JWST reads alien geology, Io is FAR more powerful than we thought, and a meteor shower peaks TONIGHT

0:00 Anna: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily,

0:03 your daily guide to the universe and

0:05 everything in it. I'm Anna.

0:07 Avery: And I'm avery. It's Tuesday the 6th of

0:10 May, 2026, and we are coming at you

0:13 with six incredible stories today from a

0:16 robotic telescope that just read the geology

0:18 of a world 50 light years away to a

0:21 meteor shower. You can watch live online

0:24 right now.

0:25 Anna: That's right, and we have a stunning mix of

0:27 planetary science, exoplanet discovery,

0:30 cosmological simulation, and some very

0:33 welcome skywatching news for our Southern

0:35 Hemisphere listeners.

0:37 Avery: Let's get straight into it. Story one is

0:39 genuinely historic.

0:41 Anna: For years, when astronomers pointed the James

0:44 Webb Space Telescope at a distant rocky

0:46 world, they were really studying its

0:48 atmosphere, the thin shell of gas around

0:51 a planet. Today, uh, we're talking about

0:54 something different, something that has never

0:56 been done before.

0:58 Avery: That's right. Astronomers have now used

1:00 JWST to directly analyze the

1:03 actual surface of a planet beyond our solar

1:06 system. Not its atmosphere, its surface,

1:09 the rock itself. And what they found is

1:11 remarkable.

1:13 Anna: The planet in question is called LHS

1:16 3844B. It's, uh, a so

1:19 called super earth, about 30% larger

1:22 than our own planet. And it sits roughly

1:24 48 and a half light years away,

1:27 orbiting a small, cool red dwarf star.

1:30 Avery: Now, this planet is an extreme situation.

1:33 It orbits its star so closely that it

1:35 completes a full year in just 11 hours.

1:39 11 hours, Anna. Um, that's your entire

1:41 working day and then some.

1:43 Anna: And because of that extreme proximity,

1:45 it's tidally locked, meaning one face

1:48 permanently points toward the star baking in

1:51 intense heat, while the other side sits in

1:54 permanent darkness. The dayside reaches

1:57 temperatures of around

1:58 725 degrees

2:01 Celsius that is hot enough to melt lead.

2:03 With room to spare, the research team

2:06 Avery: led by Laura Kreidberg at the Max Planck

2:09 Institute for Astronomy In Germany used

2:11 JWST's mid infrared instrument n

2:14 known as MIRI, to measure the thermal

2:16 emission radiating directly from the planet's

2:19 blazing hot dayside. They observed three

2:22 secondary eclipses, moments when the planet

2:24 slipped behind its star, and used those

2:26 measurements to build a picture of what the

2:28 surface is made of.

2:30 Anna: And the result? Dr. Kreidberg described it

2:33 directly. We see a, uh, dark, hot,

2:35 barren rock devoid of any atmosphere.

2:39 The surface appears to be composed of dark,

2:41 low silica material particles, probably

2:44 basalt or other olivine rich rock.

2:46 Think volcanic plains like those you'd find

2:49 on the Moon or on Mercury.

2:51 Avery: Importantly, the team was able to rule out a

2:54 number of things. There's no Earth like

2:56 silica rich crust the kind that forms through

2:59 water driven geological processes and plate

3:01 tectonics. There's no evidence of accumulated

3:04 volcanic gases, no carbon dioxide, no

3:07 sulfur dioxide. This is a geologically

3:10 quiet, airless, ancient world.

3:13 Anna: And while that might sound a bit bleak, the

3:16 significance here is huge. The published

3:18 paper in Nature Astronomy calls this the

3:21 next step in unveiling the nature of distant

3:24 planets. We're no longer just detecting

3:27 exoplanets or guessing at their atmospheres.

3:30 We're starting to read their geology.

3:33 Avery: Think about what that means for the future.

3:35 With more observations like this, we'll be

3:37 able to build up a geological census of rocky

3:40 worlds across the galaxy. That knowledge

3:42 feeds directly into our understanding of

3:45 which worlds might be capable of supporting

3:47 life, and which are simply very impressive.

3:50 Very hot pieces of rock.

3:52 Anna: A dark, hot, barren rock, but

3:55 a dark, hot, barren rock that just made

3:58 scientific history.

3:59 Avery: Sticking with the theme of worlds that are

4:01 frankly hostile to life, let's talk

4:04 Anna: about IO, Jupiter's

4:06 extraordinary moon, the most

4:08 volcanically active body in the entire

4:11 solar system. A world being continuously

4:14 kneaded by the gravitational tug of war

4:16 between Jupiter and its larger sibling moons,

4:19 ganymede and Europa.IO

4:21 Avery: has over 400 volcanic features called

4:24 paterae, essentially giant

4:26 depressions filled with lava lakes.

