Space News Today

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 106 The most distant Blazar ever seen Astronomers have detected the most distant blazar ever recorded. The blazar -- catalogued as OP 313 was detected some 8 billion light years away. Did the motion of an ocean carve Enceladus's tiger stripes? A new study suggests the iconic tiger stripes at the south pole of the Saturnian ice moon Enceladus may have been formed by ocean waves. SpaceX to build the world’s biggest space port in Louisiana SpaceX boss Elon Musk has announced plans to build the world’s largest spaceport in the Louisiana wetlands on the Gulf Coast 185 kilometres west of New Orleans. The Science Report It seems most girls prefer lovers to fighters at least in non-human animals. Scientists discover a type of brain activity that’s 'tagging' priority information to remember later. Discovery of the fossilized remains of a giant crocodile that once dominated the food chain. The trend for retro phones could mean people want to distance themselves from their smartphones. Skeptics guide to beating up psychic stories. Our Guests This Week Professor Paulo de Souza from Edith Cowan University Bryan Butler from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory 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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Anna and Avery cover BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury beginning today, as the ESA/JAXA mission jettisons the transfer module that has carried it for nearly eight years and nine planetary flybys. Plus: NASA awards Blue Origin a $700 million contract to build a dedicated Mars communications orbiter, Hubble confirms a brand-new ten-sided cloud pattern at Saturn's south pole — first spotted by amateur astronomers, one of them in outback New South Wales — and China's Galactic Energy flies its reusable Pallas-1 rocket for the first time.

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This episode includes AI-generated content.

Episode link: https://play.headliner.app/episode/35086238?utm_source=youtube

Space Nuts: Spanish Eclipse, Nancy Grace Roman Launch, Cloud Nine, and Venus's Mysterious Clouds

Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson cover four big astronomy stories in this episode, from Fred’s trip to view a sunset eclipse in Spain to the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. They also unpack a starless dwarf galaxy called Cloud Nine and a new way of thinking about the strange dark material in Venus’s clouds.

Guests and speakers

Andrew Dunkley - Host, frames the news, asks listener questions, and guides the discussion.

Professor Fred Watson - Astronomer at large, explains the eclipse, the Roman telescope, Cloud Nine, and Venus’s clouds.

Key topics

In this episode, Fred recounts the Spanish eclipse expedition

The eclipse was only 9 degrees above the western horizon at totality, making the viewing conditions unusually challenging.

He and Marnie led a 16-person tour through France, Spain, and Switzerland before settling near Santander in northern Spain.

They staked out a viewing site 2 kilometers from the hotel, set up a gazebo, and had to tie it down to a car to keep it from blowing away.

The weather looked threatening, but a hole opened in the cloud just before totality, giving them a clear view of the corona.

Fred described the yellowish corona, pink hydrogen clouds, and the crowd of around 2,000 people.

We discuss the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch

Andrew watched the launch live after being nudged by his own brain at the right moment.

Fred noted the launch was flawless, with 27 Merlin motors firing.

The telescope is headed for the L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers away.

Roman is a 2.4-meter Hubble-class telescope but with 100 times the field of view.

Its wide-angle infrared design should enable major surveys of dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets via its coronagraph.

Fred explains why Cloud Nine matters

Cloud Nine is described as a starless dwarf galaxy about 14 million light years away.

It lies near Messier 94 and was studied using the Gran Telescopio Canarias and its Hypercam instrument.

The deep exposure was 2.36 hours, yet the team found no convincing stellar population.

Fred says theory suggests the gas may be too hot to cool and collapse into stars because of the ultraviolet background radiation after reionization.

He says Cloud Nine may be the first strong example of a galaxy predicted by standard cosmology but never before clearly identified.

Venus’s clouds are still puzzling astronomers

Fred explains that Venus appears yellowish because we see the top of its cloud layer, especially in visible light.

In ultraviolet, Venus shows dramatic global cloud patterns caused by an as-yet unidentified absorber.

The new study uses radiative transfer modeling to constrain what the unknown absorber could be.

The team compares Venus’s cloud droplets to cigarette smoke, tiny particles that look light-colored when dispersed but could become dark sludge in bulk.

The result suggests the absorber must be very efficient, very concentrated, or both, but it is not being claimed as evidence of life.

