Psyche's Mars Flyby Happening RIGHT NOW + SETI's Stunning 10-Year Results

Anna: Something extraordinary is happening in our solar system right now. As you listen to this episode, a, uh, NASA spacecraft is hurtling past Mars at over 12,000 miles per hour, using the red Planet's gravity like a cosmic slingshot. We have got the details and a whole lot more coming right up on Astronomy Daily. Avery: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily guide to the universe. Hi, I'm Avery. Anna: And I'm anaa. It's Friday, the 15th of May, 2026, and you are listening to season five, episode 103.

Avery: What a lineup we have for you today. Six stories spanning the solar system, the deep cosmos, and even the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Anna: That's right. Including the results of the most rigorous SETI search in history. Ten years of listening. 70,000 stars, 100 million signals. And the answer might surprise you. Avery: We'll also check in with the Perseverance Rover, who has just reached terrain that no robot and no human has ever explored before. Terrain that may be nearly 4 billion years old.

Anna: Plus, news about a coming revolution in how we measure the universe, courtesy of artificial intelligence and a, uh, genuinely baffling cosmic mystery from the James Webb Space Telescope. Let's get into it. Ready when you are. We're starting with something that is happening as you listen to this. Right now, NASA's Psyche spacecraft, the one headed for a metallic asteroid out in the main belt, is executing a gravity assist flyby of Mars. Avery: And when we say close, we mean close. The spacecraft is passing just 2,800 miles from the Martian surface.

That sounds like a lot, but in space terms, that is an extremely tight pass. Anna: To put it in perspective, that's closer than the distance across Australia. And Psyche is moving at, uh, more than 12,000 miles per hour as it skims past. Avery: So why is it doing this? A gravity assist, sometimes called a gravitational slingshot, uses the gravity of a planet to accelerate a spacecraft and adjust its trajectory. In Psyche's case, Mars is lending it the speed boost and the directional nudge it needs to reach its final destination, the asteroid Psyche, out in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Anna: The mission team is hoping to get more than just a speed boost from this flyby. The spacecraft's instruments will be scanning for a faint, dusty ring around Mars, material thought to have been ejected from the surfaces of the planet's two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, by micrometeorite impacts over billions of years. Avery: If the alignment is right, sunlight scattering off that dust could, uh, make the ring visible to Psyche's cameras. The team will also be Searching for tiny satellites around Mars moonlets as practice for when Psyche arrives at the asteroid, where it'll perform a similar hunt.

Anna: The asteroid Psyche itself is one of the most intriguing objects in the solar system. A world that appears to be made largely of metal, which scientists think could be the exposed core of a protoplanet that was stripped of its rocky outer layers in violent ancient collisions. Avery: Psyche, the spacecraft is expected to arrive at the asteroid in 2029. After this Mars flyby sends it on the right path. Today's close approach is one of those moments that reminds us how precise and extraordinary modern space navigation truly is.

Threading the needle past an entire planet to get a free ride across the solar system. Anna: We'll keep you updated on what the flyby data reveals in coming episodes. For now though, somewhere out there in space, the slingshot is happening. And that is remarkable. Avery: For 10 years, astronomers at the University of California, Los Angeles have been pointing one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes at the stars and listening not for pulsars, not for gas clouds, but for something far extraordinary.

Anna: A signal from another civilization. Avery: The results of that decade long search are now in. The team used the Green bank telescope in West Virginia, a 100 meter dish to scan more than 70,000 stars and planetary systems. Their data processing pipeline analyzed more than 100 million candidate signals. Anna: And every single one of them, every last signal, turned out to be us human made radio frequency interference, not ET. Avery: Now, before we get too disappointed, this is actually a landmark achievement in science because a null result when it's done this rigorously is enormously valuable.

Anna: The PEAMS pipeline has a demonstrated 94 to 99% efficiency for detecting the kind of narrowband signals that a technologically advanced civilization might transmit. So if something was out there broadcasting in that frequency range, they had a very good chance of catching it. Avery: What they can now say with confidence is that fewer than 600,000 of 1% of stars within 20,000 light years of Earth. Earth hosts a transmitter powerful enough to be detectable by their search. That's an extraordinarily precise upper limit.

Anna: And the search is far from over. The team emphasizes that with next generation radio telescopes coming online in the coming years, the volume of sky they can monitor is set to increase by orders of magnitude. The universe is vast and they've only just started listening properly. Avery: Jean Luc Margaux, the lead researcher at UCLA, has been running this program since 2016. This paper marks the completion of phase one and the citizen science component. The platform called Are We Alone on Zooniverse?

Has had more than 40,000 volunteers helping classify signals. Anna: 10 years. 70,000 stars. 100 million signals. No aliens yet. But the search goes on. And now it goes on, with a roadmap built on the most rigorous SETI data ever collected. Avery: If nothing else, it's a reminder of how seriously scientists take the question and how much patience the search for cosmic company requires. Anna: Meanwhile, on the surface of Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover has just reached what scientists are calling one of the most scientifically valuable regions ever explored on the Red Planet.

