Space News Today

Is Mars still volcanically alive? Europe's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter keeps catching hydrogen chloride, a gas that comes out of volcanoes on Earth, above fresh cracks on the giant Alba Mons volcano, in the wrong season, in one place and low to the ground. We unpack the evidence, the proposed 'ice lid', and everything this result is not. Then it's The Week That Was: two black holes in one early galaxy, Swift's fiery end over Sumatra, ESCAPADE's powered slingshots over Australia, a planet rescued from Webb's glare, and the cosmic leaf blower. Plus the week's sky from both hemispheres. In this episode • Lead: Hydrogen chloride detections at Alba Mons as a potential sign of igneous activity on Mars (Trokhimovskiy, Mège et al., Science Advances, 4 Nov 2026). Detections first presented at 2025 conferences. • Week That Was: LID-1166 dual black holes (E220); Swift re-entry, 4 Nov (E221); ESCAPADE powered flybys (E222); FLIP digital-twin coronagraph and 51 Eridani b (E223); Lyman-alpha 'leaf blower' (E224). • Arc updates: AR4566 M3.5 flare and storm watch; Starship Flight 15; Voyager 1 one light-day; BepiColombo; Hera. • Skywatch: Venus and Spica; thin crescent Moon; new Moon 9 Nov; spotting ESCAPADE Gold; Mars–Jupiter 16 Nov; aurora watch; ISO 12312-2 eye safety. Sources • Science Advances, DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aeb9422 — 'Enigmatic HCl detections as a potential signature of igneous activity on Mars' • ESA release, 4 Nov 2026 — European orbiter detects hints of volcanic activity on Mars • NASA ESCAPADE blog, 2 Nov 2026 — science.nasa.gov/blogs/escapade • NASA Swift blog — science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift • EarthSky Sun news, 6 Nov 2026 astronomydaily.io · @AstroDailyPod · Bitesz.com Podcast Network YouTube description Is Mars still volcanically alive? ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has caught hydrogen chloride above fresh fissures on Alba Mons, out of season, in one place, low to the ground. We look at the evidence, the proposed ice lid, and what this result is NOT. Then The Week That Was: dual black holes in LID-1166, Swift's re-entry, ESCAPADE's slingshot over Australia, FLIP and 51 Eridani b, and the cosmic leaf blower. Plus this week's sky for both hemispheres. astronomydaily.io · @AstroDailyPod · Bitesz.com Podcast Network Chapters (estimate — confirm against final audio) 00:00 Cold open 00:40 Is Mars still breathing? Hydrogen chloride at Alba Mons 09:05 The Week That Was 14:10 Skywatch: Venus, Spica, ESCAPADE, Mars and Jupiter 17:30 Outro

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Show notes

Light from newborn stars may have blown the fog out of the early universe. A new study by Shyam Menon (Flatiron Institute, ANU PhD) and Aaron Smith (UT Dallas) finds that Lyman-alpha radiation — ultraviolet light that bounces from hydrogen atom to hydrogen atom — can clear diffuse gas and dust out of young galaxies while leaving their dense star clusters free to keep forming stars, helping explain why JWST sees so many bright galaxies so early. Also: LOFAR's sharpest and deepest low-frequency radio image yet (almost 63,000 sources, 200 hours of observing); Blue Origin's new GS3 third stage and Northstar engine; and Sandia simulations showing that an asteroid's shape and orientation can change a nuclear stand-off deflection by up to five times. Quick hits: the space station's final roll-out solar array is installed, sunspot region AR4566 fires an M3 flare as October's sunspot number falls, and Earth picks up a tiny temporary mini-moon, 2026 QQ8. Skywatch for both hemispheres: ESCAPADE's powered flybys over southern Australia, the Moon with Venus and Spica, New Moon on the 9th, globular cluster M30 for southern observers, and Mars closing on Jupiter before dawn. Sources: Menon & Smith, The Astrophysical Journal (2026), DOI 10.3847/1538-4357/aeaed6 · de Jong et al., arXiv 2611.06152 (accepted A&A) · Blue Origin announcements, 5 Nov 2026 · Moore et al., Icarus (2026) · NOAA SWPC · Minor Planet Center MPEC 2026-U95 · NASA ESCAPADE blog, 2 Nov 2026.

