Solar Flares, Bizarre Hot Jupiters, and NASA's Soccer Ball Moon Mission

0:00 Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna. Avery: And I'm avery. It's Thursday, July 2, 2026, and we've got a properly mixed bag for you today. Anna: A solar flare that could light up the sky for the Fourth of July weekend. A planet that's breaking all the hot Jupiter rules, and NASA making a very cheeky promise involving a soccer ball and the moon. Avery: Plus, we're circling back on a story that quietly reshaped how we think about dark matter. Let's get into it. Anna: Quick update on the Swift rescue mission, because if you were with us yesterday, you'll remember this one just won't lift off.

0:37 Avery: Right, Catalyst Link spacecraft riding the very last Pegasus XL rocket has now been scrubbed twice for weather. First, it slipped from June 30 to July 1. Then from July 1 to today, targeting 5O9 Eastern. Anna: So as of when, we're recording, it's a real nail biter. Swift is still up there, still safe for now. And Link is still waiting for its shot at making history as the first commercial spacecraft to grapple an uncrewed government satellite. Avery: We'll keep tracking it and give you the real result the moment we have it.

1:12 For now. Patience, Pegasus. Now for something the sun actually delivered on. On June 30, Sunspot Region AR479 let loose an x 1.1 flare, the most powerful class there is. Anna: It triggered strong radio blackouts across the daylight side of Earth, and it launched a full halo coronal mass ejection heading our way. Avery: NOAA Space Weather Prediction center has issued a G2 moderate geomagnetic storm watch for July 3, meaning Aurora could be visible much further from the poles than usual. Anna: For our friends in the Northern Hemisphere, that could mean lights as far south as New York, Wisconsin and Washington State, just in time for July 4th fireworks.

1:57 Avery: And for us down, um, under, it's the opposite season. Deep winter darkness, which is honestly prime Aurora australis viewing weather. If the geometry cooperates. Anna: Solar activity remains elevated too, with a slight chance of further X class flares from three separate active regions. Keep your cameras charged. Avery: Next up, time for a proper mystery. Meet Corot 2B, a gas giant three and a half times the mass of Jupiter orbiting its star in just 41 hours. Anna: Hot Jupiters like this are almost always tidally locked.

2:30 One side permanently cooking in starlight, the other in permanent night. With a hotspot that shifts in a predictable direction thanks to eastward winds. Avery: Coro2b has had astronomers scratching their heads for eight years because its hotspot is on the Wrong side entirely. Now, new research led by Aurora Caselli at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute has cracked. Anna: It turns out this planet just isn't tidally locked. Its day is about three Earth days long, almost double the length of its year, which is only around one and a half days.

3:04 Avery: So by the time it finishes spinning once, it's already lapped its own star nearly twice. That's genuinely bizarre for a planet this close to its host. Anna: As Caselli put it, a, uh, one size fits all model just doesn't work. Even for planets we've studied for years. There goes another tidy theory. Avery: Our next story today takes us up to Florida, where United Launch alliance sent another 29Amazon Leo broadband satellites into orbit in the small hours of this morning. Liftoff at 1224 Eastern from Cape Canaveral.

3:37 Anna: This one carries some history with it. It's the eighth and final Atlas V5 flight dedicated to Amazon Leo. From here, the constellation shifts over to Ula's newer Vulcan Centaur rocket launch. Avery: Amazon's building toward more than 3,000 satellites for its Low Earth orbit Internet network. Competing head on with SpaceX's Starlink, this launch pushes the total in orbit past the 390 mark. Anna: It's also worth noting the clock is ticking. The FCC requires Amazon to have half that constellation flying by the end of this month.

4:11 So expect the launch pace to stay brisk. Avery: Our next story is for all patriotic Americans. Well, sort of. With America's 250th birthday coming up on the 4th of July, NASA's Chandra X Ray Observatory has given the country a rather spectacular gift. Anna: Four new composite images, each rendered in red, white and blue. Combining Chandra's X ray vision with light from Hubble Webb and ground based telescopes, Avery: the lineup includes the Cassiopeia, a supernova remnant, the star forming nebula NGC 3603, the spiral galaxy Messier 94, and the galaxy cluster ZWCL 0024 1652, where Hubble has mapped out dark matter's fingerprints.

5:06 Anna: And it's not just visual. Chandra's team also released three new sonifications, turning the X ray data into sound so you can genuinely listen to a supernova remnant. Avery: A lovely patriotic little reminder that the universe doesn't know about borders. But it sure looks good in the right color scheme. Anna: Now, a bit of a different segment. A couple of weeks back, a genuinely strange discovery came out of Yale and the Keck Observatory and it's stuck with us. So we wanted to circle back and make sure you'd heard it too.

5:39 Avery: Back in Mid June, astronomers confirmed a third galaxy that appears to have essentially zero dark matter. It's called DF9. Sitting alongside two previous oddballs, DF2 and DF4. Anna: All three line up in a tight, straight trail of galaxies. And that alignment is the real kicker. It suggests they didn't form the normal way. Tucked inside a dark matter halo. Avery: The leading idea is a bullet dwarf collision, a violent high speed crash between galaxies billions of years ago that literally stripped the ordinary gas away from its dark matter, letting new galaxies form from that gas alone.

6:18 Anna: Using the Keck Observatory's Cosmic Web Imager, the team led by Yale's Michael Keim measured DF9's mass by tracking how its stars move. And the total came out almost exactly matching the visible matter. No room left over for anything invisible. Avery: It's a big deal because it's some of the clearest evidence yet that dark matter behaves like an actual physical substance, one that can genuinely be separated from ordinary matter in the right violent circumstances. Anna: So if this one slipped past you when it first broke, now you're all caught up, and it's a great excuse to look up DF2, DF4 and DF9 together.

6:56 Next clear night. Well, with a very big telescope, let's Avery: finish on something completely different. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has made a promise. If the United states wins the 2026 FIFA World Cup, NASA will send a soccer ball to the moon. Anna: This is not a joke. Apparently, Isaacman made the pledge alongside Carlos Garcia galan, who runs NASA's moon base program, during a briefing about lunar lander plans. Avery: The plan is to one up Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard, who famously smuggled a golf club and a couple of balls to the moon back in 1971 for a very short round of lunar golf.

7:38 Anna: NASA's already sent an official World cup ball to the space station so astronauts could test their zero gravity footwork. This would be the away leg, Garcia. Avery: Galan says the ball is light enough that finding room on a future lander payload won't be a problem. So really, it's all down to Team USA now. Anna: No pressure. Avery: And, um, that's a wrap for today's episode. Anna: If swift's launch finally goes ahead overnight, we'll bring you the result first thing tomorrow. Until then, clear skies, everyone.

8:08 Avery: And keep an eye out for Aurora this weekend. You might just catch a show. Anna: We'll do it all again tomorrow. Bye.

8:17 Stories,

8:21 Love.

8:25 Avery: Story, soul.