The Moon That Isn't | Today's Space News

0:00 Speaker 1: Here is a question that sounds simple.

0:02 Speaker 2: What is a moon something that goes around.

0:05 Speaker 1: The planet, right, and what is a planet.

0:09 Speaker 2: Something that goes around the star?

0:11 Speaker 1: So what do you call a Jupiter sized world that

0:15 Speaker 1: orbits an object that is not quite a star and

0:18 Speaker 1: not quite a planet, which is itself orbiting a star

0:22 Speaker 1: seventy light years away?

0:25 Speaker 2: I am going to need a minute.

0:26 Speaker 1: So it is the International Astronomical Union.

0:29 Speaker 2: We'll get back to that.

0:31 Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily.

0:33 Speaker 2: I'm anna and I'm avery. It is Friday, the twenty

0:37 Speaker 2: fourth of July twenty twenty six, and this is episode

0:41 Speaker 2: one hundred and forty nine.

0:42 Speaker 1: Coming up. Astronomers confirm the first moonlike object outside our

0:47 Speaker 1: Solar system and immediately break the vocabulary trying to describe it.

0:52 Speaker 1: We have found the most powerful particle accelerator in the galaxy,

0:56 Speaker 1: and it has been sitting next to one of the

0:58 Speaker 1: brightest stars in your sky. A black hole is starving

1:02 Speaker 1: a galaxy. It doesn't even live in.

1:05 Speaker 2: Tina flies the world's biggest solid rocket from the open

1:08 Speaker 2: ocean for the first time. Starship gets another shot at

1:11 Speaker 2: flight thirteen tonight for some of you, and the moon

1:15 Speaker 2: has a date with the heart of the scorpion.

1:18 Speaker 1: Let's get into it. We have found thousands of planets

1:22 Speaker 1: around other stars, nearly six thousand confirmed, with candidates stacked

1:27 Speaker 1: up behind them, but there has always been a conspicuous

1:30 Speaker 1: gap in the catalog. No moons, not one confirmed. We

1:35 Speaker 1: know moons must be out there. Our own Solar system

1:38 Speaker 1: has close to three hundred of them, but they are small,

1:42 Speaker 1: they are faint, and they are parked right next to

1:44 Speaker 1: something far brighter. Finding one has been one of the

1:48 Speaker 1: great frustrations of exoplanet science, and now now a team

1:53 Speaker 1: publishing in Nature has confirmed the first one sort of,

1:57 Speaker 1: and the sort of is the whole story. This system

2:00 Speaker 1: is a star called C D minus thirty five twenty

2:04 Speaker 1: seven twenty two. It is a red dwarf roughly seventy

2:09 Speaker 1: light years from US, and for our listeners in Australia

2:12 Speaker 1: and New Zealand, it sits in your southern sky. Astronomers

2:16 Speaker 1: have known for years that this star has a companion

2:19 Speaker 1: because the star wobbles. That companion is called C D

2:24 Speaker 1: minus thirty five twenty seven twenty two B, and it

2:28 Speaker 1: is heavy, somewhere between twenty nine and thirty eight times

2:32 Speaker 1: the mass of Jupiter.

2:34 Speaker 2: That's well pass planet territory.

2:36 Speaker 1: It is above about thirteen to fifteen jupiter masses, an

2:41 Speaker 1: object confuse deuterium in its core. It's not doing what

2:45 Speaker 1: the Sun does. You need around ninety jupiter masses to

2:48 Speaker 1: fuse ordinary hydrogen. But it's doing something that in between

2:53 Speaker 1: category is a brown dwarf, too big to be a

2:56 Speaker 1: planet and too small to be a.

2:58 Speaker 2: Star, the thing astronomy call a failed star, which always

3:02 Speaker 2: struck me as unkind.

