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

0:02 of space and astronomy news. I'm Anna.

0:06 Avery: And I'm, um, avery. It's Thursday, the 16th

0:08 of July, 2026, and we have a

0:11 genuinely lovely lineup for you today,

0:14 including a story that's been 10 years in the

0:17 making, or more accurately, 10 years in the

0:19 hiding.

0:20 Anna: That's Our lead astronomers have finally

0:23 caught a planet that's been playing hide and

0:25 seek with them for over a decade. And it

0:28 turns out to be the faintest exoplanet ever

0:31 imaged from Earth. And it lives in a southern

0:33 constellation, which makes it feel just a

0:36 little bit like ours.

0:37 Avery: We've also got the completion of a nine year

0:40 project to build the sharpest radio map of

0:42 the entire sky. And the James Webb Space

0:45 Telescope catching a supermassive black hole

0:48 in the act of feeding itself.

0:50 Anna: Then it's a double bill from the outer solar

0:53 system. Landslides on Pluto spotted for

0:56 the first time, and evidence that Pluto's big

0:59 moon, Charon, once spun more than 10

1:01 times faster than it does today.

1:04 Avery: And we'll wrap the news with some sobering

1:06 numbers. SpaceX's Starlink satellites had

1:09 to dodge potential collisions more than

1:11 355,000 times

1:14 in the past year. We'll unpack what that

1:17 means for everyone's

1:18 Anna: orbit, plus your Southern hemisphere sky

1:21 watching for tonight. Let's get into it.

1:23 Avery, cast your mind.

1:25 Back in 2008, astronomers

1:27 directly imaged a planet around the young

1:30 star Beta Pictoris, one of the very first

1:33 exoplanets ever photographed. That was

1:36 Beta Pictoris B. A second planet

1:38 C followed. And ever since, there's been a,

1:41 uh, nagging suspicion that the system was

1:44 hiding

1:44 Avery: something more because of the disk. Right.

1:47 Beta Pictoris has this magnificent debris,

1:49 uh, disk. It's the poster child for planet

1:51 formation. And parts of it were warped and

1:54 sculpted in ways that two known planets

1:56 couldn't fully explain.

1:58 Anna: Exactly. And now we know why. In a

2:01 study published Wednesday in the

2:02 Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team using

2:05 the European Southern Observatory's Very

2:08 Large Telescope in Chile has confirmed a

2:11 third planet, Beta Pictoris D.

2:13 And here's the headline. It's roughly

2:16 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris

2:19 B, which makes it the faintest exoplanet

2:22 ever directly imaged from Earth.

2:25 Avery: A hundred times fainter. To put that in

2:27 context for everyone, direct imaging means

2:30 actually capturing the planet's own light in

2:32 a photograph next to a star that's

2:34 overwhelmingly brighter. It's often compared

2:37 to spotting a firefly next to a lighthouse.

2:40 This is spotting a very Dim

2:43 firefly.

2:44 Anna: And the discovery itself was serendipitous.

2:47 Ben Sutliff at the University of Edinburgh

2:50 who co led the study, said they were

2:52 originally just going back to study the known

2:55 planet Beta Pictoris B to see how it

2:57 changed over time. But in their new images

3:00 from the VLT's Eris instrument, there was

3:03 something else. A faint point of light

3:05 separated from Planet B that sent them down

3:08 an entirely new path.

3:10 Avery: And this is where the hide and seek comes in.

3:13 Once they knew what to look for, they trawled

3:15 back through the archives. And there it was,

3:17 lurking. In more than a decade of old

3:20 observations from the VLT SPEAR instrument

3:23 and even in James Webb Space Telescope data,

3:25 the planet had been photographed for years.

3:28 Nobody had noticed.

3:30 Anna: Co author Jane Burkeby at Oxford put it

3:33 beautifully. Planet D has been playing hide

3:36 and seek with us for over a decade and now

3:38 we can say found you.

3:40 Avery: So what do we know about the world itself?

3:43 Anna: It's a gas giant about 2.4 times

3:46 the mass of Jupiter, which sounds big, but

3:48 is actually the lightweight of the family.

