Space News Today

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 111 27 new Trans Neptunian Objects discovered in the outer solar system The first ever joint observation of Trans Neptunian objects by NASA’s Hubble and Webb space telescopes has discovered 27 new worlds in the dark outer reaches of the solar system. A decagon discovered at Saturn's south pole New observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a giant, evolving, 10-sided decagon atmospheric structure encircling Saturn's south pole. LINK’s failed rescue mission scopes its target but can’t save it The LINK spacecraft which was meant to rescue NASA's doomed Swift Gamma Ray space Telescope (https://phys.org/news/2026-06-nasa-swift-telescope-falling-earth.html) has now reached to within 15 kilometres of Swift and has even managed to take some images of the stricken observatory. The Science Report The latest data on HIV and sexually transmitted diseases in Australia paints a mixed picture. Climate change forcing a decline in global sea weed forests. Asian elephants shown to resist impulsive behaviour in favour of rational problem solving. The artificial-intelligence chatbot Claude cracks Fermat’s last theorem. Alex on Tech the phone duo.

Our Guests This Week Dr Fred Jourdan from Curtin University ESA BepiColombo Project Scientist Johannes Benkhoff DLR Planetary Scientist Jorn Helbert Our regular guests: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from techadvice.life Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics 🌏 Get Our Exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.bitesz.com/nordvpn (http://www.bitesz.com/nordvpn) . The discounts and bonuses are incredible! And it’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌ If you’d like to support the podcast and gain access to bonus content by becoming a SpaceTime crew member, you can do just that through The Big Bang editions on Patreon, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Details on the Support page on our website https://www.bitesz.com/show/spacetime/support/ (https://www.bitesz.com/show/spacetime/support/)

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SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 110 Lunar far side rocks rewriting history A new study claims the timing and intensity of asteroid bombardment across the lunar surface declined gradually, rather than being a short, intense burst of impacts as previously thought. The crystals that might have made Snow Ball Earth worse A new study claims planet Earth may have been pushed deeper into a global deep freeze known as snowball Earth by something as ordinary as salt. Meteor strike reported off the Western Australian coast The European Space Agency’s Near Earth Objects co-ordination centre has reported a meteor impact in the Indian Ocean off the coast of north western Australia. The Science Report Warnings of a ten percent chase that AI could cause human extinction within the next decade. The world enters a new era of artificial general intelligence with the release of GPT-6 Astra. A new study has shown that Psychiatrists agree on a diagnosis in only 55% of cases. The 2026 Ig Nobels handed out in Switzerland showing what happens to old undies. Skeptics guide to the truth about surveys.

Our Guests This Week Dr Fred Jourdan from Curtin University ESA BepiColombo Project Scientist Johannes Benkhoff DLR Planetary Scientist Jorn Helbert Our regular guests: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from techadvice.life Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics 🌏 Get Our Exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.bitesz.com/nordvpn (http://www.bitesz.com/nordvpn) . The discounts and bonuses are incredible! And it’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌ If you’d like to support the podcast and gain access to bonus content by becoming a SpaceTime crew member, you can do just that through The Big Bang editions on Patreon, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Details on the Support page on our website https://www.bitesz.com/show/spacetime/support/ (https://www.bitesz.com/show/spacetime/support/) For more SpaceTime and show links: https://linktr.ee/biteszHQ (https://linktr.ee/biteszHQ) If you love this podcast, please get someone else to listen too. Thank you…