3:04 Speaker 1: Deeply unkind. And this particular brown dwarf is bright enough

3:08 Speaker 1: and far enough from its star that the very large

3:11 Speaker 1: telescope in Chile can photograph it directly. So the team

3:16 Speaker 1: took spectra of the brown dwarf itself and found that

3:19 Speaker 1: it wobbles too. Something is orbiting the brown dwarf. Best

3:23 Speaker 1: estimate of its mass about one jupiter.

3:27 Speaker 2: So we have a Jupiter going around the brown dwarf

3:30 Speaker 2: going around the red.

3:31 Speaker 1: Dwarf, a three tiered system, and nobody can agree on

3:35 Speaker 1: what to call the object at the.

3:37 Speaker 3: Bottom, because if the brown dwarf counts as a planet,

3:40 Speaker 3: then this thing is a moon, an exo moon, the

3:43 Speaker 3: first one confirmed. But if the brown dwarf counts as

3:46 Speaker 3: a star. Then this thing is a planet and it's

3:49 Speaker 3: not a.

3:49 Speaker 1: Moon at all, and the brown dwarf is genuinely physically

3:53 Speaker 1: both and neither. The paper hedges by calling it an

3:57 Speaker 1: exo satellite, which is honest and also a bit of

4:00 Speaker 1: a shrug.

4:01 Speaker 2: We've been here before, though. This is the Pluto argument

4:04 Speaker 2: in a fresh outfit.

4:06 Speaker 1: It really is. Pluto is not a planet because it

4:09 Speaker 1: has not cleared its orbital neighborhood. Fine, but Pluto has Sharon,

4:14 Speaker 1: and Sharon is so large relative to Pluto that the

4:17 Speaker 1: two of them orbit a point in empty space between them.

4:20 Speaker 1: So is Sharon a moon of a non planet? Are

4:23 Speaker 1: they a double dwarf planet? And our own moon is

4:27 Speaker 1: bigger than Pluto? Should it be a dwarf planet that

4:30 Speaker 1: happens to be captured?

4:31 Speaker 2: Nature does not care about our filing system.

4:35 Speaker 1: Nature does not care at all. And here's the part

4:38 Speaker 1: I find genuinely exciting. Brown dwarfs are common. If this

4:42 Speaker 1: one has a Jupiter mass companion, plenty of others probably

4:46 Speaker 1: do too. Some of those could sit in the habitable

4:49 Speaker 1: zone of the parent star. You could have a warm,

4:52 Speaker 1: temperate world with liquid water orbiting a failed star orbiting

4:56 Speaker 1: a real one.

4:58 Speaker 2: And we would not have a word for it.

5:00 Speaker 1: The team says, this is the first of its kind,

5:03 Speaker 1: not the last. I suspect the IAU is going to

5:06 Speaker 1: have a long decade.

5:08 Speaker 2: Now. If you go outside tonight and look up, one

5:10 Speaker 2: of the first bright stars you will find is Altaire.

5:13 Speaker 2: Northern listeners. It is high overhead in the evening, the

5:16 Speaker 2: southern corner of the Summer Triangle. Southern listeners, look north,

5:20 Speaker 2: it's lower down, but it's unmistakable one.

5:23 Speaker 1: Of the closest bright stars to us sixteen and a.

5:26 Speaker 2: Half light years sixteen point seven now roughly in that

5:30 Speaker 2: same direction, but nowhere near it in actual space. Sits

5:34 Speaker 2: an object that has just been confirmed as the most

5:37 Speaker 2: powerful particle accelerator in the Milky Way. By the way,

5:40 Speaker 2: I should stress the nowhere near it as the key

5:44 Speaker 2: point here.

5:45 Speaker 1: Worth being precise about that same patch of sky, wildly

5:49 Speaker 1: different distance.

5:50 Speaker 2: Wildly Altare is sixteen light years away. This thing is

5:54 Speaker 2: closer to fourteen thousand. It just happens to line up.

