Space Mirrors Spark Controversy, Hidden Space Junk Revealed, and Black Hole Energy Breakthrough

Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy daily for

Tuesday the 14th of July

2026. I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm, um, Avery. Episode 140

of season five. And honestly, today's rundown

reads like someone dared us to pick the most

argument starting stories we could find.

Anna: It really does. Coming up, American

regulators have just approved the launch of

the first commercial space mirror, a

spacecraft designed to beam sunlight down to

Earth at night. And astronomers are,

let's say, not thrilled.

Avery: We've also got a newly revealed minefield of

invisible space junk in one of the most

valuable orbits around Earth with an

Australian telescope right in the middle of

the detective work. Plus, physicists and

Manhattan have recreated black hole energy

extraction in a lab. The biggest telescope

ever built just moved for the very first

time. And a new paper explains how the Square

Kilometer Array is about to turn cosmic

lightning flashes into a map of the invisible

universe.

Anna: And later, a quick update on Starship

Flight 13 and the story of the Harvard

astronomer who's just been handed the keys to

the White House's new UFO

Avery: Science Council told you argument

starting. Let's get into it.

Anna: Our lead story today. On 9 July,

the US Federal Communications Commission

formally authorized the launch of Earendil

1, a demonstration satellite from

California startup Reflect Orbital.

Once in orbit around 600 kilometers up,

it will unfurl a thin film reflector

18 meters on a side that's roughly

60ft and use it to bounce sunlight

down to specific spots on the ground for

several minutes at a time.

Avery: So to be clear for everyone, a giant

steerable mirror in space whose entire

job is to shine daylight onto the night side

of Earth.

Anna: That's exactly it. The company calls itself

the Sunlight Company and the pitch is

sunlight on demand. Lighting construction

sites so crews can work through the night,

illuminating search and rescue operations,

and boosting solar farms by extending their

generating hours past sunset.

Avery: The demonstration satellite weighs about

142kg and is due to launch

later this year. And here's the number that

makes this a much bigger story than one test

satellite. ReflectorBital has talked about

operating 50,000 or more of these

mirror craft in low Earth orbit by 2035,

which is why

Anna: the astronomy community has reacted the way

it has. The FCC application drew

nearly 1900 public comments, the

overwhelming majority critical. For

comparison, SpaceX's application for up to

a million orbital data center satellites drew

about 1500. The European southern

Observatory has described plans like these as

an existential threat to optical astronomy.

Avery: And it's not just professional observatories.

The American Astronomical Society Raised the

prospect of eye damage for amateur

astronomers. The company itself has

acknowledged there's a risk if someone

happened to catch the reflected beam through

a telescope with a large enough aperture.

Plus concerns about momentarily dazzling

pilots and about what artificial daylight

does to wildlife. Circadian rhythms are not

optional extras for most living things.

Anna: The FCC's answer to all of that was

essentially not our department. The

commission said concerns about optical

astronomy and the environment fall outside

its review, which is limited to radio

spectrum. It found the risks with a single

satellite unlikely to materialize, and said

testing novel technology is in the public

interest.

Avery: Which might be true for one satellite. One

mirror tested carefully with the light

contained, switchable and steered away from

observatories. That's a technology

demonstration. 50,000 of them is a

different planet to live on. And the

regulatory gap is the real story here. If the

agency licensing these satellites says

impacts on the sky aren't their job, then,

uh, whose job are they?

Anna: To be fair to the company, they say they're

trying to earn trust. The light is

contained within the target spot. It can be

switched off at any moment. And they'll avoid

sensitive areas like research

observatories and protected habitats.

Their co founders said this license is the

first step toward rigorously testing

both the technology and the safeguards.

Avery: And that test data, uh, will matter. But I

suspect this is one we'll be covering again

and again.

Anna: The satellites, named Earendil, by the way.

Tulkin fans, will recognize the mariner, who

sails the sky with a shining star on his

brow.

Avery: At least they've got good taste in names.

Whether the night sky agrees is another

matter. Okay.

From mirrors we can see, to junk

we can't. A new study led by the

University of Warwick has uncovered some of

the faintest space debris ever detected in

geosynchronous orbit. Fragments down to

about five centimeters across. That's

two inches. And here's the kicker.

