Space Missions on Hold, Evolving Galaxies, and Searching for Extraterrestrial Life

Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna and

I'm so glad you could join us. For today's

episode, we've got a jam packed show for you

covering some really fascinating developments

from across the universe and right here on

Earth too. First up, we'll dive into

the latest on space missions, including an

update on the Axiom mission 4 and that

unexpected anomaly that's caused a bit of a

setback for SpaceX's Starship program.

Then we'll turn our attention back in time to

uncover how ancient life on Earth might have

survived some truly brutal snowball Earth

periods. After that, we're zooming out to the

cosmos to talk about galaxy evolution and

how scientists are getting closer to

understanding the very birth of galaxies

similar to our Milky Way. And speaking of

searching, we'll explore how the hunt for

alien life and advanced civilizations is now

going real time, which is super exciting.

Finally, we'll tackle one of those enduring

planetary mysteries. Why giant planets

often end up in the far reaches of their

solar systems. It's a bit like a cosmic game

of pinball, apparently. So stick around, it's

going to be a really interesting ride.

Alright, let's kick things off with some news

from the International Space Station, or ISS.

The launch of Axiom Mission 4, which was

originally set for Sunday, June 22, has

actually been put on hold again. NASA, Axiom

Space and SpaceX are still reviewing new

launch opportunities, so we'll have to wait

and see when it's rescheduled. Now, why the

delay? Well, NASA needs a little more time,

it seems, to evaluate the ISS operations

after some recent repair work on the Zvezda

service modules aft segment. You see, the

space station's systems are all really

interconnected, so they want to make

absolutely sure everything is totally ready

for additional crew members. They're taking

all the necessary time to review the data and

make sure it's safe. The crew is currently in

quarantine in Florida, but they're ready to

go as soon as the station gives the green

light. Meanwhile, SpaceX's Falcon

9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft are reportedly

in great shape, just waiting on the launch

pad at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's

Kennedy Space Center. Stay tuned for updates

on that. It's on.

Okay, shifting gears a bit to some not so

great news after. As I reported yesterday,

SpaceX experienced a pretty significant

setback at their Massey's test site near

Starbase Texas on the evening of June 18th.

They were doing a routine six engine static

fire test of ship 36 for their starship

program and unfortunately There was a sudden

energetic anomaly just after

11pm Central Daylight Time. While propellant

was being loaded onto the vehicle, a pair of

explosions ripped ship 36 apart,

producing a large fireball and causing

significant damage to the test facility. This

ship was actually slated for the 10th Test

flight of Starship and super heavy, expected

very soon, which obviously won't be happening

now. So what happened? Well, according to

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, initial

data points to a failure of a composite

overwrapped pressure vessel, or COPV,

in Ship 36's nose cone. These are

lightweight tanks that hold high pressure

gases. A rupture acted like a shaped charge,

tearing the payload wall and header tank

transfer tubes. This caused the liquid

methane and oxygen to mix and instantly

ignite, leading to the first explosion. The

nose cone collapse. Seconds later, the rest

of the propellant ignited, causing the

second. Fires kept burning for several

hours, indicating damage to the liquid

methane farm. The good news is fire.

Thankfully, SpaceX confirmed no personnel

were injured and everyone was accounted for.

All media and public members were safe too,

thanks to preset exclusion zones. This is a

crucial point, obviously for the Starship

program, though this is a notable setback.

It's the first time SpaceX has lost a ship in

ground testing since May 2020. And

what's more, they've lost the ability to

perform testing at Massey's for now, due to

all that significant damage to their static

fire test stand and the surrounding

infrastructure. It means that even ships like

ship 37, which just started getting engines,

can't be static fired without repairs. It's

worth noting that the COPVs on Starship don't

share commonality with those used on SpaceX's

Falcon rockets. So this issue is isolated to

the Starship program. The FAA won't be

involved in the investigation since it

happened during ground testing. SpaceX will

conduct their own. This means we're likely

looking at some significant changes and

delays for the Starship program in the coming

months as they assess repairs and

potentially inspect other ships in their

fleet. It's a tough break for sure, but as

SpaceX has demonstrated in the past, they

will bounce straight back from looking

at challenges in space.

Let's turn our attention back to Earth and a

fascinating mystery from its deep past. New

research out of MIT is shedding light on how

early complex life forms, what we call

eukaryotes, might have survived those extreme

periods known as Snowball Earth between

720 and 635 million years

ago. Now, imagine our planet completely iced

over. We're talking average global

temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius.