5:58 Speaker 2: It's called lhaa aso J nineteen twelve plus ten fourteen U,

6:04 Speaker 2: which I'm going to say exactly once. And it was

6:07 Speaker 2: picked up in twenty twenty four by a Chinese observatory

6:10 Speaker 2: high on the Tibetan Plateau.

6:12 Speaker 1: And what makes it special.

6:14 Speaker 2: It's throwing protons out at more than one thousand trillion

6:17 Speaker 2: electron volts one pev Astronomers call an object that can

6:22 Speaker 2: do that a pevotron, and it's worth pausing on what

6:26 Speaker 2: that number means. The Large Hadron Collider is twenty seven

6:29 Speaker 2: kilometers of superconducting magnets buried under the French Swiss border,

6:34 Speaker 2: and it's the most powerful machine humanity has ever built

6:37 Speaker 2: for this purpose. This object beats it by a factor

6:40 Speaker 2: of well over one hundred.

6:42 Speaker 1: With no magnets and no budget.

6:45 Speaker 2: With no magnets and no budget. Now, we've known about

6:48 Speaker 2: pevetron candidates for a while. There are dozens of them.

6:52 Speaker 2: The problem has always been proving what's actually being accelerated.

6:55 Speaker 2: Because when you detect very high energy gamma rays coming

6:59 Speaker 2: from one of these sources, there are two ways to

7:01 Speaker 2: make them. Protons smashing into gas or electrons scattering off light.

7:07 Speaker 2: Both produce gamma rays. The observatories that found these sources

7:11 Speaker 2: can't tell the two apart because their images are too

7:13 Speaker 2: blurry to see the difference.

7:15 Speaker 1: So how do you settle it, you.

7:18 Speaker 2: Stop relying on one telescope. A team led by Tsunafumi

7:21 Speaker 2: Mizuno at Hiroshima University pulled together three completely different instruments

7:26 Speaker 2: looking at three completely different kinds of light. NASA's Fermi

7:30 Speaker 2: Space Telescope for gamma rays at lower energies, a Japanese

7:34 Speaker 2: radio survey from the forty five meter dish at Nobayama,

7:37 Speaker 2: which maps the cold gas clouds in that region, and

7:40 Speaker 2: NASA's Chandra Observatory for X rays.

7:43 Speaker 1: Three views of the same patch of sky.

7:46 Speaker 2: And the pattern only works one way. Fermi found an

7:49 Speaker 2: excess of gamma rays at exactly the energies you'd expect

7:53 Speaker 2: if protons were slamming into gas, and the radio data

7:56 Speaker 2: showed the gas was right there for them to slam into.

7:59 Speaker 2: The electron explanation doesn't fit the shape of the signal,

8:02 Speaker 2: So this is a proton accelerator, confirmed in the Astrophysical Journal.

8:07 Speaker 1: What was it? Originally thought to be.

8:09 Speaker 2: A super nova remnant the expanding wreckage of a dead star,

8:14 Speaker 2: perfectly reasonable until it started putting out gamma rays above

8:18 Speaker 2: one hundred trillion electron volts and stopped being ordinary. And

8:22 Speaker 2: it is big on the sky. It spans more than

8:25 Speaker 2: one degree twice the width of the full moon.

8:28 Speaker 1: Which matters because cosmic rays are not just an abstraction.

8:32 Speaker 1: They're hating us constantly, constantly.

8:35 Speaker 2: They are a genuine hazard for astronauts and for spacecraft electronics,

8:39 Speaker 2: and they play into the chemistry of the interstellar medium.

8:42 Speaker 2: Knowing where the most energetic ones actually come from is

8:45 Speaker 2: not a trivia question. The team says, there are dozens

8:48 Speaker 2: more candidates to work through, and now they have a

8:51 Speaker 2: method that works. Expect more of these. Next up story three,

8:55 Speaker 2: The starved Red Potato.

8:57 Speaker 1: Every imagine a desert right on the coastline, stretching to

9:00 Speaker 1: the horizon on one side, and almost no rainfall for

9:04 Speaker 1: years at a time.