Nearly 80% of the faint objects

they found don't appear in any publicly

available catalog.

Anna: Let's set the scene for anyone new to this

geosynchronous orbit is that special

band about

36,000km up where a

satellite circles the Earth, exactly in

step with our planet's rotation so it

hangs over the same spot. It's home

to the big, expensive workhorses.

Communications, broadcasting, weather,

monitoring, some of the most valuable real

estate in space.

Avery: And unlike low Earth orbit, there's no

cleanup service. Down low, the wisps of

atmosphere gradually drag debris down until

it burns up. At, uh, geo altitude, there

is essentially nothing. Whatever ends up

there, a dead satellite, a, uh, fragment from

a breakup stays there effectively

forever.

Anna: So how did they find pieces this small

at that distance?

Avery: Clever image processing rather than new

hardware. The team went back to archival

survey data from the Isaacman Newton

Telescope in the Canary Islands and applied a

technique called blind stacking, layering

many images along different possible

trajectories so that incredibly faint moving

objects rise up out of the noise. That

reprocessing revealed 25 debris track

lips the original analysis had completely

missed. And the brightness flickering of many

of these fragments shows their tumbling as a

drift.

Anna: And um, there's a lovely local connection in

this one. The follow up observing campaign

extended the survey to Siding Spring

Observatory here in Australia. Working with

the Australian National University plus

Japan's Bisei Space Guard center with

jaxa. Genuinely international

detective work, which makes sense because the

Geo Belt is a shared resource.

Avery: The study's lead author, Dr. James Blake,

pointed out that pieces of junk up there can

be moving at kilometers per second relative

to each other. So even a 5 centimeter

fragment carries enough energy to do serious

damage to a very expensive satellite. And

his co author, Dr. Stuart Eaves had the line

of the week. The debris in geosynchronous

orbit is a potential minefield. And

nobody in their right mind walks into a

minefield without a mine detector.

Anna: The constructive takeaway being we now

have the detection techniques. Beeper's

systematic surveys of the Geo Belt need

to become routine because there are

only so many orbital slots up there and

one bad debris event could poison a

chunk of that belt for generations.

M Now to a story that's been making headlines

this week, and it's a proper piece of physics

history. Researchers at the Advanced

Science Research center at the City

University of New York have recreated in

a laboratory the mechanism by which energy

can be extracted from a spinning black hole.

The papers in Nature.

Avery: Okay, walk me through the black hole part

first, because it's one of the great ideas of

20th century physics.

Anna: It goes back more than half a century. To Sir

Roger Penrose, A, uh, spinning black hole

drags the very fabric of space around with it

in a region called the Ergosphere.

Penrose realized that if a particle ventured

in there and split in two, one piece could

fall in while the other escaped, carrying

more energy than the original particle

arrived with energy stolen from the black

hole's rotation. The physicist

Yakov Zeldowicz then extended the

idea to bounce a wave off a, uh,

sufficiently fast rotating object and the

wave can come away amplified. That effect

is called super radiance.

Avery: And the problem for 50 odd years has been the

words sufficiently fast. You can't

mechanically spin anything quickly enough.

There were beautiful experiments with water

vortices in 2017 and a rotating

acoustic disc in 2020. But physically

spinning objects hit a heart

Anna: ceiling, which is where the New York team's

trick comes in. They call it synthetic

rotation. Instead of spinning anything at

all, they built a ring of electronic

resonators and rapidly modulated their

electrical properties in a timed sequence

running around the ring to an incoming

radio wave. The stationary device is

indistinguishable from something rotating

impossibly fast. The synthetic rotation

can even mimic motion faster than light,

which no physical object could ever achieve.

Avery: And it worked. The waves actually came out

stronger.

Anna: They did. The team measured genuine

amplification with waves extracting energy

from the synthetic rotation, exactly as

Penrose and Zeldewicz predicted. Nothing

moves. Yet the wave leaves with more energy

than it arrived with.

Avery: What I love about this one is that it cuts

both ways. It's a fundamental physics

validation, a 50 year old prediction about

black holes confirmed on a benchtop in

Manhattan. But it's also a brand new kind of

amplifier. With a team talking about

applications in wireless communications,

optics and quantum technologies.

Astrophysics as an engineering department.

Anna: Black holes inspiring better radios since

1969, who knew?

