WEBVTT
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Right now as you're listening to this, four human beings
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are traveling to the Moon, not orbiting Earth, not docked
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at the space station, heading to the Moon. And today
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we're going to tell you everything that's happened in the
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past twenty four hours because on the Artemis two mission,
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every hour counts.
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Welcome to Astronomy Daily.
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I'm Avery and I'm Anna. It's Friday, April third, twenty
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twenty six, and this is Season five, episode eighty strap in.
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We've got a packed show today.
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Let's start with the big one. Last night, April second,
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at seven forty nine pm Eastern Time, the Orion spacecraft
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fired its main engine for five minutes and fifty five seconds.
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That engine, built by the European Space Agency, produces six
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thousand pounds of thrust. In that time, it added about
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nine hundred miles per hour to Orion's velocity, and that
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was enough enough to escape Earth's gravitational embrace entirely.
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That burn, known as the trans lunar injection or TLI,
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is the defining moment of any lunar mission. Everything before
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it is preparation, everything after it is commitment. And the
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last time mission control performed a TLI with a crew
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on board was December seventy two, Apollo seventeen, fifty three
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years ago.
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Mission control Capcom Chris Burge radioed up immediately after the burn,
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integrity looks like a good burn. Integrity. That's the call
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sign for the Orion Mule crew module, and the crew
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responded through Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
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He said, humanity has once again shown what we are
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capable of, and it's your hopes for the future that
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carry us now on this journey around the Moon. I've
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listened to that quote three times and I'm still getting goosebumps.
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The crew is now on a free return trajectory, meaning
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lunar gravity will bend their path around the far side
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of the Moon and slingshot them back towards Earth no
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additional burns required. On April six, they'll pass within eight
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thousand kilometers of the lunar surface, getting an unprecedented view
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of the far side that no crew has seen since
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Apollo seventeen splashed down in the Pacific. Is targeted for
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April tenth, and.
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In a lovely touch. Flight Day two started with mission
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control playing green Light by John Legend and Andre three
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thousand as the CRU's wake up call, because sometimes the
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poetry of the moment gets a little help from the playlist.
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Now, while mission control was riding high from the successful
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TLI burn, there was a slightly less heroic problem to
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solve a boarder Ryan.
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The toilet broke, specifically the Universal Waste Management System, which
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is a rather grand name for what is essentially the
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world's most expensive and complicated toilet twenty three million dollars
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for context.
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So what went wrong?
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A fan in zero gravity? You can't rely on gravity
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to pull waste away from the body. That's Earth's job,
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and there is no Earth up there in that sense. Instead,
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the toilet uses a powerful airflow to do the job.
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When the fan controller malfunctioned, the urine system stopped working.
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The crew could still, how do I put this, use
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the solid waste side of the system, but the liquid
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side was out of order.
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Which meant at least one astronaut had to use a
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backup contingency bag a collapsible contingency urinal to give it
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its full dignified name. It was later emptied overboard into space,
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which feels like a very poetic way to leave one's
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mark on the Cosmos mission.
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Control guided Christina Cock through the repair. She found the blockage,
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cleared it, and the toilet was back online within about
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six hours of launch. NASA confirmed it in the early
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morning hours of April second. The crew's relief was presumably
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both metaphorical and literal.
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And here's the thing, this is exactly what a test
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flight is for. Orion's toilet is the first commode ever
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installed on a crude deep space mission. Apollo astronauts had
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no toilet at all. They used bags for the entire
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lunar journey, So even a malfunctioning space toilet represents significant progress,
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and everything learned from this fix will make future missions better.
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Also worth noting, it's so loud that the crew has
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to wear ear protection to use it, which raises questions
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I didn't know I had about the acoustics of deep
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space plumbing.
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Now, while humans are heading to the Moon, there's something
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else heading toward our Sun, and tomorrow we'll find out
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if it survives.