9:05 Speaker 2: The Atacama or the namebe.

9:07 Speaker 1: Exactly those All that water is sitting there, right there,

9:10 Speaker 1: and none of it arriving. That image is what got

9:13 Speaker 1: an astronomer in Milan thinking about a galaxy.

9:16 Speaker 2: Go on.

9:16 Speaker 1: Back in January, we got word of a galaxy nicknamed

9:19 Speaker 1: the Red Potato, named with real scientific rigor for looking

9:23 Speaker 1: like a red potato in the JWST image. It's more

9:26 Speaker 1: than eleven billion light years away. We're seeing it as

9:29 Speaker 1: it was when the universe was under two billion years old,

9:32 Speaker 1: and it sits in the southern sky at a declination

9:35 Speaker 1: of about minus forty nine.

9:36 Speaker 2: And the problem with it.

9:38 Speaker 1: The problem is that it's sitting in the middle of

9:40 Speaker 1: an enormous reservoir of cold gas, a node in the

9:43 Speaker 1: cosmic web, exactly the kind of place where galaxies are

9:46 Speaker 1: supposed to gorge themselves and blaze with new stars, and

9:50 Speaker 1: it's making almost none. It's quiet, red, old, and quiet

9:55 Speaker 1: at an age of the universe that it has no

9:57 Speaker 1: business being any of those things.

10:00 Speaker 2: Coastal desert, coastal desert.

10:02 Speaker 1: Now, the usual suspect for shutting down star formation is

10:06 Speaker 1: the galaxy's own central black hole. It fires up, blows

10:09 Speaker 1: the gas out, and the galaxy starves textbook, but the

10:13 Speaker 1: observations showed no sign of an active black hole in

10:16 Speaker 1: the Red Potato and no sign of any strong outflows.

10:20 Speaker 1: There was nothing there to blame.

10:22 Speaker 2: So what changed? This week?

10:23 Speaker 1: Tandra, the team led by Waychen Wang at the University

10:26 Speaker 1: of Milano Bikacoa, took deep X ray observations and found

10:30 Speaker 1: a long jet of particles. And it's not coming from

10:33 Speaker 1: the Red Potato. It's coming from a black hole in

10:36 Speaker 1: a neighboring galaxy, and it's pointed straight at the Red

10:39 Speaker 1: Potatoes gas cloud.

10:41 Speaker 2: What it's being starved by someone else's black hole.

10:45 Speaker 1: That's the finding. The jet doesn't appear to be doing

10:47 Speaker 1: much to its own host galaxy. It's narrow near home,

10:51 Speaker 1: and it widens out as it travels. By the time

10:54 Speaker 1: it reaches the Red Potato's neighborhood, it's wide enough to

10:57 Speaker 1: stir up that whole gas reservoir. One turbulent gas is

11:01 Speaker 1: turbulent gas. Turbulent gas will not settle down and fall in.

11:05 Speaker 1: The galaxy is surrounded by fuel. It cannot collect.

11:09 Speaker 2: What's the measured evidence for the turbulence.

11:11 Speaker 1: The gas motions are elevated. They can read that off

11:14 Speaker 1: the shape of the emission lines. It's not proof of causation,

11:18 Speaker 1: and the team is careful about that. They can't fully

11:20 Speaker 1: rule out that the Red Potato had some earlier violent

11:23 Speaker 1: episode that evtied it out, but there's no evidence for one,

11:27 Speaker 1: and there is a very obvious jet pointing at it.

11:30 Speaker 2: And this is the interesting bit for the wider picture,

11:33 Speaker 2: because Web keeps finding these quiet early galaxies.

11:36 Speaker 1: It does, and they're a genuine problem for our models.

