Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News

SHOW NOTES Black hole jets follow one universal rule Adelle Goodwin (Curtin University / ICRAR, Forrest Research Foundation Fellow) and Andrew Mummery (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) show that supermassive black holes launch their outflows at the same critical accretion rate as stellar-mass black holes — about 2% of the Eddington limit — making accretion-outflow coupling scale-invariant across seven orders of magnitude in mass. Nature Astronomy, 17 September 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02951-1 JWST's Little Red Dots are black hole seeds caught mid-growth Sunmyon Chon, Shingo Hirano, Tomoaki Ishiyama, Seok-Jun Chang and Volker Springel ran fully cosmological radiation-hydrodynamic simulations on Japan's ATERUI III supercomputer and produced heavy black hole seeds of about a million solar masses, whose optically thick discs generate exactly the broad hydrogen emission seen in Little Red Dots. Nature 657, 621-625, 16 September 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10985-8 Earth's centre of mass moves about half as far as we thought Donald Argus, Felix Landerer and colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with the University of Nevada, the University of Montana and the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, revise the annual oscillation between Earth's centre of mass and its centre of figure down from roughly 11 millimetres to about 4 to 5.5. Geophysical Journal International, ggag314. DOI: 10.1093/gji/ggag314 Two numbers explain the weather on a world 20 light-years away Merle Schrader and colleagues at Trinity College Dublin applied principal component analysis to one rotation of JWST spectroscopy of the brown dwarf SIMP 0136 and found two components — temperature and vertical cloud structure — account for all the detectable variability. Astronomy & Astrophysics, open access. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202660109 The Sun goes blank With only active region AR4528 left on the Earth-facing disc and rotating out of view, the Sun was on the verge of its first spotless day since 24 February 2026 — which itself ended a 1,335-day run of continuous sunspot activity stretching back to June 2022. Skywatch: Venus at greatest brilliancy, first quarter Moon, Observe the Moon Night Venus reaches greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude -4.8; the Moon reaches exact first quarter at 20:43 UTC the same day, setting up International Observe the Moon Night on Saturday 19 September. All times and altitudes in this segment were computed for Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and London. SKYWATCH — COMPUTED REFERENCE Computed in-session with PyEphem 4.2.1. Local times. Sydney on AEST (UTC+10); Los Angeles PDT; New York EDT; London BST. City Sunset Venus alt Venus sets Mercury Mars pre-dawn Sydney 17:45 39.2 deg 20:58  (3h13m) 16.4 deg  (sets 1h20m) 20.4 deg Los Angeles 18:52 14.3 deg 20:10  (1h19m) 8.8 deg  (sets 0h43m) 48.4 deg New York 18:56 10.3 deg 19:59  (1h03m) 7.0 deg  (sets 0h38m) 46.1 deg London 19:04 3.6 deg 19:32  (0h28m) 3.9 deg  (sets 0h26m) 40.6 deg ·         Venus greatest brilliancy: 18 September 2026, magnitude -4.8. Disc 39.6 arcsec, 26% illuminated. ·         By 22 September the disc has grown to 42.3 arcsec but the lit fraction has fallen to 22.7% — the two changes nearly cancel, which is why listings disagree on the date. The peak is genuinely flat. ·         Moon reaches exact first quarter 18 September at 20:43 UTC = 06:43 AEST Sat 19 Sep / 16:43 EDT Fri 18 / 13:43 PDT Fri 18 / 21:43 BST Fri 18. ·         Moon altitude at sunset: Sydney 81.6 deg (near overhead), Los Angeles 27.1 deg, New York 20.4 deg, London 9.4 deg. ·         International Observe the Moon Night: Saturday 19 September 2026. NASA event at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Huntsville, 5:30-8:00pm CST. ·         Pre-dawn Sat 19 Sep at nautical dawn — Jupiter: Los Angeles 26.4 deg, New York 25.1 deg, London 21.9 deg, Sydney 8.9 deg. ·         Mars-Jupiter separation: 22.9 deg on 18 Sep, 12.0 deg mid-October, 1.2 deg mid-November 2026. ·         Saturn is up essentially all night; sets 06:47 Sydney, 07:55 Los Angeles. Opposition 4 October 2026, disc 19.6 arcsec, rings approx 7 deg open. ·         September equinox: a single instant, 00:05:09 UTC on 23 September 2026 — evening of the 22nd in the Americas, mid-morning of the 23rd in Australia. ·         All figures computed in-session with PyEphem 4.2.1 for the four reference cities. Sydney is on AEST (UTC+10); daylight saving begins 4 October.