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Today's episode — S05E183, Wednesday September 2, 2026: Main story: A thermal anomaly beneath Mars's south pole. Writing in Nature on August 27, a team led by Alexander Berne (Caltech PhD '26, now University of Arizona) reports that the interior of Mars's southern hemisphere is 200–400 °C hotter than the northern hemisphere and partially molten. The team used tidal tomography — measuring how much the solid body of Mars flexes under the Sun's tidal pull by tracking minute velocity changes in three orbiters (Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) across roughly 25 years of radio tracking data. Hotter, softer rock deforms more, so the degree of flex reveals interior temperature. The result offers a deep-interior explanation for the Martian crustal dichotomy — the sharp division between the smooth low northern plains and the ancient, thickly crusted southern highlands, unexplained since the Viking era — and also accounts for the concentration of crustal magnetic anomalies in the south and the unexpectedly strong seismic-wave damping seen by InSight. The cause of the asymmetry remains open: a giant early impact, lopsided mantle convection, or a heat-trapping compositional layer. Co-authors span Brown University, NASA Goddard, the University of Arizona, Academia Sinica, the University of Rome, TU Delft, UCLA, UT Austin, CU Boulder and UC Santa Cruz. Crew-13 stands down. NASA and SpaceX announced on August 29 that an oxidizer leak had been found in the Dragon spacecraft's propulsion system during standard prelaunch processing, delaying the Crew-13 launch from its September 12 target. Teams are performing additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework before flight; a new target date will be announced once available. The crew is commander Jessica Watkins (NASA), pilot Luke Delaney (NASA), and mission specialists Joshua Kutryk (CSA) and Sergey Teteryatnikov (Roscosmos), flying an approximately seven-month increment with significant station maintenance and several spacewalks planned. Swift is observing again. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory restarted science operations on August 26, with two of its three instruments back online and the third expected within weeks. Swift's telescopes had been powered down progressively — the ultraviolet/optical and X-ray telescopes in February, the Burst Alert Telescope in April — to reduce power draw and atmospheric drag while awaiting a boost from Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft, launched in July. NASA announced on August 19 that LINK would not attempt the capture after developing attitude-control problems. With no rescue coming, NASA has restarted the instruments to extract as much science as possible. NASA expects Swift to fall below roughly 300 km (185 miles) — where telescope operations become impractical — within the next one to two months. Katalyst will still fly proximity operations to demonstrate in-orbit servicing techniques. An 80,000-year mission to Alpha Centauri. The Seattle-area nonprofit Fermi Explorer Mission announced plans to launch a 100–200 kg probe toward Alpha Centauri (4.4 light-years away) at the end of 2029, most likely on a SpaceX rideshare. Solar electric propulsion plus repeated perihelion pumping manoeuvres would build a cruise speed of 24.2 km/s (about 54,000 mph) — faster than New Horizons at Pluto — for a journey of roughly 80,000 years: 12 years of active operations followed by around 79,500 years of coasting. Budget is under $15 million, with $10 million verbally pledged. Payload is at least 1 kg in a shielded 10 cm cube, including a digitised Voyager Golden Record, messages from children worldwide, and cosmic-ray detectors. Co-founders Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean are behind the space computing company Starcloud; the advisory board includes Rob Meyerson (former Blue Origin president) and Jeff Thornburg (former SpaceX propulsion lead). Johnston: "We'll be the first to leave, and the last to arrive." It would be the first spacecraft deliberately aimed at a specific star. Tonight's sky and the month ahead: Five naked-eye planets are in play through September. Venus dominates the early evening, low in the west/west-southwest about 14° up an hour after sunset (Sydney sunset ≈ 5:34pm AEST), still close to Spica after last night's conjunction, and building to maximum brilliance on September 18 — with a thin crescent Moon alongside on the 14th. Saturn is up most of the night at magnitude +0.4 with its rings tilted just 8° from edge-on, the narrowest in about a dozen years, and rides far higher for Southern Hemisphere observers than for northern ones. Mars rises around 1:40am and is slowly brightening; Jupiter rises east-northeast around 3:50am, and on September 8 the Moon occults Jupiter for much of North America. Mercury appears low in evening twilight in the final week, about 1° above Spica on the 25th. The Moon is a waning gibbous heading to last quarter on September 4....

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 105 More evidence Mars once had liquid water More than 20 years after NASA's Mars Spirit rover landed on the red planet scientists have uncovered new evidence that suggests liquid water – essential for life as we know it -- may once have covered large parts of the Martian surface. Are mysterious little red dots hiding something big A new study claims mysterious Little Red Dots seen near the dawn of the universe are likely to reside in small, dense compact star forming galaxies. Chang'e-7 lunar mission delayed Beijing has scrubbed for now its Chang’e-7 mission to the Moon sighting a failure to meet strict launch conditions. The Science Report A promising new way to tackle one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer. Proof that alumni relationships between judges and lawyers are affecting court rulings. Looking for inexpensive and safer alternatives to dangerous lithium-ion batteries. The new app helping blind or visually impaired people navigate outdoors. Alex on Tech: Meta gets a slap on the wrist.

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