Hide and Seek - The Faintest Planet Ever Imaged, Pluto's Landslides & Starlink's 355,000 Dodges

0:00 Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily dose of space and astronomy news. I'm Anna. Avery: And I'm, um, avery. It's Thursday, the 16th of July, 2026, and we have a genuinely lovely lineup for you today, including a story that's been 10 years in the making, or more accurately, 10 years in the hiding. Anna: That's Our lead astronomers have finally caught a planet that's been playing hide and seek with them for over a decade. And it turns out to be the faintest exoplanet ever imaged from Earth.

0:32 And it lives in a southern constellation, which makes it feel just a little bit like ours. Avery: We've also got the completion of a nine year project to build the sharpest radio map of the entire sky. And the James Webb Space Telescope catching a supermassive black hole in the act of feeding itself. Anna: Then it's a double bill from the outer solar system. Landslides on Pluto spotted for the first time, and evidence that Pluto's big moon, Charon, once spun more than 10 times faster than it does today.

1:04 Avery: And we'll wrap the news with some sobering numbers. SpaceX's Starlink satellites had to dodge potential collisions more than 355,000 times in the past year. We'll unpack what that means for everyone's Anna: orbit, plus your Southern hemisphere sky watching for tonight. Let's get into it. Avery, cast your mind. Back in 2008, astronomers directly imaged a planet around the young star Beta Pictoris, one of the very first exoplanets ever photographed. That was Beta Pictoris B. A second planet C followed.

1:39 And ever since, there's been a, uh, nagging suspicion that the system was hiding Avery: something more because of the disk. Right. Beta Pictoris has this magnificent debris, uh, disk. It's the poster child for planet formation. And parts of it were warped and sculpted in ways that two known planets couldn't fully explain. Anna: Exactly. And now we know why. In a study published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile has confirmed a third planet, Beta Pictoris D. And here's the headline.

2:15 It's roughly 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris B, which makes it the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from Earth. Avery: A hundred times fainter. To put that in context for everyone, direct imaging means actually capturing the planet's own light in a photograph next to a star that's overwhelmingly brighter. It's often compared to spotting a firefly next to a lighthouse. This is spotting a very Dim firefly. Anna: And the discovery itself was serendipitous. Ben Sutliff at the University of Edinburgh who co led the study, said they were originally just going back to study the known planet Beta Pictoris B to see how it changed over time.

2:58 But in their new images from the VLT's Eris instrument, there was something else. A faint point of light separated from Planet B that sent them down an entirely new path. Avery: And this is where the hide and seek comes in. Once they knew what to look for, they trawled back through the archives. And there it was, lurking. In more than a decade of old observations from the VLT SPEAR instrument and even in James Webb Space Telescope data, the planet had been photographed for years. Nobody had noticed.

3:30 Anna: Co author Jane Burkeby at Oxford put it beautifully. Planet D has been playing hide and seek with us for over a decade and now we can say found you. Avery: So what do we know about the world itself? Anna: It's a gas giant about 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter, which sounds big, but is actually the lightweight of the family. Planets B and c are each 10 Jupiter masses. Planet D sits, um, much further out from the star on a wide orbit, so it's cooler and dimmer than its siblings, hence the difficulty.

4:02 And satisfyingly, its presence helps explain that odd structure in the debris disk that's puzzled astronomers for years. Avery: There's also a nice milestone tucked in here. This makes Beta Pictoris only the second planetary system after HR 8799, where more than two planets have been directly. We're building up actual family portraits of other solar systems now. Anna: And an independent team at the University of California spotted the same object in their own data at almost the same time, which gives the detection real confidence.

4:37 Now the bit our audience will love. Beta Pictoris is a southern star. It sits in the constellation Pictor, the Painter's Easel, just next to brilliant canopus. And at 63 light years away, it's visible from Australia and New Zealand. Though right now in July it's low in our evening sky and best hunted in the pre dawn hours later in Avery: the year, a planetary system with three photographed worlds sitting in our southern sky. Not bad at all. Next, A, uh, project nine years in the making has just crossed the finish line.

5:11 The U.S. national Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory has announced that observations for the Very Large Array Sky Survey VLAS are complete. It's the most detailed radio survey of the sky ever conducted. Anna: This is the VLA in New Mexico. The iconic Y shaped array of 27 dishes from every space documentary ever made. Avery: That's the one. From September 2017 through February this year, the array repeatedly swept about 34,000 square degrees. Essentially the whole sky visible from New Mexico and everything north of minus 40 degrees declination.

5:53 That's roughly 80% of the entire celestial sphere. Mapped at a resolution of about 2 and a half arcseconds in the 2 to 4 GHz band. Anna: And how does that compare to what came before? Avery: It's about 18 times sharper than the previous benchmark all sky radio survey from the 1990s. The numbers are staggering. Roughly six and a half thousand thousand observing hours. Half a petabyte of raw data. And the processed data products are expected to reach around 2 petabytes, the largest data volume the VLA has ever produced.

