What the Heck Is This Planet?

0:00 Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily guide to

0:03 Speaker 1: the universe. I'm Anna and I'm Avery. It is Tuesday,

0:07 Speaker 1: the third of March twenty twenty six, and we are

0:10 Speaker 1: Season five, episode fifty three. Anna, quite a lineup today.

0:15 Speaker 1: We really do have something for everyone. We've got an

0:18 Speaker 1: update to that major shakeup at NASA, the kind that

0:21 Speaker 1: has the whole space community talking.

0:23 Speaker 2: We've got a planet shaped like a lemon. That's not

0:26 Speaker 2: a metaphor, it is literally shaped like lemon.

0:29 Speaker 1: There is a new approach to one of the biggest

0:31 Speaker 1: unsolved mysteries in all of physics.

0:34 Speaker 2: A space probe has snapped its first close up of

0:37 Speaker 2: an interstellar comet. And we've got your global launch roundup,

0:41 Speaker 2: including a big one from Japan making its third attempt.

0:45 Speaker 1: And China is about to debut a new reusable rocket

0:48 Speaker 1: that could shake up the commercial launch industry. Avery, where

0:52 Speaker 1: do we start.

0:53 Speaker 2: Let's start at the top with NASA and a decision

0:56 Speaker 2: that's rewriting the Artemis playbook.

0:58 Speaker 1: So Avery. When NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood up at

1:02 Speaker 1: Kennedy Space Center just days ago and said Artemis three

1:06 Speaker 1: will not be landing on the Moon, it was a

1:09 Speaker 1: significant moment.

1:10 Speaker 2: It really was to understand why a quick bit of context,

1:14 Speaker 2: Artemis three was meant to be humanity's first crude lunar

1:18 Speaker 2: landing since Apollo seventeen back in nineteen seventy two. That's

1:22 Speaker 2: over fifty years, a very long time to.

1:24 Speaker 1: Wait, and now it's not happening. Instead, the mission, now

1:28 Speaker 1: targeting a launch sometime in mid twenty twenty seven, has

1:32 Speaker 1: been completely redesigned. It will stay in low Earth orbit

1:35 Speaker 1: and focus on testing docking procedures between NASA's Orion capsule

1:39 Speaker 1: and the commercial lunar landers.

1:41 Speaker 2: And that's where it gets really interesting, because those landers

1:45 Speaker 2: are SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origins Blue Moon, and NASA

1:49 Speaker 2: is now openly keeping both of them in the running

1:52 Speaker 2: rather than committing exclusively to Starship.

1:55 Speaker 1: Isaacman was quite candid about why he compared the current

1:59 Speaker 1: Artemis cado to Apollo and found it wanting. Apollo was

2:03 Speaker 1: launching missions every four to five months, Artemis has been

2:06 Speaker 1: going every couple of years, which means the agency loses

2:10 Speaker 1: what he called muscle memory between flights, engineers leave procedures

2:14 Speaker 1: get rusty.

2:15 Speaker 2: And Starship, despite eleven test flights, has yet to reach

2:19 Speaker 2: Earth orbit. It's still technically a suborbital vehicle, and the

2:23 Speaker 2: list of milestones it needs to hit before it could

2:26 Speaker 2: put astronauts on the Moon orbital refueling, rendezvous and docking

2:31 Speaker 2: an uncrude lunar landing is still very long.

2:34 Speaker 1: So the plan now is Artemis three in low Earth

2:37 Speaker 1: orbit to test systems, then Artemis four as the first

2:41 Speaker 1: real moonlanding, targeting twenty twenty eight, and NASA is even

2:45 Speaker 1: talking about two moon landing missions in twenty twenty eight

2:48 Speaker 1: if they can get the launch cadence up ambitious.

2:51 Speaker 2: Very and in the meantime, Artemis two, the crewe fly

2:55 Speaker 2: by around the Moon with no landing, is still on

2:58 Speaker 2: track for an April launch after being rolled back to

3:00 Speaker 2: the vehicle assembly building for repairs to a helium flow issue.