3:51 Planets B and c are each 10 Jupiter

3:54 masses. Planet D sits, um, much further out

3:57 from the star on a wide orbit, so it's cooler

3:59 and dimmer than its siblings, hence the

4:02 difficulty. And satisfyingly, its

4:04 presence helps explain that odd structure in

4:07 the debris disk that's puzzled astronomers

4:09 for years.

4:10 Avery: There's also a nice milestone tucked in here.

4:13 This makes Beta Pictoris only the second

4:15 planetary system after HR

4:18 8799, where more than two

4:20 planets have been directly. We're building

4:23 up actual family portraits of other solar

4:26 systems now.

4:27 Anna: And an independent team at the University of

4:29 California spotted the same object in their

4:32 own data at almost the same time, which gives

4:34 the detection real confidence. Now the

4:37 bit our audience will love. Beta Pictoris is

4:40 a southern star. It sits in the constellation

4:43 Pictor, the Painter's Easel, just next to

4:46 brilliant canopus. And at 63 light

4:48 years away, it's visible from Australia and

4:51 New Zealand. Though right now in July

4:53 it's low in our evening sky and best hunted

4:56 in the pre dawn hours later in

4:58 Avery: the year, a planetary system with three

5:01 photographed worlds sitting in our southern

5:03 sky. Not bad at all.

5:05 Next, A, uh, project nine years in the

5:08 making has just crossed the finish line. The

5:11 U.S. national Science Foundation's National

5:14 Radio Astronomy Observatory has announced

5:17 that observations for the Very Large Array

5:20 Sky Survey VLAS are

5:22 complete. It's the most detailed radio

5:25 survey of the sky ever conducted.

5:28 Anna: This is the VLA in New Mexico. The

5:31 iconic Y shaped array of 27 dishes

5:34 from every space documentary ever made.

5:36 Avery: That's the one. From September 2017

5:39 through February this year, the array

5:42 repeatedly swept about 34,000

5:45 square degrees. Essentially the whole sky

5:48 visible from New Mexico and everything north

5:51 of minus 40 degrees declination.

5:53 That's roughly 80% of the entire

5:56 celestial sphere. Mapped at a resolution

5:59 of about 2 and a half arcseconds in the 2

6:02 to 4 GHz band.

6:03 Anna: And how does that compare to what came

6:05 before?

6:06 Avery: It's about 18 times sharper than the

6:09 previous benchmark all sky radio survey from

6:12 the 1990s. The numbers are

6:14 staggering. Roughly six and a half thousand

6:17 thousand observing hours. Half a petabyte of

6:20 raw data. And the processed data products are

6:22 expected to reach around 2 petabytes, the

6:25 largest data volume the VLA has ever

6:28 produced. They use a clever on the fly

6:31 mosaicing technique where the antennas sweep

6:34 continuously across the sky in a raster

6:36 pattern rather than stopping to point at each

6:39 field.

6:39 Anna: And crucially, they surveyed the sky multiple

6:42 times over those nine years. Which means VLAS

6:45 isn't just a map, it's a movie. Comparing

6:48 epochs revealed a dynamic radio sky.

6:51 Sources that flare, fade or appear from

6:53 nowhere. Exploding stars, feeding black

6:56 holes, colliding neutron stars.

6:59 Avery: Which brings us to the timing. And honestly,

7:01 the timing is the best part of the story.

7:04 Just over two weeks ago on June 30, the

7:07 Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile began

7:10 its decade long legacy survey of space and

7:13 time, sweeping the southern optical sky

7:16 every few nights. So for the first time in

7:18 history, we have a complete high resolution

7:21 radio map and a real time optical

7:24 transient stream operating simultaneously.

7:27 Anna: Though when Rubin flags something going bang

7:29 in the optical, astronomers can immediately

7:32 check what that patch of sky looks like and

7:34 looked like in the radio. The whole multi

7:37 wavelength discovery machine the community

7:39 has spent two decades building is now

7:42 switched on and the data's public.

7:44 Avery: Radio astronomers, multi wavelength folks,

7:47 citizen scientists. The radio sky now

7:50 belongs to everyone.

