The Unifying Mystery of Black Hole Jets: Stellar and Supermassive Connections

0:00 Anna: Take a black hole 10 times the mass of the Sun. Now take one 10 million times heavier, the kind that sits in the middle of a galaxy and anchors a hundred billion stars. Avery: Those two objects have almost nothing in common. Different sizes, different neighbourhoods, different life storeys. One of them you could fit inside a city. The other one you could pour the entire inner solar system into and still have room. Anna: And this week, a team led out of Perth has shown that when it comes to the single most dramatic thing a black hole does, firing a jet of material out into space at close to the speed of light, both of them wait for exactly the same moment, Avery: same trigger, same threshold, seven orders of magnitude apart.

0:48 Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy AstroDailyPod. I'm Anna. Avery: And I'm avery. It's Friday the 18th of September, 2026, and this is episode 197. Anna: So let's start with the thing that makes this hard. Black holes don't emit anything themselves. What we actually see is the material falling in. It piles up into a disc. It heats up through friction until it's glowing across the electromagnetic spectrum. And then sometimes, not always, but sometimes, some of it gets flung back out in a narrow, tightly collimated jet.

1:24 Avery: And the question of when you get a jet and when you don't has been open for decades. Anna: It m has. But for one class of black hole, we actually have a very good answer. Stellar mass. Black holes, the ones left behind when a massive Star collapses maybe five to 20 times the Sun's mass, often sit in binary systems, pulling material off a companion star. And those systems cycle. They brighten, they fade, they go through what astronomers call state transitions, and they do it over weeks and months, which Avery: means we've watched the whole process start to finish many times over many, many times.

2:04 Anna: And what we've learned is that the jets switch on and off at particular points in that cycle. And those points are tied to how fast the black hole is feeding, measured against something called the Eddington limit. Avery: And this is worth spelling out, because everything else today rests on really does. Anna: So material falling toward a black hole gets extremely hot, and hot material radiates. That radiation pushes outward, gravity pulls inward. The Eddington limit is the point where those two balance, where the radiation coming off the infalling material is pushing outward just as hard as the black hole's gravity is pulling in.

2:44 Avery: So if you try to feed a black hole faster than that, the radiation starts blowing the meal away. Anna: Anna. Roughly, yes. Though nature has ways around it, and we'll come back to that. The useful thing about the Eddington limit is that it scales with mass. A, uh, black hole a million times heavier has a limit a million times higher. So instead of talking about absolute brightness, astronomers talk in fractions of Eddington, 10% of Eddington, 1% of Eddington. And that gives you a way to compare black holes of wildly different sizes on the same scale.

3:19 Avery: Which brings us to the supermassive black holes. And the reason this has been so stubborn. Anna: The reason is simply time. Everything about an accretion flow scales with the mass of the black hole, and that includes how fast it evolves. A stellar mass system cycles in months. A supermassive black hole in an ordinary active galaxy takes something on the order of thousands of years to do the equivalent. Avery: So you can't watch one. You get a single frame of a film that runs for millennia, exactly that.

3:52 Anna: You can look at thousands of active galaxies and take a census. Here's one with a jet, here's one without. But you can never watch a single object cross a threshold and see what happens. Which means the critical accretion rates that we know so precisely for stellar mass black holes have simply been unmeasurable for the big ones. Avery: Unless something gives a supermassive black hole a sudden, well defined meal. Anna: And that's the move. Tidal disruption events. A, uh, star wanders too close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of its galaxy.

4:25 The difference in gravitational pull across the star exceeds what's holding the star together and it comes apart. Roughly half the debris gets flung away and the other half falls back and builds a brand new accretion disc from nothing. Avery: And that one plays out fast. Anna: Years, not millennia. You get to watch an accretion flow around a supermassive black hole be born, rise, peak and decline. And you can do it inside a single research career. That is the entire reason this result was possible.

4:59 Avery: So Dr. Adele Goodwin at, uh, Curtin University's International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Perth, who's also a Forest Research foundation fellow, working with Dr. Andrew Mummery at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, published in Nature astronomy yesterday, Thursday 17th September. Anna: And what they show is that tidal disruption events actually launch outflows twice in two physically distinct episodes. The first comes early, while the black hole is feeding above its Eddington limit.