Geologists call this the cryogenian period.

And whether Earth was a hardened snowball or

more of a softer slushball. And is still

debated. But one thing's for most of

it was plunged into a deep freeze. So the big

question has always been, how and where did

life actually survive? Previously, ideas

included patches of open ocean, deep sea,

hydrothermal vents, or perhaps even under ice

sheets. But this new study suggests another

intriguing meltwater ponds on

the surface of the ice. Fatima Hussain,

a graduate student at mit, explained their

interest, saying, we see evidence for

eukaryotes before and after the cryogenian in

the fossil record, but we largely lack direct

evidence of where they may have lived during.

She added, the great part of this mystery is

we know life survived. We're just trying to

understand how and where. To test this

meltwater pond hypothesis, the researchers

analyzed samples from modern meltwater ponds

in Antarctica, specifically on the McMurdo

Ice Shelf. These ponds, just a few feet deep

and meters wide, form when trapped sediments

rise to the surface, absorb sunlight, and

melt the ice. The bottom of these ponds

are lined with microbial mats, kind of like

sticky, layered communities of cells.

While we know simpler life like cyanobacteria

can survive in these harsh environments, the

researchers wanted to know if eukaryotes,

those more complex organisms with a cell

nucleus, could also weather such challenging

circumstances. Using a combination of lipid

analysis, specifically looking for sterols

and genetic components called ribosomal rna,

they found something pretty remarkable. They

discovered a surprising diversity of

eukaryotic life, including various types of

algae, protists, and even microscopic animals

thriving within these microbial mats.

Houssain noted that no two ponds were alike,

but they all hosted diverse eukaryotic

assemblages from all the major groups. This

really suggests that meltwater ponds during

the snowball Earth episodes could have served

as crucial above ice oases,

nurturing the eukaryotic life that eventually

led to the incredible diversification of

complex life we see today, including us.

The study was published in the journal Nature

Communications.

Okay, from understanding ancient life here on

Earth, let's turn our gaze even further back

in time, to the very early universe and the

birth of galaxies. There's some really

groundbreaking new research that's helping us

understand how galaxies, including our own

Milky Way, first came to be.

We're talking about a period known as the

cosmic noon, which spanned from 10 to 12

billion years ago. During this incredibly

active time, star formation was happening at

a rate 10 to 100 times greater than it is

today. And New research has been looking

deeply into a particular type of ancient

galaxy called Lyman Alpha emitters or

laes. Now, without getting too technical,

Lyman Alpha or Leia, is a hydrogen line

emission in the UV spectrum. Basically, when

young energetic stars form, they emit intense

UV light that ionizes hydrogen gas around

them. And when that hydrogen recombines, it

emits this specific Lya line. So

detecting it is like a really strong

indicator of active star formation. LAEs are

thought to be the direct progenitors of

galaxies like our Milky Way. They're

typically low mass and very young, only about

200 to 600 million years old, and they have

the highest star formation rates among all

galaxies. But there's been a bit of, a

puzzle surrounding them. Were they undergoing

their very first intense burst of star

formation or were they older galaxies just

restarting their star forming engines after a

quiet period? A new study titled

Star Formation Histories Reveal Formative

Starbursts Experienced by lea emitting

Galaxies at Cosmic Noon. Led by Nicole

Firestone from Rutgers University, set out to

answer this. Firestone calls laes the most

profound beacons of the high redshift

universe, adding that they're fantastic

probes of distant galaxy populations because

they shine so brightly. M the team used

machine learning to examine the light from 74

LAEs detected by the 100 DCAM Imaging in

Narrowband Survey, or ODIN.

This allowed them to trace the star formation

history of each galaxy. They identified three

main those undergoing their first burst,

those with a dominant burst happening now,

but some past activity, and those where the

dominant burst occurred in the past.

The exciting finding a strong majority,

67% of the LAEs they studied were indeed

experiencing their very first major star

formation burst, with at most only modest

activity in their past. In fact,

95% were experiencing what the researchers

called dominant bursts of star

formation at the time of observation.