7:52 Anna: Now to a decades old mystery that may

7:55 finally have its answer. Avery, how do

7:57 supermassive black holes keep feeding?

8:00 Nearly every large galaxy hosts one of these

8:03 monsters. Millions or billions of times the

8:06 mass of the Sun. When they feed, they blast

8:09 out enormous energy, powerful jets that heat

8:11 the gas around them. And that's the paradox.

8:14 That heating should cut off the black hole's

8:17 own fuel supply. So why don't they starve?

8:20 Avery: The leading idea has been a kind of cosmic

8:23 recycling loop. The heated gas eventually

8:25 cools back down, condenses into long thin

8:28 streamers called filaments and rains back

8:31 towards the center. Self regulating

8:34 but Actually seeing the connection filament

8:36 to black hole has eluded astronomers for

8:39 decades.

8:40 Anna: Until now. An international team led by Julie

8:43 Hvlasic Lorando at the University of Montreal

8:46 pointed the James Webb Space telescope at

8:48 NGC 4696, the giant

8:51 elliptical galaxy at the heart of the

8:53 Centaurus cluster, about 145

8:56 million light years away. Their results were

8:58 published this week in the Astrophysical

9:00 Journal Letters.

9:01 Avery: And Centaurus, we should note, is a southern

9:04 constellation. This galaxy cluster rides high

9:07 in our winter sky right now, though you'll

9:09 need a decent telescope for the galaxy

9:11 itself.

9:12 Anna: White. Now, Hubble had previously

9:14 photographed a curious S shaped swirl of gas

9:17 near this galaxy's central black hole. But

9:19 Hubble could only show where the gas sat, not

9:22 how it moved. So the team gave Webb's

9:24 NIRSP instrument nearly eight hours on the

9:27 target and mapped the motion of the gas deep

9:29 inside the black hole's sphere of influence,

9:32 resolving features just 30 light years across

9:35 in a galaxy hundreds of thousands of light

9:37 years wide.

9:38 Avery: And the swirl turned out to be

9:41 Anna: a spinning disk of gas wrapped around

9:44 the black hole, nearly 800 light

9:46 years across, with material whipping around

9:49 at, uh, up to 600 kilometers per second.

9:52 And here's the money shot. That disk is

9:55 physically connected to one of the huge

9:58 infalling filaments stretching out into the

10:00 galaxy. They watched gas flowing along

10:03 the filament, pouring into the disk, and from

10:06 the disk falling onto the black hole.

10:09 Avery: The missing link caught on camera heat the

10:12 gas. The gas cools into filaments. The

10:14 filaments feed the disk. The disk feeds the

10:16 black hole. The black hole heats the gas.

10:19 Round and round it goes.

10:20 Anna: Havlasic Lorando said Webb is revealing that

10:22 black holes might be the ultimate cosmic

10:25 recyclers. And because this feeding loop

10:27 shapes when galaxies can and can't form

10:29 stars, understanding it is really

10:32 understanding how galaxies, including ours,

10:35 grow up.

10:35 Avery: Anna, uh, time for a double bill from the

10:38 outer solar system. Two stories,

10:41 one spacecraft, and a dwarf planet that

10:43 keeps on giving. First,

10:46 scientists have detected landslides on Pluto

10:49 for the very first time.

10:50 Anna: This is New Horizons data, isn't it? That

10:53 Flyby was 11 years ago this week.

10:55 Avery: It is, and that's the delightful part. A

10:58 paper in the journal Icarus, which has been

11:00 making headlines this week, reports that an

11:03 international team went back through the high

11:05 resolution images from New Horizons lorry

11:08 camera pictures showing Pluto's surface at

11:10 about 300 meters per pixel and found

11:13 six large landslides inside three impact

11:16 craters near Sputnik Planita. That famous

11:19 heart shaped nitrogen ice plane.

11:21 Anna: How do you recognize a landslide on a world

11:23 made of ice?

