Solar Storms, Grounded Missions, and the Planet That Survived Its Star

Anna: From the bytes.com podcast network. This is

Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm avery. It's Friday, July 3,

2026, and we've got a proper Fourth of July

weekend send off for you. A rescue mission

that's still grounded, a solar storm that's

actually arrived, and a planet that came back

from the dead sort of.

Anna: Today on the show, NASA's Swift Rescue

mission hits another wall, this time mid

flight. The sun is genuinely kicking

off right now with a geomagnetic storm watch

in effect for tonight. Hess accidentally

discovers a planet it was never built to

find. A red dwarf just 25 light years

away might be hiding the most Earth like

world we've found in ages.

Astronomers sound the alarm on satellite

mega constellations. And we close with a

planet that shouldn't exist, orbiting the

corpse of its own star.

Avery: Six stories. One very busy week for the

universe. Let's get into it.

Anna: We start with an update to a story we've been

tracking for weeks. And it's not the Update

anyone wanted. NASA's mission to rescue

the Swift Observatory attempted to launch on

Thursday, July 2. And for the first

time, it actually got off the ground.

Avery: Right, quick recap for anyone just joining

us. The Neil Garrels Swift Observatory is

a 22 year old Gamma ray telescope that's

losing altitude fast because heightened solar

activity has puffed up Earth's upper

atmosphere and increased drag on its orbit.

Anna: Left alone, Swift reenters and burns up by

October. So NASA hired a company

called catalyst space technologies,

$30 million, incredibly tight

timeline to build a robotic spacecraft

called Link 3 articulated arms.

The plan is for Link to grapple Swift,

a satellite that was never designed to be

serviced, and shove it back up to a safer

orbit.

Avery: It launches piggyback. A Northrop Grumman

Pegasus rocket tucked under the belly of the

Stargazer aircraft takes off from Kwajalein

Atoll in the Marshall Islands, climbs to

about 39,000ft and then drops the

rocket, which lights up five seconds later.

This week alone, it had already been scrubbed

twice for weather.

Anna: So Thursday morning, Stargazer finally

takes off. It's airborne, heading for the

release point. And then mid flight, the team

spots a, uh, warning in the data stream and

makes the call not to release the rocket at

all.

Avery: Which is a genuinely different failure mode

than what we told you earlier this week. This

wasn't weather. This was an act of abort in

the air on a live vehicle. It's not even

clear yet whether the warning came from the

rocket or from the carrier aircraft itself.

Anna: No new Launch date has been set. NASA's been

very upfront that this is a race against the

clock. They've already suspended most of

Swift's science operations since February

just to buy time flying it in a low drag

orientation to slow the decay.

Avery: The stakes here go beyond one telescope. 2.

If Link pulls this off, it's the first time a

commercial spacecraft has docked with a

government satellite that was never built for

servicing. That's a template for saving

Hubble one day or any number of aging

observatories we'd otherwise just have to

write off.

Anna: So, still grounded, still no date, and the

clock is still ticking towards October. We'll

keep you posted the moment there's movement.

Avery: Story 2 and if you were listening earlier

this week, you'll remember we flagged the big

X class flare and told you to watch the

skies. Well, watch the skies.

It's happening.

Anna: The sun has been properly busy

after that X1.1 flare from

Sunspot Region

AR4479 on June 30. It

followed up with 10m M class flares

in a single 24 hour stretch.

Multiple coronal mass ejections, several of

them Earth directed.

Avery: NOAA Space Weather Prediction center has a G2

that's a moderate geomagnetic stormwatch

active for today July 3rd, with a chance of

reaching G2 levels through the day as the CME

arrives and interacts with Earth's magnetic

field.

Anna: The key thing forecasters are watching is the

BZ component of the magnetic field,

basically whether the storm's magnetic

orientation points south, which is what lets

solar wind energy pour into our

magnetosphere efficiently. Get that right

and the aurora show

Avery: gets a lot more dramatic in the Northern

Hemisphere. That means aurora potentially

visible much farther south than usual.

Forecasters are talking about spots like

Idaho and New York if skies stay dark and

clear over the coming nights.

Anna: And for our Southern Hemisphere listeners,

this is a genuine Aurora Australis

opportunity too. D2 level storms can

push the southern lights up into Tasmania

and sometimes as far as southern Victoria and

the Lower south island of New Zealand. If

you've got clear, dark skies away from the

coast tonight, it's worth a look.

