Starship Set for Launch, First Black Hole Found in Omega Centauri, and X-Rays in Space

Anna: The world's biggest rocket has a launch date,

a clean bill of health from the regulators,

and finally an explanation for what went

wrong last time.

Avery: Plus, a, uh, globular cluster hanging in your

southern sky right now has just given up the

first of its 10,000 missing black holes.

And astronauts have taken the first ever

medical X rays in space. With four hours of

training, all that,

Anna: A, uh, brand new crew on the space station,

dead stars hiding next door, and the darkest

skies of the month. This is Astronomy Daily.

Avery: Hello and welcome to Astronomy daily. It's

Wednesday the 15th of July, 2026.

This is series five, episode 141.

And I'm Avery.

Anna: And I'm Anna. We've got a packed one today.

Two big spaceflight stories, two genuinely

lovely deep sky discoveries, a, uh, first in

space medicine, and a sky watching window you

do not want to waste. Shall we get into it?

Avery: Let's do it.

Anna: So Avery, on Monday we previewed Starship

Flight 13 and told you it was penciled in for

today, Wednesday the 15th. Well,

the pencil has moved.

Avery: It has. SpaceX is now targeting Thursday

July 16th with a 90 minute launch

window opening at 6:45 in the evening

Eastern time, which for us here in Australia

is Friday morning, 8:45am on the

east Coast. So set your alarms for Friday

breakfast viewing.

Anna: But honestly, the launch date isn't even the

biggest news in this story because on Monday

the Federal Aviation Administration formally

closed its investigation into what went wrong

on Flight 12. And for the first time we got

the full picture.

Avery: And um, it's fascinating. Remember, Flight 12

back in May was the debut of the big version

three vehicle. And it mostly went well,

except the super heavy booster never made its

controlled splashdown in the Gulf. It just

didn't get there.

Anna: And now we know why. It comes down to

hot staging. That maneuver where the upper

stage lights its engines while it's still

attached to the booster. SpaceX changed the

ignition sequence of ship's engines on this

flight and that change pushed the Booster

into a 90 degree orientation error

right after separation.

Avery: So the booster comes out of staging pointing

the wrong way. And then to make matters

worse, when it tries its boost back burn,

five of its 33 raptor engines fail to

relight.

Anna: The FAA's report boiled it down to two

root causes heat effects on propulsion

components during ascent. And I love this

phrase, erroneous engine alarm settings.

Essentially the alarm thresholds were tuned

wrong for the multi engine flight

environment. Though engines were being shut

down that could have kept burning.

Avery: And SpaceX's fixed list covers all of it A,

uh, modified startup sequence for ship,

hardware updates on the booster and retuned

engine alarms and abort settings. The FAA has

accepted the corrective actions, so the

regulatory road is clear.

Anna: Which brings us to what Flight 13 actually

has to do. It's essentially a rerun of

Flight 12's objectives, but this time with

real cargo. 20 functional Starlink

V3 satellites, the first of their kind ever

to fly.

Avery: And these aren't the mass simulators from

Flight 12. These are working satellites.

They'll deploy solar arrays and antennas and

attempt to connect with a ground station in

South Africa and and with other starlinks.

Six of them even carry cameras to inspect

ship's heat shield from the outside.

Anna: The catch being it's a suborbital flight, so

those satellites get about 20 minutes of

glory before they re enter and burn up. It's

a test, not a delivery.

Avery: There's also an in space Raptor relight on

the checklist, which matters enormously for

the lunar Lander version of Starship that

NASA's Artemis program is counting on. And if

all of this goes to plan, Flight 14 could

see SpaceX attempt a first V3 catch

back at the

Anna: tower Friday morning, Australian time.

We'll have the full wrap on Saturday's show.

Either way.

Avery: From a rocket that's about to launch to one

that just did. On Tuesday. A Soyuz

2 1A lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome

in Kazakhstan carrying NASA astronaut Anil

Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov

and Anna Kikina.

Anna: And this was the express service, A two orbit

fast rendezvous. They docked with the

International Space Station's Pritchell

module just over three hours after liftoff.

Compare that to the two day chases of the old

days.

Avery: The 3O joins Expedition

7475 for a roughly an eight

month stay coming home in April 2027.

It's the second flight for both Dubrov and

Kikina, but the very first for Menin. And his

backstory is wonderful, it really is.