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An Australian-led team has rebuilt thirty years of supernova observations into one consistent catalogue — and it adds fresh weight to the idea that dark energy is not constant. We also ask whether the young Sun swallowed a super-Earth, find out why a quiet Sun is bad news at thirty-five thousand feet, and watch JWST run the most sensitive exomoon search ever attempted. Plus a Crew-13 update and a skywatch with a live aurora alert for both hemispheres. In this episode · Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four Type Ia supernovae, rebuilt from Pantheon+ and the Dark Energy Survey's full five-year sample into a single internally consistent catalogue by Ryan Camilleri and Professor Tamara Davis at the University of Queensland, with ANU, Swinburne and international colleagues. · On their own the supernovae give a matter density of 0.310 for flat ΛCDM. Combined with the CMB and baryon acoustic oscillations, a tension appears under constant dark energy — and eases when dark energy is allowed to evolve. Preference: 2.5–3.1 sigma. · Why that is interesting but not a discovery, and why a second independent line of evidence pointing the same way as DESI changes the shape of the argument. · Professor Mutlu Yildiz (Ege University) on whether the young Sun engulfed a planet of 5–10 Earth masses — and whether that single event explains both the solar sound-speed discrepancy and the Sun's missing lithium. · Yaniv, Yair and Price on six balloon flights to 35 km: cosmic radiation at cruising altitude runs 40–60% higher at solar minimum, with an anticorrelation of r = −0.71 against solar activity. · David Kipping stacks twelve JWST transits of LP 890-9c and excludes moons down to 0.1 Earth radii across the entire Hill region — the most sensitive exomoon search on record. · Crew-13 now targeting no earlier than late September after an oxidiser leak in Dragon's propulsion system. · Skywatch: a coronal-hole stream arriving today with aurora chances at both ends of the planet, Venus at greatest brilliancy on 18 September, Mars past Pollux, Saturn towards opposition, International Observe the Moon Night on the 19th, and the equinox on the 22nd. Sources · University of Queensland — 'Big supernova dataset challenges dark energy theory', 8 September 2026 · Camilleri, Lee, Davis, Rubin, Shah, Scolnic, Lidman et al., 'Supernovae Unite: Combining Pantheon+ and DES-SN5YR', Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia — arXiv:2609.05053; companion host-mass paper arXiv:2609.05321 · Royal Astronomical Society — ''Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet', 10 September 2026. Yildiz, MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1527 · Yaniv, Yair & Price, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, September 2026 — cosmic radiation at aviation altitudes across the solar cycle · Kipping, 'JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet', arXiv:2609.05301, 4 September 2026 · NASA Space Station blog — 'NASA, SpaceX Adjust Crew-13 Launch Date', 29 August 2026; Canadian Space Agency update, September 2026 · EarthSky sun news and NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center outlooks, 12–14 September 2026 · NASA Science — 'What's Up: September 2026 Skywatching Tips'

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Space Nuts: Q&A on Mitsubishi's Role in Telescope Manufacturing, Jupiter's Storms, and Gravitational Waves

In this Q&A episode of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson tackle a range of fascinating listener questions, from the involvement of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in telescope manufacturing to the mysteries of Jupiter’s storms and the nature of gravitational waves. Join them as they delve into these cosmic queries with their signature wit and expertise.

Key topics

- Thomas from Canberra asks about Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and their role in the manufacturing of telescope hardware at Siding Spring Observatory. Fred Watson explains the engineering behind the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the significance of its construction.

- Young listener Emily poses a question about Jupiter's Great Red Spot, prompting a discussion on the dynamics of storms and atmospheric patterns on the gas giant.

- Butch from the UK inquires about the Parker Solar Probe and its mission to study the sun, as well as the advancements in solar observation technology.

- Trent from North Georgia wonders if gravitational waves are slowed down by passing through matter, leading to an insightful explanation of how these waves interact with the fabric of spacetime.

- The episode wraps up with a lively discussion on the role of artificial intelligence in astronomy and its implications for the future of scientific research.