 

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Astronomers have confirmed the youngest planet ever found - Elias 2-24 b, less than a million years old, sitting inside a gap it is carving in its own birth disc 450 light-years away. Plus: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter finds a 222-metre crater that was not there in 2024, a 178-year-old space weather record gets corrected by seven years, and Sakurai's Object - a star that came back from the dead - has become six times hotter in thirty years.

SOURCES Newfound 'Baby' Planet Smashes Record for Youngest Known World NASA Science, 16 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/universe/newfound-baby-planet-smashes-record-for-youngest-known-world/ Elias 2-24 b discovery paper Bernardi, Cieza et al., The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 16 September 2026, DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ae9bb6  -  https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae9bb6 ALMA Observations of Elias 2-24: A Protoplanetary Disk with Multiple Gaps (background) Cieza et al., ApJL 851 L23, 2017, DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/aa9b7b  -  https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aa9b7b NASA's Moon Orbiter Spots New, 'Once-in-Century' Moon Crater NASA Science, 16 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbiter-spots-new-once-in-century-moon-crater/ New 222-metre lunar crater - mission release W. M. Keck / Intuitive Machines / NASA LROC, 16 September 2026; two papers in Science Advances (Robinson et al., morphology and ejecta; Powell et al., Diviner thermal signature)  -  https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasas-lunar-reconnaissance-orbiter-discovers-a-new-222-m-diameter-lunar-crater-302880555.html Mystery of one of the earliest recorded space weather impacts solved Lancaster University / RMIT University, 16 September 2026; Wild, Carter, Hapgood et al., Space Weather (AGU), DOI 10.1029/2026SW005239  -  https://doi.org/10.1029/2026SW005239 'Born-again' star offers rare chance to watch stellar evolution in real time The University of Manchester, 16 September 2026; Zijlstra, van Hoof et al., 'The emergence of a [WC] star in Sakurai's object', MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1533  -  https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1533 Cargo Mission and Crew-13 Updates; Station Research, Maintenance Continue NASA Space Station Blog, 16 September 2026  -  https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2026/09/16/cargo-mission-and-crew-13-updates-station-research-maintenance-continue/ International Observe the Moon Night 2026 NASA, Saturday 19 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/moon/observe-the-moon-night/overview Skywatch ephemerides Computed in-session with PyEphem for Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and London, 17-18 September 2026

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First starlight from Roman, a shorter fuse on the Solar System, weapons in orbit, and a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Roman opens its eye — and finds it has twice as long to look NASA has activated the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera built around eighteen detectors, with a field of view at least a hundred times larger than Hubble's infrared field — a patch of sky bigger than the full Moon in a single exposure, at Hubble-comparable sharpness. The instrument reached its operating temperature of −143 °C on 11 September; detectors and the calibration system came up across the 11th and 12th; the element wheel turned in microgravity for the first time on the 12th; the focus mechanism was verified on the 13th. Roman then took its first starlight image — deliberately out of focus, and exactly as intended: a baseline diagnostic that proves the optical path is clear and every detector is live. Sharp science images are expected by early 2027. The Coronagraph Instrument has completed initial communications checkout from Caltech/IPAC and is running 30-day decontamination cycles at room temperature. Separately, NASA published the numbers from Roman's first mid-course correction: better than 99% accurate, using about 18 kg of a 200 kg propellant budget, on a spacecraft that launched lighter than its allowance. Jamie Dunn (Goddard): Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations, against a design life of ten. Caveat kept on air: that is a fuel figure, not a funding or hardware figure. Why it matters: Roman's High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey measures cosmic expansion with Type Ia supernovae, and its High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey probes cosmic acceleration across more than 5,000 square degrees through weak lensing and galaxy clustering — two independent handles on the dark energy question that Monday's Australian-led supernova compilation sharpened but could not settle. A doubled mission means a longer lever arm in time, which in this measurement is everything. Caltech: the Solar System's dynamical fuse is far shorter than we thought Konstantin Batygin, Jim Fuller and Fred Adams (Caltech), 'Terminal instability of the Solar System triggered by stochastic solar mass loss', arXiv:2609.12494, posted 11 September and accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The standard