5:34 That brief ferocious phase right after the star comes apart, when there's far more material trying to get in than the black hole can comfortably swallow. Avery: The prompt outflow, the prompt one. Anna: And then later, sometimes months or years later, there's a second separate outflow. And that One arrives as the accretion rate falls through a specific value, about 2% of the Eddington limit. Avery: 2%. And that number is familiar. Anna: That number is the same critical accretion rate at which stellar mass black holes in binaries make their state transitions.

6:10 The same value we've measured over and over in objects millions of times smaller. Goodwin and Mummery are arguing that the coupling between how a black hole feeds and how it throws material back out is scale invariant, that it doesn't care Avery: about mass at all across roughly seven orders of magnitude, which, if it holds, Anna: is a genuinely unifying statement about a class of object we usually treat as two separate populations. Avery: And it also clears up a mess, doesn't it? Because radio astronomers have had an awkward problem with these events for a while, Anna: a very awkward one.

6:47 Some tidal disruption events produce a radio flare almost immediately. Some produce one much later, out of nowhere, sometimes years after everyone has stopped paying attention. Some appear to produce nothing at all that looked like three different phenomena or worse, like noise. Avery: And the two outflow picture makes it Anna: one phenomenon, one phenomenon with two stages, where whether you see either of them depends on when you happen to be looking and how the accretion rate was falling. The prompt and delayed outflows stop being a puzzle and start being a prediction.

7:23 Avery: And Goodwin makes a very practical point about that. Anna: She does, and it's my favourite part of the release. Her line is quote, radio telescopes are incredibly powerful, but knowing when to look is just as important as knowing where to look. And she goes on, if we can anticipate when a black hole is more likely to launch a jet, we can run better targeted campaigns, waste fewer observations and improve our chances of catching these rare events. At the moment, they matter most, which Avery: is not a small thing when you're competing for time on the world's big dishes.

7:57 Anna: It's the difference between a survey and a stakeout. And it matters enormously for what's coming, because the Vera Rubin Observatory is about to start finding tidal disruption events in numbers we've never had before. If you can look at the optical light curve and predict roughly when the radio outflow should arrive, you can have the radio telescopes ready. Avery: Without that, you're guessing, and this one is properly ours. Anna: It is led from Curtin University in Perth through icrar, and the underlying data set is the product of years of multi wavelength campaigns, drawing on telescopes in Australia, the United States, India, South Africa and in space.

8:39 This is not a single instrument result. It's a decade of patient radio follow up on rare events assembled into One Avery: picture, and it lands in the same week that we're talking about the Square Kilometre Array's southern half taking shape out in Western Australia, which is precisely the Anna: instrument you'd want pointed at the next one. Avery: Two things to keep straight, though. Anna: Yes. The first is that this is a threshold, not a switch. Saying black holes launch outflows at around 2% of Eddington is a statement about where the transition sits, not a promise that every black hole crossing that line will produce a jet you can detect.

9:21 Whether you actually see one depends on the environment, the geometry, the distance and the luck of having a telescope pointed in the right direction. Avery: And the second? Anna: The second is about timing. And we want to be straight with you. This was published in Nature Astronomy yesterday. That's real. And the peer review is done. But the preprint went up on the archive back in February. So while this is newly published, it is not newly written. And if it feels vaguely familiar to anyone who follows the preprint servers closely, that's why.

9:53 Avery: Which is a pattern we flagged before on this show. Anna: It is, and we'll keep flagging it. The science is no less good for having waited seven months in review. But published this week and discovered this week are different claims, and we try very hard not to blur them. Avery: Longtime listeners will hear some threads here, too. We covered a wandering black hole revealed by a tidal disruption event back in episode 153. And a, uh, quasar driving turbulence across 300,000 light years in 154.

10:25 Anna: And the partial disruptions that fade and come back in episode 185. This result is the framework those individual objects have been waiting for. Avery: Now on to storey two. That phrase. Super Eddington came up in the lead, and it's about to come up again. Because the second storey this week is also about a black hole eating faster than it should be able to just 11 billion years earlier. Anna: The little red dots. Avery: The little red dots. And if you've been with us a while, you'll know these have been one of the most irritating things the James Webb Space Telescope has found.