11:40 Speaker 1: If a galaxy can be shut down by a neighbor

11:42 Speaker 1: rather than by itself, then galaxy evolution is not something

11:46 Speaker 1: a galaxy does on its own. It's something done to

11:49 Speaker 1: it by whatever happens to be nearby. That's a considerably

11:53 Speaker 1: messier universe than the one we had drawn.

11:56 Speaker 2: Let's move on to story four. Gravity one at open

12:00 Speaker 2: On Wednesday morning, Beijing time, a rocket lifted off from

12:04 Speaker 2: the deck of a ship one hundred and seventy kilometers

12:07 Speaker 2: out in the East China Sea, east of Shanghai, and

12:10 Speaker 2: put nine satellites into orbit.

12:13 Speaker 1: Fee launch is not new, but that distance is unusual.

12:17 Speaker 2: That is the story. The rocket is Gravity one, built

12:21 Speaker 2: by a commercial company called Orient Space, based in Shandong Province.

12:26 Speaker 2: This was its third flight and its third success, and

12:30 Speaker 2: its first genuine open ocean launch. The previous two went

12:34 Speaker 2: up from waters just off the coast. This time the

12:37 Speaker 2: ship sailed properly out to sea. Why does that matter conditions?

12:42 Speaker 2: The chief designer, Su Gul Kwang made the point that

12:46 Speaker 2: open sea is a different problem, different swell, different weather,

12:50 Speaker 2: no easy shore support. If you can launch out there,

12:53 Speaker 2: you can launch from almost anywhere, which means you can

12:56 Speaker 2: pick your orbit rather than being stuck with whatever your

12:59 Speaker 2: fixed past that allows. It also happens to be China's

13:02 Speaker 2: first commercial sea launch in the Yanksee River.

13:05 Speaker 1: Delta, and the rocket itself is unusual.

13:09 Speaker 2: Very Gravity one is about thirty meters tall, STUW squat

13:14 Speaker 2: four strap on boosters, around three core stages, and every

13:18 Speaker 2: single one of those motors is solid fuel, no cryogenic propellant,

13:23 Speaker 2: no complex plumbing. You build it, you ship it, you

13:27 Speaker 2: light it. That makes it the most powerful all solid

13:30 Speaker 2: fueled orbital rocket in the world, at six and a

13:33 Speaker 2: half tons to low Earth orbit.

13:36 Speaker 1: Which sounds enormous until you compare it, and we should.

13:40 Speaker 2: Falcon nine does about twenty two point eight tons, so

13:44 Speaker 2: Gravity one is roughly a third of that. The record

13:48 Speaker 2: it holds is specifically for solid fueled rockets, and that

13:51 Speaker 2: is a meaningful category. Solids are simple, storable, and quick

13:56 Speaker 2: to prepare, which is exactly what you want if your

13:59 Speaker 2: business is putting up batches of satellites on a schedule.

14:02 Speaker 2: But went up nine payloads, including six satellite for a

14:06 Speaker 2: constellation called Hwantian, two optical satellites carrying artificial intelligence hardware

14:12 Speaker 2: to do image recognition on board rather than beaming everything

14:16 Speaker 2: down first and four radar satellites designed to fly in formation.

14:20 Speaker 1: And orient space is not stopping at solids.

14:24 Speaker 2: No Gravity two is the next vehicle, liquid fueled, recoverable

14:29 Speaker 2: twenty one and a half tons to low Earth orbit

14:32 Speaker 2: MAIDE in flight, targeted for the final quarter of this year,

14:35 Speaker 2: which is ambitious and the wider context is worth noting.

14:39 Speaker 2: That launch was China's forty ninth orbital attempt of twenty

14:43 Speaker 2: twenty six. The national record is ninety two set last year.

14:47 Speaker 2: They're on pace to clear one hundred.

14:49 Speaker 1: One more from the Chinese program worth having on your radar.

14:53 Speaker 2: The big one, the long March five that will send

14:56 Speaker 2: Changa seven to the lunar South Pole, arrived in wen

14:59 Speaker 2: Chong on the thirteenth of July. Navigation warnings point to

15:03 Speaker 2: a launch window opening around the twenty fourth of August.

