Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News

Today's episode — S05E191, Friday September 11, 2026: Main story: A population-synthesis study published in Nature Astronomy on 10 September argues that magnetars make up roughly half of all neutron stars, not the one-in-a-hundred implied by the catalogues. Celsa Pardo-Araujo and Nanda Rea (Institute of Space Sciences, ICE-CSIC, Barcelona) with Michele Ronchi (ASTRON) and Vanessa Graber (Royal Holloway) modelled the whole isolated-neutron-star population as one family rather than four separate classes, evolving spin-down, magneto-thermal decay and Galactic dynamics together, then filtering the simulated population the way real surveys filter the sky. Of the 24 known neutron stars younger than 2,000 years, magnetars and central compact objects are about 59%; the derived birth fraction averages ~50% (40–70% or 30–50% depending on the assumed birth-field distribution, which peaks at 1–2.5 × 10^14 gauss). Two consequences: the Galactic core-collapse supernova rate has to be higher than assumed, around two per century, and magnetar central-engine models for superluminous supernovae, gamma-ray burst plateaus and fast radio bursts finally have the supply to work. Caveats: it is a model rather than a census, the anchor sample is 24 objects, and 'magnetar' is defined by a field threshold. Southern thread: the field began with SGR 0526−66 in the Large Magellanic Cloud on 5 March 1979, and the same Barcelona group modelled GLEAM-X J162759, found with the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia. The rest of the news: ·         Chariklo's rings: The first stellar occultation ever planned specifically for JWST — 18 October 2022 — has been published in Science Advances, led by Yücel Kılıç, Pablo Santos-Sanz and Celia Navas (IAA-CSIC) with Nicolas Rambaux, Bruno Sicardy and Josselin Desmars (LTE) and Damya Souami (LIRA). Against the 2017 ground-based occultations, the inner ring C1R is about 50% more opaque and the outer ring C2R about 60% less, with the ring positions unchanged. Chariklo is the largest known centaur at ~125 km radius; the rings sit at 390 and 405 km and are a few km wide. Candidate explanations: material loss from C2R, material arriving at or collisions grinding down C1R — or a wavelength effect, since infrared is being compared with visible light. The rings were discovered in 2013 by an occultation campaign across Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. ·         Mercury under bombardment: Kilpua et al. report in Nature Astronomy (8 September) that BepiColombo's fourth Mercury flyby in September 2024 — 165 km above the surface, closer than its eventual science orbit — coincided with a major solar particle eruption. The Finnish-built SIXS instrument watched energetic electrons and protons penetrate Mercury's magnetosphere and precipitate onto the surface over a wide area. That bombardment both sputters atoms off the surface and drives the X-ray fluorescence used to read its composition, and Mercury's small, weak magnetosphere makes it a stand-in for Earth during an extreme solar storm. The spacecraft separated its transfer module on 3 September; gravity capture is 21 November. ·         Europe buys a way home: ESA has awarded The Exploration Company a contract worth up to €760M under ALADDIN (Autonomous LEO Accelerated Demo Docking to ISS Node) — €310M for the demonstration mission, with ESA funding 60% and the company 40%, plus €450M in options for two further flights. The Nyx capsule flies on Ariane 6 and must dock with the ISS no later than Q2 2029, with up to €50M in additional incentive for using European launch vehicles. Europe has flown cargo up before, with the five ATVs, but has never returned anything from orbit. CEO Hélène Huby: 'It is the first time in Europe that a five-year-old space startup wins a contract worth hundreds of millions of euros.' The company's Mission Possible capsule survived reentry in June 2025 but was lost before splashdown — a partial success in its own words. Thales Alenia Space Italy remains in a parallel tender. ·         Parker Solar Probe: NASA reports the spacecraft completed its 29th close approach on 4 September, again matching the record set on Christmas Eve 2024 — 430,000 mph and 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, for the eighth time. The encounter ran 30 August to 9 September with nine days of autonomous operation and a beacon tone on the 7th; this pass targeted structures near the Sun's north pole, sampling nearly 40% of the solar circumference in a day. Telemetry began flowing on 11 September, science data 13–27 September. The mission is extended through 2029. ·         Skywatch: New Moon on 11 September at 14:27 AEST makes tonight and tomorrow the darkest nights of the month. Southern Hemisphere — Venus low in the west after sunset, building to greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8, with a very thin crescent Moon sweeping past on the 13th and 14th (about half a degree apart on the 14th, near Spica); EarthSky notes the Southern Hemisphere gets the better view. Saturn rises soon after sunset heading for its 4 October opposition with the rings ~7° open, and the Milky Way core is still high in the early evening. The zodiacal light is an evening object here — 'false dusk' in the west after full darkness, through early