11:01 Extremely compact, extremely red, extremely numerous in the early universe. They show the broad hydrogen emission lines you'd expect from gas whipping around a black hole. But there are far too many of them. And the black holes implied are far too heavy for the galaxies they sit in. Anna: Which has produced a small industry of explanations. Avery: Some of them fairly exotic, some very exotic. So here's what's new. A team led by Sun Myun Chan, with Shingo Hirano Tomoaki ishiyama Sukjoon Chang and Volker Springle, published in Nature on 16 September, ran fully cosmological radiation hydrodynamic simulations of a dense protocluster region in the early universe using Japan's Atarui UH3 supercomputer.

11:53 Anna: And crucially, without putting the answer in by hand. Avery: That's the point. They didn't seed the simulation with the black holes they wanted. They let the physics run. And what happens is in that intensely over dense environment, the the giant gas clouds are bathed in so much ultraviolet radiation that they can't fragment into ordinary stars. Normally a big cloud breaks up into lots of little stellar nurseries. Here it can't. So instead the whole thing collapses as one object, a primordial supermassive star, which then promptly collapses into a black hole, a heavy seed.

12:33 A heavy seed of around a million solar masses, which is roughly 10 times heavier than theory typically expects. And then those seeds develop dense optically thick discs, so thick that light bounces around inside them, scattering off free electrons on the way out. And that electron scattering smears the hydrogen emission into exactly the broad lines we see in little red dots. Anna: So the broad lines aren't necessarily telling you the gas is moving as fast as you'd assumed. Avery: That's the elegant bit.

13:06 Part of the width is scattering, not velocity. And then sustained super Eddington accretion drives the thing up to around 30 million solar masses by a redshift of 8, which puts it right in the population of overmassive quasars. Webb keeps finding. Anna: So it's one continuous storey seed dot quasar and eventually the supermassive black holes sitting in galaxies today. Avery: One storey, with the little red dot phase being short and dust shrouded. A, uh, stage rather than a species. And the timing is rather lovely because Nature Astronomy published a whole focus issue on little red dots the same week, including a review by Hannah Hubler on massive black holes in the first billion years.

13:53 M the field is consolidating and this happens to be the week it did it. Anna: One caution, though, and it's the same one we gave for the black hole feedback work last month. Avery: Go on. Anna: This is a simulation that reproduces the observations. That's a demonstration that the physics is sufficient. You don't need anything exotic to get little red dots. It is not, on its own proof that this is what actually happened. Other routes may also produce them. What would settle it is a direct measurement of one of these objects that distinguishes scattering broadened lines from genuinely fast Avery: gas, which is exactly the Kind of thing Webb could do.

14:32 Anna: Right, next up, let's come all the way back, about 6,000 kilometres, in fact, to the middle of the Earth, which Avery: is not where you think it is. Anna: It really isn't. And this is one of those facts that sounds like a trick until you sit with it. There are two different centres of the Earth. There's the centre of figure, the geometric middle of the solid planet surface, which is essentially fixed. And there's the centre of mass, the balance point of everything the planet is made of. Avery: And the planet is partly made of water and air, which move constantly.

15:05 Anna: Snow falls across Siberia and Canada. The Apple basin floods. The monsoon arrives over Southeast Asia. Every one of those shifts an enormous amount of mass from one part of the planet to another, and the balance point moves to follow it. So the centre of mass and the centre of figure drift apart and back together over the course of a year. Avery: And we care because. Anna: Because the centre of mass is what satellites orbit. It's the origin of the reference frame that underpins satellite navigation and every precise elevation measurement on the planet.

15:39 If you're wrong about where it is, you're wrong about where everything else is. Avery: So how big is the wobble? Anna: That's the news. The traditional figure has been around 11 millimetres. A team led by Donald Argus at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory now puts it at roughly four to five and a half, about half what we thought. Published in Geophysical Journal International with the JPL release on Tuesday. Avery: Half is a big, big correction for something people have been measuring for decades.

16:08 Anna: It is. And here's how uncertain it's been. The last two international estimates, one from 2017 and one from 2023, disagree with each other by about 7 millimetres, which is almost as large as the entire motion they're trying to measure. Avery: So the error bar was the same size as the signal. Anna: Essentially, Argus's own line is that the movement now looks like about half of of what we believed eight years ago, and that the mass of water and air sloshing between the hemispheres is smaller than we thought.

