Space News Today

Wednesday SpaceTime 20261014 Series 29 Episode 123 Surfs up on the Saturnian moon Titan A new study suggests lakes and seas on the Saturnian moon Titan could produce a three metre surf under the right conditions. How planet Earth rock and rolls on its axis Ancient sea-level changes have provided new evidence showing that planet Earth experienced episodes of rapid true polar wander during the Juras...

Show notes Hera Hits the Brakes ESA's Hera spotted its target asteroid for the first time last week and fires its first braking burn on Thursday — 93 minutes of thrust to start stopping at Didymos and Dimorphos, the asteroid pair NASA's DART hit in 2022. Plus: Solar Orbiter traces a solar-wind switchback back to the Sun, Gemini North finds chains of giant knots in the remnant of the supernova of 1...

Sponsor Link: This episode of Space Nuts is brought to you by NordVPN . Protect your online privacy today by visiting www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts ( https://www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts) for an exclusive offer! Space Nuts: Fast-Moving Planets, Photon Pressure, and the Nature of Moons In this engaging Q&A episode of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson tackle a series of intrig...

The coldest brown dwarf we know has weather. JWST watched water clouds thicken and thin on WISE 0855, a sunless world seven and a half light-years away — plus a star slowly eating a brown dwarf, ten minutes of X-rays after a half-second burst, a Soviet satellite breaking up over Western Australia, NASA's lunar cave hunt, and Mercury's best evening show of the year for the south. Stories Weather on...

Monday SpaceTime 20261012 Series 29 Episode 122 How ancient black holes and a hidden fifth dimension could explain dark matter A new study claims an ancient hypothetical type of black hole and a hidden fifth dimension of spacetime may help explain the mysterious substance known as dark matter as well as a strange type of ultra-high-energy neutrino detected three years ago. Australia’s new lunar ro...

Sponsor Link: This episode of Space Nuts is brought to you with the support of NordVPN . To check out our special money-saving deal , visit www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts ( https://www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts) Space Nuts: Unraveling the Mysteries of NGC 4698 and Chariklo's Rings In this exciting episode of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson explore some truly peculiar cosmic phen...

Sponsor Link: This episode of Space Nuts is brought to you by NordVPN. Protect your online privacy today by visiting www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts ( https://www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts) for an exclusive offer! Space Nuts: Time Travel, Orbiting Telescopes, and Gold Origins In this Q&A episode of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson tackle a range of thought-provoking listener q...

Show notes We're back after a short break! Today: the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Francis Halzen for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory — a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice turned into a telescope. Then a Sydney-led team publishes the most distant fast radio burst yet, from a dwarf galaxy just 3 billion years after the big bang; Hubble's archive yields a possible second-generation planet aro...

Sponsor Link: This episode of Space Nuts is brought to you with the support of NORDVPN. Get your privacy in order today. To check out our special offer and support the show, visit www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts ( https://www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts) Space Nuts: Space Force Weapons, Purple Mars, and New Lunar Crater In this episode of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson delve into...

Friday SpaceTime 20261009 Series 29 Episode 121 The mysterious star cluster discovered hidden deep in Milky Way's disk Astronomers have discovered a strange star cluster hidden in the crowded galactic plane disk region of the Milky Way galaxy some 32,800 light-years away. The truth about Nazi Germany’s infamous nuclear bomb project The Manhattan Project was not just a quest to build a nuclear bomb...

Monday SpaceTime 20261005 Series 29 Episode 119 Starship test flight 14 achieves orbit The world’s largest and most powerful rocket SpaceX’s Starship superheavy has successfully achieved orbital insertion during its latest test flight out of Texas. How Earth’s weather changes the planet’s centre of gravity A new study shows that changing seasonal weather patterns like snowfall, monsoons and oceans...

Wednesday SpaceTime 20261007 Series 29 Episode 120 NASA adds new science investigations for Moon Base NASA has added payload suites for three new lunar scientific investigations as part of efforts paving the way for humanity’s first Moon Base. The new secrets on the Martian north pole revealed A new study has found that the Martian north pole is less dusty than previously thought. NASA and Boeing...

SpaceTime 20261002 Series 29 Episode 118 A lost galaxy hiding deep inside the Milky Way Astronomers have discovered a group of 20 stars deep inside the Milky Way which may once have been part of another galaxy. NASA to launch a far infrared space telescope NASA has announced a new mission using a far infrared space telescope to explore the history and evolution of the universe. NASA discovers a hu...

SpaceTime 20260930 Series 29 Episode 117 NASA names Dragonfly’s landing site on Titan NASA has identified the landing site where its Dragonfly rotocopter will first touchdown on the surface of the Saturnian Moon Titan. New clues about the Moon’s ancient magnetic field from the far side A new study claims that just like the present day Earth, the Moon once had a geodynamo driven magnetic field. Why...

SpaceTime 20260928 Series 29 Episode 116 Discovery of the Milky Way's first microblazar Astronomers have discovered their first ever microblazar in the Milky Way and observations suggest it’s generating the fastest particles ever detected in the galaxy. Early Mars rocks reveal at least three separate water episodes A new study shows the region of the red planet now being explored by NASA’s Mars Pe...

Sponsor Link: This episode of Space Nuts is brought to you with the support of NordVPN .. To check out special money saving deal , visit www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts ( https://www.nordvpn.com/spacenuts) Space Nuts: Q&A on Radial Velocity, Dark Matter, and Angular Momentum In this engaging Q&A episode of Space Nuts, hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson tackle a variety of intriguing...

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 115 A comet older than the Sun Astronomers have found new clues about the origin of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS suggesting it’s more than twice as old as the Sun and solar system. The nearby “Super Earth” that might be a candidate for life Astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet finding it may be more Earth-like than previously thought. A new way to s...

Perseverance drove to the edge of an ancient Martian lake expecting a beach and found the inside of a volcano — rock that water has been through at least three separate times. Europe's Jupiter probe comes home on Monday night and crosses Australia in a fully dark sky. Two teams, using two completely different techniques, both find something hiding inside the most famous planetary system we have ev...

Perseverance drove to the edge of an ancient Martian lake expecting a beach and found the inside of a volcano — rock that water has been through at least three separate times. Europe's Jupiter probe comes home on Monday night and crosses Australia in a fully dark sky. Two teams, using two completely different techniques, both find something hiding inside the most famous planetary system we have ev...

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 114 United States Space Force confirms it has weapons in orbit The United States Space Force confirms it has weapons in orbit to protect America’s assets in space. Why a moon could not survive in orbit around Venus A new study claims a moon could not survive in orbit around Venus because of the planet’s unusually slow rotation. Water discovered near the galaxy’s Superma...

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 113 New evidence of superflares on the Sun A new study has found that a giant sunspot observed back in 1947 had the potential to trigger a massive solar super flare. How Gondwana changes life on Planet Earth A new study has rewritten the evolution of one of planet Earth’s greatest ancient land masses, the super continent of Gondwana. The incredibly shrinking planet Merc...

Space Nuts: Q&A on BepiColombo, Neutrinos, and Time Dilation In this Q&A edition of Space Nuts , hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson dive into a series of intriguing listener questions that span topics from the nuances of orbital velocity to the enigmatic world of neutrinos and the complexities of time dilation. Join them as they unravel these cosmic queries with their signature...

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...

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 dea...