all about exactly this, how radiation from young, massive stars pushes on the gas that makes star clusters. Listeners with long memories might recognize Federath's name. He came up back in episode 199 as one of the referees on the Andromeda Super Bubbles paper.

[00:07:47] [SPEAKER_00] Which makes this a nice third chapter. In episode 199, we saw supernovae keep a galaxy churning. On Wednesday in episode 222, we saw wind strip the oxygen out of small galaxies.

[00:07:59] [SPEAKER_01] And today, before a single supernova has even gone off, the light of the newborn stars is already clearing the stage. Read back at every scale from the very beginning. A cosmic leaf blower, built from the simplest atom there is.

[00:08:12] [SPEAKER_00] From ultraviolet light to radio waves now. And a picture that's been a long time in the making. A team led from Leiden University has produced what they say is the sharpest and most sensitive radio image ever made at low frequencies.

[00:08:24] [SPEAKER_01] This is LOFAR, the low frequency array. It's not a dish, it's tens of thousands of simple antennas spread across the Netherlands, with stations reaching out across Europe. Combine the signals and you get a telescope as wide as the continent.

[00:08:37] [SPEAKER_00] They pointed it at a patch of northern sky called Eleus N1 for 200 hours, between about 115 and 168 megahertz. Roughly the neighborhood of FM radio.

[00:08:47] [SPEAKER_01] And the numbers are something. Almost 63,000 radio sources. In a patch of sky about 25 times the area of the full moon. 20 times sharper than the previous most sensitive LOFAR image of that field. Sharp enough, the team says, to pick out a coin from about 10 kilometers away. The full image is 8 billion pixels.

[00:09:07] [SPEAKER_00] The authors say these are the deepest radio images to date, anywhere below about 1.3 gigahertz.

[00:09:15] [SPEAKER_01] Why does sharpness matter? Because at this depth, most of what you see is distant galaxies. And the big question for each one is, is that radio glow coming from stars forming or from a black hole firing jets? At blurry resolution, they look alike. Sharpen the image and you can see the jets.

[00:09:32] [SPEAKER_00] The hard part is the sky itself. Low frequency radio waves have to come through the ionosphere, which ripples and distorts them. A bit like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool. The team improves their calibration and processing, and the release says they cut processing costs more than tenfold along the way.

[00:09:48] [SPEAKER_01] The paper was posted on Wednesday and has been accepted by astronomy and astrophysics. And the data have been made public.

[00:09:54] [SPEAKER_00] Now, an honest hemisphere note, ELA's N1 sits well up in the northern sky. From New York, it climbs to about 76 degrees. From Sydney, it barely scrapes one degree above the horizon.

[00:10:05] [SPEAKER_01] But the paper itself points south. It talks about laying the foundation for the next generation. And that includes SKA Low being built in Western Australia. More than 130,000 antennas in 512 stations, up to about 74 kilometers apart.

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_00] To be fair about the comparison, SKA Low won't match this image's sharpness. That takes Lofar's baselines, stretching right across Europe. By our own rough estimate, SKA Low's sharpest view at these frequencies will be a few arc seconds. Where it will shine is sensitivity. And the whole southern sky.

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_01] Rocket news now. On Thursday, Blue Origin announced two new pieces of hardware for its New Glenn rocket.

[00:10:44] [SPEAKER_00] First, a third stage, called GS3. New Glenn currently flies with two stages. Its reusable booster uses seven BE-4 engines. And the upper stage has two BE-3Us. It's about 98 meters tall and can lift around 45 tons to low Earth orbit.

[00:11:01] [SPEAKER_01] GS3 sits on top and is powered by a single BE-7. That's the engine Blue Origin developed for its Blue Moon lander. The company says the third stage allows satellites to be delivered directly to geostationary orbit, and supports heavy science and exploration missions to the Moon and deep space.

[00:11:16] [SPEAKER_00] And there's already a customer. Blue Origin says an unnamed government customer has booked a GS3 mission into cislunar space, the region between Earth and the Moon, targeted for 2028.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_01] The second announcement is a new booster engine called North Star. Like BE-4, it burns liquid oxygen and liquid methane. But Blue Origin says it's 30% lighter, has half as many parts, and pushes thrust up from 640,000 to 715,000 pounds force. They also say it can be assembled in under a day.

[00:11:47] [SPEAKER_00] No date yet for its first flight though.

[00:11:48] [SPEAKER_01] Some context, because it's been a rough year for New Glenn. On its third flight in April, it placed a communications satellite in the wrong orbit and the satellite was lost. Then in May, a rocket exploded on the pad during an engine test. The company has been rebuilding, with a fourth flight expected late this year.

[00:12:06] [SPEAKER_00] And this matters well beyond Blue Origin. Their Blue Moon lander is part of the Artemis plan we covered in Episode 213. And Blue Origin also holds the NASA-Mars telecommunications orbiter contract, where Rocket Lab's protest is due to be decided by the Government Accountability Office around mid-December.

[00:12:22] [SPEAKER_01] So new hardware on paper and a lot riding on the next launch. Planetary Defense next.

[00:12:27] [SPEAKER_00] If a dangerous asteroid were found heading our way with too little warning for a gentle nudge, one last resort option is a nuclear device. Not to blow the asteroid up, but to detonate nearby.

[00:12:39] [SPEAKER_01] In space, there's no shockwave in the air. What you get is an intense pulse of X-rays. That pulse vaporizes a thin layer of the surface on one side. The vapor blasts off and the recoil shoves the asteroid the other way.

[00:12:52] [SPEAKER_00] A team led by Nathan Moore at Sandia National Laboratories has now modeled that with real asteroid shapes. Most earlier work treated asteroids as spheres because the mass is easier. But as Moore points out, spherical asteroids don't exist.