3:05 Speaker 1: A lot happening on the Artemis front. We will absolutely

3:08 Speaker 1: keep you updated. Now, let's go somewhere much much further away,

3:13 Speaker 1: seven hundred and fifty light years.

3:15 Speaker 2: In fact, this one genuinely made me do a double

3:18 Speaker 2: take when I read it. Scientists using the James Web

3:22 Speaker 2: Space telescope have found an exoplanet unlike anything ever studied,

3:26 Speaker 2: and they are baffled.

3:28 Speaker 1: So let's set the scene. The planet is called PSR

3:31 Speaker 1: J two three two two DASH two six five zero B.

3:36 Speaker 1: It's about the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits its

3:38 Speaker 1: star at a distance of just one million miles. For comparison,

3:43 Speaker 1: Earth orbits the Sun at about one hundred million miles.

3:46 Speaker 1: This planet is one hundredth of that distance away.

3:49 Speaker 2: One complete orbit one full year for this planet takes

3:53 Speaker 2: just seven point eight hours.

3:56 Speaker 1: And its star is not a normal star. It's a pulsar,

3:59 Speaker 1: a raw, rapidly spinning neutron star, the collapsed core of

4:03 Speaker 1: a long dead massive star containing the mass of our

4:06 Speaker 1: entire Sun packed into something the size of a city.

4:10 Speaker 2: And the gravity from that pulsar is so extreme that

4:14 Speaker 2: it's literally stretching the planet. Instead of being roughly spherical

4:19 Speaker 2: like Earth or Jupiter, the gravitational tidal forces are pulling

4:23 Speaker 2: it into an elongated shape, like a lemon or an

4:26 Speaker 2: American football, if you prefer.

4:29 Speaker 1: The lead researcher, Michael Zang from the University of Chicago

4:32 Speaker 1: described it as the stretchiest planet we've confirmed, the stretchiness

4:37 Speaker 1: of which is a sentence I never expected to hear

4:40 Speaker 1: in astronomy.

4:41 Speaker 2: But the shape is almost the least weird thing about it.

4:44 Speaker 2: When WEB turned its infrared instruments on this world, the

4:47 Speaker 2: atmosphere came back completely wrong. Instead of water, methane, carbon dioxide,

4:53 Speaker 2: the things you'd normally expect on a gas giant, it's

4:56 Speaker 2: almost entirely helium and carbon.

5:00 Speaker 1: Carbon compounds called C two and C three, specifically molecular carbon,

5:05 Speaker 1: and because the pressure inside the planet is enormous, scientists

5:09 Speaker 1: think that carbon could actually be crystallizing in the deep

5:12 Speaker 1: interior forming diamonds.

5:15 Speaker 2: The surface temperature is around thirty seven hundred degrees fahrenheit,

5:19 Speaker 2: by the way, which is four times hotter than venus.

5:22 Speaker 2: So it's a lemon shaped diamond cord thirty seven hundred

5:26 Speaker 2: degree mystery world, orbiting a zombie star every eight hours.

5:31 Speaker 1: And nobody can explain how it formed, Zang said. The

5:34 Speaker 1: carbon composition rules out every known formation mechanism. It's part

5:38 Speaker 1: of what's called a black widow system, where the pulsar

5:41 Speaker 1: is slowly evaporating its companion, but even that doesn't fully

5:46 Speaker 1: explain what WEB is seeing.

5:48 Speaker 2: The team is seriously entertaining the idea that this might

5:51 Speaker 2: be an entirely new class of cosmic object, not quite

5:54 Speaker 2: a planet, not quite a stellar remnant, something in between

5:58 Speaker 2: with no name.