Firestone emphasized, for the very first

time, we have been able to definitively show

that most LAEs are experiencing their first

major starburst at the time of observation

and only have very young stars. This

is a big deal, because if LAEs are truly the

precursors to galaxies like ours, then this

research has essentially unlocked a part of

our own galaxy's origin story. As Eric

Gowiser, also from Rutgers, put it, now we

know the answer to that question is yes. When

asked if we'd looked far enough back to find

the starting points for galaxies like the

Milky Way. It really builds on those

fascinating JWST findings that showed

surprisingly massive, well, structured

spiral galaxies in the early universe. I

mean, it's all part of this incredible story

of galaxy evolution.

Alright, let's shift gears a little bit from

the cosmic past to the future of searching

for alien civilizations. Imagine

scanning the night sky for signs of alien

technology using the very same systems that

hunt for exploding stars. That's exactly

what researchers are starting to do now.

Transforming astronomical alert systems

originally designed to catch things like

supernovae into powerful tools for

detecting potential technosignatures.

That's the evidence of advanced civilizations

beyond Earth. Every single night, the

Zwicky Transient Facility, or ztf,

generates up to a million alerts as it

monitors the sky for changing objects.

These alerts flow through what are called

alert brokers, which are basically

sophisticated software systems that process

and distribute information about anything

that brightens, dims or suddenly appears

in the sky. And the upcoming Legacy Survey

of Space and Time, or lsst,

is going to increase this volume by an order

of magnitude, creating just an unprecedented

flood of astronomical data. While these

systems were initially built to catch

explosive events like supernovae and to track

asteroids, new research by Eleanor Gallet,

James Davenport and Steve Croft is

demonstrating their untapped potential for

seti, the search for Extraterrestrial

intelligence. Their work shows how we can

totally repurpose these existing astronomical

systems to search for those subtle signatures

that might indicate artificial structures or

technology around distant stars. The

inspiration for this approach actually comes

partly from Boyajian's Star, also known as

Tabby's Star. This star, officially KIC

846-2852, really puzzled

astronomers with its mysterious dimming

patterns a few years back. And while natural

explanations like dust clouds ultimately

proved most likely in that case, the study of

Boyajian's star highlighted how unusual

stellar behavior could potentially indicate

artificial megastructures like a Dyson

sphere, which is a hypothetical construct an

advanced civilization might build around its

star. So this new research takes that

concept even further, creating automated

systems to identify what they call stellar

dippers. These are stars that suddenly and

dramatically dim without any obvious natural

causes like a classical stellar variability

or other astrophysical phenomena. The

challenge of course, is immense. How do you

filter millions of nightly alerts? To find

the handful that might represent something

truly anomalous, the researchers

developed a two stage approach. First,

they use the alert broker's built in

filtering capabilities to narrow down

candidates. Then they apply additional

analysis using historical data to identify

stars showing unprecedented dimming behavior.

They're even deploying clever optical SETI

techniques like looking for planetary transit

zone geometries. And using something called

the Ceti ellipsoid The SETI ellipsoid

is this particularly neat concept that

identifies the zone in space where

hypothetical alien observers would have seen

Earth transit across our sun, potentially

prompting them to send signals in our

direction. Now the researchers are

honest about the current limitations. The

SETI methods that these alert brokers can

execute are still somewhat limited, but

they're providing suggestions to enhance

future technosignature and anomaly searches.

Especially in the era of the Vera C Rubin

Observatory. The existing systems weren't

designed with SETI in mind, so some

modifications and new approaches will

definitely be needed to fully realize their

potential. However, the foundation is

really solid. Alert brokers already have

sophisticated tools for identifying unusual

astronomical events. The LaserRE alert

broker, for instance, offers a watchmap

feature that can monitor specific regions of

the sky for anomalous signals. And as the

Vera C Rubin Observatory comes online with

lsst, the volume of astronomical

alerts is just going to increase

dramatically, which creates both huge

opportunities and challenges for

technosignature research. More data means

better chances of catching rare anomalous

events. But it also means developing even

more sophisticated filtering techniques so we

don't get completely overwhelmed. This work

represents a really sensible approach to SETI

because it uses existing infrastructure

rather than requiring dedicated alien hunting

telescopes. By utilizing systems

that are already scanning the entire visible

sky every few nights, we're essentially

getting a free ride on one of the most

comprehensive surveillance networks ever

pointed at the sky. And

while we shouldn't expect to find alien

megastructures next week, this research is

definitely establishing the groundwork for a

new generation of SETI that could operate

continuously, scanning millions of stars

for those signs that we are not alone in the

universe.