[00:13:07] [SPEAKER_01] They built a new algorithm, which they say is over 1600 times faster and tested three very different shapes. Bennu, the spinning top asteroid, Itokawa, the peanut, and Golevka, a lumpy one.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_00] The result is in the journal Icarus. Depending on which way the asteroid happens to be facing at the moment of the blast, the push it gets can vary by up to nearly two times for Bennu, four times for Itokawa, and five times for Golevka.

[00:13:33] [SPEAKER_01] Orr's reaction was that they expected aim to matter. What surprised them was how much.

[00:13:38] [SPEAKER_00] Two caveats. The model handles rocks breaking off the surface, but not the whole asteroid breaking apart. And this is an option of last resort. A kinetic impactor like Dart is the preferred tool when there's time.

[00:13:50] [SPEAKER_01] But the lesson is clear. Know the shape first. Which is exactly what ESA's Hera mission is doing right now at Didymos and Dimorphos, the paired Dart hit. Detailed images of Dimorphos are due on the 25th. Next up, let's get a few quick stories. A few quick ones indeed. The space station's power upgrade is complete. On Thursday, Anil Manon and Canada's Joshua Kutrik installed the eighth and final rollout solar array, finishing a multi-year project that boosts station power by about 30%.

[00:14:20] [SPEAKER_00] On Thursday's show, we flagged Sunspot Region 4566 with its tangled magnetic field. It delivered. An M3 flare at 1833 Universal Time on the 5th. That's 533 on Friday morning in Sydney. Meanwhile, NOAA's monthly sunspot number for October fell to 45.7, down from 60.3 in September. The sun is still winding down, but it can still bite. A big coronal hole is also turning toward us, so watch four auroras at High Latitudes this weekend.

[00:14:48] [SPEAKER_01] Earth has a new mini-moon. It's called 2026 QQ8, discovered in August by Christian Sharnetsky, and the Minor Planet Center reported it on the 29th of October. It's tiny, about 1 to 2 meters, depending on who you ask. And it's been loosely held by Earth's gravity since around April. Expect it to drift away around the turn of the year.

[00:15:11] [SPEAKER_00] And Starship Flight 15 is still targeted for November, with no date from SpaceX yet. Next, time to look up. And we'll start with something happening this weekend that isn't a star or a planet.

[00:15:23] [SPEAKER_01] NASA's TWIM escapade spacecraft are swinging past Earth on their way to Mars, each firing its engine during the flyby. Both burns happen over southern Australia. The first is at 8.51 on Saturday night, Sydney time. The second is at 9.51 on Monday night.

[00:15:38] [SPEAKER_00] One thing our calculations turned up, at Saturday's burn, the sun is only 16 degrees below the horizon in Sydney, so the sky isn't fully dark yet. Monday's burn isn't a properly dark sky. If you're planning to try with a telescope, Monday's the better bet. In North America, that first burn falls into small hours of Saturday morning.

[00:15:57] [SPEAKER_01] Before sunrise this week, Venus sits just over a degree from the bright star Spica, low in the east. On Saturday morning, a very thin crescent moon joins them. And this one is a northern wind. From New York, the moon and Venus are about one and a half degrees apart. From London, about two. And from Los Angeles, closer to three.

[00:16:16] [SPEAKER_00] From Sydney on Saturday, they're more than eight degrees apart. Our turn comes on Sunday morning when the moon is about four and a half degrees from Venus, but it's only two and a half percent lit and just four degrees up, so you'll need a clear eastern horizon and some luck.

[00:16:30] [SPEAKER_01] New moon is on Monday the 9th at 7.02 Universal Time. That's 6.02 on Monday evening in Sydney. Dark skies all around next week.

[00:16:39] [SPEAKER_00] And with the moon out of the way, here's one for southern observers. Messier 30, a globular cluster in Capricornus. NASA released a lovely new Hubble image of it this week. Once it's fully dark, it's about 67 degrees up from Sydney. From Los Angeles and New York, it's under about 33 degrees. And from London, just 15. That one's ours.

[00:16:59] [SPEAKER_01] Saturn is well placed in the evening sky everywhere. About 50 degrees up from Sydney at full dark and a bit lower further north.

[00:17:07] [SPEAKER_00] And for the north, the headline act, Mars and Jupiter are closing in before dawn. They're about four degrees apart now. And our calculation puts their closest approach at 1.2 degrees at 2 a.m. Universal Time on the 16th.

[00:17:21] [SPEAKER_01] From Los Angeles, they're about 70 degrees up before sunrise. From New York, 64. From London, 53. From Sydney, about 32. Still easy to see, just lower.

[00:17:31] [SPEAKER_00] Watch too for the northern torrents, peaking around the 12th. Not many meteors, but they're known for slow, bright fireballs.

[00:17:38] [SPEAKER_01] And as always, because it's our duty to make sure you stay safe, never look directly at the sun. If you ever do observe it, use only a solar filter certified to ISO 123112-2 or a proper projection method. Ordinary sunglasses are not safe.

[00:17:56] [SPEAKER_00] That's the show for Friday. Light from newborn stars clearing the fog of the early universe, the sharpest radio picture ever made at low frequencies, Blue Origin's new hardware, and white asteroid shapes matter.

[00:18:09] [SPEAKER_01] Tomorrow is the weekend wrap with The Week That Was. And if you've got a question about anything we've covered, you can reach us through the contact form at AstronomyDaily.io, where you'll also find every episode and our newsletter. We're on social media at Astro Daily Pod. I'm Avery. And I'm Anna. Clear skies, everyone. And if you're under a dark sky on Monday night in Australia, keep an eye out for a little spacecraft on its way to Mars.