5:59 Speaker 1: Yet only Web could have found this. The pulsar amidst

6:03 Speaker 1: mostly gamma rays, which are invisible to infrared instruments, so

6:06 Speaker 1: Web could study the planet without the star drowning it

6:09 Speaker 1: out a pristine spectrum. The researchers called it a perfect

6:14 Speaker 1: observational setup. Remarkable stuff from the inexplicable to the cosmological.

6:20 Speaker 2: What's next, So the Hubble tension. If you've been listening

6:23 Speaker 2: to astronomy daily for any length of time, you've heard

6:26 Speaker 2: us mention this. But let's quickly recap why it matters

6:29 Speaker 2: so much.

6:30 Speaker 1: The Hubble constant is a measure of how fast the

6:33 Speaker 1: universe is expanding. Different methods of measuring it produce different answers,

6:38 Speaker 1: not wildly different. We're talking about a ten percent gap,

6:41 Speaker 1: but in cosmology that gap is enormous. If the universe's

6:45 Speaker 1: expansion rate isn't consistent, something in our fundamental model of

6:49 Speaker 1: physics is wrong.

6:51 Speaker 2: And now a team from the University of Illinois and

6:54 Speaker 2: the University of Chicago thinks they may have found the

6:57 Speaker 2: new tool that could finally help resolve it. They call

7:00 Speaker 2: let the stochastic Siren method.

7:02 Speaker 1: And it works like this. Every time two black holes

7:06 Speaker 1: spiral together and collide somewhere in the universe, which is

7:09 Speaker 1: happening constantly across billions of galaxies, they release gravitational waves

7:15 Speaker 1: ripples in the fabric of space time itself. Most of

7:18 Speaker 1: these events are too distant and too faint for us

7:21 Speaker 1: to detect individually.

7:23 Speaker 2: But together all those undetected collisions create a background hum,

7:27 Speaker 2: a constant, low level gravitational wave signal washing through everything

7:32 Speaker 2: all the time, and the team realized that by looking

7:35 Speaker 2: for or in this case, not finding that background signal

7:39 Speaker 2: in existing data from the Ligo, Virgo and Cogra detectors,

7:43 Speaker 2: they could actually constrain the hubble constant.

7:46 Speaker 1: Even the non detection is informative. If certain expansion rates

7:50 Speaker 1: were correct, you'd expect to see a background signal by

7:53 Speaker 1: now you don't, so those slower expansion scenarios can be

7:57 Speaker 1: ruled out.

7:59 Speaker 2: Combined with exact existing measurements from individual black hole mergers,

8:03 Speaker 2: the team produced a new, more precise estimate of the

8:06 Speaker 2: expansion rate, one that sets right in the contested zone

8:09 Speaker 2: where the hubble tension actually bites.

8:12 Speaker 1: The research is published in Physical Review Letters. Daniel Holtz

8:16 Speaker 1: from You Chicago put it well, saying it's not every

8:19 Speaker 1: day you come up with an entirely new tool for cosmology.

8:23 Speaker 1: And as gravitational wave detectors become more sensitive over the

8:27 Speaker 1: next decade, this method will only get sharper.

8:31 Speaker 2: The gravitational weight background itself is expected to be directly

8:35 Speaker 2: detected within about six years. When that happens, this technique

8:39 Speaker 2: becomes even more powerful. We might actually be within reach

8:43 Speaker 2: of solving one of the deepest puzzles in physics. Exciting times, from.

8:48 Speaker 1: The vast and theoretical to the relatively local. We had

8:52 Speaker 1: a visitor in our solar system and we've got a

8:55 Speaker 1: new photo.

8:56 Speaker 2: So three I slash Atlass has been quite the recurring

8:59 Speaker 2: care on the show, and with good reason. This is

9:02 Speaker 2: only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected passing through

9:06 Speaker 2: our Solar system, and it's by far the most studied

9:10 Speaker 2: because we had more warning than with the previous.