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Pommet C twenty twenty six a one known as Maps,
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named for the four astronomers who discovered it from the
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Atacama Desert in Chile back in January. It's a Kreutz
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Sungrazer which which is a family of comets that all
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share the same ancient ancestor a massive comet that broke
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apart roughly eighteen hundred years ago. Some of its descendants
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have become the most spectacular comets in recorded history. Tomorrow
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Maps finds out which side of that ledger it falls on.
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Tomorrow, Saturday, April fourth, at around fourteen twenty two, UTC
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Maps will pass just one hundred and sixty one thousand
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kilometers from the Sun's surface. That's less than half the
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distance from the Earth to the Moon. It'll be threading
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the inner solar corona, the Sun's own atmosphere. At that point,
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it's traveling through million degree plasma, being subjected to tidal
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forces that could simply tear it apart.
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So what might we see? Three scenarios. One, it disintegrates
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before or during perryhillion, and we get nothing or maybe
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a dusty, headless tail for a few days. Two it
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survives as a modest object. It's right enough for binoculars
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or a small telescope emerging from the solar glare around
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April seventh. Three, the scenario that has the comet community buzzing.
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It survives and brightens dramatically like its famous cousin Lovejoy
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did in twenty eleven. In that case, we could be
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looking at a naked eye comet with a tail stretching
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ten degrees or more across the Southern Hemisphere sky.
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And for our Australian listeners, you are in prime position.
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If MAPP survives, look to the western horizon after sunset
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from April sixth. The Southern Hemisphere gets the best views.
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We'll have updates in tomorrow's episode. Regardless of the outcome,
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this is very much a story to watch in the meantime.
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Coronagraphs on the Soho spacecraft and NASA's New Punch mission
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are watching the Commet right now as it makes its
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final approach towards the Sun. It's a vigil in its
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own way.
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Here's a counterintuitive piece of science for you. Finding a
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galaxy with no dark matter actually makes the case for
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dark matter stronger. Let me explain.
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I love it when the universe does that.
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A team at Yale University has confirmed that a third
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galaxy in a group called NNGC one zero five to
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two appears to essentially have no dark matter at all.
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It's an ultra diffuse galaxy as wide as the Milky Way,
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but containing one thousand times fewer stars, making it almost ghostly.
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Using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, they measured how fast
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the stars inside it are moving. In a normal galaxy,
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stars move quickly because dark matter's gravity is helping hold
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everything together. In this galaxy, the stars are barely moving.
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There's no dark matter required to explain what's there.
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And this is now the third galaxy in the same
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region of sky to show the same signature. They're lined
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up in a trail DF two, DF four, and now
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DF nine, and the Yale team thinks they know why the.
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Bullet dwarf collision theory two dwarf galaxies collide at enormous
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speeds bit millions of years ago. Here's the key. Dark
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matter only interacts through gravity. It doesn't collide, it doesn't stick,
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so the dark matter halos of both galaxies pass straight
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through each other like two ghosts walking through the same wall.
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The gas and stars, however, do interact. They get stripped away,
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thrown into a trail, and that trail cools and collapses
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into a string of ultra diffuse dark matter free galaxies.
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Which is exactly what DF two, DF four, and DF
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nine appear to be, and the reason this strengthens the
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case for dark matter is that this can only happen
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if dark matter is a real, separate substance, something that
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can be physically separated from normal matter. If dark matter
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were just a modification to our laws of gravity, as
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some alternative theories suggest, you couldn't separate it like this.
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The trail of missing dark matter is paradoxically proof that
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dark matter exists.
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The team is now going after a fourth and fifth
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galaxy along the same trail the story's building.
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For thousands of years, there have been stars being born
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in our galaxy that no human eye has ever seen,
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hidden behind curtains of thick cosmic dust. This week, thanks
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to the James Webb Space Telescope, we finally got to
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look behind one of those.
