Shenzhou-23 Makes History, Psyche's Mars Masterclass, and a 19-Day Solar Mystery

Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily,

your Monday briefing on everything happening

across the cosmos. I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. It is Monday 25th

May, 2026, and we have a packed show

for you today.

Anna: We do. Uh, coming up, China makes history

with a crew launch that breaks several

records at once. NASA's Psyche

spacecraft wows us with brand new imagery

from Mars. And the sun served up a

signal so bizarre, scientists are staring,

still scratching their heads.

Avery: Plus ghost particles from a cosmic monster,

A stellar feeding frenzy in an orbit that's

almost impossibly fast, and the

surprisingly hopeful story about farming on

Mars. Let's get into it.

Anna: China made history on Sunday night, launching

three astronauts to its Tiangong space

station aboard the Shenzhou 23

spacecraft. And this crew is carrying

several firsts with them into orbit.

Avery: The long March 2F rocket blasted off from the

Zhuoquan Satellite launch Center in the Gobi

Desert at, uh, just after 11pm Beijing time,

sending the crew on their way to what China

calls the Heavenly Palace.

Anna: The crew consists of Mission commander Xu

Yangzhou, pilot Zhang Zhiyuan,

and payload specialist Lai Kaying.

And it's Lai who's making the history books.

She was born and raised in Hong Kong and

holds a doctorate in computer forensics. She

is the very first astronaut from Hong Kong to

reach space.

Avery: That's a genuinely big moment, Anna. Um, Hong

Kong has been growing its contributions to

China's space program significantly in recent

years, with university teams developing

instruments for upcoming lunar missions. To

now have someone from the city actually

flying, that's a real milestone.

Anna: And the historic firsts don't stop there.

One member of the Shenzhou 23 crew will stay

aboard Tiangong for a full year to the

first time any Chinese astronaut has

undertaken a 12 month mission.

Avery: The extended stay is connected to a

fascinating plan for the Follow up

shenzhou24Mission due later this year.

That mission will carry a Pakistani

astronaut, the first international visitor to

China space station, who will spend a short

time aboard before returning on the outbound

Shenzhou 23 vehicle, leaving one of the

current crew to complete that year long stay.

Anna: It's a clever piece of mission architecture,

and all of it is building toward China's

stated goal of a crewed lunar landing by

2030. Every long duration mission,

every new crew rotation, is laying the

groundwork for those much longer future

missions.

Avery: The new crew will also relieve the Shenzhou

21 astronauts who've been aboard Tiangong for

more than 200 days, slightly longer than

originally planned following an incident last

year where their Return spacecraft was

damaged by suspected debris. They'll be very

glad to see a fresh crew arrive.

Anna: Congratulations to Xu Yongzhu, Zhong

Zhiyuan and especially Lai Kai Ying

on this historic mission. We'll be following

their time aboard Tiangong closely now.

Avery: Remember a couple of weeks ago we told you

about NASA's Psyche spacecraft preparing to

slingshot around Mars on its way to the

asteroid belt. Well, the images are in

and they are spectacular.

Anna: NASA released the photos this week from

Psyche's gravity assist flyby, uh, of Mars.

On 15 May. The spacecraft came within just

under 2,900 miles of the Martian surface,

traveling, uh, at more than 12,000 miles an

hour. And its multispectral imager was

working overtime.

Avery: The standout image shows the Huygens crater,

a massive double ringed impact structure

nearly 300 miles across in Mars's

southern highlands. Psyche enhanced the

colors to highlight compositional differences

in the dust, sand and bedrock.

And the result is genuinely beautiful. Ochres

and tans and pale blues against the ancient

cratered terrain.

Anna: These images serve a, uh, real scientific

purpose. Beyond the stunning visuals,

they're calibration data for Psyche's imaging

instruments. The first chance the science

team has had to test them against an object

larger than a few pixels. That's

going to be crucial when the spacecraft

finally arrives at its target.

Avery: And Mars delivered the goods dynamically as

well. The flyby gave Psyche a speed boost of

around 1,000 miles per hour and shifted its

orbital plane, all without burning a drop of

onboard propellant. The navigation team

confirmed a spacecraft is now on a direct

course for the asteroid, with arrival

expected in August 2029.

Anna: Asteroid 16 Psyche, of course,

is one of the most intriguing objects in the

solar system. Uh, a metallic world that may

be the exposed core of a protoplanet

and potentially worth more than the entire

global economy in precious metals.