9:12 Speaker 1: Two and now ESA's Juice spacecraft, the Jupiter icy Moons

9:17 Speaker 1: Explore currently in Root to Jupiter, has captured its first

9:21 Speaker 1: detailed image of the comet, and what it's showing is

9:24 Speaker 1: a bright, glowing coma surrounding the nucleus with a sweeping

9:28 Speaker 1: tail already developing.

9:30 Speaker 2: Juice was actually well positioned to get an early look

9:33 Speaker 2: at this object, which makes it a brilliant opportunistic observation.

9:37 Speaker 2: The spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter's moons, but its

9:41 Speaker 2: cameras are perfectly capable of turning onto a bright comet.

9:45 Speaker 1: What makes three i atlas so scientifically exciting is what

9:49 Speaker 1: it can tell us about chemistry beyond our Solar system.

9:53 Speaker 1: Interstellar objects carry the fingerprints of wherever they formed previous

9:58 Speaker 1: NASA observations. All Bettie revealed the coma and a flare

10:02 Speaker 1: up as it was heading outward, and the composition data

10:05 Speaker 1: has been trickling in.

10:06 Speaker 2: And now we have Juice's optical imagery to add to

10:10 Speaker 2: that picture. Every instrument, every telescope, every spacecraft that can

10:15 Speaker 2: contribute data is doing so. This is coordinated Solar System

10:19 Speaker 2: science at its best.

10:21 Speaker 1: Three I at lists is now heading back out into

10:24 Speaker 1: the Solar System. So the window for observations is narrowing,

10:27 Speaker 1: but the data already collected, we'll be keeping researchers busy

10:31 Speaker 1: for years. Now, let's check in on what's flying this week.

10:36 Speaker 2: It is a busy week at launch sites around the globe.

10:39 Speaker 2: Five missions on the schedule, and there are some real

10:42 Speaker 2: standout moments to watch for.

10:44 Speaker 1: The international highlight is japan Space one, a commercial startup

10:49 Speaker 1: backed by Canon Electronics and Ihi Aerospace, is attempting its

10:53 Speaker 1: third launch of the Cairos rocket from Spaceport Key on

10:57 Speaker 1: the Key Peninsula. The window opens Wednesday, the fourth of March.

11:01 Speaker 2: Now, the first two Cairos flights did not go well.

11:05 Speaker 2: Flight one in March twenty twenty four was terminated by

11:08 Speaker 2: the Autonomous Flight Termination System due to first stage underperformance.

11:13 Speaker 2: Light two in December twenty twenty four was lost because

11:17 Speaker 2: a sensor failure caused loss of control during the first

11:20 Speaker 2: stage burn.

11:21 Speaker 1: Third time lucky hopefully. This flight is targeting Sun synchronous

11:26 Speaker 1: orbit and is carrying five small payloads from a range

11:29 Speaker 1: of customers, including satellites from Taiwan and a microsatellite from

11:34 Speaker 1: a Japanese high school. Lovely to see that kind of diversity.

11:38 Speaker 2: On the SpaceX side, there are four Falcon nine missions

11:41 Speaker 2: this week, launching from both Cape Canabrol and Vandenberg. The

11:45 Speaker 2: standout is a Vandenberg launch on Wednesday, where booster B

11:48 Speaker 2: ten seventy one will be flying for its thirty second mission,

11:52 Speaker 2: and that landing will mark SpaceX's six hundredth Falcon booster

11:56 Speaker 2: recovery attempt.

11:57 Speaker 1: Six hundred the numbers just keep getting bigger and more

12:01 Speaker 1: mind boggling. A booster that's flown thirty two times is

12:06 Speaker 1: extraordinary by any standard. This week's Falcon nine missions will

12:10 Speaker 1: also push SpaceX to its thirtieth launch of twenty twenty six. Overall,

12:15 Speaker 1: the cadence is relentless, and we're watching.