Avery: Perseverance has now traveled nearly 26 miles across the Martian surface since landing in Jezero crater back in 2021, almost the distance of a full marathon. And in doing so, it has pushed further west than any rover has gone before entering a rugged landscape the science team calls Lac des Charms do mark Anna: the occasion, because apparently even rovers like a selfie. Perseverance assembled a self portrait from 61 individual images showing it perched against a dramatic backdrop of ancient Martian terrain, with the western rim of Jezero Crater stretching into the distance behind it.

Avery: But the selfie is just the beginning. Alongside it, the rover captured a sweeping panoramic mosaic of a Nearby region called Arbat 46 images stitched together into one of the richest geological vistas of the entire mission. Anna: What scientists see in that panorama is extraordinary. The landscape is filled with what appear to be mega breccia rock fragments the size of skyscrapers, believed to have been hurled outward by a colossal meteorite impact on the Martian plain called acetus planitia approximately 3.9 billion years ago.

Avery: To put that in perspective, that impact happened before complex life even began on Earth. These rocks have been sitting there largely unchanged for nearly4.4 billion years, and now a small robot from Earth is studying them. Ken Farley, the Perseverance Deputy project scientist at Caltech, described what he sees in the panorama as, and I'm quoting here, excellent exposure of likely the oldest rocks we are going to investigate during this mission. The geological diversity in this region is dramatically different from what Perseverance found inside Jezero Crater.

Instead of water deposited sediments and delta formations, many of the rocks here appear to be igneous, formed from ancient cooling magma or lava flows. These are windows into Mars deep crust and its earliest volcanic history. Anna: Scientists believe this region may predate the formation of Jezero Crater itself. And that means Perseverance is now exploring Martian ground that has never been accessible to study, not by previous rovers, not from orbit, and not by any instrument we've sent before.

Avery: Every meter, Perseverance travels west Is new scientific territory, and right now, it's standing on some of the oldest ground Our solar system has to offer. Anna: Now, new is about the future of space astronomy, and it involves two of the greatest telescopes ever built. In what scientists are calling a, uh, passing of the baton, NASA's Hubble Space Avery: Telescope has just completed a massive survey of the Milky Way's galactic bulge, the dense, bulging region surrounding the center of our galaxy.

And the results are about to hand an enormous advantage to Hubble's successor, the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope. Anna: Roman is scheduled to launch in September of this year, Just a few months away. And remarkably, it is running six months ahead of schedule. When it reaches orbit, one of its primary tasks will be surveying the galactic bulge to hunt for exoplanets Using a technique called gravitational microlensing. Avery: Microlensing works like this. When a massive object, A star, a planet, even a black hole, Passes in front of a more distant background star, Its gravity bends and amplifies the background star's light.

By measuring those brief brightenings, Roman will be able to detect planets that would otherwise be invisible to us. Anna: Roman's galactic bulge time domain survey is expected to locate more than 1,000 exoplanets orbiting far from their stars, beyond the orbital distance of Earth from the sun. But to do that, well, scientists need to know exactly what the galactic bulge looks like before any lensing events occur, so they can tell the difference between a lensing signal and just a variable star.

Avery: That's where Hubble comes in. The survey it's just completed has built a baseline catalog of 20 to 30 million stars in the galactic bulge. When Roman gets going, it will expand that catalog tenfold to 200 to 300 million sources and produce some of the deepest images ever taken of any part of the sky. Anna: Jay Anderson of the space telescope institute summed it up beautifully. He said, the great thing about microlensing is that we'll be able to do a complete census of objects as small as Mars that are moving between us and these fields in the bulge.

No matter what it is. Black holes, rogue planets, neutron stars Roman will find them all. Avery: Hubble, now more than 30 decades into its mission, Is gradually losing its ability to precisely point itself as its gyroscopes age. One day, its extraordinary journey will come to an end. But it is going out with Grace, Making one final massive contribution to science and lighting the way for the telescope that will carry on its legacy. Anna: Roman launches in September. The age of wide field space astronomy is almost here.

Alright. Before moving on to our next story, let's get in a quick mention about our sponsor, NordVPN, the people who not only protect us online, but help us keep the lights on. They've put together a great deal for you, which I highly recommend you check out. After all, you want the best online protection for the lowest price, right? You can find all the details about our hot deal by clicking on the link in the show notes. Avery: Alright, let's get back into today's space and astronomy news. One of the great challenges in modern cosmology is measuring how fast the universe is expanding.

And right now there's a crisis. Different methods of measuring that expansion rate give different answers and nobody is quite sure why. It's called the Hubble Tension and it has been keeping cosmologists up at night for years now. Anna: A team of researchers has used artificial intelligence to make one of the key tools in that measurement. Type 1a supernovae, significantly more precise. Four times more precise in fact. Avery: Let's unpack that. Type 1a supernovae are stellar explosions that happen when a white dwarf star accumulates enough material from a companion star to trigger a catastrophic nuclear runaway.