November. North America — the zodiacal light is a pre-dawn object in the east ('false dawn'), well flagged around the 15th; Jupiter dominates the pre-dawn east closing on Regulus with Mars near Castor and Pollux; Saturn is ~50° up in the south after midnight, and early Saturday morning Dione transits Saturn's north polar region around 2:55 a.m. EDT with Tethys entering Saturn's shadow around 2:10 a.m. EDT. Space weather has eased to quiet-to-unsettled after two minor G1 storms on the 8th and 9th. Eye safety: never point optics near the Sun without a purpose-built front-mounted solar filter; eclipse glasses must be ISO 12312-2 certified and are for naked-eye use only, never with binoculars or a telescope. Links & sources ·         Pardo-Araujo, Rea, Ronchi & Graber, 'Magnetar fraction in Core-Collapse Supernovae', Nature Astronomy (10 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16159 ·         ICE-CSIC — Institute of Space Sciences, magnetar population release (10 Sept 2026) — https://www.ice.csic.es/ ·         Kılıç, Santos-Sanz, Navas, Rambaux, Sicardy, Desmars & Souami, 'JWST stellar occultation reveals unexpected changes in Chariklo's ring system', Science Advances (Sept 2026) — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh4794 ·         Observatoire de Paris / LTE — The James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Chariklo's Invisible Rings Are Changing (9–10 Sept 2026) — https://lte.observatoiredeparis.psl.eu/The-James-Webb-Space-Telescope-Reveals-That-Chariklo-s-Invisible-Rings-Are ·         Sky & Telescope — Webb Space Telescope Discovers Surprising Changes in an Asteroid's Rings (10 Sept 2026) — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/webb-space-telescope-discovers-surprising-changes-in-an-asteroids-rings/ ·         Kilpua et al., 'Planetary shielding and surface precipitation of solar energetic particles during BepiColombo's close Mercury flyby', Nature Astronomy (8 Sept 2026) — https://www.nature.com/natastron/research-articles ·         University of Helsinki / SIXS — BepiColombo measures Mercury's particle bombardment up close (10 Sept 2026) — https://phys.org/news/2026-09-bepicolombo-mercury-particle-bombardment.html ·         ESA — Press Release N° 47–2026: ESA awards service contract to The Exploration Company (10 Sept 2026) — https://www.esa.int/Newsroom/Press_Releases ·         European Spaceflight — ESA Awards The Exploration Company a €760M Space Station Cargo Contract (10 Sept 2026) — https://europeanspaceflight.com/esa-awards-the-exploration-company-a-e760m-space-station-cargo-contract ·         NASA — After Latest Swing Past Sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe Checks In (10 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/parker-solar-probe/ ·         EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ ·         EarthSky — Zodiacal light: everything you need to know — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-zodiacal-light-or-false-dawn/ ·         Astronomy.com — The Sky This Week from September 11 to 18 — https://www.astronomy.com/the-sky-this-week/the-sky-this-week-from-september-11-to-18-2026/ Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E190, Thursday September 10, 2026: Main story: 109 fast radio bursts have been used to measure how much galactic feedback has smoothed out the matter in the universe. A fast radio burst lasts about a millisecond, and on its way to us it is dispersed — low radio frequencies slowed more than high ones by free electrons along the path, exactly the way a prism separates white light. The size of that delay counts the ordinary matter the burst passed through. Writing in Nature Astronomy on 8 September, a team led by Kritti Sharma at Caltech, with Vikram Ravi, Liam Connor and Elisabeth Krause (University of Arizona), used 109 bursts localised to host galaxies out to redshift ~0.3 — most of them from Caltech's DSA-110 — to constrain the suppression of matter clustering by feedback, and the gas fractions of groups and clusters between 10^13 and 10^15 solar masses. They find more gas retained than the X-ray picture implies: gas fractions about 1.9σ above stacked eROSITA measurements, and slightly above the Atacama Cosmology Telescope's kSZ constraints, consistent with the bursts counting cool gas that X-rays miss. The constraint is already competitive with both of those far larger experiments, cutting the uncertainty on clustering at these scales by roughly a factor of eight. That matters because feedback is the confound sitting under the S8 tension — it mimics the signature of massive neutrinos and of some dark energy and dark matter models. The technique's foundation is Australian: the Macquart relation, established with ASKAP in Western Australia in 2020, is what found the universe's missing ordinary matter in the first place. The rest of the news: ·         Hypersoft X-ray sources: NASA and the Chandra X-ray Center announced a new class of object on 9 September — 84 sources across six galaxies (M31, M101 and four ellipticals) that emit more than eight times as many photons below 0.3 keV as just above it, exceeding 10^38 erg/s in that narrow band and more again in the extreme ultraviolet. Led by Mustafa Muhibullah (University of Alabama) with Jimmy Irwin and Rosanne Di Stefano (CfA), published in Nature Astronomy. They are likely compact objects