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Friday SpaceTime 20261106 Series 29 Episode 133 Mysterious disturbances from Betelgeuse Astronomers have detected strange happenings on the mysterious companion star that lurks in the shadows of Betelgeuse. Solving the mystery of the Orion Nebula Astronomers may have finally solved the mystery of the Orion Nebula the largest star forming region near Earth. X-37B Space Shuttle still on mission The U.S. Space Force's X-37B spaceplane is now almost 14 months into its latest mission testing new quantum inertial navigation technology. November Skywatch The giant spiral galaxy M31 Andromeda. the Crab Nebula M1 and three meteor showers are among the highlights of the November night skies on Skywatch. Our Guests This Week HERA Principal Investigator Patrick Michel from ESA Our regular guests: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from techadvice.life Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics And Senior science writer and Sky and Telescope magazine contributor Jonathan Nally 🌏 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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Show notes

A Northwestern-led team builds a physics-based digital twin of the James Webb Space Telescope's coronagraph and recovers the giant planet 51 Eridani b in two-year-old data where standard processing could not see it. Plus VVV CL001, a dust-hidden cluster near the Milky Way's core dated at 13.4 billion years; China's most detailed account yet of its two-launch crewed Moon landing plan; and the flare alert system that tells sounding rockets exactly when to launch, as sunspot region AR4566 turns magnetically complex. The Planet in the Glare (lead) Ferrer-Chavez, Wang, Bouman, Freeman, Pueyo et al., Nature, 4 Nov 2026, DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-11213-z. FLIP (Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets) models JWST/NIRCam coronagraph optics as a digital twin and subtracts simulated starlight. Tested on HIP 65426, 51 Eridani and TYC 5899: sensitivity improved 2–15×; 51 Eri b recovered at 5σ in F430M (CO₂ band) data where standard processing failed. Not a new planet; three-star demonstration; picometre-stability relief for the Habitable Worlds Observatory is a prospect, not yet shown. VVV CL001: the oldest cluster in the Galaxy? Olivares Carvajal, Zoccali et al., accepted to A&A, arXiv 2610.27969 (posted 20 Oct 2026). Age 13.4 ± 0.4 Gyr from Magellan/FourStar and Hubble photometry; [Fe/H] ≈ −2.2; ~7.3 kpc in the bulge. ~1 Gyr additional systematic from distance; Ton 2 dated at 13.6 Gyr — a strong candidate, not a settled record. China's crewed Moon landing plan Wang Xiang, 7th Manned Space Symposium, Beijing, 31 Oct 2026. Two Long March 10 launches; Lanyue lander and Mengzhou crew ship rendezvous in lunar orbit; crew of three, two land, rover on first landing. No new dates; target remains before 2030. Catching a flare in the act Early flare alert system, The Astrophysical Journal, 4 Nov 2026, DOI 10.3847/1538-4357/ae95fd. Enabled FOXSI-4 and Hi-C Flare to launch into an M-class flare on 17 Apr 2024 and FOXSI-5 to catch three flares on 14 May 2026. AR4566 reached beta-gamma-delta classification on 4 Nov. Quick hits Swift re-entered 7:39 a.m. EST 4 Nov (12:39 UTC) over North Sumatra; NASA's SSPICY (Starfish Space Otter) declared unrecoverable; final ISS roll-out solar array spacewalk (Kutryk, Menon); Hera begins early characterisation at Didymos per ESA's timeline.

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Space Nuts: A New Dwarf Planet, 3I/ATLAS, and Neptune’s Hidden Trojans

In this episode of Space Nuts , Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson explore three discoveries from across the Solar System and beyond. They begin with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s discovery of a distant, potentially large dwarf planet, and discuss what its unusual orbit could tell us about the hunt for the elusive Planet Nine. Next, they examine new James Webb Space Telescope observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, whose unusual chemistry may preserve clues to its origins in a very cold environment billions of years ago. Finally, the hosts turn to Neptune’s long-sought Trojan asteroids, discovered in data from the Rubin Observatory by a team in Belfast. Join Andrew and Fred Watson for distant worlds, ancient cosmic ice and asteroids hiding in the dark.

Key topics

- The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s discovery of dwarf planet candidate 2026 ED138.

- What makes an object a dwarf planet, and how its orbit could inform the Planet Nine debate.

- 3I/ATLAS’s unusual isotope ratios, methane and possible origins in an ancient, cold environment.

- The discovery of Neptune’s Trojan asteroids and why they have been so difficult to observe.

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction and episode overview

01:20 - The Vera C. Rubin Observatory discovers a new distant dwarf planet

05:30 - What defines a dwarf planet and how it may eventually be named

09:00 - The object’s size, unusual orbit and possible relevance to Planet Nine

12:00 - 3I/ATLAS and its unusual chemistry revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope

16:00 - Isotope ratios, methane and clues to the comet’s age and origins

20:00 - Neptune’s Trojan asteroids are finally discovered

24:00 - How Trojan asteroids share a planet’s orbit and why Neptune’s were hard to find

27:00 - Closing remarks and where to follow Space Nuts

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