15:06 Speaker 2: That is a landing mission to the most contested real

15:10 Speaker 2: estate on the Moon, and it's now about a month out.

15:13 Speaker 2: In our next story, we visit an old friend for

15:15 Speaker 2: an update our Starship Flight thirteen watch guide.

15:19 Speaker 1: Quick update on a story we've been following all week,

15:22 Speaker 1: and this one is a watch guide rather than a

15:24 Speaker 1: result because as we record. It hasn't happened yet.

15:28 Speaker 2: Light thirteen has had a fortnight.

15:31 Speaker 1: It has back On the sixteenth, the countdown reached zero

15:34 Speaker 1: and the flight software called an aubort because four of

15:37 Speaker 1: the thirty three Raptor engines on the booster failed to

15:40 Speaker 1: reach acceptable starting conditions. The limit is three, so the

15:44 Speaker 1: vehicle stood itself down, which is the system working exactly

15:48 Speaker 1: as designed.

15:49 Speaker 2: Two raptors were swapped out after that.

15:51 Speaker 1: Two raptors replaced a leak check on the twenty second

15:55 Speaker 1: Ship forty stacked back on Booster twenty that evening, and

15:58 Speaker 1: SpaceX went for it yesterday and then waved off at

16:01 Speaker 1: ten past four in the afternoon Central time. Not a

16:04 Speaker 1: vehicle problem.

16:05 Speaker 2: Weather, which is a slightly unusual reason to scrub.

16:09 Speaker 1: It is, and the explanation is interesting. One of the

16:12 Speaker 1: key objectives this flight is getting clean camera footage from

16:16 Speaker 1: the ground of the heat shield while the vehicle is

16:18 Speaker 1: punching through maximum aerodynamic pressure on the way up. Cloud

16:22 Speaker 1: cover means no footage, and no footage means a lost objective.

16:26 Speaker 1: Though they waited for a clear day.

16:28 Speaker 2: So here are the times.

16:29 Speaker 1: The window opens Tonight, Friday the twenty fourth, at six

16:33 Speaker 1: forty five in the evening Eastern time. That's five forty

16:36 Speaker 1: five Central, four forty five Mountain, three forty five Pacific.

16:40 Speaker 1: The stream starts about half an hour before and.

16:42 Speaker 2: For those of us on this side of the world,

16:45 Speaker 2: that is Saturday morning, eight forty five am Eastern Australian time,

16:49 Speaker 2: ten forty five am in New Zealand. Coffee in hand,

16:53 Speaker 2: entirely civilized for once.

16:55 Speaker 1: The payload is the headline twenty Starlink V three satellites,

16:59 Speaker 1: the first time real functional V three spacecraft have gone

17:03 Speaker 1: up on Starship rather than the mass simulators of earlier flights.

17:07 Speaker 1: Six of them carry cameras aimed back at Starship's own

17:11 Speaker 1: heat shield, so the vehicle gets to inspect itself on

17:14 Speaker 1: the way through.

17:15 Speaker 2: Also raptor relay in space, a booster splashed down in

17:18 Speaker 2: the Gulf and the ship coming down in the Indian Ocean.

17:21 Speaker 1: That is the flight. We will have the result for

17:24 Speaker 1: you in tomorrow's weekend wrap, whatever it turns out to be.

17:27 Speaker 1: And finally, today let's turn our eyes skywards with our

17:30 Speaker 1: daily SkyWatch.

17:32 Speaker 2: We're talking about the sky over your head.

17:34 Speaker 1: Tonight, the moon has a close encounter with Antari's the

17:38 Speaker 1: Red Super giant at the heart of Scorpius, the star

17:41 Speaker 1: whose name literally means rival of Mars, and.

17:44 Speaker 2: This one favors the north, which is a nice change.