accreting from companions, and may be both the long-sought progenitors of Type Ia supernovae and a significant unaccounted source of ionising radiation. ·         A rendezvous with Halley's Comet: a trajectory study circulated on 6 September by Roberto Flores and Elena Fantino (Khalifa University), Mauro Pontani (Sapienza), and Ivano Bertini and Cesare Barbieri (Padua) sets out the first Halley rendezvous achievable with proven hardware — unpowered Jupiter and Saturn gravity assists plus deep-space low-thrust arcs, a Hall-effect thruster on a standard RTG, ~2,000 kg launch mass with ~750 kg of instruments, launching August 2036 or September 2037 and arriving in 2060, about a year before Halley's 2061 perihelion. Months alongside the comet instead of Giotto's minutes at 68 km/s. ·         Apollo Maneuvers 2026: US Space Command announced on 8 September that it had completed the first live-fly orbital manoeuvre exercise of its kind, moving real operational satellites across low, medium and geosynchronous orbits with Operation Olympic Defender allies (Australia among them) and commercial operators via its Commercial Integration Cell. Named for the US Army's 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers. The practical consequence is more unpredictable objects in an already crowded region, and in-orbit refuelling becoming load-bearing. ·         Skywatch: New Moon on 11 September at 14:27 AEST (04:27 UTC) makes tonight and tomorrow the darkest nights of the month. Southern Hemisphere — the galactic core still high after dark, and Venus well placed low in the west-south-west, 7.4° from Spica and building to greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. Saturn rises about an hour after sunset for everyone, heading for its 4 October opposition with the rings about 7° from edge-on. North America — the pre-dawn sky, with Mars in Gemini passing Castor on the 12th and Pollux on the 17th, and Jupiter below it in Cancer. Plus a convoy of CMEs from AR4524 arriving since 8 September, two G1 storms already recorded and G2 possible: aurora chances at both ends of the planet, including Tasmania, coastal southern Victoria and New Zealand's South Island. Links & sources ·         Caltech — Fast Radio Bursts Poised to Help with Biggest Cosmic Mysteries (8 Sept 2026) — https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/fast-radio-bursts-poised-to-help-with-biggest-cosmic-mysteries ·         Sharma, Krause, Ravi, Connor et al., 'Signatures of Suppressed Matter Clustering revealed by Fast Radio Bursts', Nature Astronomy (8 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17162 ·         NASA — NASA's Chandra Unveils Mysterious X-ray Objects (9 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/nasas-chandra-unveils-mysterious-x-ray-objects/ ·         Muhibullah, Irwin & Di Stefano, 'Hypersoft X-ray Sources: A New Class of Luminous Cosmic Emitters', Nature Astronomy (9 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06192 ·         Flores, Beolchi, Pozzi, Pontani, Bertini, Barbieri & Fantino, 'Double Gravity-Assist Rendezvous Trajectory to Halley's Comet Using Deep-Space Low Thrust' (arXiv, 6 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02189 ·         Air & Space Forces Magazine — SPACECOM Maneuvers Satellites Across Orbits in New Exercise (9 Sept 2026) — https://www.airandspaceforces.com/space-command-maneuvers-satellites-across-multiple-orbits-in-new-exercise/ ·         EarthSky — Sun news: series of sun blasts arriving, auroras to come — https://earthsky.org/sun/sun-news-activity-solar-flare-cme-aurora-updates/ ·         EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ ·         TheSkyLive — Moon calendar, September 2026 — https://theskylive.com/moon-calendar?year=2026&month=09

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Everything beyond Neptune is a leftover. The icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt never got assembled into a planet, and out there — dark, cold and empty enough that things mostly leave each other alone — they are the closest thing we have to the original building blocks of the solar system, still sitting roughly where they were made. The trouble is that everything we know about them, we learned from the big ones. Ground-based telescopes stop at around twenty-five kilometres. In two papers published on 8 September in The Astronomical Journal, teams using Hubble and Webb simultaneously — one telescope in visible light, one in the infrared, on the same field at the same moment — report twenty-seven previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, the faintest ever directly detected. The smallest is about five kilometres across. NASA's own description of the faintest of them: the equivalent of standing on Earth and picking out a small swarm of fireflies on the Moon. The surprise is the colours. Objects that small are assumed to be collision fragments, and a fragment should be showing us the fresh ice under the irradiated red rind — so the small population should look bluer and messier than the large one. It doesn't. Led by Anastasia Morgan at Northern Arizona University, the colour study finds the small objects carry the same colour relationship as their large counterparts, in both the dynamically cold population that formed in place and the dynamically hot population that was flung outward during the