Anna: He's a physician, a former Air Force flight

surgeon who flew over a hundred sorties and

F15s, worked as a first responder after the

Haiti and Nepal earthquakes, and was actually

SpaceX's first ever flight surgeon before

NASA selected him as an astronaut in 2021.

Avery: And here's the bit I love. His wife, Anna

Menon, has already been to space. She flew on

the Polaris dawn mission in 2024, the one

with the first commercial spacewalk. So

they're now officially a two astronaut

Anna: household with two kids who presumably win

every what do your parents do? Conversation

at school. Forever.

Avery: Forever. And there was a diplomatic first

at the launch, too. NASA administrator Jared

Isaacman was at Baikonur in person, meeting

Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov face to face

for the first time. Isaacman and Menon are

close friends. Annamin flew on Isaacman's own

Polaris dawn mission.

Anna: As for the work, Menon's eight months are

heavy on the science that suits a doctor.

They'll be refining in space production of

semiconductor crystals. And this ties

beautifully into our next but one story

performing ultrasound using augmented reality

and AI techniques that could remove the need

for medical support from Earth on deep space

missions.

Avery: A doctor testing the Future of Space

Medicine launched the same week the first

space X rays are published.

Anna: Hold that thought now, Avery.

If you step outside tonight, anywhere in

Australia or New Zealand, and look up at the

constellation Centaurus riding high in our

winter sky, there's a soft, fuzzy star you

can see with your naked eye from a dark

sight.

Avery: That's Omega Centauri, the greatest

globular cluster in the sky. 10 million

stars packed into a ball about 18,000

light years away. And an object that has

puzzled astronomers for decades because,

according to the models, it should be teeming

with black holes. Around 10,000 stellar

mass black holes left behind by exploded

stars.

Anna: And until this week, astronomers had found

none of them. Evidence for an intermediate

mass black hole lurking at the center? Yes.

But that missing population of 10,000 smaller

ones? Silence.

Avery: Until now. In a paper published Monday in the

Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by

Matthew Whitaker at the University of Utah

announced the first first stellar mass black

hole ever detected in Omega Centauri. It's

been dubbed Omega Cat BH2, and

Anna: the way they found it is the real star of

this story. Not X rays, not radio emission

astronomy measuring the positions of stars

so precisely over such a long time that you

can watch one being swung around by something

invisible.

Avery: They sifted through nearly 20 years of

Hubble archival data observations running

from 2003 to 2023, and

added recent James Webb data to sharpen the

measure. It was a star with about

78% the mass of our sun, orbiting

something massive and utterly dark.

Anna: The team said, uh, the precision comes down

to a fraction of a pixel on Hubble and Webb's

detectors. It simply would not have been

possible without both telescopes working

together.

Avery: And BH2 turns out to be a rule

breaker. Its mass is lower than expected, and

the star that orbits it takes 94 years

to go around, which Makes this the widest,

longest period stellar mass black hole binary

ever found.

Anna: One black hole down, roughly

9,999 to go.

But the astronomers suspect this first

detection opens the floodgates. Now they

know exactly what signature to look for.

Avery: And for our southern listeners, that cluster

is up there right now in your July evening

sky. Ten million stars, an

intermediate mass black hole at the middle,

and at least one newly unmasked stellar mass

black hole. Go out and look at it tonight.

You'll never see it the same way again. Okay,

Anna.

Space uh, medicine. As promised, the

Radiological Society of North America has

just published results confirming a genuine

first diagnostic X ray images taken

in orbit.

Anna: And the mission behind it was Fram 2, the

private SpaceX crew Dragon flight from

March 2025. The first crew ever

to fly a polar orbit. Four first time

astronauts, none of them medical experts.

Three and a half days in space before launch.

Avery: They got just four hours of training on a

commercial off the shelf portable X ray

system. Then in orbit with no guidance from

ground control, they X rayed a calibration

phantom. A smartwatch, a hand, a

forearm, an abdomen, a pelvis and a

chest.

Anna: And here's the result that matters. Back on

Earth, three independent medical experts

compared the in flight images with X rays

taken before launch. The ground images were

better quality, but the space images were

good enough to diagnose injuries like broken

bones.

Avery: Which is a conceit Buster, as Dr. Shaina

Gifford of the Mayo Clinic put it. The

assumption has always been that because

everything in space is constantly moving,

getting a diagnostic image in orbit was just

too technically challenging.