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction to the Q&A format and listener interactions

01:20 - Thomas's question about Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Siding Spring Observatory

10:30 - Emily's question about storms on Jupiter

18:45 - Butch's inquiry on the Parker Solar Probe and solar missions

26:00 - Trent's question about gravitational waves and their speed

32:15 - Discussion on artificial intelligence in astronomy and its impact

40:00 - Closing remarks and listener engagement

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Today's episode — The Weekend Wrap, Saturday 12 September 2026: OUR LEAD: A SMALLER MERCURY Mercury has been contracting for four and a half billion years as its huge iron core cools, and it writes the record on its own surface — in long lobe-fronted cliffs called lobate scarps, where one slab of crust has ridden up over another. Add up all that shortening and you get the total contraction. The trouble was that the surface record always gave a smaller number than thermal models predicted. New work led by Gaku Nishiyama at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, published in Geophysical Research Letters and released by the American Geophysical Union on 10 September, explains the gap — and the explanation is beautifully simple. Impact debris buries the cliffs. Using MESSENGER imagery reworked with stereophotogrammetry, the team showed that the rougher the terrain, the fewer shortening structures you can find per unit area. Since faults don't know what the surface above them looks like, that correlation isn't geology — it's a detection limit. Correct for it and Mercury's total loss of diameter rises by 10–30%, from a range topping out near 16 km to as much as 23 km. That points to a larger metal core, fewer light elements in it, or a hotter start — and it closes the long-standing mismatch with the physics. BepiColombo is about ten weeks from gravity capture at Mercury, carrying a far better laser altimeter and a much less eccentric orbit. If Nishiyama is right, it should find the missing small scarps in exactly the rough ground where today's maps look suspiciously empty. Some of that data will come home through ESA's New Norcia station in Western Australia, run in partnership with CSIRO. THE WEEK THAT WAS · Monday — Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reached orbit from Andøya Spaceport in Norway on 5 September, the first vehicle ever to do it from Western European soil, carrying five university cubesats. · Tuesday — giant-impact simulations including temperature-dependent rock strength can produce an intact Moon in about five hours rather than a slowly accreting debris disc. A sensitivity result, not a new origin story. · Wednesday — Hubble and Webb together found 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects down to about 5 km, and the small ones keep the colours of their birth population rather than looking like collision fragments. · Thursday — 109 localised fast radio bursts were used to measure how far galactic feedback has smoothed the clumpiness of matter, finding more cool gas in big haloes than X-ray surveys see. · Friday — population synthesis suggests magnetars are roughly half of all neutron stars at birth, not one in a hundred, which doubles the Galactic supernova rate and makes magnetar central engines affordable. ALSO IN THIS EPISODE · The Sun's superflare potential — new work from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research with the University of Colorado, released 10 September. Scaling the 300 strongest modern solar flares against the size of their active regions, then applying that relation to the giant sunspot group of 1947 — the largest in four centuries of observation — gives a region with enough stored magnetic energy to power a superflare. Potential, not prediction: the caveats are covered properly on air. · Rocket Lab has filed a protest with the US Government Accountability Office over NASA's ~$700M Mars Telecommunications Network award to Blue Origin, on eligibility and technical-evaluation grounds. A GAO decision is due around mid-December. · Starship Flight 14 has slipped to no earlier than 18 September — and the tower catch of the ship is deferred to a later flight, which corrects how we framed it earlier this month. SKYWATCH — BOTH HEMISPHERES · The Moon and Venus about half a degree apart in front of Spica on the evenings of 13–14 September — Southern Hemisphere observers get the better geometry. · Venus reaches greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. · SN 2026aaiv, a Type Ia supernova in NGC 7331 in Pegasus, around magnitude 12 — the week's best observing target, and far easier from North America than from Sydney. · Saturn building towards its 4 October opposition, with Dione and Tethys events in the small hours for northern telescope owners. · Mars passing 6° south of Pollux pre-dawn on 18 September. · The zodiacal light — an evening object in the west from the Southern Hemisphere, a pre-dawn object in the east from the Northern. Best chance until early October. · Eye safety: never point binoculars or a telescope near the Sun when hunting daylight Venus or twilight Mercury. Solar filters must be certified to ISO 12312-2, fitted over the front of the instrument, and inspected every time. Links & sources · Mercury contraction — Geophysical Research Letters: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL124067 · Mercury contraction — AGU Newsroom release: https://news.agu.org/press-release/mercury-is-shrinking-more-than-we-thought · Superflares — Max...