Okay, so we've talked about searching for

life, but, what about the formation of

planets themselves? Let's turn our attention

to one of the really big mysteries in

planetary why are enormous and

mysterious worlds sometimes found silently

looping around their stars far beyond the

orbit of known planets? Like some drift

as far as 10,000 times the distance

between Earth and the Sun? For decades,

astronomers really struggled to explain how

these lonely giants ended up so far from the

warm center of their systems. But thanks to

new research out of Rice University, the

mystery might finally have a solution.

A new study published in Nature Astronomy

reveals that these distant worlds aren't just

cosmic flukes. They're actually the natural

results of wild early life behavior in

planetary systems. During this chaotic

stage, young planets collide. They bounce,

and they scatter, almost like balls on a

pinball machine. And sometimes, if the

conditions are just right, one of these

planets Gets pushed to the outer limits of

the system. And believe it or not, it just

stays there. As Andre Isidoro,

A lead author and assistant professor at

Rice, put it, essentially, we're watching

pinballs In a cosmic arcade. He explained

that when giant planets Scatter each other

through gravitational interactions, Some are

flung really far away. But if the timing and

the surrounding environment Are just right,

those planets don't get ejected completely.

Instead, they get trapped in these extremely

wide orbits. This happens while

stars are still part of crowded birth

clusters, which contain hundreds or even

thousands of stars. The Rice team,

along with collaborators, Ran thousands of

computer simulations of early planetary

systems Living in these dense clusters.

Many of these virtual universes Showed

planets being kicked into orbits between one

hundred and ten thousand astronomical units

from their stars. That's up to 250

times farther than Neptune. Now. Usually

when planets are pushed that far, they don't

survive. They just get ejected into deep

space and become rogue planets Wandering the

galaxy alone. But in these simulations,

Some actually survived.

Gravitational nudges from neighboring stars

in the cluster Helped stabilize these extreme

orbits. As Nathan Kaib, A co author

of the study, explained, when these

gravitational kicks happen at just the right

moment, A planet's orbit becomes decoupled

from the inner planetary system. This creates

a wide orbit planet that's essentially frozen

in place after the cluster disperses.

And get this. These findings Might shed new

light on one of our own solar system's Most

intriguing mysteries, Planet Nine.

This theorized world, if it exists, could

be between five and ten times Earth's mass

and orbits somewhere between 250 and

a thousand astronomical units from the sun.

It hasn't been observed directly, but several

icy bodies Beyond Neptune have these strange

clustered orbits. That suggests they're being

pulled by something big and unseen. Planet

nine could be that something. According to

the study, if the early solar system

Experienced two specific instability phases,

One during the growth of Uranus and Neptune,

and another during the later scattering among

gas giants, there's up to a 40% chance

that Planet Nine was actually trapped in its

current location. Isidoro said. Our

simulations show that these kinds of orbits

Are entirely possible. The solar system

might not be unique, but it could be One of

the more efficient ones when it comes to

trapping these wide orbit planets. The

study also provides A bit of a roadmap for

future exoplanet hunters. Wide orbit planets

Are super hard to detect because they're so

far away and dim, but the research suggests

they're more likely to appear around metal

rich stars that already have gas giants.

These stars could become prime targets for

deep imaging surveys, and instruments like

the upcoming Vera C Rubin Observatory will be

absolutely essential. This telescope is

expected to help either find Planet nine or

disprove its existence by scanning the sky in

unprecedented detail. It's really

fascinating to think that the chaos of early

planetary systems, combined with the

gravitational influence of a crowded stellar

neighborhood, could be responsible for these

distant, stable worlds. It really

adds another piece to the complex puzzle of

how planetary systems, including our own,

came.

And that wraps up another exciting episode of

Astronomy Daily. It's always amazing to

delve into the latest breakthroughs and

mysteries of the cosmos, isn't it? From

delayed space missions and unexpected

incidents to the ancient secrets of life on

Earth and even the search for alien

civilizations, there's just so much to

explore. Thank you so much for joining me

on this journey through the universe's latest

happenings. If you want to catch up on all

the latest space and astronomy news with our

constantly updating news feed, or if you want

to listen to all our back episodes, be sure

to visit our [email protected]

that's a S T R O N o M M y

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is Anna signing off and reminding you to keep

looking up.

In this episode