11:25 Avery: Same fingerprints as Earth. Crescent shaped

11:27 collapse scars near the crater rims. Huge

11:30 displaced blocks of ice and debris fanning

11:32 out across the crater floors. The team

11:35 measured them. These slides descend one and a

11:37 half to over two kilometers, run out as far

11:40 as 14 and a half kilometers and the largest

11:42 covers around 130 square kilometers.

11:45 Anna: And landslides are everywhere else, aren't

11:48 they? Earth, Mars, Ceres,

11:50 asteroids, even Pluto's moon Charon showed

11:53 evidence years ago Pluto itself was the odd

11:56 one out which was

11:57 Avery: genuinely puzzling because Pluto has steep

12:00 crater walls and rugged icy terrain. All the

12:02 right ingredients. Now the gap is filled and

12:05 it tells us gravity driven slope processes

12:08 are actively reshaping Pluto's frozen

12:10 surface. Even under gravity, a fraction of

12:13 ours. What triggered them is still open.

12:15 Possibilities range from tectonic activity to

12:18 meteoroid impacts.

12:19 Anna: A world we visited for a few hours in 2015,

12:23 still handing us firsts a decade later.

12:26 Avery: And um, it's not done because part two of

12:28 our Pluto double is about

12:30 Avery: the other half of that famous pair

12:32 Anna: of Charon, Pluto's enormous moon. So

12:35 big relative to Pluto that the two really

12:38 form a double world. And a study published

12:41 Tuesday in Nature Communications says

12:43 Charon's mountains have preserved a memory of

12:46 a wilder youth.

12:47 Avery: What kind of memory?

12:49 Anna: A record of despinning across the solar

12:52 system. Tidal forces gradually slow a body's

12:54 rotation and as ah, the spin slows the

12:57 body's shape relaxes stressing and

13:00 cracking the surface. The it's long been

13:02 theorized for Charon but clear geological

13:05 evidence was missing. So Han, Zeng Chin

13:08 and colleagues at ETH Zurich and

13:10 UCLA examined the orientations

13:13 and types of tectonic features, mountain

13:16 ranges and faults in Aus Terra

13:18 Sharon's northern rugged highlands. Again

13:21 using New Horizons flyby data.

13:24 Avery: And um, the tectonic pattern fits the de

13:26 spinning story beautifully.

13:28 Anna: Their modeling suggests Charon's rotation

13:30 period was once around 14.3 hours

13:33 and it has since slowed to today's roughly

13:36 153 hours locked in step with

13:39 its orbit around Pluto. That's more than a

13:41 tenfold slowdown and the stresses from that

13:44 transformation are etched into the mountains

13:46 we photographed in 2015.

13:48 Avery: Chen said the study drastically changed her

13:51 understanding of Charon's geologic history.

13:53 And there's a bonus finding, isn't there

13:55 about how Charon was born?

13:57 Anna: Yes, the way despinning and global

14:00 contraction evolved together favors

14:02 what's called a cold start for Charon, which

14:05 is a real clue to the early thermal history

14:08 of icy moons across the Outer solar system.

14:11 So between Pluto's landslides and charon's

14:14 slowing spin, one 11 year old dataset

14:17 gave us two papers in a week. Not a bad

14:19 return on a flyby.

14:21 Avery: Our final story today, Anna, uh, comes with

14:23 some genuinely eye widening numbers.

14:26 SpaceX has filed its latest semi annual

14:29 constellation status report with the U.S.

14:32 federal Communications Commission. And

14:34 according to coverage of the filing, StarLink

14:37 satellites performed

14:38 207,152

14:42 collision avoidance maneuvers between

14:44 December 2025 and

14:46 May 2026.

14:48 Anna: 207,000 in six months,

14:51 up nearly 60,000

14:53 Avery: on the previous half year. Put the two

14:55 periods together and the constellation made

14:58 over 355,000

15:00 dodges in 12 months. More

15:03 than triple what it performed in all of

15:05 2024. At uh, on average,

15:08 each Starlink satellite now swerves more

15:11 than 40 times a year. That's nearly a

15:14 dodge a week per satellite.

15:16 Anna: Let's be fair to SpaceX for a moment though.