Anna: Not anymore. And the applications go well

beyond broken bones. That smartwatch X

ray was the proof of concept for non

destructive testing. Inspecting spacecraft,

hardware, satellites, even spacesuits for

hidden damage without taking anything apart.

Avery: And think about where humanity is headed. A

lunar outpost is days from a hospital. Mars

is months. If you're going to break an arm

240,000 miles from the nearest radiology

department, you want the radiology department

to come with you.

Anna: The device even survived the trip home.

Superficial scuffs on the exterior internals.

Fine. As Dr. Gifford put it, the sky

is not the limit when it comes to X rays in

space.

Now for a story about the neighbors we never

knew we had. Astronomers at the University

of Warwick and the University of Colorado

Boulder have found four white dwarfs hiding

within 65 light years of Earth.

Avery: Which sounds impossible, doesn't it? We've

been surveying the solar neighborhood in

exhaustive detail for decades. How do you

miss four entire dead Stars on your own

street.

Anna: Because they had accomplices. Each of these

four white dwarfs orbits a, ah, red dwarf

companion, a, uh, bigger, brighter star whose

glare completely drowned them out in visible

light. To every survey, these looked like

perfectly ordinary single stars.

Avery: The giveaway was the wobble. Each red dwarf

showed a substantial radio wobble, the

telltale sign of a massive unseen companion

tugging on it. So the team went hunting with

the Hubble Space Telescope's imaging

spectrograph in near ultraviolet light, where

white dwarfs shine and red dwarfs fade.

Anna: And there they were, four hidden white dwarfs

unmasked. Lead author Dr. Mayrey O'

Brien put it beautifully. It's a reminder

that even in our own cosmic neighborhood, we

can still find surprises if we look in the

right way at the right wavelength.

Avery: The headliner of the four is a system called

G203 47, only

about 25 light years away, which makes its

white dwarf the ninth closest known to the

Sun. And finding it closed a mystery that had

been open for 27 years, ever since that

unexplained wobble was first spotted.

Anna: But G2O3 47

replaces one mystery with another. The

red dwarf orbits its white dwarf every

14.9 days, but rotates on

its axis only once every 100 plus days.

In systems like this, tides should have

locked those two motions together long ago.

The M way. The Moon always shows Earth the

same

Avery: face, so the fact that it isn't locked

tells us these four binaries had very

different life stories. Some went through

violent, prolonged interactions that

synchronized them. While

G20347 seems to have

had a gentler, briefer encounter.

Anna: Four new entries in the local census

published in the monthly notices of the Royal

Astronomical Society. And a strong hint

there are more dead stars hiding in plain

sight around familiar stars.

Avery: And so to the sky itself. Anna

uh, the Moon hit New Moon on Tuesday, which

means right now we're in the darkest skies of

the month.

Anna: And for those of us in Australia and New

Zealand, mid July New Moon is as good

as it gets. The Milky Way core,

Sagittarius Scorpiusthat great

glowing heart of the galaxy is essentially

overhead in the evening. If you've been

meaning to get out of the city for a proper

dark sky night, this week is the week.

Avery: It's also the week to hunt a Comet. Comet

10P Tempel 2 is brightening as it heads

towards perihelion in early August, currently

sitting around magnitude 7. 8 in the evening

sky.

Anna: Now, that's not naked eye territory. You'll

want binoculars at minimum. Ideally a

telescope. Look for a soft, fuzzy,

grayish patch the comet's glowing

coma. And here's the nice bit for us

Southern Hemisphere observers get a slightly

higher altitude view than our northern

friends, a

Avery: dark sky, the galactic core overhead,

and a comet on the rise. Sometimes the

universe just hands you the itinerary.

Anna: And for the early risers, Mars is currently

drifting through Taurus near the red giant

Aldebaran. In the pre dawn sky, two

red beacons side by side. Worth a look with

your morning cuppa.

Avery: Uh, and that's our journey around the cosmos

for today. Starship cleared and counting down

to Friday morning our time, a new crew

safely aboard the station, a black hole

unmasked in Omega Centauri, the first

X rays in orbit, four hidden white dwarfs

and a dark sky waiting for you tonight.

Anna: If you enjoyed the show, share it with a

fellow Stargazer. It genuinely helps.

All our episodes show notes and links are at

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Pod.

Avery: We'll be back tomorrow with more space and

astronomy news. Until then, I'm Avery.

Anna: And I'm Anna. Thanks for listening and as

always, keep looking up.

Avery: Clear skies, everyone.

In this episode