4:29 Scientists have been measuring the heat

4:31 output of these features for decades, and a

4:33 new study released just yesterday suggests

4:36 we've been getting it dramatically wrong.

4:39 Anna: The paper, now available as a preprint on

4:41 arXiv, uses data from Juno's infrared

4:44 instrument, the Gyram, to look at IO's

4:47 Paterae in a completely new way. And it

4:50 turns out previous measurements were only

4:52 seeing part of the picture for a long time.

4:55 Avery: Scientists measured IO's volcanic heat output

4:57 using what's called the M band, um, of

4:59 infrared. And the M M band is excellent at

5:02 picking up the really hot bright spots at the

5:04 active edges of lava lakes, where fresh

5:07 uncooled magma is churning. What it

5:10 misses is the vast, cooler, older crust

5:13 that forms across the rest of the lava lake

5:15 surface.

5:16 Anna: And that crust, it turns out, is enormous.

5:19 It's much, much more massive than those hot

5:21 peripheral rings. So while it's cooler in

5:24 temperature, its sheer scale means it

5:27 contributes a staggering amount of total

5:29 thermal output. Bateem used Gyram's

5:32 updated data, which can detect those lower

5:34 temperatures, to build a

5:36 Avery: revised picture for one well studied

5:38 patera alone, known simply as P63.

5:41 The old estimate was around 7 gigawatts of

5:44 thermal output. Some models put it at

5:47 20. The new gyrom data 80

5:50 gigawatts from a single lava lake.

5:53 Anna: To put that in perspective, the entire output

5:56 of the UK's electricity grid is around 40

5:58 gigawatts. One volcanic depression on IO

6:01 is putting

6:02 Avery: out double that, and that's just one of

6:05 the 400 patere. The study only looked at

6:08 32 of them. The implications for IO's

6:11 total heat budget are significant. We may

6:13 have been underestimating this moon's thermal

6:15 fury by an order of magnitude.

6:18 Anna: And the study also found something intriguing

6:20 about the crust itself. Using thermal

6:23 cooling models, the team estimated that a

6:25 crust at 200 Kelvin would be roughly

6:28 13 years old, meaning these lakes

6:30 resurface on timescales of about a decade.

6:34 So the geology of IO is incredibly

6:36 dynamic, constantly renewing itself.

6:39 Avery: IO never stops surprising us. And now, thanks

6:42 to Juno, we're starting to truly understand

6:44 just how powerful this extraordinary little

6:47 moon is.

6:48 Anna: Now we're going to zoom out, way,

6:51 way out, from one single moon to,

6:54 well, the entire universe.

6:56 Avery: An international team of astrophysicists led

6:59 by researchers at Durham University in the UK

7:01 and Leiden University in the Netherlands, has

7:04 just released one of the largest cosmological

7:07 data sets ever assembled. We're talking

7:09 about two and a half petabytes of data.

7:12 Anna: Two and a half petabytes. That is equivalent

7:15 to roughly half a million high definition

7:17 movies, all now freely available to

7:20 researchers anywhere in the world.

7:22 Avery: This is the Flamingo project, a, uh, suite of

7:25 large scale computer simulations that model

7:27 how matter has evolved across the universe

7:30 right from the Big Bang through to the

7:32 present day. The simulations were run on the

7:34 Cosma 8 supercomputer at Durham, which is

7:37 part of the DRAC National High Performance

7:39 Computing Facility in the UK.

7:41 Anna: And what makes Flamingo special is its scope.

7:45 Many detailed simulations focus on small

7:47 regions of space. You get great detail on

7:50 individual galaxy formation, but you can't

7:52 see the big picture. Other simulations

7:55 capture vast cosmic volumes, but lose

7:58 resolution at the small scale. Flamindo

8:01 does both.

8:02 Avery: Its simulations stretch across billions of

8:04 light years, allowing researchers to study

8:07 rare massive structures like galaxy clusters,

8:09 while still capturing the physics of

8:12 individual galaxy formation. The

8:14 cosmic web, that vast network of filaments

8:17 and nodes along which galaxies are

8:19 distributed, is reproduced across these

8:21 volumes in extraordinary detail.

8:24 Anna: The data includes 22 full

8:26 hydrodynamical simulations. Galaxy

8:29 and Halo catalogs, all sky maps and

8:32 particle data. Because the dataset is so

8:35 vast, the Flamingo team also built a

8:38 custom web based system so researchers can

8:41 access just the data they need without having

8:43 to download the entire archive.

