July 24, 2026
The Moon That Isn't | Today's Space News
Astronomers have confirmed the first moon-like object beyond our solar system — and immediately discovered our vocabulary cannot handle it. A Jupiter-mass world orbits a brown dwarf, which orbits a red dwarf, seventy light-years away. Is it a moon? A planet? Something we have not named yet? Also on today’s show: the Milky Way’s most powerful particle accelerator is confirmed in the direction of Altair, out-punching the Large Hadron Collider by a factor of a hundred. Chandra catches a black hole starving a galaxy it does not even live in. China flies the world’s largest solid rocket from the open ocean for the first time. Starship Flight 13 gets another window. And the Moon meets the heart of the Scorpion. Chapters Time Chapter 00:00 Cold open — what is a moon, exactly? 00:35 Welcome and headlines 01:15 The first exo-satellite — CD-35 2722 05:55 The galaxy’s most powerful particle accelerator 10:00 The Red Potato galaxy and its hostile neighbour 13:35 Gravity-1 launches from the open sea 16:55 Starship Flight 13 — when and where to watch 19:10 Skywatch — the Moon and Antares 22:30 Sign-off Story sources 1. First confirmed exo-satellite • Hoy, K., Zurlo, A., Peña R, P.A. et al. “Planetary-mass exosatellite detected around the substellar companion of a star.” Nature 655, 865–869 (2026). • European Southern Observatory release eso2610a, 23 July 2026. • Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, Cerro Paranal, Chile. 2. Proton PeVatron confirmed • Mizuno, T., Sano, H., Murase, T., Oka, T., Suzuki, H., Nakahara, N. “Hadronic Scenario for Galactic PeVatron LHAASO J1912+1014u Supported by Fermi-LAT Gamma-Ray Data and FUGIN CO Data.” The Astrophysical Journal, 16 July 2026. • Hiroshima University news release; instruments: Fermi-LAT, Nobeyama 45 m / FUGIN survey, Chandra X-ray Observatory. 3. The Red Potato galaxy • NASA / Chandra X-ray Observatory news release, July 2026. Wang, W., Cantalupo, S., Travascio, A. et al., University of Milano-Bicocca. • Galaxy designation MQN01 J004131.9-493704, redshift approximately 3.25. Original JWST identification announced January 2026; the Chandra jet result is the new element. 4. Gravity-1 open-sea launch • Orienspace Gravity-1 Y4, third flight. Liftoff 0254 UTC, 22 July 2026, from a launch service ship approximately 170 km east of Shanghai. • Reporting via SpaceNews, CGTN and Space.com. Nine payloads including six Huantian constellation satellites. 5. Starship Flight 13 • SpaceX; live coverage via Spaceflight Now and Space.com. Booster 20 / Ship 40, second flight of Starship V3. • Launch window opens 24 July 2026 at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 UTC). Payload: 20 Starlink V3 satellites. 6. Skywatch • Astronomy.com Sky This Week; timeanddate.com Moon guide; EarthSky visible planets guide. • Moon 0.6° south of Antares, 6:00 p.m. EDT 24 July. Full Buck Moon 29 July, 14:36 UTC, in Capricornus.
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WEBVTT
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Here is a question that sounds simple.
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What is a moon something that goes around.
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The planet, right, and what is a planet.
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Something that goes around the star?
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So what do you call a Jupiter sized world that
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orbits an object that is not quite a star and
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not quite a planet, which is itself orbiting a star
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seventy light years away?
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I am going to need a minute.
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So it is the International Astronomical Union.
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We'll get back to that.
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Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily.
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I'm anna and I'm avery. It is Friday, the twenty
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fourth of July twenty twenty six, and this is episode
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one hundred and forty nine.
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Coming up. Astronomers confirm the first moonlike object outside our
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Solar system and immediately break the vocabulary trying to describe it.
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We have found the most powerful particle accelerator in the galaxy,
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and it has been sitting next to one of the
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brightest stars in your sky. A black hole is starving
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a galaxy. It doesn't even live in.
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Tina flies the world's biggest solid rocket from the open
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ocean for the first time. Starship gets another shot at
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flight thirteen tonight for some of you, and the moon
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has a date with the heart of the scorpion.
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Let's get into it. We have found thousands of planets
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around other stars, nearly six thousand confirmed, with candidates stacked
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up behind them, but there has always been a conspicuous
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gap in the catalog. No moons, not one confirmed. We
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know moons must be out there. Our own Solar system
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has close to three hundred of them, but they are small,
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they are faint, and they are parked right next to
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something far brighter. Finding one has been one of the
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great frustrations of exoplanet science, and now now a team
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publishing in Nature has confirmed the first one sort of,
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and the sort of is the whole story. This system
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is a star called C D minus thirty five twenty
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seven twenty two. It is a red dwarf roughly seventy
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light years from US, and for our listeners in Australia
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and New Zealand, it sits in your southern sky. Astronomers
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have known for years that this star has a companion
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because the star wobbles. That companion is called C D
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minus thirty five twenty seven twenty two B, and it
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is heavy, somewhere between twenty nine and thirty eight times
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the mass of Jupiter.