They are so bright, billions of times the output of our sun, that they can be seen across the universe. And because they explode in a relatively consistent way, astronomers can use them as cosmic m mile markers to estimate distances. Anna: The trouble is, they are not perfectly consistent. Their brightness varies depending on the age of the host galaxy, the chemical composition of the original star, and a host of other factors. Astronomers have long used correction factors to standardize these measurements, but those corrections have always been somewhat blunt.

Avery: One well known example is the so called mass step. Supernovae in heavier galaxies tend to appear slightly differently from those in lighter galaxies. So researchers apply a brightness correction based on the host galaxy's mass. It works as a practical fix, but it doesn't really explain what's driving the difference at a physical level. Anna: The new AI approach cuts through all of that noise in a single step. Instead of applying a series of separate corrections, the machine learning model analyzes the full complexity of the supernova's light curve, simultaneously accounting for multiple sources of variation at once and producing a far cleaner distance estimate.

Avery: The result is distance measurements that are four times more precise than conventional methods, which is a staggering improvement applied across thousands of supernova observations. That precision could sharpen our measurement of the universe's expansion history dramatically. Anna: This matters enormously for the Hubble tension. If the tension survives with cleaner data, it really does suggest something new and fundamental is going on. Some unknown physics that our current Models don't account for.

If better data resolves it, that's equally important. It means the tension was a, uh, measurement artifact all along. Avery: Either way, we learned something profound about the nature of the universe, and AI Just became one of cosmology's most important instruments. Anna: And we finish today with a genuine cosmic mystery, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope. One that has astronomers scratching their heads in the very best way. Avery: Deep in the early universe, about 2 billion years after the Big Bang, the astronomers have found a massive galaxy that simply doesn't spin.

Anna: Now, that might not sound immediately startling, but it really should. Our current models of galaxy formation tell us that young galaxies spin as gas flows inward and gravity pulls matter together. Angular momentum builds up and sets the whole system rotating. It's like water draining down a plug hole. The rotation is almost inevitable, except for this one. Avery: The galaxy, cataloged as XMMVid M M 2075, shows no evidence of rotation whatsoever. Instead of the ordered rotating structure you'd expect from a young galaxy, its stars are moving in essentially random directions.

Chaotic swirl with no net spin. Anna: That kind of behavior, what astronomers call a slow rotator, is normally associated with the very largest, most evolved galaxies in the local universe. Galaxies that have been through billions of years of collisions and mergers and have had all that angular momentum scrambled away. Avery: Finding it in a galaxy that formed when the universe was less than 2 billion years old is, to put it mildly, not what anyone expected. Anna: Ben Forrest, the lead author from the University of California, Davis, described it simply.

This one did not show any evidence of rotation, which was surprising and very interesting. The team examined three galaxies from the same era using Webb. One was rotating normally. One showed irregular structure. And this one, nothing. Just random stellar motion. Avery: How does the galaxy in the young, turbulent early universe end up looking like an ancient, exhausted elliptical? Did it somehow form through a different process entirely? Was there a massive early merger event that scrambled its angular momentum before it could properly form?

Or does this represent something we simply don't yet understand about the physics of galaxy formation? Anna: The James Webb Space Telescope is pushing the frontier of exactly these kinds of studies, examining the internal kinematics. The motion of material within galaxies at high redshift was essentially impossible before Webb. Now it's revealing that the early universe contained structures far more diverse and surprising than we imagined. Avery: A, uh, galaxy that forgot to spin. Another reminder that the cosmos has a gift for defying our expectations.

Anna: Before we go, your Southern Hemisphere sky watching update for tonight and the weekend. Avery: Jupiter continues to be a spectacular evening object in the northwest after sunset. And Tonight is particularly special for anyone with a small telescope. A rare double shadow transit is occurring as the shadows of both Europa and Ganymede simultaneously cross Jupiter's cloud tops. Anna: For Australian observers, this event is happening in the late evening hours. Check local astronomy apps for your precise timing as the event unfolds across different time windows depending on your location.

The two shadows are clearly different sizes and speeds. Ganymede's shadow is larger and slower, while Europa's is smaller and faster. Avery: Mars is also visible before sunrise, though it is fading now as Earth moves away from us in our respective orbits. Saturn is rising in the pre dawn hours and making a fine target for patient early risers. Anna: The Moon is at New Moon phase today, which means dark skies all weekend. If you've been waiting for the right conditions to try some deep sky observing, this is your window.

Avery: Get outside, look up and enjoy the dark. Anna: And that is Astronomy daily for Friday 15th May 2026. Six stories, one live cosmic event, one landmark SETI result Ancient Martian ground, a revolutionary telescope, Baton Pass, AI powered cosmology, and a galaxy that forgot the rules. Avery: Not a bad Friday. Anna: Not bad at all. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, subscrib and leave us a review. Um, it genuinely helps more space enthusiasts find the show.

Avery: Find us at astronomydaily IO for full show notes, episode transcripts and our blog, and follow us on social media. We're Astrodaily, Pod on X, Instagram, TikTok and Tumblr. Anna: Until tomorrow, we'll be back with more of the universe's biggest stories and the weekend wrap. Until then, keep looking up from Avery and Anna. Clear skies everyone.