estimate for how long the giant planets hold their architecture — about 10¹⁸ years — assumes the dying Sun sheds mass smoothly. Observations of white-dwarf recoil indicate mass is instead lost in discrete, independently directed ejections, so planetary orbits take a random walk. In simulations, roughly 40% of systems are disrupted or violently scattered before white dwarf formation and about 90% within ~3 billion years after, cutting the outer Solar System's dynamical lifetime to around a gigayear past white dwarf formation. Framed on air as a prediction to test — planetary systems around old white dwarfs should be rarer and more chaotic — with the granularity of the mass loss named as the number to go and measure. The United States says, for the first time, that it has weapons in orbit Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, speaking on the opening day of the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland on Monday 14 September: the United States now has 'on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary actions'. It is the first public US acknowledgement of offensive capability in orbit. No systems, numbers, locations or timelines were disclosed. A Space Force spokesperson defined space control as employing 'kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation and even destruction, if necessary'. Gen. Douglas Schiess, Chief of Space Operations, said the following day that 'it was time' to talk about it, citing Chinese and Russian anti-satellite advances. Covered factually, with both the deterrence and the arms-control readings presented, and with orbital debris as the physical consequence that outlasts any dispute. Australian context: Operation Olympic Defender and Defence Space Command. Rubin finds a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Aashay Pai, William Cerny, Andrew Pace, Alex Drlica-Wagner and colleagues, 'Rubin Observatory Reveals a Dust-Shrouded Halo Globular Cluster in Ophiuchus', arXiv:2609.15872, posted 14 September. Rubin-GC1 was found in Rubin's Early Data Preview 2 — not the survey proper — in the direction of the galactic bulge, behind heavy dust and a crowded foreground. It sits about 31 kiloparsecs away, roughly 100,000 light-years, out in the Milky Way's halo. Half-light radius ~5 pc, absolute magnitude ≈ −2.4, placing it in the faint tail of the globular cluster luminosity function; age ≈ 9.2 billion years; moderately metal-poor. Gaia DR3 proper motions and phase-space modelling point to an origin in the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal — an accreted cluster, not one of our own. Spectroscopy is the confirming next step. Reusable framing, now used four times in a month: catalogues are detection limits, not censuses. Quick hit — Starship Flight 14 has a firm date SpaceX has published and the FAA has cleared Flight 14 for Tuesday 22 September, a 75-minute window opening 08:15 EDT / 12:15 UTC (22:15 AEST on the 22nd). This is the first orbital attempt: six orbits at about 275 km, then a Pacific splashdown west of Chile roughly ten hours after launch. The payload is 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the first flight of the next-generation satellites designed for Starship — three of them carrying cameras to photograph the ship's heat shield during re-entry. Super Heavy splashes down in the Gulf about seven minutes after liftoff. No tower catches on this flight, for either stage, confirming the correction we carried on 12 September. Skywatch — both hemispheres Tonight: a five-day-old waxing crescent Moon beside Antares — 2.5° apart and 60° up from Sydney, 5.5° apart and 18° up from Los Angeles, nearly 7° apart and 12° up from New York. The September ecliptic tilt again. Friday 18 September: Venus at greatest brilliancy, about magnitude −4.8 — brightest not when fullest but when the product of a thinning crescent (~26% lit) and a swelling disc (~39 arcsec) peaks. Steadied binoculars will show the crescent. Venus sets ~3h15m after the Sun from Sydney, ~1h20m from Los Angeles, ~1h05m from New York; northern listeners should look low in the west 20–45 minutes after sunset with a clear horizon. Mercury is a southern-only bonus at magnitude −0.4 but only 16° from the Sun: 15° up at sunset from Sydney, 3° from London. Saturn rises within about an hour of sunset everywhere and is up all night, heading for opposition on 4 October with the rings ~7° open. First quarter falls on 18 September at 20:43 UTC, setting up International Observe the Moon Night on Saturday 19 September — timed near first quarter because that is when the terminator throws long shadows. Pre-dawn belongs to the north: Mars 45–47° up at nautical dawn from Los Angeles and New York against 20° from Sydney, with Jupiter below it, and the pair closing to about 2° by mid-November. Zodiacal light returns after the 26th — false dusk in the west from the south, false dawn in the east from the north. The September equinox is a single instant, 00:05 UTC on 23 September: the evening of the 22nd in the Americas, mid-morning on the 23rd in Australia. Eye safety: never sweep the daytime sky with binoculars or a telescope while hunting Venus. Block the Sun behind a building or wall first. Eclipse glasses must carry the ISO 12312-2 certification and be undamaged, and are for looking at the Sun only. Never use optics on the Sun without proper solar filtration fitted