6:29 They use a clever on the fly mosaicing technique where the antennas sweep continuously across the sky in a raster pattern rather than stopping to point at each field. Anna: And crucially, they surveyed the sky multiple times over those nine years. Which means VLAS isn't just a map, it's a movie. Comparing epochs revealed a dynamic radio sky. Sources that flare, fade or appear from nowhere. Exploding stars, feeding black holes, colliding neutron stars. Avery: Which brings us to the timing. And honestly, the timing is the best part of the story.

7:04 Just over two weeks ago on June 30, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile began its decade long legacy survey of space and time, sweeping the southern optical sky every few nights. So for the first time in history, we have a complete high resolution radio map and a real time optical transient stream operating simultaneously. Anna: Though when Rubin flags something going bang in the optical, astronomers can immediately check what that patch of sky looks like and looked like in the radio. The whole multi wavelength discovery machine the community has spent two decades building is now switched on and the data's public.

7:44 Avery: Radio astronomers, multi wavelength folks, citizen scientists. The radio sky now belongs to everyone. Anna: Now to a decades old mystery that may finally have its answer. Avery, how do supermassive black holes keep feeding? Nearly every large galaxy hosts one of these monsters. Millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. When they feed, they blast out enormous energy, powerful jets that heat the gas around them. And that's the paradox. That heating should cut off the black hole's own fuel supply.

8:18 So why don't they starve? Avery: The leading idea has been a kind of cosmic recycling loop. The heated gas eventually cools back down, condenses into long thin streamers called filaments and rains back towards the center. Self regulating but Actually seeing the connection filament to black hole has eluded astronomers for decades. Anna: Until now. An international team led by Julie Hvlasic Lorando at the University of Montreal pointed the James Webb Space telescope at NGC 4696, the giant elliptical galaxy at the heart of the Centaurus cluster, about 145 million light years away.

8:57 Their results were published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Avery: And Centaurus, we should note, is a southern constellation. This galaxy cluster rides high in our winter sky right now, though you'll need a decent telescope for the galaxy itself. Anna: White. Now, Hubble had previously photographed a curious S shaped swirl of gas near this galaxy's central black hole. But Hubble could only show where the gas sat, not how it moved. So the team gave Webb's NIRSP instrument nearly eight hours on the target and mapped the motion of the gas deep inside the black hole's sphere of influence, resolving features just 30 light years across in a galaxy hundreds of thousands of light years wide.

9:38 Avery: And the swirl turned out to be Anna: a spinning disk of gas wrapped around the black hole, nearly 800 light years across, with material whipping around at, uh, up to 600 kilometers per second. And here's the money shot. That disk is physically connected to one of the huge infalling filaments stretching out into the galaxy. They watched gas flowing along the filament, pouring into the disk, and from the disk falling onto the black hole. Avery: The missing link caught on camera heat the gas.

10:12 The gas cools into filaments. The filaments feed the disk. The disk feeds the black hole. The black hole heats the gas. Round and round it goes. Anna: Havlasic Lorando said Webb is revealing that black holes might be the ultimate cosmic recyclers. And because this feeding loop shapes when galaxies can and can't form stars, understanding it is really understanding how galaxies, including ours, grow up. Avery: Anna, uh, time for a double bill from the outer solar system. Two stories, one spacecraft, and a dwarf planet that keeps on giving.

10:45 First, scientists have detected landslides on Pluto for the very first time. Anna: This is New Horizons data, isn't it? That Flyby was 11 years ago this week. Avery: It is, and that's the delightful part. A paper in the journal Icarus, which has been making headlines this week, reports that an international team went back through the high resolution images from New Horizons lorry camera pictures showing Pluto's surface at about 300 meters per pixel and found six large landslides inside three impact craters near Sputnik Planita.

11:18 That famous heart shaped nitrogen ice plane. Anna: How do you recognize a landslide on a world made of ice? Avery: Same fingerprints as Earth. Crescent shaped collapse scars near the crater rims. Huge displaced blocks of ice and debris fanning out across the crater floors. The team measured them. These slides descend one and a half to over two kilometers, run out as far as 14 and a half kilometers and the largest covers around 130 square kilometers. Anna: And landslides are everywhere else, aren't they?

11:48 Earth, Mars, Ceres, asteroids, even Pluto's moon Charon showed evidence years ago Pluto itself was the odd one out which was Avery: genuinely puzzling because Pluto has steep crater walls and rugged icy terrain. All the right ingredients. Now the gap is filled and it tells us gravity driven slope processes are actively reshaping Pluto's frozen surface. Even under gravity, a fraction of ours. What triggered them is still open. Possibilities range from tectonic activity to meteoroid impacts. Anna: A world we visited for a few hours in 2015, still handing us firsts a decade later.