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Curtains, the W fifty one star forming region, about seventeen
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thousand light years away. A team from the University of
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Florida pointed JWST's infrared instruments at this region and captured
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images of unprecedented clarity. Infrared light passes through dust the
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way X rays pass through skin, revealing structures that optical
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telescope simply cannot see, and what they found was extraordinary.
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Proto stellar jets, beams of material blasting outward from newly
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forming stars, bubbles of ionized gas carved out by the
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radiation of massive young stars, dark filaments of cold gas
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threading through the region like ink and water, and young stars,
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some of the most massive in our galaxy still embedded
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in their birth clouds, having begun forming less than a
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million years ago. In cosmic terms, that's brand new.
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The lead researcher Tyu put it, simply, because of James Web,
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we can see those hidden young massive stars forming in
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the star forming region. By looking at them, we can
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study their formation mechanisms. And every time the team reviewed
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the images, Professor Ginsberg said, they found something new and unexpected.
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But here's the detail I think is most striking. When
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the team compared the JWST images with radio observations from
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the Alma telescope array, they found that only a small
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fraction of stars were visible in both, which means that
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even with the most powerful space telescope ever built, there
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are still stars so deeply embedded in dust that only
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radio waves escape. The universe still has hiding places that
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JWST alone cannot reach.
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Let's close with a story that's been building for months,
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and this week it moved from debate to imminence.
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As we reported earlier this week, a California startup called
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reflect Orbital is preparing to launch its first demonstration satellite,
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erindill one, potentially as early as this month. When it
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reaches orbit, it will unfold a mirror the size of
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a small building eighteen meters by eighteen meters, and when
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that mirror is in the right position, it will cast
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a beam on the ground that's as bright as the
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full moon.
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Their business model is sunlight on demand. Solar farms could
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stay operational after dark, greenhouses could get extended. Light cities
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could theoretically be illuminated from orbit. If reflect Orbital gets
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to its target of fifty thousand mirrors, those mirrors would
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outnumber every star visible to the naked eye by a
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factor of more than five.
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And that's before we get to SpaceX. In January, SAX
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filed with the FCC for permission to launch up to
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one million satellites orbital data centers for artificial intelligence one million.
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There are currently around fifteen thousand active satellites in Earth orbit.
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SpaceX wants to increase that number by roughly seventy times.
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The response from the scientific community has been unified and urgent.
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The International Astronomical Union, the European Southern Observatory, the Royal
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Astronomical Society all have filed opposition. A study published in
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Nature last December found that if all currently proposed constellations
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are launched, one third of Hubble space telescope images would
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be contaminated. Base based telescopes could have more than ninety
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six percent of their exposures affected.
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The FCC comment periods have closed, but Dark Sky International
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is continuing the fight with open letters to both SpaceX
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and reflect Orbital calling for a pause and a full
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environmental review before any launches proceed. We'll link to those
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letters in the show notes.
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For our listeners. In Australia and across the Southern Hemisphere,
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you live under some of the darkest, most spectacular skies
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on Earth. The Milky Way that stretches overhead in a
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clear night in the outback, the Magellanic clouds that our
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Northern Hemisphere friends rarely get to see. These are part
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of your natural heritage and they are worth fighting for.
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What a Friday. Humans on the way to the Moon,
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a comment about to face judgment from the Sun, ancient
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cosmic collisions, solving dark matter mysteries, hidden stellar nurseries revealed,
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and the future of the night sky hanging in the balance.
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Tomorrow's episode is going to be big. We'll have the
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outcome of comet maps, Perihelion, and the next Artemis milestone
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as the crew continues their journey toward the Moon.
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If you're enjoying Astronomy Daily, please subscribe, leave us a review,
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and share us with someone who looks up at the
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sky and wonders. Find us at Astronomy Daily dot m
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and on social media at astro Daily Pod. I'm avery
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keep looking up and I'm anna clear skies everyone, And
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if you're in the southern Hemisphere, check the western horizon
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after sunset this weekend. Something might be waiting for you.
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Sunny day stars to start all