8:46 Avery: Matouch Aler of Leiden University summed up

8:49 the ambition well, open access to datasets of

8:52 this Scale can significantly accelerate

8:54 scientific progress. Since Flamingo

8:56 simulations were first introduced in 2023,

8:59 they've already been used in dozens of

9:01 studies. Now the full dataset is public, the

9:04 scientific community can do so much more.

9:07 Anna: This is open science at its most ambitious.

9:10 Virtual universes freely given to the world.

9:14 Avery: And hopefully the world will receive it in

9:16 the spirit it is given.

9:18 Anna: Now, before we move on to our next story, I'd

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9:44 find in the show.

9:45 Avery: Notes from the very large to the very

9:48 precise.

9:49 Our next story is about a clever new

9:51 technique that's unlocking a whole new

9:53 population of planets that we've been

9:55 struggling to find.

9:56 Anna: This one has a lovely Australian connection,

9:59 which we always enjoy. The study was led by

10:02 Margo Thornton, a doctoral candidate at

10:05 unsw, the University of New South

10:07 Wales in Sydney. And it tackles a real

10:10 challenge in exoplanet science.

10:13 Avery: So here's the problem. NASA's TESS satellite

10:16 finds planets by detecting tiny dips in

10:19 starlight as a planet passes in front of its

10:21 star. It's brilliant and it's found hundreds

10:23 of confirmed planets. But there's a class of

10:26 systems it really struggles. Binary

10:29 stars.

10:30 Anna: Binary stars are pairs of stars in orbit

10:33 around each other, and they're very common. A

10:36 huge fraction of stars in our galaxy have a

10:38 companion. The complication is that when you

10:41 have two stars doing their own thing, it

10:44 becomes very hard to tease out the much

10:46 smaller signal of a planet passing in front

10:49 of one of them.

10:50 Avery: But m this new approach uses a different

10:52 approach entirely. Instead of looking for the

10:55 planet's shadow, it looks for the planet's

10:57 gravitational fingerprint. As a planet orbits

11:00 in a binary system, its gravity gently

11:03 tugs on the stars and that changes the

11:05 precise timing of when the two stars eclipse

11:08 each other.

11:09 Anna: It's a beautiful idea. You're not watching

11:12 the planet at all, you're watching the stars

11:14 dance and noticing when something is slightly

11:17 out of step.

11:18 Avery: And it works. The team applied this eclipse

11:21 timing technique to test data and uncovered

11:24 more than 25 new exoplanet candidates

11:27 orbiting in binary star systems.

11:29 Systems where traditional transit detection

11:32 methods simply

11:33 Anna: couldn't find them before this study,

11:35 only 18 such circumbinary

11:38 planets had ever been confirmed across all

11:41 all telescopes combined. Sixteen from

11:43 NASA's retired Kepler mission, plus two

11:46 found by TESS itself. This new method

11:49 has the potential to dramatically expand that

11:52 number.

11:52 Avery: It's a reminder that the way we look for

11:54 things matters as much as what we're looking

11:57 for. Great work from the UNSW team

11:59 showing that Australia is very much at the

12:02 frontier of exoplanet discovery.

12:04 Anna: Our penultimate story takes us to the outer

12:07 solar system, to those mysterious

12:09 underexplored giants, Uranus and Neptune.

12:13 Avery: We often call them the ice giants, but that's

12:16 a bit of a misnomer. Their interiors are not

12:19 cold at all. They're subjected to

12:21 temperatures in thousands of degrees and

12:23 pressures millions of times greater than

12:25 anything at Earth's sea level. It's an

12:27 environment we simply cannot recreate in a

12:30 lab.

12:31 Anna: And because of that, the physics of what

12:33 happens to materials under those conditions

12:36 has long been the subject of theoretical

12:38 modeling. Now, a new paper published in

12:41 Nature Communications from researchers at the

12:44 Carnegie Institution has added a striking

12:47 new entry to that catalog.

12:49 Avery: They've identified a, uh, previously

12:51 unrecognized state of matter that may exist

12:53 in these extreme environments. A phase they

12:56 call quasi one dimensional

12:59 superionic. It's a mouthful, so

13:02 let's break that down.

13:03 Anna: Superionic materials are already

13:05 fascinating. In a normal solid, both the

13:08 ions and electrons are locked in place. In

13:11 a normal liquid, both flow freely. A

13:14 superionic state is something in between.

13:17 The ion lattice is solid, but some

13:19 particles flow through it like a liquid. We

13:22 actually believe a superionic phase exists

13:25 deep inside Uranus and Neptune already.

13:28 But this new phase is different.