at the front. Sources and further reading ·         NASA Roman blog — 'NASA Activates Roman's Primary Instrument, Checks Out Coronagraph' (15 Sept 2026) ·         NASA Roman blog — 'Fuel Savings Double Potential Lifetime for NASA's Roman Mission' (14 Sept 2026) ·         NASA — Roman Core Community Surveys ·         arXiv:2609.12494 — Batygin, Fuller & Adams, 'Terminal instability of the Solar System triggered by stochastic solar mass loss' (accepted, ApJL) ·         arXiv:2609.15872 — Pai et al., 'Rubin Observatory Reveals a Dust-Shrouded Halo Globular Cluster in Ophiuchus' ·         AFA Air, Space & Cyber Conference 2026 — remarks by Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, 14 September 2026 ·         SpaceX — Starship Flight 14 mission page ·         Astronomy Daily S05E193 — 'The Universe Changes Its Mind' (the dark energy lead this episode calls back to) ·         Astronomy Daily S05E187 — stellar streams (Nora Shipp co-author callback)

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An Australian-led team has rebuilt thirty years of supernova observations into one consistent catalogue — and it adds fresh weight to the idea that dark energy is not constant. We also ask whether the young Sun swallowed a super-Earth, find out why a quiet Sun is bad news at thirty-five thousand feet, and watch JWST run the most sensitive exomoon search ever attempted. Plus a Crew-13 update and a skywatch with a live aurora alert for both hemispheres. In this episode ·         Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four Type Ia supernovae, rebuilt from Pantheon+ and the Dark Energy Survey's full five-year sample into a single internally consistent catalogue by Ryan Camilleri and Professor Tamara Davis at the University of Queensland, with ANU, Swinburne and international colleagues. ·         On their own the supernovae give a matter density of 0.310 for flat ΛCDM. Combined with the CMB and baryon acoustic oscillations, a tension appears under constant dark energy — and eases when dark energy is allowed to evolve. Preference: 2.5–3.1 sigma. ·         Why that is interesting but not a discovery, and why a second independent line of evidence pointing the same way as DESI changes the shape of the argument. ·         Professor Mutlu Yildiz (Ege University) on whether the young Sun engulfed a planet of 5–10 Earth masses — and whether that single event explains both the solar sound-speed discrepancy and the Sun's missing lithium. ·         Yaniv, Yair and Price on six balloon flights to 35 km: cosmic radiation at cruising altitude runs 40–60% higher at solar minimum, with an anticorrelation of r = −0.71 against solar activity. ·         David Kipping stacks twelve JWST transits of LP 890-9c and excludes moons down to 0.1 Earth radii across the entire Hill region — the most sensitive exomoon search on record. ·         Crew-13 now targeting no earlier than late September after an oxidiser leak in Dragon's propulsion system. ·         Skywatch: a coronal-hole stream arriving today with aurora chances at both ends of the planet, Venus at greatest brilliancy on 18 September, Mars past Pollux, Saturn towards opposition, International Observe the Moon Night on the 19th, and the equinox on the 22nd. Sources ·         University of Queensland — 'Big supernova dataset challenges dark energy theory', 8 September 2026 ·         Camilleri, Lee, Davis, Rubin, Shah, Scolnic, Lidman et al., 'Supernovae Unite: Combining Pantheon+ and DES-SN5YR', Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia — arXiv:2609.05053; companion host-mass paper arXiv:2609.05321 ·         Royal Astronomical Society — ''Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet', 10 September 2026. Yildiz, MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1527 ·         Yaniv, Yair & Price, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, September 2026 — cosmic radiation at aviation altitudes across the solar cycle ·         Kipping, 'JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet', arXiv:2609.05301, 4 September 2026 ·         NASA Space Station blog — 'NASA, SpaceX Adjust Crew-13 Launch Date', 29 August 2026; Canadian Space Agency update, September 2026 ·         EarthSky sun news and NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center outlooks, 12–14 September 2026 ·         NASA Science — 'What's Up: September 2026 Skywatching Tips'

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Today's episode — The Weekend Wrap, Saturday 12 September 2026: OUR LEAD: A SMALLER MERCURY Mercury has been contracting for four and a half billion years as its huge iron core cools, and it writes the record on its own surface — in long lobe-fronted cliffs called lobate scarps, where one slab of crust has ridden up over another. Add up all that shortening and you get the total contraction. The trouble was that the surface record always gave a smaller number than thermal models predicted. New work led by Gaku Nishiyama at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, published in Geophysical Research Letters and released by the American Geophysical Union on 10 September, explains the gap — and the explanation is beautifully simple. Impact debris buries the cliffs. Using MESSENGER imagery reworked with stereophotogrammetry, the team showed that the rougher the terrain, the fewer shortening structures you can find per unit