16:42 Avery: And where does the movement actually come from? Anna: Three main ocean, atmosphere and land water. In March, snow sitting across Eurasia and North America pulls the centre of mass about 3 millimetres toward the northern Pole. Then, in April, the Apple hits its annual water maximum, around 2,400 gigatons, and tugs it roughly 2.2 millimetres towards south America. Later in the year, monsoon water across Southeast Asia peaks at around 600 gigatons and pulls in its own direction. Avery: None of which wins.

17:17 Anna: None of which wins they combine into an annual oscillation that never settles. And my favourite complication in the whole study is this. When you pile trillions of tonnes of water onto a continent, the crust flexes under the load, which means the ground stations you're using to measure the movement are themselves moving. Avery: You have to subtract the observatory from the observation you do. Anna: They handled it by combining laser ranging to satellites, and that's the LAGEOS technique, which Australia contributes to from the Matt Stromlo station outside Canberra with GPS and with the Grace Follow On Gravity mission, then modelling the crustal deformation out and Avery: the practical end, um, of it.

17:59 Anna: Felix Landerer, one of the CO authors, put it well. He said that while these movements might appear tiny, our modern world relies on extremely accurate positioning and that by understanding what changes the reference system, we can build better reference systems. He lists the beneficiaries as everything from global shipping logistics to precision agriculture, which Avery: is a long way from black holes. And I rather like that about this job. Anna: Me too. Avery: Last storey, and it's a small, clever one.

18:30 20 light years away, there's an object called Simp M0136. It's a brown dwarf, too heavy to be a, uh, planet in the ordinary sense, too light to have ever ignited hydrogen fusion and become a star. It sits right on the boundary and it has no host star at all. It's just drifting, which makes it unusually easy to study, enormously easier. Normally, if you want to look at a giant planet's atmosphere, you're fighting the glare of the star next to it. Here, there's no star. You just point and look. Which is why Simp0136 has become the reference object for what directly imaged giant planets are probably like.

19:18 Anna: And it varies. Avery: It spins once every 2 hours and 25 minutes, and as it spins, its brightness changes by a few percent different amounts at different wavelengths. Which tells you there's weather, clouds, hotspots, chemistry, all of it changing as different faces rotate into view. The trouble has been that it's looked fantastically complicated. Multiple mechanisms, multiple layers, all tangled together. Anna: So what did they do differently? Avery: They stopped assuming. Merle Schrader, a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin with colleagues there and elsewhere, took one full rotation of Webb spectroscopy and ran principal Component Analysis on it, which is a technique for asking a data set the blunt question, how many independent things are actually changing here?

20:09 Not, does my model fit, Just how many knobs are being turned? Anna: And the answer was two. Avery: Two components are enough to push what's left over down to the Noise floor of the instrument. Which means that within what Webb can detect, there is nothing else going on. Anna: And what are the two? Avery: The first is broadband. It moves the whole spectrum together and that's temperature. The second is chromatic wavelength dependent and that traces the vertical structure of the clouds, how high and how thick they are.

20:44 And between them, those two resolve into three recurring patches that are hotter with thinner cloud, patches that are cooler with thick vertically extended cloud and transitional regions between the two. Anna: So it looks chaotic and it's actually organised. Avery: Low dimensional is the term. Uh, a famously messy atmosphere turns out to be running on two dials. And the team then went further and projected model atmospheres into the same mathematical space and found the models largely occupy the same territory, which is a decent sign the models are capturing the right physics rather than accidentally agreeing.

21:23 Anna: Two notes of care on this one, please. The first is that some of the coverage has described these patterns as persisting over more than a dozen rotations. The paper's core analysis is one rotation. That's a real and interesting result. But a second high quality rotation is precisely the test that would confirm the pattern's hold. So we'll describe it as the test rather than the finding. Avery: And the second is our usual one. Anna: The preprint went up in late July, so there's about a seven week gap before the journal version and the Trinity release this week.

21:57 Shorter than yesterday's, but worth saying. Avery: And one lovely human detail to finish. Simp 0136 is 20 light years away. The web data Schrader analysed was gathered in 2023, so the light she was working with left that object in the year she was born. Anna: That's a very good reason to go into astronomy. Avery: Now we have one more quick one before Skywatch. Anna: We do indeed. The sun has gone very quiet indeed. Avery: How quiet? Anna: Very nearly blank. As of yesterday, there was exactly one numbered active region left on the Earth facing side, AR4528.