15:19 These maneuvers are the system working as

15:21 designed, aren't they?

15:22 Avery: They are. The satellites dodge

15:24 autonomously whenever the predicted collision

15:27 probability exceeds 3 in 10 million,

15:30 an extremely conservative threshold, far

15:33 tighter than the industry standard. Experts

15:36 consistently credit SpaceX with managing its

15:38 traffic well and being transparent with the

15:41 data. The concern is the trendline,

15:44 not the competence.

15:45 Anna: Because the numbers compound. More

15:47 satellites means more close approaches means

15:50 more maneuvers means more residual risk

15:53 that never quite goes to zero.

15:55 Avery: Exactly the point Huw Lewis makes. He's the

15:58 University of Birmingham um, astronautics

16:00 professor who's tracked these reports for

16:02 years. Each maneuver cuts the collision odds

16:05 to about one in a million, which sounds

16:08 negligible, but as he puts it, if you make

16:11 a million maneuvers with a one in a million

16:13 residual, you end up with an aggregate risk

16:16 across the Constellation that you simply

16:18 can't get rid of. His blunt assessment,

16:21 he thinks we're heading towards a situation

16:23 where there will be a collision involving an

16:26 operational satellite in the Constellation.

16:29 Avery: And the projections on current growth

16:32 Starlink passes. A million total avoidance

16:35 maneuvers by mid2027. And by

16:37 2030 the constellation could be making more

16:40 than a million maneuvers every single year.

16:43 Remember too, and regular listeners will.

16:46 SpaceX has applied to the FCC to grow

16:49 Starlink toward 100,000 satellites,

16:51 a story we covered a couple of weeks back.

16:54 And it's not alone up there. Amazon's

16:56 Constellation and China's Qian Fan are

16:58 actively deploying as well.

17:00 Anna: The number of operational spacecraft in orbit

17:03 has gone from about 10,000 to about

17:05 16,000 in just a year. Other

17:08 experts are calling for operators to disclose

17:10 predicted maneuver counts before

17:12 Constellations are even approved. Though

17:15 regulators know whether the satellites can

17:17 Avery: actually keep up, low Earth orbit is a

17:19 shared resource. And this is the traffic

17:22 report. We'll keep watching the numbers

17:24 because everyone from astronomers to airlines

17:27 to your GPs depends on that neighborhood

17:29 staying safe.

17:30 Anna: Time now for tonight's skywatching. And for

17:33 our Southern Hemisphere friends, the news is

17:35 good. The Moon is a waning crescent rising in

17:38 the small hours, so evenings this week are

17:40 dark and glorious, which means

17:43 Avery: the winter Milky Way at its absolute best

17:46 face south after dinner. And the galactic

17:48 core in Sagittarius and Scorpius is almost

17:51 directly overhead from most of Australia and

17:54 New Zealand dust lanes. Star clouds, the

17:57 lot. If you can get away from city lights

17:59 this week, do it while you're there.

18:01 Anna: Sweep up Omega, uh, Centauri and the Southern

18:04 Cross riding high. And if you've got

18:06 binoculars, the star fields between

18:08 Scorpius's tail and the teapot of Sagittarius

18:11 will keep you busy all evening. Saturn

18:14 is climbing in the east by mid evening for a

18:16 late night treat. And dazzling Venus still

18:18 rules the early evening western sky.

18:21 Avery: And one for the launch watchers. SpaceX's

18:24 Starship Flight 13 window opens tonight,

18:27 US time. That's tomorrow morning for us

18:30 from about 8:45 aesthetic.

18:33 So pour a coffee and watch this space. We'll

18:35 have the full story in Saturday's weekend

18:37 wrap.

18:38 Anna: That's it for today's episode. Thanks for

18:40 joining us. You can find show notes, links to

18:43 every story and our back catalog@ah,

18:46 astronomydaily.IO and we're astronomy

18:48 Daily Pod on all the socials.

18:51 Avery: Astronomy Daily is part of the bytes.com

18:53 podcast network. I'm um, Avery.

18:55 Anna: And I'm Anna. We'll see you tomorrow. Until

18:58 then, clear skies.