12:17 Speaker 2: The Chiros launch particularly closely. Japan's commercial launch sector has

12:22 Speaker 2: been growing, and the successful Chiros flight would be a

12:25 Speaker 2: significant milestone for the country's private space industry. Fingers crossed

12:30 Speaker 2: now speaking of new rockets.

12:32 Speaker 1: And we close today's episode with a look further ahead

12:36 Speaker 1: to the end of March, when China's commercial space sector

12:39 Speaker 1: is about to make a significant move.

12:42 Speaker 2: CAS Space, a commercial offshoot of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,

12:47 Speaker 2: is preparing to debut its new Connecticut two rocket. Launch

12:51 Speaker 2: is targeted for late March from the Gooquan Satellite Launch

12:55 Speaker 2: Center out in the Gobi Desert.

12:57 Speaker 1: The Connecticut two is a fifty three meter tall rocket

13:01 Speaker 1: powered by three YF one oh two engines running on

13:05 Speaker 1: kerosene and liquid oxygen, a similar propellant combination to SpaceX's

13:10 Speaker 1: Falcon nine, and like Falcon nine, it's designed to be reusable.

13:15 Speaker 2: It can carry up to twelve thousand kilograms to low

13:18 Speaker 2: Earth orbit or around seventy eight hundred kilograms to a

13:21 Speaker 2: five hundred kilometers Sun synchronous orbit. That's a meaningful capability.

13:25 Speaker 2: It puts it in a similar class to Falcon nine

13:28 Speaker 2: in terms of payload.

13:29 Speaker 1: For its debut mission, it's carrying the qin Zau one,

13:33 Speaker 1: a prototype cargo spacecraft designed to eventually resupply China's Tiongong

13:38 Speaker 1: space station. Think of it as China's equivalent of testing

13:42 Speaker 1: a dragon capsule, a first step toward a regular, affordable resupply.

13:47 Speaker 2: System, and cast Base has ambitious plans. They're aiming for

13:51 Speaker 2: at least four Kinetica two launches in twenty twenty six alone,

13:55 Speaker 2: including missions to deploy satellites into mega constellations, directly competing

14:00 Speaker 2: with Starlink in the global broadband market.

14:03 Speaker 1: It's worth noting that CAAs Space's smaller solid fuel rocket,

14:07 Speaker 1: the Kineticut one, has already flown eleven successful missions and

14:12 Speaker 1: has eight more planned for this year, so this is

14:15 Speaker 1: not a first time player, they have operational experience.

14:19 Speaker 2: The broader picture is that the global commercial launch industry

14:22 Speaker 2: is genuinely becoming competitive in a way it never was before.

14:26 Speaker 2: BaseX still leads, but you now have serious players from China, Japan,

14:31 Speaker 2: Europe and beyond all developing capable, affordable rockets. It's a

14:36 Speaker 2: fascinating time to be watching this space unabsolutely intended.

14:41 Speaker 1: And on that note, it's time to wrap up episode

14:44 Speaker 1: fifty three.

14:45 Speaker 2: Really already?

14:47 Speaker 1: Yes, that is a wrap on Astronomy Daily Season five,

14:51 Speaker 1: episode fifty three. What a week it's shaping up to be.

14:54 Speaker 1: From NASA's lunar reset to lemon planets, to cosmic background

14:59 Speaker 1: hums to ar new reusable rocket on the launch pad.

15:02 Speaker 2: If you've enjoyed today's episode, we would love it if

15:05 Speaker 2: you leave us a review. Wherever you listen, it really

15:08 Speaker 2: does make a difference in helping new listeners find the show.

15:11 Speaker 1: You can find full show notes, blog posts, and more

15:14 Speaker 1: over at Astronomy Daily dot io, and follow us on

15:18 Speaker 1: social media at astro Daily Pod for daily space updates.

15:22 Speaker 2: Until next time, keep looking up. The universe has no

15:25 Speaker 2: shortage of surprises.

15:27 Speaker 1: Clear skies everyone, goodbye.

15:29 Speaker 2: Say stars, Star