12:26 Avery: And um, it's not done because part two of our Pluto double is about Avery: the other half of that famous pair Anna: of Charon, Pluto's enormous moon. So big relative to Pluto that the two really form a double world. And a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications says Charon's mountains have preserved a memory of a wilder youth. Avery: What kind of memory? Anna: A record of despinning across the solar system. Tidal forces gradually slow a body's rotation and as ah, the spin slows the body's shape relaxes stressing and cracking the surface.

13:01 The it's long been theorized for Charon but clear geological evidence was missing. So Han, Zeng Chin and colleagues at ETH Zurich and UCLA examined the orientations and types of tectonic features, mountain ranges and faults in Aus Terra Sharon's northern rugged highlands. Again using New Horizons flyby data. Avery: And um, the tectonic pattern fits the de spinning story beautifully. Anna: Their modeling suggests Charon's rotation period was once around 14.3 hours and it has since slowed to today's roughly 153 hours locked in step with its orbit around Pluto.

13:40 That's more than a tenfold slowdown and the stresses from that transformation are etched into the mountains we photographed in 2015. Avery: Chen said the study drastically changed her understanding of Charon's geologic history. And there's a bonus finding, isn't there about how Charon was born? Anna: Yes, the way despinning and global contraction evolved together favors what's called a cold start for Charon, which is a real clue to the early thermal history of icy moons across the Outer solar system.

14:11 So between Pluto's landslides and charon's slowing spin, one 11 year old dataset gave us two papers in a week. Not a bad return on a flyby. Avery: Our final story today, Anna, uh, comes with some genuinely eye widening numbers. SpaceX has filed its latest semi annual constellation status report with the U.S. federal Communications Commission. And according to coverage of the filing, StarLink satellites performed 207,152 collision avoidance maneuvers between December 2025 and May 2026. Anna: 207,000 in six months, up nearly 60,000 Avery: on the previous half year.

14:55 Put the two periods together and the constellation made over 355,000 dodges in 12 months. More than triple what it performed in all of 2024. At uh, on average, each Starlink satellite now swerves more than 40 times a year. That's nearly a dodge a week per satellite. Anna: Let's be fair to SpaceX for a moment though. These maneuvers are the system working as designed, aren't they? Avery: They are. The satellites dodge autonomously whenever the predicted collision probability exceeds 3 in 10 million, an extremely conservative threshold, far tighter than the industry standard.

15:35 Experts consistently credit SpaceX with managing its traffic well and being transparent with the data. The concern is the trendline, not the competence. Anna: Because the numbers compound. More satellites means more close approaches means more maneuvers means more residual risk that never quite goes to zero. Avery: Exactly the point Huw Lewis makes. He's the University of Birmingham um, astronautics professor who's tracked these reports for years. Each maneuver cuts the collision odds to about one in a million, which sounds negligible, but as he puts it, if you make a million maneuvers with a one in a million residual, you end up with an aggregate risk across the Constellation that you simply can't get rid of.

16:19 His blunt assessment, he thinks we're heading towards a situation where there will be a collision involving an operational satellite in the Constellation. Avery: And the projections on current growth Starlink passes. A million total avoidance maneuvers by mid2027. And by 2030 the constellation could be making more than a million maneuvers every single year. Remember too, and regular listeners will. SpaceX has applied to the FCC to grow Starlink toward 100,000 satellites, a story we covered a couple of weeks back.

16:54 And it's not alone up there. Amazon's Constellation and China's Qian Fan are actively deploying as well. Anna: The number of operational spacecraft in orbit has gone from about 10,000 to about 16,000 in just a year. Other experts are calling for operators to disclose predicted maneuver counts before Constellations are even approved. Though regulators know whether the satellites can Avery: actually keep up, low Earth orbit is a shared resource. And this is the traffic report. We'll keep watching the numbers because everyone from astronomers to airlines to your GPs depends on that neighborhood staying safe.

17:30 Anna: Time now for tonight's skywatching. And for our Southern Hemisphere friends, the news is good. The Moon is a waning crescent rising in the small hours, so evenings this week are dark and glorious, which means Avery: the winter Milky Way at its absolute best face south after dinner. And the galactic core in Sagittarius and Scorpius is almost directly overhead from most of Australia and New Zealand dust lanes. Star clouds, the lot. If you can get away from city lights this week, do it while you're there.

18:01 Anna: Sweep up Omega, uh, Centauri and the Southern Cross riding high. And if you've got binoculars, the star fields between Scorpius's tail and the teapot of Sagittarius will keep you busy all evening. Saturn is climbing in the east by mid evening for a late night treat. And dazzling Venus still rules the early evening western sky. Avery: And one for the launch watchers. SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 window opens tonight, US time. That's tomorrow morning for us from about 8:45 aesthetic. So pour a coffee and watch this space.

18:35 We'll have the full story in Saturday's weekend wrap. Anna: That's it for today's episode. Thanks for joining us. You can find show notes, links to every story and our back catalog@ah, astronomydaily.IO and we're astronomy Daily Pod on all the socials. Avery: Astronomy Daily is part of the bytes.com podcast network. I'm um, Avery. Anna: And I'm Anna. We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, clear skies.