Avery: South conditions are expected to start

easing back toward quieter levels tomorrow,

July 4th as the CME's effects wane.

So if you're chasing the lights tonight into

the small hours is your best shot before the

Northern Hemisphere's holiday fireworks take

over as the main show.

Anna: Our third story is a lovely bit of science

serendipity. NASA's Tess, the

transiting exoplanet Survey satellite has

notched ah, a genuine first. Its first

planet found by gravitational

microlensing,

Avery: which is a big deal because TESS wasn't

designed for that at all. Its entire job is

watching for the tiny dip in starlight when a

planet crosses in front of its star.

Microlensing is a completely different trick.

It happens when a foreground star drifts

almost exactly in front of a background star

and its gravity bends and briefly magnifies

that background star's light, like a natural

lens.

Anna: If that foreground star happens to have its

own planet, the planet adds its own little

flicker to that magnification event. And

that's exactly what happened here. The

planet's called Gaia 23 Bra, a

super Jupiter, about 1.63

times Jupiter's mass, orbiting an orange

dwarf star roughly 40,000 light years away

out near the galactic center.

Avery: It was actually the European Space Agency's

Gaia mission that first flagged the

brightening event back in 2023. But

Gaia's observations were too sparse to

confirm a planet was involved. It was only

when researchers went back and combed through

tess's archival data that they realized

TESS had caught the same event with enough

detail to nail it down.

Anna: Lead author Mallory Harris, a UH doctoral

candidate at the University of New Mexico,

published The findings on July 1st in the

Astrophysical Journal Letters. And the

tantalizing bit is what it implies. TESS

has been quietly recording eight years of

data and nobody was looking for this kind of

signal. There could be plenty more of these

hiding in the archive.

Avery: It's also a nice bit of foreshadowing.

NASA's Roman Space Telescope, on track to

launch August 30 this year, is being

purpose built for exactly this kind of

survey. It's expected to find around

1,000 microlensing planets. By staring

into the crowded center of The Galaxy

Gaia, uh, 23B is basically a

preview of what's coming.

Story four takes us a lot closer to home,

just 25 light years away, which in galactic

terms is basically next door.

Anna: This is

GJ3378B,

a rocky world orbiting a faint red dwarf

star in the constellation Camilo partillaris,

the giraffe. It was actually first picked up

back in 2024 by French astronomers,

but the original numbers pegged it as a puffy

mini Neptune, five times Earth's mass,

orbiting on a 25 day period, sitting

right at the edge of the habitable zone.

Avery: A team at UC Irvine led by Paul

Robertson went back with two instruments. The

Habitable Zone Planet Finder on the Hobby

Eberly Telescope in Texas and the NED

Spectrometer on the YIYN Telescope

at Kitt Peak in Arizona and revised those

numbers substantially. Robertson put it

nicely this super Earth gets about 90%

of the radiation Earth gets from the sun

right in the sweet spot for liquid water, at

least in principle.

Anna: The catch, and there's always a catch with

red dwarfs, is that these stars can be

vicious with stellar wind and radiation,

which tends to strip atmospheres clean

off nearby planets. And because

GJ3378B doesn't

transit its star from our point of view, we

can't use transit spectroscopy to check

whether it's actually kept in atmosphere, the

trick JWST has been using on planets

like the Trappist 1 system.

Avery: So the honest answer is nobody knows yet.

We'll likely have to wait for NASA's

Habitable Worlds Observatory, which isn't due

to launch until sometime in the 2000-40s, to

get a direct look. But for a planet this

close and this promising, that's a long wait

worth marking on the calendar.

Anna: Dory 5 is one that hits close to home

for us, quite literally given our own dark

skies down here in the Southern Hemisphere.

Avery: The European Southern Observatory has

published the first study to actually

calculate what happens to ground based

astronomy if current satellite mega

constellation proposals go ahead and um, the

word ESO used was devastating.

Anna: There are currently somewhere around 14

to 17,500 satellites in

orbit. But between SpaceX, which wants

roughly a million more for space based data

centers, and companies like

Reflectorbital, which is proposing three

50,000 mirror satellites designed to beam

sunlight down to Earth at night, the combined

proposals on the table add up to over

1.7 million satellites.

Avery: The study, led by ESO astronomer

Olivier Hainau and accepted for publication

in Astronomy and Astrophysics, modeled the

actual imaging impact for a SpaceX

scale constellation. Even if every satellite

stayed just below naked eye brightness, the

study found it would produce dozens of trails

per image on ESO's Very Large Telescope,

cutting usable field of view by up to

28%.