22:37 And it's rotating out of view as we speak. If nothing new emerges behind it, we're about to get the Sun's first spotless day since the 24th of February this year. Avery: And February was itself notable. Anna: February ended a streak of 1,335 consecutive days, with at least one sunspot going all the way back to June 2022. Solar cycle 25 peaked in October 2024. And this is what the downhill side looks like for scale. The last solar minimum between 2018 and 2020 delivered something like 700 spotless days.

23:16 Avery: And minimum itself is still Some way Anna: off, not expected before about 2030. But here's the part worth holding onto. And it connects two storeys we've run recently. A quiet sun is not a harmless sun. It's a differently hazardous one. We Talked in episode 192 about the energy a, uh, big active region can store for a superflare, and in 193 about cosmic radiation at aviation altitudes. And that second one runs the opposite way. When the sun is quiet, its magnetic field does less to shield the inner solar system, so galactic cosmic rays get through more easily.

23:54 Radiation dose at cruising altitude runs 40 to 60% higher at solar minimum than at maximum. Avery: Same dial, opposite end. Anna: Fewer auroras, more cosmic rays. Avery: And that's a very good excuse to talk about the sky, because tonight there is something genuinely worth walking outside for. And it works from everywhere. Anna: Venus. Avery: Venus at, uh, greatest brilliancy. Tonight, the 18th of September, Venus reaches its peak brightness for this entire evening. Apparition magnitude M 4.8. There is nothing else in the night sky that comes close except the Moon.

24:35 Anna: And the reason it peaks tonight rather than when Venus is full is genuinely counterintuitive. Avery: It's the best bit of physics in the whole segment. Venus is not full tonight. It's a Crescent, only about 26% lit. But because it's swinging in closer to us, that crescent has swollen to nearly 40 arcseconds across. Brightness is lit fraction multiplied by apparent size. And right now, the disc is growing faster than the illuminated fraction is shrinking. Anna: A big, thin crescent beats a small Avery: full disc every time.

25:11 And if you have binoculars, hold them steady and you'll actually see the crescent shape. At 40 arcseconds, it's within reach, which surprises people, because we don't think of Venus as something you can resolve. Anna: And if you see a different date quoted somewhere, some listings say the 22nd. Both are defensible. The peak is very flat. Between tonight and the 22nd, the lit fraction drops from about 26% to 23, while the disc grows from roughly 40 arc seconds to 42. And those two changes very nearly cancel.

25:47 So you're not going to miss it by going out on the wrong night. Avery: Now, how well you do tonight depends enormously on where you're standing and. And the gap is dramatic. Anna: From Sydney, this is a spectacle. Sunset is at quarter to six, and at that moment, Venus is 39 degrees above the western horizon. That's more than a third of the way up the sky. It doesn't set until just before 9 o', clock, which gives you 3 hours and 13 minutes of Venus after sunset. You do not need a clear horizon. You do not need to hurry.

26:19 Avery: And from the Northern Hemisphere, it's a different evening entirely. From Los Angeles, sunset is at 10 to 7 and Venus is 14 degrees up. It sets an hour and 19 minutes after the sun. From New York, 10 degrees up one hour and three minutes. From London, three and a half degrees at sunset and gone 28 minutes later. Anna: Which is not Venus being fainter. It's exactly as bright everywhere. It's the geometry. Avery: It's the tilt of the ecliptic. At this time of year, the plane of the solar system stands almost vertically out of the western horizon at dusk from the Southern Hemisphere.

27:00 So anything on that plane climbs steeply and takes a long time to set. From the Northern Hemisphere in September, that same plane lies down almost flat against the horizon, and everything on it skims sideways and sets quickly. Anna: So northern listeners, here's the practical version. Find a spot with a genuinely clear, flat western horizon. No trees, no buildings. Start looking 20 minutes after sunset and don't leave it much past 45. It'll be the brightest thing in that part of the sky by an enormous margin.

27:34 So you won't be in any doubt once you've got it. Avery: And a bonus for the South, Mercury is up there, too. From Sydney, Mercury is 16 degrees above the horizon at sunset and and doesn't set for an hour and 20 minutes, which for Mercury is a comfortable viewing window. From Los Angeles, it's 9 degrees and 43 minutes. From London, 4 degrees and 26 minutes. That one really is a southern target this week. Anna: And then there's the Moon, which is doing something rather precise tonight. Avery: First quarter, and it's exact.