Though we should note that last part is very

much a theoretical figure.

Avery: Still, it's quite a headline. Gorgeous

images. Now the asteroid itself in three

years time. Well worth the wait.

Anna: Here's a solar physics story that genuinely

surprised researchers. Back In August of

2025, NASA's instruments

picked up what initially looked like a

perfectly routine radio burst from the sun.

Avery: Except it didn't stop Exactly.

Anna: These type 4 solar radio

bursts, produced when energetic electrons

get trapped inside the Sun's magnetic fields,

normally last anywhere from a few hours to

maybe a few days. The previous record

stood at five days.

Avery: This one lasted 19, nearly

four times the previous record. That's not a

small anomaly. That's a completely different

Class of event.

Anna: The tricky part was actually tracking it,

because as the sun rotates, different

spacecraft had it in view at different times.

A fleet of four missions pieced the

Kickstarter, NASA's Parker Solar

Probe, the STEREO mission, the WIND

spacecraft, and the joint ESA

NASA Solar Orbiter each observed

the burst for several days across three

overlapping windows.

Avery: So it was almost like relay baton passing

across a solar system. One spacecraft would

watch the signal fade from its perspective,

and then another on the other side would pick

it up again as the sun rotated.

Anna: Using data from stereo, the team

developed a new tracking technique that

pinpointed the source, a structure in the

Sun's corona called a helmet streamer.

These funnel shaped features form when hot

plasma gets trapped along enormous

magnetic loops extending outward from the

Sun's surface.

Avery: And the leading theory for why this one

lasted so long was that three successive

coronal mass ejections within the same region

of the sun essentially kept re energizing the

burst like someone repeatedly topping up a

fire.

Anna: The findings have been published in the

Astrophysical Journal Letters, and the

implications for space weather forecasting

are significant. While the radio waves

themselves are harmless, the magnetic

environments that produce these bursts can

also accelerate dangerous particles toward

Earth. Particles that can damage satellites

and spacecraft. Understanding how these

bursts work and how long they can last is

directly relevant to protecting our

infrastructure in space.

Avery: And with solar activity intensifying through

the current cycle, the timing of this

research couldn't be better.

Anna: Now we're going deep. Very deep.

Two miles below the surface of the

Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Sicily,

sits one of the most unusual telescopes

ever built. It's called KM

M3Net, and it doesn't look at light.

Avery: It hunts ghost particles,

neutrinos, subatomic particles so

small, so elusive, that a light year of

solid lead would only have a fixed 5050

chance of stopping one. Trillions of them are

passing through your body right now without

you feeling a thing.

Anna: Back in February 2023,

KM3Net detected something

extraordinary. A neutrino with an

energy of 220PETA

electron volts. To put that in context,

that's more than 30 times the energy of the

most powerful neutrino ever previously

recorded. A ping pong ball dropping 1

meter carries about the same energy

packed into a single subatomic

particle.

Avery: Scientists have been trying to work out where

this particle came from ever since. And

now, fresh research published this week in

the Journal of Cosmology and Astrophysics

points to a culprit. Lazars.

Anna: Lasers are among the most violent objects in

the universe. They're active galactic nuclei,

effectively supermassive black holes that are

shooting jets of plasma directly toward Earth

from billions of light years away. They're

cosmic particle accelerators on an almost

incomprehensible scale.

Avery: If the KM3 NET team's interpretation is

confirmed that this record shattering

neutrino originated from a population of

blazars, it would completely rewrite our

understanding of how these objects accelerate

particles. It implies that blazars can push

matter to energies far beyond what scientists

previously thought possible.

Anna: And the story isn't finished yet.

Hem3net is still under construction.

This detection arrived when only a fraction

of the final instrument was operational. As

the detector expands, it should catch more of

these ultra high energy events, potentially

narrowing down the source to a specific

object or class of objects.

Avery: A ghost particle from the edge of the

universe, decoded by a telescope on the

ocean floor. This is exactly the kind

of story that reminds you why particle

astrophysics is so extraordinary.

Anna: Our next story comes from mit and it involves

one of the most extreme gravitational dances

ever observed. Two dead stars locked in

an orbit so tight, so fast, it almost

defies belief.

Avery: We're, we're talking about a binary white

dwarf system. White dwarfs are the remnant

cores of stars like our Sun. Extremely dense,

roughly Earth sized, but retaining the mass

of a full star. When two of them end up

orbiting each other at uh, very close range,

remarkable things can happen.