Anna: It gets worse for the Vera Rubin

Observatory's new legacy survey of Space and

Time, which just began full science

operations. If those satellites were even a

little brighter than assumed, most of Rubin's

images each night could be rendered

essentially unusable.

Avery: And reflect orbital's mirrors are their own

special problem. Even when they're not

pointed directly at an observer, the

scattered light alone could brighten the

entire night sky three to four times over.

I now describe the single one of those

mirrors as being as Bright as, uh, Venus, the

so called Morning Star.

Anna: ESO's recommendation is a hard

ceiling, no more than 100,000

satellites total, all kept fainter than

naked eye visibility. Worth noting, this

study also directly informs the

observatories closest to us here in the

southern hemisphere, since ESO's Very

Large Telescope and the Extremely Large

Telescope currently under construction. Both

sit in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

Avery: SpaceX and reflect orbital are both still

waiting for a decision from the U.S. federal

Communications Commission about whether their

proposed constellations get approved. And

this study is now very much part of that

conversation.

And for our, uh, final story today, one

that's been bugging astronomers since 2020,

and JWST just cracked it.

Anna: Meet WD 1856

b. It's a gas giant,

somewhere between 4 and 11 times

Jupiter's mass. And it orbits its star

every 34 hours, less than 3

million kilometers out, 50 times

closer than Earth is to the Sun. When it

transits, it blocks 56% of

the star's light, one of the deepest transits

ever recorded.

Avery: Here's the problem. The star it's orbiting is

a white dwarf, the collapsed Earth

sized corpse of a star that has already gone

through its red giant phase, where it swells

up hundreds of times its original size and

incinerates anything nearby. A, uh,

planet orbiting this close should have been

vaporized billions of years ago when the star

was still ballooning outward.

Anna: So how is it still there? Using

JWST, an international team

including Northwestern's Christopher O'

Connor and lead author Ryan McDonald measured

the planet's atmosphere directly for the

first time. Gas temperature and chemical

composition, including methane and

hydrocarbon haze, which would give it a color

similar to Saturn's moon.

Avery: Titanium and the temperature was the

giveaway. The planet's running at around

400 kelvin, roughly

240 degrees hotter than

it should be if it were only being warmed by

the faint light of its dead star. That extra

heat had to come from somewhere.

Anna: By modeling how giant planets cool over time,

the team worked backward and found the planet

was heated somewhere between 3 and 5.5

billion years after the white dwarf formed.

In other words, it wasn't sitting in this

tight, dangerous orbit during the red giant

phase at all. It was out at a safe distance

the whole time and only migrated inward

billions of years later through gravitational

interactions with other bodies in the system,

eating up as it went.

Avery: It didn't survive the apocalypse. It arrived

after the funeral.

Anna: Which makes this more than just a curiosity,

because our own sun is going to do exactly

this in about 5 billion years swell

into a red giant, almost certainly consume

Mercury and Venus, with Earth sitting right

on the edge of that danger zone. Jupiter and

Saturn will very likely survive that phase

out at a safe distance, just like

WD1856B's planet originally

did.

Avery: And what this research suggests is that the

story doesn't necessarily end there. Over

billions more years afterward, gravitational

nudges could send one of our own surviving

gas giants migrating inward, closer

to whatever's left of the sun, just like this

planet did around its white dwarf.

Anna: As the researchers put it, stellar death

isn't necessarily the end. Some planets

get a whole second act afterwards. A

nice thought to leave you with heading into

the weekend.

Avery: And that's a wrap on Astronomy daily for

Friday, July 3. A grounded rescue

mission, A solar storm right over our heads.

A planet Tess wasn't even looking for. A

promising new neighbor 25 light years out,

a warning about our crowding skies, and a

planet that outlived its own star's death.

Anna: If you're in the US have a safe and happy 4th

of July weekend. And if the skies stay dark

and clear, maybe let the aurora provide a few

fireworks of its own tonight.

Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit

subscribe wherever you're listening and, uh,

leave us a review. If you can spare 30

seconds, it really does help new listeners

find the show.

Anna: You can find full show notes, sources and

links at astronomydaily IO and

We're back tomorrow with more from across the

universe and of course, the weekend wrap.

Avery: I'm Avery.

Anna: I'm Anna. Clear skies, everyone.

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