28:09 The Moon reaches first quarter at 2043 Universal Time tonight. That's quarter to 5 on Friday afternoon in New York, quarter to 2 in Los Angeles, quarter to 10 on Friday evening in London, and for Australia, 20 to 7 on Saturday morning. Anna: And from Sydney tonight, the Moon is very nearly overhead, 82 degrees up at sunset, which is close enough to straight up that you'll find yourself leaning back to look at it. Avery: Which matters, because tomorrow night, Saturday the 19th, is international. Observe the Moon night.

28:43 Anna: And the timing of that is not an accident. It's deliberately scheduled near first quarter, because first quarter is when the Moon is at its most interesting. Through any optical aid along the terminator, the line dividing day from night, the sun is striking the surface at a grazing angle. So every crater rim and mountain throws a long shadow across the ground behind it. Avery: A full moon looks Flat. A half moon looks three dimensional. Anna: Completely three dimensional. Run the terminator with even a small pair of binoculars and the whole landscape stands up out of the surface.

29:18 If you've only ever looked at a full moon and found it disappointing, this is the night to try again. NASA's own event is at the US Space and Rocket Centre in Huntsville Alabama. But the whole point is that it's global. You just need to go outside and Avery: to balance the ledger. Because the south has had the better of the evening, the morning sky belongs decisively to the north. Anna: It does. Mars and Jupiter are both climbing in the pre dawn east. And the same ecliptic geometry that flattened Venus for northern viewers works the other way around.

29:50 Before sunrise at nautical dawn tomorrow morning, Mars is 48 degrees up from Los Angeles and 46 from New York and 41 from London. Avery: Avery and from Sydney, 20 degree. Anna: So that's very much your sky, not ours. Jupiter is 26 degrees up from Los Angeles and nine from Sydney and those Avery: two are closing on each other. They're about 23 degrees apart this morning. By mid October that's down to 12 and by the middle of November they'll be a little over a degree apart, close enough to cover with a fingertip at arm's length.

30:27 That's the one to diarize. Anna: Saturn meanwhile is up uh, essentially all night from everywhere. It doesn't set until nearly 7 in the morning from Sydney and just before 8 from Los Angeles. And it's building toward opposition on the 4th of October when the disc will be about 19 and a half arc seconds across with the rings roughly 7 degrees open. Avery: And the equinox next week, which we'll Anna: flag carefully because we got this slightly wrong in an earlier episode and corrected it. The September equinox is a single instant, not a day.

31:02 Five minutes past midnight Universal Time on the 23rd, that's the evening of the 22nd across the Americas and mid morning on the 23rd in Australia. So the date depends entirely on where you're standing. Avery: And one last thing which follows directly from that quick hit about the blank sun, because every time we mention sunspots people quite reasonably want to go and Anna: look and you can, but never, ever with unprotected eyes and never through binoculars or a telescope that isn't purpose built for it.

31:35 The only safe way to look directly at the sun is through filters certified to the international standard ISO 123122. That's eclipse glasses or a proper solar filter fitted over the front of the instrument, never on the eyepiece end and Avery: ordinary sunglasses are not solar filters. Neither is smoked glass, exposed film, a cd, or stacking several pairs of sunglasses together. Anna: None of those are safe. Cheque your eclipse glasses for the ISO 123122 marking, and if they're scratched, punctured or you can't find the marking, don't use them.

32:15 The safest option of all, and honestly the best one for a group, is projection. Put the sun's image onto a white card and everybody can look at once without anyone looking up. Avery: Although this week there may be nothing to see, which is rather the point. Anna: That's Astronomy daily for Friday 18th September. Everything we've talked about today, the papers, the DoIs, the full Skywatch figures for all four cities is in the show notes and on the website at astronomydaily Avery: IO, where you'll also find the full back catalogue, the daily newsletter and the contact form.

32:51 And do use that contact form. Some of our favourite segments this year have come from listener questions, and we read every one of them. Anna: Go out tonight and look west. Venus will not be this bright again Avery: this year, and tomorrow night, look at the Moon. Anna: We'll be back on the weekend with this week's weekend wrap. Until then, clear skies.