Episodes

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 hundre...

Sponsor Link: This episode of Space Nuts is brought to with the support of NordVPN. To grab our special NordVPN deal, simply visit www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts (https://www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts) ....take control of your online privacy because no-one else is going to do it for you! Space Nuts: Q&A on Mitsubishi's Role in Telescope Manufacturing, Jupiter's Storms, and Gravitational Waves In this Q&A episode of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson tackle a range of fascinati...

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 wo...

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 c...

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 109 Witnessing the birth of a comet More than 5 billion kilometres from Earth, an ancient icy object is slowly awakening as a distant frozen world known as a Centaur transforming into an active comet. New mysteries about the moons of Neptune A new study has revealed that three of Neptune's inner moons may be the shattered remains of ancient icy worlds. NASA’s Roman Space Telescope blasts off bound for orbit beyond the Moon NASA’s next great flagship cosmic observatory...

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 Ast...

Space Nuts: Dark matter clues, Saturn’s new decagon, Mars and Titan missions. Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson cover a packed astronomy episode that moves from a tentative dark matter signal to a newly spotted ten sided storm pattern on Saturn. They also dig into two upcoming sample return style missions, one to Mars and one to Titan, before finishing with listener questions about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, solar missions, gravitational waves, and AI in astronomy. Key topics In this ep...

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...

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...

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...

Space Nuts: Q&A on the Swift Satellite, Redshift, and Hypothetical White Holes In this engaging Q&A edition of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson dive into a myriad of intriguing questions posed by listeners. From the fate of the Swift satellite to the mysteries of redshift and the speculative nature of white holes, this episode covers a wide range of cosmic curiosities. Key topics include: - The fate of the Swift satellite and the challenges faced by the Link mission...

Anna and Avery open the Weekend Wrap with a genuine first: South Africa's MeerKAT has detected the 21-centimetre hydrogen signal from four to five billion light years away using radio data alone — no optical galaxy survey propping it up — proving out the technique the Square Kilometre Array will use to measure dark energy. Then the week in review: Roman's coronagraph wakes up, Starship Flight 14 gets a date, Mars turns out to be lopsided inside, BepiColombo lets go, LZ's one unexplained flash, a...

Links & sources Brown University — LZ experiment sees surprising result in search for dark matter — https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results US Department of Energy — LZ Sees Surprising Result in Search for Dark Matter — https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/lz-sees-surprising-result-search-dark-matter Imperial College London — Dark matter hunt takes unexpected turn after puzzling signal spotted in LZ detector — https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/articles/natural-sciences/phys...

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 106 The most distant Blazar ever seen Astronomers have detected the most distant blazar ever recorded. The blazar -- catalogued as OP 313 was detected some 8 billion light years away. Did the motion of an ocean carve Enceladus's tiger stripes? A new study suggests the iconic tiger stripes at the south pole of the Saturnian ice moon Enceladus may have been formed by ocean waves. SpaceX to build the world’s biggest space port in Louisiana SpaceX boss Elon Musk has annou...

Anna and Avery cover BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury beginning today, as the ESA/JAXA mission jettisons the transfer module that has carried it for nearly eight years and nine planetary flybys. Plus: NASA awards Blue Origin a $700 million contract to build a dedicated Mars communications orbiter, Hubble confirms a brand-new ten-sided cloud pattern at Saturn's south pole — first spotted by amateur astronomers, one of them in outback New South Wales — and China's Galactic Energy flies its reusabl...

Space Nuts: Spanish Eclipse, Nancy Grace Roman Launch, Cloud Nine, and Venus's Mysterious Clouds Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson cover four big astronomy stories in this episode, from Fred’s trip to view a sunset eclipse in Spain to the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. They also unpack a starless dwarf galaxy called Cloud Nine and a new way of thinking about the strange dark material in Venus’s clouds. Guests and speakers Andrew Dunkley - Host, frames the news, asks l...

Today's episode — S05E183, Wednesday September 2, 2026: Main story: A thermal anomaly beneath Mars's south pole. Writing in Nature on August 27, a team led by Alexander Berne (Caltech PhD '26, now University of Arizona) reports that the interior of Mars's southern hemisphere is 200–400 °C hotter than the northern hemisphere and partially molten. The team used tidal tomography — measuring how much the solid body of Mars flexes under the Sun's tidal pull by tracking minute velocity changes in thre...

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 105 More evidence Mars once had liquid water More than 20 years after NASA's Mars Spirit rover landed on the red planet scientists have uncovered new evidence that suggests liquid water – essential for life as we know it -- may once have covered large parts of the Martian surface. Are mysterious little red dots hiding something big A new study claims mysterious Little Red Dots seen near the dawn of the universe are likely to reside in small, dense compact star forming...

Today's episode — S05E182, Tuesday September 1, 2026: Main story: SpaceX cleared Booster 21's static fire at Starbase's Pad 2 on August 30, the last major milestone before Starship Flight 14 — the third flight of the Starship V3 design. Ship 41 had already completed its own static fire campaign at Massey's Test Site. Flight 14 will attempt something no Starship flight has done before: catching the ship itself, not just the Super Heavy booster, with the launch tower's upgraded "chopstick" arms. P...

🚀 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is safely away — Anna and Avery recap Sunday's clean Falcon Heavy launch, what happens next on the road to L2, and a surprise Australian link in the mission. Then: Elon Musk signals the eventual retirement of Falcon 9, two Nobel laureates defend an accelerating universe against a slowing-expansion claim, a single ancient asteroid strike solves two mysteries on Mars's moon Deimos, and everything worth looking up at tonight, wherever you are. Chapters / topi...

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 104 Strange anomaly discovered below the Martian south pole Astronomers have discovered a strange thermal asymmetry deep beneath the surface of the Martian southern hemisphere. Starship bound for home Starship 40 has finally left Australian waters bound for home. The orbiter used for SpaceX test flight 13 has been loaded aboard the 48,000-tonne semi-submersible vessel Forte for the long journey back to Starbase Texas. Roman Space Telescope final countdown The final co...

In this intriguing Q&A episode of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Jonti Horner tackle a variety of cosmic queries from listeners. Join them as they explore the fascinating world of radio telescopes and how they produce images from radio waves, delve into the complexities of gravitational waves, and ponder the sounds and smells of space. Key topics include: - How photographic images are generated from radio telescopes, despite only receiving radio waves, and the fundamental prin...