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That's well pass planet territory.
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It is above about thirteen to fifteen jupiter masses, an
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object confuse deuterium in its core. It's not doing what
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the Sun does. You need around ninety jupiter masses to
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fuse ordinary hydrogen. But it's doing something that in between
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category is a brown dwarf, too big to be a
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planet and too small to be a.
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Star, the thing astronomy call a failed star, which always
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struck me as unkind.
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Deeply unkind. And this particular brown dwarf is bright enough
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and far enough from its star that the very large
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telescope in Chile can photograph it directly. So the team
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took spectra of the brown dwarf itself and found that
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it wobbles too. Something is orbiting the brown dwarf. Best
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estimate of its mass about one jupiter.
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So we have a Jupiter going around the brown dwarf
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going around the red.
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Dwarf, a three tiered system, and nobody can agree on
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what to call the object at the.
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Bottom, because if the brown dwarf counts as a planet,
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then this thing is a moon, an exo moon, the
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first one confirmed. But if the brown dwarf counts as
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a star. Then this thing is a planet and it's
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not a.
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Moon at all, and the brown dwarf is genuinely physically
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both and neither. The paper hedges by calling it an
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exo satellite, which is honest and also a bit of
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a shrug.
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We've been here before, though. This is the Pluto argument
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in a fresh outfit.
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It really is. Pluto is not a planet because it
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has not cleared its orbital neighborhood. Fine, but Pluto has Sharon,
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and Sharon is so large relative to Pluto that the
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two of them orbit a point in empty space between them.
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So is Sharon a moon of a non planet? Are
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they a double dwarf planet? And our own moon is
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bigger than Pluto? Should it be a dwarf planet that
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happens to be captured?
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Nature does not care about our filing system.
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Nature does not care at all. And here's the part
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I find genuinely exciting. Brown dwarfs are common. If this
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one has a Jupiter mass companion, plenty of others probably
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do too. Some of those could sit in the habitable
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zone of the parent star. You could have a warm,
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temperate world with liquid water orbiting a failed star orbiting
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a real one.
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And we would not have a word for it.
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The team says, this is the first of its kind,
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not the last. I suspect the IAU is going to
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have a long decade.
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Now. If you go outside tonight and look up, one
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of the first bright stars you will find is Altaire.
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Northern listeners. It is high overhead in the evening, the
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southern corner of the Summer Triangle. Southern listeners, look north,
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it's lower down, but it's unmistakable one.
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Of the closest bright stars to us sixteen and a.
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Half light years sixteen point seven now roughly in that
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same direction, but nowhere near it in actual space. Sits
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an object that has just been confirmed as the most
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powerful particle accelerator in the Milky Way. By the way,
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I should stress the nowhere near it as the key
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point here.
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Worth being precise about that same patch of sky, wildly
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different distance.
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Wildly Altare is sixteen light years away. This thing is
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closer to fourteen thousand. It just happens to line up.
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It's called lhaa aso J nineteen twelve plus ten fourteen U,
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which I'm going to say exactly once. And it was
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picked up in twenty twenty four by a Chinese observatory
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high on the Tibetan Plateau.
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And what makes it special.
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It's throwing protons out at more than one thousand trillion
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electron volts one pev Astronomers call an object that can
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do that a pevotron, and it's worth pausing on what
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that number means. The Large Hadron Collider is twenty seven
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kilometers of superconducting magnets buried under the French Swiss border,
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and it's the most powerful machine humanity has ever built
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for this purpose. This object beats it by a factor
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of well over one hundred.
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With no magnets and no budget.
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With no magnets and no budget. Now, we've known about
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pevetron candidates for a while. There are dozens of them.
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The problem has always been proving what's actually being accelerated.
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Because when you detect very high energy gamma rays coming
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from one of these sources, there are two ways to
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make them. Protons smashing into gas or electrons scattering off light.
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Both produce gamma rays. The observatories that found these sources
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can't tell the two apart because their images are too
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blurry to see the difference.
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So how do you settle it, you.
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Stop relying on one telescope. A team led by Tsunafumi
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Mizuno at Hiroshima University pulled together three completely different instruments
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looking at three completely different kinds of light. NASA's Fermi
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Space Telescope for gamma rays at lower energies, a Japanese
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radio survey from the forty five meter dish at Nobayama,
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which maps the cold gas clouds in that region, and
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NASA's Chandra Observatory for X rays.