area. Since faults don't know what the surface above them looks like, that correlation isn't geology — it's a detection limit. Correct for it and Mercury's total loss of diameter rises by 10–30%, from a range topping out near 16 km to as much as 23 km. That points to a larger metal core, fewer light elements in it, or a hotter start — and it closes the long-standing mismatch with the physics. BepiColombo is about ten weeks from gravity capture at Mercury, carrying a far better laser altimeter and a much less eccentric orbit. If Nishiyama is right, it should find the missing small scarps in exactly the rough ground where today's maps look suspiciously empty. Some of that data will come home through ESA's New Norcia station in Western Australia, run in partnership with CSIRO. THE WEEK THAT WAS ·         Monday — Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reached orbit from Andøya Spaceport in Norway on 5 September, the first vehicle ever to do it from Western European soil, carrying five university cubesats. ·         Tuesday — giant-impact simulations including temperature-dependent rock strength can produce an intact Moon in about five hours rather than a slowly accreting debris disc. A sensitivity result, not a new origin story. ·         Wednesday — Hubble and Webb together found 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects down to about 5 km, and the small ones keep the colours of their birth population rather than looking like collision fragments. ·         Thursday — 109 localised fast radio bursts were used to measure how far galactic feedback has smoothed the clumpiness of matter, finding more cool gas in big haloes than X-ray surveys see. ·         Friday — population synthesis suggests magnetars are roughly half of all neutron stars at birth, not one in a hundred, which doubles the Galactic supernova rate and makes magnetar central engines affordable. ALSO IN THIS EPISODE ·         The Sun's superflare potential — new work from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research with the University of Colorado, released 10 September. Scaling the 300 strongest modern solar flares against the size of their active regions, then applying that relation to the giant sunspot group of 1947 — the largest in four centuries of observation — gives a region with enough stored magnetic energy to power a superflare. Potential, not prediction: the caveats are covered properly on air. ·         Rocket Lab has filed a protest with the US Government Accountability Office over NASA's ~$700M Mars Telecommunications Network award to Blue Origin, on eligibility and technical-evaluation grounds. A GAO decision is due around mid-December. ·         Starship Flight 14 has slipped to no earlier than 18 September — and the tower catch of the ship is deferred to a later flight, which corrects how we framed it earlier this month. SKYWATCH — BOTH HEMISPHERES ·         The Moon and Venus about half a degree apart in front of Spica on the evenings of 13–14 September — Southern Hemisphere observers get the better geometry. ·         Venus reaches greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. ·         SN 2026aaiv, a Type Ia supernova in NGC 7331 in Pegasus, around magnitude 12 — the week's best observing target, and far easier from North America than from Sydney. ·         Saturn building towards its 4 October opposition, with Dione and Tethys events in the small hours for northern telescope owners. ·         Mars passing 6° south of Pollux pre-dawn on 18 September. ·         The zodiacal light — an evening object in the west from the Southern Hemisphere, a pre-dawn object in the east from the Northern. Best chance until early October. ·         Eye safety: never point binoculars or a telescope near the Sun when hunting daylight Venus or twilight Mercury. Solar filters must be certified to ISO 12312-2, fitted over the front of the instrument, and inspected every time. Links & sources ·         Mercury contraction — Geophysical Research Letters: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL124067 ·         Mercury contraction — AGU Newsroom release: https://news.agu.org/press-release/mercury-is-shrinking-more-than-we-thought ·         Superflares — Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research: https://www.mps.mpg.de/news ·         Superflares — release summary: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143231 ·         Rocket Lab GAO protest: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/rocket-lab-protests-nasas-decision-to-award-blue-origin-usd700-million-mars-orbiter-contract ·         Starship Flight 14 schedule: https://www.spacelaunchschedule.com/launch/starship-flight-14/ ·         SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331: https://www.rochesterastronomy.org/sn2026/sn2026aaiv.html ·         Magnetar fraction — Nature Astronomy: https://www.nature.com/natastron/articles?year=2026 ·         Sky this week: https://www.astronomy.com/the-sky-this-week/the-sky-this-week-from-september-11-to-18-2026/ ·         ESA deep space ground stations: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/New_era_for_New_Norcia_deep_space_antenna More at astronomydaily.io — full back catalogue, news feed, newsletter sign-up and listener contact form. Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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