Anna: In this case, the two white dwarfs are

orbiting each other with a period of just

8.56 minutes. To put that in

perspective, the Earth takes

365 days to orbit the Sun.

These two stellar corpses are completing a

full orbit in less than nine minutes.

Avery: At uh, that proximity, gravity becomes

overwhelming. One of the white dwarfs is

actively stripping material from the other,

pulling it apart and devouring it in what

astronomers call a, uh, mass transfer. It's

essentially a slow motion cosmic cannibalism.

Anna: Led by emma Chikls at MIT's Kavli Institute,

the research team says this gives us one of

the clearest news yet of how ultra compact

white dwarf binaries exchange mass at such

extreme orbital periods. Previous

observations of these systems have been

limited, and many fundamental questions about

how violent mass transfer can get in such

tight orbits have remained unanswered.

Avery: There's another dimension to this discovery

that's particularly exciting for the future

of astronomy. Systems like this one are

prime targets for next generation

gravitational wave detectors, space based

observatories that will be able to detect the

ripples in space time produced by these

ultra compact binaries.

Anna: So what we're seeing here isn't just a

fascinating stellar spectacle. It's a

signpost pointing toward gravitational

astronomy. The tighter the orbit, the more

intense the gravitational signal. And at

eight and a half minutes, this system is

generating waves that future detectors should

be able to pick up directly.

Avery: The findings are published in the

Astrophysical. Even burnt out stellar

cores, it turns out, can be torn apart under

the right circumstances. Space is

metal.

Anna: It really, really is.

Avery: We're going to close today's episode with

something that feels almost like science

fiction, but is very much science fact.

If humans are ever going to live on Mars long

term, they're going to need to eat. And that

means growing food. But Martian soil, or

regolith, to use the correct term, is

toxic, nutrient, dead, and about as

welcoming to plant life as a car park.

Anna: Not for long, if researchers from the United

States and Brazil have their way. Their new

study, published in Frontiers in Astronomy

and Space Sciences, proposes a biological

solution. Fungi.

Avery: Specifically, a group called beneficial

fungi, organisms that have been promoting

plant growth on Earth since long before

humans arrived. The key players here are

arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, or

amf, which work by essentially acting as

a microscopic extension of a plant's root

system, dramatically increasing its ability

to absorb nutrients.

Anna: Martian regolith is critically deficient in

three things plants need above, um, almost

everything nitrogen, potassium, and

phosphorus. It's also highly alkaline,

perchlorate laden, and lacks the organic

matter that makes Earth soil biologically

active. The researchers propose that

AMF and a related fungal species called

Trichoderma could begin to overcome those

deficiencies and transform the regolith into

something biologically workable.

Avery: What makes this particularly interesting is

that these fungi have already been tested in

space environments. Fungal species have been

used on the International Space Station, and

researchers are building an understanding of

how they perform under the kind of abiotic

stress, extreme temperatures, radiation,

nutrient poverty that any organism on

Mars would face.

Anna: The team is candid that significant

challenges remain before you're growing wheat

in Martian regolith. Real world testing with

actual Martian soil samples rather than

simulants hasn't happened yet. But they're

optimistic, and they frame this approach as a

strategic biotechnological tool for what's

called in situ resource utilization.

Living off the land.

Avery: The concept being, instead of shipping soil

from Earth, which would be extraordinarily

expensive and logistically nightmarish, and

you bring a handful of carefully chosen

microorganisms and let them do the

terraforming at the microscale. Turn poison

into farmland. One fungal threat at a

time.

Anna: It's patient science, but it's the kind of

patient science that makes long duration Mars

missions and eventually permanent human

settlement imaginable. We'll be watching this

research closely.

Avery: And that's our Monday edition of Astronomy

Daily, six stories from across the cosmos,

from the launch pads of the Gobi Desert to

the ocean floor of Sicily, from the surface

of Mars to the edge of the observable

universe.

Anna: Thank you so much for spending part of your

Monday with us. If you're enjoying the show,

please take a moment to leave a review.

Wherever you listen, it makes a real

difference in helping new listeners find us.

Avery: You can find us at astronomydaily, uh

IO and follow us on X

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@astrodaily pod. All the links are

in the show notes.

Anna: We'll be back tomorrow with more of the

latest from the Cosmos. Until then, keep your

eyes on the

Avery: skies and keep looking up.

In this episode