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Three views of the same patch of sky.
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And the pattern only works one way. Fermi found an
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excess of gamma rays at exactly the energies you'd expect
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if protons were slamming into gas, and the radio data
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showed the gas was right there for them to slam into.
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The electron explanation doesn't fit the shape of the signal,
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So this is a proton accelerator, confirmed in the Astrophysical Journal.
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What was it? Originally thought to be.
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A super nova remnant the expanding wreckage of a dead star,
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perfectly reasonable until it started putting out gamma rays above
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one hundred trillion electron volts and stopped being ordinary. And
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it is big on the sky. It spans more than
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one degree twice the width of the full moon.
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Which matters because cosmic rays are not just an abstraction.
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They're hating us constantly, constantly.
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They are a genuine hazard for astronauts and for spacecraft electronics,
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and they play into the chemistry of the interstellar medium.
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Knowing where the most energetic ones actually come from is
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not a trivia question. The team says, there are dozens
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more candidates to work through, and now they have a
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method that works. Expect more of these. Next up story three,
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The starved Red Potato.
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Every imagine a desert right on the coastline, stretching to
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the horizon on one side, and almost no rainfall for
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years at a time.
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The Atacama or the namebe.
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Exactly those All that water is sitting there, right there,
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and none of it arriving. That image is what got
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an astronomer in Milan thinking about a galaxy.
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Go on.
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Back in January, we got word of a galaxy nicknamed
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the Red Potato, named with real scientific rigor for looking
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like a red potato in the JWST image. It's more
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than eleven billion light years away. We're seeing it as
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it was when the universe was under two billion years old,
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and it sits in the southern sky at a declination
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of about minus forty nine.
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And the problem with it.
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The problem is that it's sitting in the middle of
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an enormous reservoir of cold gas, a node in the
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cosmic web, exactly the kind of place where galaxies are
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supposed to gorge themselves and blaze with new stars, and
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it's making almost none. It's quiet, red, old, and quiet
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at an age of the universe that it has no
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business being any of those things.
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Coastal desert, coastal desert.
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Now, the usual suspect for shutting down star formation is
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the galaxy's own central black hole. It fires up, blows
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the gas out, and the galaxy starves textbook, but the
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observations showed no sign of an active black hole in
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the Red Potato and no sign of any strong outflows.
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There was nothing there to blame.
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So what changed? This week?
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Tandra, the team led by Waychen Wang at the University
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of Milano Bikacoa, took deep X ray observations and found
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a long jet of particles. And it's not coming from
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the Red Potato. It's coming from a black hole in
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a neighboring galaxy, and it's pointed straight at the Red
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Potatoes gas cloud.
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What it's being starved by someone else's black hole.
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That's the finding. The jet doesn't appear to be doing
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much to its own host galaxy. It's narrow near home,
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and it widens out as it travels. By the time
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it reaches the Red Potato's neighborhood, it's wide enough to
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stir up that whole gas reservoir. One turbulent gas is
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turbulent gas. Turbulent gas will not settle down and fall in.
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The galaxy is surrounded by fuel. It cannot collect.
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What's the measured evidence for the turbulence.
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The gas motions are elevated. They can read that off
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the shape of the emission lines. It's not proof of causation,
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and the team is careful about that. They can't fully
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rule out that the Red Potato had some earlier violent
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episode that evtied it out, but there's no evidence for one,
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and there is a very obvious jet pointing at it.
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And this is the interesting bit for the wider picture,
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because Web keeps finding these quiet early galaxies.
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It does, and they're a genuine problem for our models.
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If a galaxy can be shut down by a neighbor
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rather than by itself, then galaxy evolution is not something
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a galaxy does on its own. It's something done to
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it by whatever happens to be nearby. That's a considerably
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messier universe than the one we had drawn.
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Let's move on to story four. Gravity one at open
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On Wednesday morning, Beijing time, a rocket lifted off from
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the deck of a ship one hundred and seventy kilometers
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out in the East China Sea, east of Shanghai, and
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put nine satellites into orbit.
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Fee launch is not new, but that distance is unusual.
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That is the story. The rocket is Gravity one, built
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by a commercial company called Orient Space, based in Shandong Province.
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This was its third flight and its third success, and
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its first genuine open ocean launch. The previous two went
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up from waters just off the coast. This time the
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ship sailed properly out to sea. Why does that matter conditions?
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The chief designer, Su Gul Kwang made the point that
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open sea is a different problem, different swell, different weather,
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no easy shore support. If you can launch out there,
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you can launch from almost anywhere, which means you can
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pick your orbit rather than being stuck with whatever your
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fixed past that allows. It also happens to be China's
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