giant planets' migration. David Trilling: these hot objects 'retain a signature of where they were born, even though they've been orbitally scrambled since then.' The companion size-distribution study, led by Marielle Eduardo at the University of Victoria, finds the same size distribution in both populations despite their different birthplaces. Together the two results point away from small TNOs being rubble and towards planetesimals that formed quickly, at large sizes — the picture Arrokoth gave us up close in 2019. Then: Anak Krakatau. The Sunda Strait volcano went into a major explosive phase on 5 September that ran more than twenty-four hours, throwing ash to 15,000 metres — 50,000 feet — to the west. Eight airports closed across Java and Sumatra, 2,961 flights grounded, around 170,000 travellers stranded. NASA's Earth Observatory published Landsat 8 and Suomi NPP imagery on 9 September. The whole warning chain runs through orbit: geostationary Himawari-9 imaging the full disc every ten minutes, feeding the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre run by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology — because ash doesn't show up on aircraft weather radar, and the only warning a crew gets comes up from the ground. ESA closed out the 26-year Cluster mission by flying its last two satellites, Samba and Tango, into the atmosphere over the South Pacific near Tonga on 31 August and 1 September — deliberately, and precisely enough that a chartered business jet carrying thirty instruments could be underneath them. The ROSIE campaign, led by Jiří Šilha of Astros Solutions, got about fifty seconds on each spacecraft, measuring not the light show but the chemistry: titanium, sodium, potassium and aluminium, and specifically aluminium oxide, whose effect on ozone at those altitudes is a genuinely open question as constellations scale. ESA's Draco mission in 2027 will record the same process from the inside. And a study from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and released on 4 September, finds that Messier 74 — the Phantom Galaxy — is more than twice the size the catalogues give it. Deep imaging with a one-metre telescope, about ten times deeper than Sloan, traces a disc of young stars out to roughly 100,000 light years against a catalogued 45,000. Mean age in that outer region: 640 million years. The likely cause is a close pass by the neighbouring galaxy UGC 1176 about a billion years ago. Skywatch covers both hemispheres on a New Moon week — the galactic core overhead from Sydney in its last strong month, the Teapot low in the south for North America, Venus building to greatest brilliancy on the 18th, Saturn climbing towards its 4 October opposition, and the full ISO 12312-2 safety passage for anyone tempted to hunt Venus in daylight. Links & sources NASA — NASA's Hubble, Webb Find Far-out Solar System Objects 'Remember' Past — https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-webb-find-far-out-solar-system-objects-remember-past/ Morgan et al. — colours of small trans-Neptunian objects, The Astronomical Journal (8 Sept 2026) — https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ae907f Eduardo et al. — size distribution of small trans-Neptunian objects, The Astronomical Journal (8 Sept 2026) — https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ae9084 NASA Earth Observatory — Anak Krakatau Rumbles Again (Image of the Day, 9 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/anak-krakatau-rumbles-again/ ANTARA News — Volcanic ash grounds 2,961 flights in Indonesia — https://bali.antaranews.com/berita/413072/volcanic-ash-grounds-2961-flights-in-indonesia ESA — Cluster's encore for reentry science a success (2 Sept 2026) — https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Cluster_s_encore_for_reentry_science_a_success ESA — Moving satellites to meet a plane for rare reentry data — https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Moving_satellites_to_meet_a_plane_for_rare_reentry_data Space.com — 2 satellites just burned up in Earth's atmosphere, and scientists were watching from a private jet — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/2-satellites-just-burned-up-in-earths-atmosphere-and-scientists-were-watching-from-a-private-jet-heres-why Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias — An IAC study reveals that galaxies can grow in an 'explosive' way (4 Sept 2026) — https://www.iac.es/en/outreach/news/iac-study-reveals-galaxies-can-grow-explosive-way Astronomy & Astrophysics — 2026 press releases — https://www.aanda.org/2026-press-releases NASA — What's Up: September 2026 skywatching tips — https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/whats-up-september-2026-skywatching-tips-from-nasa/ TheSkyLive — Moon phase calendar, September 2026 — https://theskylive.com/moon-calendar?year=2026&month=09

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For fifty years the story has been that the Moon assembled slowly out of a disc of debris. New simulations from Southwest Research Institute add one thing everybody left out — the strength of rock — and get an intact Moon in about five hours. Plus eight black holes that outgrew their galaxies, two massive stars that fell past each other and got caught, Dragonfly's Titan landing site gets a name, and today's daylight occultation of Jupiter.