Avery: Next to a mountaintop in Chile's Atacama

Desert, where the biggest optical telescope

humanity has ever attempted just did

something for the very first time, it moved.

Anna: This is the European Southern Observatory's

Extremely Large Telescope, the

elt, under construction on Cerro

Armazonis. Crews rotated the

telescope's entire structure around its

vertical axis for the first time. And in the

most charming detail of the week, they

started by pushing it by hand a few

centimeters before completing a full

rotation with auxiliary motors. Eso

captioned the release. And yet it moves,

which Galileo would surely have appreciated.

Avery: Now, let's put numbers on why hand pushing

this thing is remarkable. The structure

currently weighs about three and a half

thousand tons. Once the mirrors and

instruments go in, it climbs to around 4,600

tons. And the whole assembly floats on a film

of oil just 80 microns thin,

roughly the width of a human hair. That's how

a handful of people can start 10 million

pounds of telescope turning.

Anna: And this wasn't ceremony. It was a critical

engineering test. That rotation is how the

ELT will point anywhere in the southern

sky. So proving the motion is smooth is a

genuine milestone on the road to first light.

When it's complete, the ELT's segmented

primary mirror will stretch 39 meters

across, built from 798

hexagonal segments. Working as one,

it'll gather more light than any optical

telescope in history.

Avery: ESO's program manager, Roberto Damai, said

it beautifully that it's a reminder of what

can be achieved when people push in the same

direction, literally and figuratively.

Anna: And for our listeners. Remember, this giant

lives under southern skies, the Magellanic

Clouds, the galactic center overhead. The

ELT will see the same sky you do from

your backyard, just 40 million times

better.

Avery: Rude, frankly, but we'll allow it.

Anna: Sticking with giant instruments and southern

skies. A new paper doing the rounds this

week lays out how the Square Kilometer

Array is going to use one of the most

violent phenomena in the cosmos to

map things, things no telescope can see.

And the lead author is Dr. Manisha Caleb

of the University of Sydney Home, UM team.

Avery: All right. The violent phenomenon in

question being fast radio bursts.

Anna: Fast radio bursts. Flashes of radio

energy from other galaxies that last about

a millisecond, a hundred times quicker than a

blink, yet carry enormous energy.

And they're useful precisely because of what

happens to them on the way here. As a

burst crosses billions of light years, the

plasma it passes through disperses it,

stretching the signal out by frequency. And

magnetic fields twist its polarization

through an effect called Faraday rotation.

Every burst arrives carrying a record of

everything it traveled through.

Avery: So each one is like a core sample drilled

through the universe. The gas between

galaxies barely emits any light, and

magnetic fields emit none at all. But you can

read both from what they've done to the burst

along the way.

Anna: Exactly. And the paper's argument is

about scale. We've caught FRBs by

the hundreds so far. The SKA, with

SKA low being commissioned right now

in Western Australia alongside the Dish

Array in South Africa, is expected to

detect them in the thousands upon thousands.

At those numbers, the team argues, frbs

graduate from curiosities into a

genuine cosmological survey tool,

tracing where the universe's missing ordinary

matter is hiding, mapping cosmic

magnetic fields, probing the universe's

expansion, even testing fundamental

physics, like whether photons have any

mass at all.

Avery: And the poetry of it is that we still don't

fully know what makes a fast radio burst.

Magnetars are the leading suspects, but the

case is enclosed. So the SKA

gets to work the mystery from both ends,

using the bursts as tools while

simultaneously figuring out what they are.

Anna: A telescope, partly in our own backyard,

using millisecond flashes from across the

universe to weigh the invisible. The next

few years of this are going to be something

special Next up

Avery: a, uh, quick update on Starship Flight 13. We

gave you the full preview in yesterday's

episode. So just the new developments today.

First, the launch date has slipped. SpaceX

is now targeting no earlier than Thursday

16th July at 6:45

in the evening US Eastern Time. That's

8:45 Friday morning for those of us on

Australia's east coast.

Anna: And second, the good news that came with the

slip. Basex has completed a, uh, full

static fire of the super heavy Booster,

lighting all 33 Raptor engines on the

pad. That's the final major test before

flight.

Avery: The mission itself is unchanged from what we

covered yesterday. The second flight of the

version 3 vehicle carrying the first

genuinely functional Starlink V3

satellites rather than mass simulators.