17:47 Speaker 1: It genuinely does, so let us be straight about it.

17:50 Speaker 1: The closest approach happens at six in the evening Eastern

17:53 Speaker 1: Time on Friday, when the moon passes about six tenths

17:56 Speaker 1: of a degree south of Antaris. For North American observer,

18:00 Speaker 1: that's right around your evening. By the time the sky

18:02 Speaker 1: is properly dark, the moon will have drifted a little,

18:05 Speaker 1: but you're still looking at a waxing gibbous moon and

18:08 Speaker 1: a bright orange red star sitting within a degree or

18:11 Speaker 1: two of each other. Bring binoculars if you have them.

18:14 Speaker 1: The color contrast is lovely.

18:16 Speaker 2: And for us in Australia and New Zealand, the exact

18:19 Speaker 2: moment falls in daylight on Saturday morning, so we get

18:22 Speaker 2: the pairing on either side of it Friday evening and

18:25 Speaker 2: Saturday evening, with the moon and ataris several degrees apart,

18:29 Speaker 2: rather than snuggled up, but.

18:31 Speaker 1: With an enormous compensation.

18:33 Speaker 2: An enormous one. In late July, Scorpius is not scraping

18:37 Speaker 2: the southern horizon for us, it's close to overhead the

18:41 Speaker 2: whole constellation, the claws, the curve of the body. The

18:44 Speaker 2: sting is laid out near the zenith in a way

18:47 Speaker 2: northern observer simply never gets a see. So take the

18:51 Speaker 2: wider pairing and enjoy the best view of Scorpius on

18:54 Speaker 2: the planet.

18:54 Speaker 1: And while you're out there, find all tear again our

18:57 Speaker 1: particle accelerator. From earlier listeners, it's high in the east

19:01 Speaker 1: to southeast in the evening, the bottom point of the

19:04 Speaker 1: summer triangle with Vega and DANEB. Southern listeners look north

19:08 Speaker 1: and about a third of the way up somewhere in

19:11 Speaker 1: that direction fourteen thousand light years past it something is

19:14 Speaker 1: flinging protons at energies. Our best machines cannot touch.

19:19 Speaker 2: Good thing to think about while you're standing in the cold.

19:21 Speaker 1: A few more for the diary. Full moon on Wednesday,

19:24 Speaker 1: the twenty ninth, the buck moon peeking at half past

19:27 Speaker 1: two in the afternoon utc over in Capricornice, which does

19:31 Speaker 1: mean the sky is brightening all.

19:33 Speaker 2: Week, though if you're chasing the delta acarids, do it

19:36 Speaker 2: now rather than waiting for the peak. We've said that

19:39 Speaker 2: all week, and it still holds.

19:42 Speaker 1: And in the pre dawn east Mars and Saturn are

19:45 Speaker 1: both up. Saturn is the brighter and easier of the two,

19:49 Speaker 1: and the rings are tilted about nine degrees at the moment,

19:53 Speaker 1: far better than the near edge on view we had

19:56 Speaker 1: at the end of last year. Worth a telescope if

19:59 Speaker 1: you are up early.

20:00 Speaker 2: And keep the twelfth of August circled total solar eclipse

20:04 Speaker 2: across Iceland and Spain, and a moonless Percy had peaked

20:07 Speaker 2: the same night. We will have plenty on both closer

20:10 Speaker 2: to the time.

20:11 Speaker 1: That is Astronomy Daily for Friday, the twenty fourth of July.

20:16 Speaker 2: You can find us at Astronomy Daily dot io and

20:19 Speaker 2: on your social platform of choice at astro Daily Pod.

20:22 Speaker 2: Astronomy Daily is part of the bites dot com podcast network.

20:26 Speaker 1: We're back tomorrow with the weekend wrap and with whatever

20:30 Speaker 1: Starship has done overnight until then from both of us

20:34 Speaker 1: Clear Skies.

20:35 Speaker 2: Sunday stars start