Links & sources Southwest Research Institute — SwRI-led modeling identifies new scenarios for Moon formation — https://www.swri.org/newsroom/press-releases/swri-led-modeling-identifies-new-scenarios-moon-formation Denton, Canup, Asphaug et al. — The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI) — https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae91e9 Space.com — Earth's moon could have formed in just 5 hours after giant impact — https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/earths-moon-could-have-formed-in-just-5-hours-after-giant-impact Buchner et al. — A large population of overmassive black hole quasars at z=0.3–0.8 revealed by eROSITA, A&A 713, A11 — https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2026/09/aa59356-26/aa59356-26.html Astronomy & Astrophysics — 2026 press releases — https://www.aanda.org/2026-press-releases Zhang, Garay et al. — An eccentric massive protobinary assembled via a core-merger parabolic encounter, Nature Astronomy — https://www.nature.com/natastron/articles?year=2026 Universidad de Chile coverage of the IRAS 07299-1651 result — https://www.radiofestival.cl/la-danza-nupcial-de-estrellas-masivas-astronomo-de-la-universidad-de-chile-participa-de-historico-hallazgo/ NASA / APL — Dragonfly Gets Wired Up While Titan Landing Area Is Named — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/dragonfly/2026/09/02/nasas-dragonfly-gets-wired-up-while-titan-landing-area-is-named/ Sky & Telescope — Tuesday's daytime Jupiter occultation, a warm-up for the 'big one' — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/tuesdays-daytime-jupiter-occultation-a-warm-up-for-the-big-one/ Universe Today — September's lunar occultations: circumstances and visibility — https://www.universetoday.com/articles/penultimate-lunar-occultations-inbound-for-jupiter-venus-and-more-in-september NASA — What's Up: September 2026 skywatching tips — https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/whats-up-september-2026-skywatching-tips-from-nasa/ EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/

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A German rocket lifted off from an Arctic island on Saturday and became the first vehicle ever to reach orbit from Western European soil. Plus: the gaps in stellar streams may not be dark matter after all, two white dwarfs circling every 374 seconds in the far southern sky, peptides that fold in concentrated sulfuric acid, and what Katalyst's LINK is actually doing next to Swift. Both-hemispheres skywatch, and a serious safety warning for tomorrow's daylight Jupiter occultation.

Links & sources ·         Isar Aerospace — mission updates — https://isaraerospace.com/mission-updates-overview ·         ESA — Spectrum launches to orbit (imagery) — https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2026/09/Spectrum_launches_to_orbit ·         NASASpaceflight — Isar 'Onward and Upward' — https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2026/09/isar-onward-and-upward/ ·         Space.com — Private German rocket makes history — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/isar-aerospace-second-launch-norway-andoya-spaceport-spectrum-rocket ·         Space.com — Gilmour Space eyes a second orbital attempt — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/australias-gilmour-space-not-going-to-give-up-as-it-eyes-2nd-orbital-launch-attempt-in-2026 ·         Sky & Telescope — Gaps in stellar streams may be common — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/gaps-in-stellar-streams-common-not-sign-dark-matter/ ·         Arora et al. — Semianalytic modeling of subhalo encounters with thin stellar streams, ApJ — https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adf740 ·         Sharma et al. — Rapid orbital decay in eRASSU J060839.5−704014 (arXiv) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09341 ·         Maitra et al. — eRASSU J060839.5−704014 discovery paper, A&A (2024) — https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/ref/2024/03/aa47811-23/aa47811-23.html ·         MIT News — Peptides can form well-defined structures in Venus-like conditions — https://news.mit.edu/2026/study-peptides-can-form-well-defined-structures-harsh-venus-conditions-0831 ·         NASA Swift blog — Commercial spacecraft for Swift boost continues tech demo — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/09/04/commercial-spacecraft-for-nasas-swift-boost-continues-tech-demo/ ·         NASA Swift blog — LINK spacecraft recovery progressing — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/08/06/link-spacecraft-recovery-progressing-for-nasas-swift-boost/ ·         EarthSky — Saturn at opposition, 4 October 2026 — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/saturn-at-opposition-closest-brightest-best/ ·         Star Walk — Astronomical events, September 2026 — https://starwalk.space/en/news/night-sky-tonight-september

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