If the schedule holds, we'll have the full

story in Friday's episode.

Anna: Set those alarms, Australia. A Friday

breakfast launch is the civilized way to

watch Starship fly.

Now, in case you missed it over the past

couple of weeks, and because it's simply too

interesting to leave on the shelf, Harvard

astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been

appointed to chair a brand new White House

UAP Science Advisory Council, a

scientific panel tasked with investigating

unidentified anomalous phenomena.

That's the current official term for what

everyone still calls UFOs, covering

objects in the air, in space or even

underwater.

Avery: And for listeners who know the name, yes,

that Avi Loeb, former chair of

Harvard's Astronomy Department, hundreds of

papers on black holes and the early universe,

and in recent years, the most famous or

infamous advocate for taking the possibility

of alien technology seriously. He's the one

who suggested the interstellar object

Oumuamua might have been an artificial light

sail back in 2017.

Anna: The setup the council was established under

the Trump administration's transparency push

on uap alongside agencies

including the Pentagon's Anomaly Resolution

Office, Office of the Director of National

Intelligence and the FBI.

Loeb's team reports to a new UAP

governance board overseen by the intelligence

community. And after its first meeting, the

council requested more than 50 videos,

images and documents from the Pentagon tied

to known incidents, including the so called

orb sightings reported by military personnel.

Avery: Now the scientific community's reaction has

been divided is the polite word.

John Kirkpatrick, who used to run the

Pentagon's own UAP investigations, said

Loeb is not viewed favorably by much of the

scientific community and lacks national

security experience. Critics point to his

hand picked counsel, including not just data

scientists and oceanographers, but also

figures who've openly claimed the US has

recovered non human craft and

Anna: in fairness, here's the other side of the

ledger. Loeb himself says he's starting from

the assumption these objects are human made

and treating it as a national security

question. He says the government is genuinely

baffled by some of what it's seen, and his

argument is that the fact these cases are

being open to scientists at all suggests

officials aren't confident they're

conventional. His stated focus is

instrumentation, data standards and

rigorous collection. In his words, better

data could settle the alien debate once and

for all.

Avery: And that's the version of this I can

genuinely get behind. The worst outcome for a

question like this is that it stays in the

realm of blurry footage and anecdote forever.

If this council produces calibrated

instruments and open data, that's a win,

regardless of what the answer turns out to

be. If it produces headlines instead of data,

well, we'll report that too.

Anna: His own line on it Keep our eyes on the

orbs, not the social media.

Avery: On, um, this show, we keep our eyes on both

strictly professionally Time for

Anna: your skywatch, and Tonight is genuinely one

to circle. 14 July brings a

super new moon, which means the darkest

skies of the entire month. And for those of

us in Australia and New Zealand, that's a

standing invitation. The Milky Way's core

is riding high through the evening, with

Scorpius and Sagittarius nearly

overhead. If you've been meaning to get

somewhere dark and see our galaxy properly

tonight and the next few nights are the

Avery: time while you're out there, look west after

sunset for Venus, absolutely blazing at

around magnitude -4 in LEO. You

can't miss it. And here's one for your diary.

On Thursday and Friday evening, the 16th

and 17th, a slender young crescent

moon slides up past Regulus and then Venus,

low in the western twilight.

Anna: A beautiful photo opportunity for the early

risers. The pre dawn east is where the

planets are congregating. Saturn is up after

midnight and high before dawn with its rings

tilted nicely for small telescopes. And

Mars is gliding right past Aldebaran in

Taurus this very morning. Two reddish

points of similar brightness about 5 degrees

apart. A lovely color comparison with just

your eyes.

Avery: Dark skies, a brilliant evening star, and

a red planet racing a red star. Not a

bad week's programming from the universe.

Anna: And that's Astronomy daily for Tuesday

14th July. All our episodes,

show notes and the newsletter are

@astronomydaily IO and you'll

find us across social media.

Avery: Astrodaily pod if

today's episode sparked an opinion and let's

face it space mirrors and UFO councils will

do that. Come tell us about it. We read

everything. I'm Avery.

Anna: And I'm Anna. Thanks for spending part of

your day with us. Until tomorrow.

Avery: Clear skies.

In this episode