13:30 Avery: The quasi one dimensional part refers to the

13:33 fact that in this newly identified phase, the

13:36 flowing particles don't move freely in all

13:39 directions. They're constrained to flow along

13:41 narrow one dimensional channels within the

13:44 material structure. It's like water moving

13:47 through a, uh, network of pipes rather than

13:49 flooding a room.

13:50 Anna: This is significant because the behavior of

13:53 materials in ice giant interiors

13:55 governs everything from their magnetic field

13:58 generation to their heat flow, to their

14:01 atmospheric dynamics. If we've been missing

14:03 an entire phase of matter that exists in

14:06 these conditions, our models of how Uranus

14:09 and Neptune actually work may need revision.

14:12 Avery: With new missions to the ice giants being

14:15 seriously discussed by both NASA and ESA for

14:17 the coming decades, this kind of foundational

14:20 physics work is exactly what's needed to

14:23 ensure we know what questions to ask when we

14:25 get there.

14:26 Anna: A new state of matter hidden inside two

14:29 worlds just a few billion kilometers away.

14:32 Sometimes the Most exotic physics doesn't

14:35 require going to another galaxy, just the

14:38 outer edge of our own solar system.

14:40 Avery: M and finally, something you can do something

14:42 about tonight, or more precisely in the pre

14:45 dawn hours of tomorrow morning.

14:47 Anna: The Eta Aquarian meteor shower is at its

14:50 peak right now. And for our Southern

14:52 Hemisphere listeners, particularly our

14:54 Australian and New Zealand friends, this is

14:57 one of the best meteor events of the year.

15:00 Avery: The Eta Aquariids are the debris of Halley's

15:02 Comet, the legendary comet that last swept

15:05 through the inner solar system in 1986

15:08 and won't return until 2061.

15:11 Every year in early May, Earth plows through

15:14 the trail of dust and rock particles Halley

15:16 has left behind across its 76 year

15:19 orbit. And those particles burn up in our

15:21 upper atmosphere as spectacular shooting

15:24 stars.

15:24 Anna: What makes the Eta Aquaria special for the

15:27 Southern Hemisphere is geometry. The radiant,

15:30 the point in the sky the meteors appear to

15:32 stream from in. The constellation Aquarius

15:35 rises high in the sky before dawn. From

15:38 Australia and New Zealand, it reaches a

15:40 really favorable altitude, meaning you can

15:43 expect to see up to 50 meteors per hour

15:46 under ideal conditions.

15:48 Avery: There is a caveat. This year, a waning

15:50 gibbous moon is hanging around in the sky and

15:53 it will wash out some of the fainter meteors.

15:56 But the brighter ones, the proper fireballs,

15:58 should punch through just fine. Your best

16:01 window is in the hours before dawn, away from

16:04 the Moon, lying back on a blanket and looking

16:06 up.

16:07 Anna: And if clouds are in the way or you're deep

16:09 in the city, or you simply can't face a

16:12 4am alarm, there's good news. There are free

16:15 live streams of the shower available online.

16:18 One particularly impressive option comes from

16:20 the Alma Observatory in Chile's Atacama

16:23 Desert, one of the driest, clearest places

16:26 on Earth and one of the premier sites in

16:28 world astronomy. You'll find links in our

16:30 show notes.

16:31 Avery: So whether you're watching from a dark

16:33 paddock under the Milky Way or from your

16:36 lounge with a coffee at sunrise, you can join

16:38 millions of people tonight in witnessing the

16:41 cosmic legacy of Halley's Comet.

16:43 Anna: Shooting stars, every single

16:46 one. A tiny piece of one of the most

16:49 famous objects in the history of

16:52 human sky watching. That never

16:55 gets old.

16:56 Avery: And that's a wrap.

16:57 On today's Astronomy Daily, we've read the

17:00 geology of an alien world. We've discovered

17:03 IO is even more powerful than we thought.

17:06 We've opened two and a half petabytes, uh, of

17:08 virtual universe to the world. We've found

17:11 new planets around binary stars. We've

17:14 discovered new states of matter inside Ice

17:16 Giants. And we've told you exactly where to

17:19 watch a meteor shower tonight.

17:21 Anna: Not a bad day's work for a Tuesday. If you

17:24 enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, leave

17:27 a review, and share us with a friend who

17:29 loves space as much as we do. You can

17:32 find us at astronomydaily.IO and on

17:35 socials. AstroDailyPod.

17:38 Avery: We're part of the bytes.com podcast

17:41 network. Until tomorrow. Keep looking up.

17:44 Anna: This is Anna and Avery. Clear

17:46 skies, everyone.

17:48 Avery: Astronomy Day.

17:51 The stories we told.