Blood Moon, Broken Records & the Hubble Mystery

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Last night, the moon turned red and bled

across the sky for nearly an hour.

A spacecraft is being prepped for the most daring crude

mission in half a century and somewhere out there.

Four stars are dancing together in a space so tight

it would fit inside Mercury's orbit.

And apparently, no aliens are coming to visit.

Physicceso.

Dot even a postcard.

This is Astronomy Daily.

I'm Anna.

And I'm Avery.

Let's get into it.

Welcome to Astronomy Daily, the podcast bringing you

the universe's best stories six days a week.

It is Wednesday, March the 4th, 2026.

And we have a genuinely stellar episode for you today.

Pun absolutely intended.

We have the aftermath of what many of you

stayed up all night to see, the Blood Moon Total Lunar Eclipse.

We have major Artemis 2 news, a star system that

honestly shouldn't exist.

The solution to one of Cosmology's biggest headaches,

the dawn of commercial space astronomy,

and the physics-based reality check on alien visitors.

It's a lot.

Let's not waste a second.

OK, first things first.

Yesterday morning or the early hours of yesterday,

depending on where you were, the moon turned blood red.

And I need to know, Anna, did you watch it?

I absolutely did.

I dragged a blanket outside and watched the whole thing

from my garden.

And the moment totality hit, this deep rusty orange glow,

stars suddenly visible that had been washed out by moonlight,

it was genuinely one of those I love being alive

on a planet with the moon moments.

Right?

For those who missed it, here's what happened.

The moon passed completely through Earth's shadow.

That's what makes it a total lunar eclipse.

And the reason it turns red rather than just going dark

is this beautiful piece of physics.

Every sunrise and every sunset happening

on Earth at that moment projects its orange and red light

through our atmosphere and bends it onto the moon's surface.

So what you're seeing is the light of every dawn

and dusk on the planet all at once.

Which is one of the most romantic explanations

in all of astronomy, honestly.

Totality lasted just under an hour, 59 minutes to be precise.

And it was visible across the US, Canada, Mexico,

and parts of South America in the morning hours.

And from Australia, New Zealand, and Asia after sunset.

So pretty much anyone who wanted to see it had a shot.

The timing was great for observers

in the mountain and Pacific time zones in North America.

They got totality in fully dark skies.

Eastern time viewers had to contend with twilight creeping in,

but honestly still spectacular.

And here's the bittersweet part.

If you missed this one, you're going to be waiting a while.

This was the last total lunar eclipse visible

from North America until New Year's Eve, 2028.

So if you watched it, well done, you caught a rare treat.

And if you didn't, mark your calendars now.

New Year's Eve, 2028.

Great excuse for a party.

We'd love to hear from you.

Did you get clear skies?

Drop us a message at at Astro DailyPod.

All right, next up, huge news for human spaceflight.

NASA has confirmed that repairs to the Artemis II rocket

are complete, and an April launch is still very much

on the table.

This is the one we've all been waiting for.

Artemis II would be the first crewed mission

to fly around the moon in over 50 years.

Not a landing, not yet, but a crewed flight

that will take four astronauts further from Earth

than any humans have ever been.

The crew is commander-read wise men, pilot Victor Glover,

mission specialist Christina Koch,

who would become the first woman to travel to the moon,

and Canadian space agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

The issue that needed fixing was a hydrogen leak

that showed up during fueling tests.

NASA took it seriously, worked through it methodically,

and they're now satisfied it's resolved.

The vehicle is back in the vehicle assembly building

at Kennedy Space Center, and the teams are working

towards an April target.

No exact launch date has been confirmed yet.

NASA is still working through its checklist,

but the fact that repairs are complete

and they're still talking April is genuinely encouraging.

To put it in perspective, the last time humans flew

to the moon was Apollo 17 in December 1972.

That's 53 years.

And if Artemis too launches as planned,

we'll be back in lunar space before this spring is out.

We'll keep tracking this one closely

as the launch date firms up, exciting times.

Okay, I need everyone to picture something.

Take our entire solar system from the sun to mercury

that tiny sliver of space, roughly 77 million kilometers.

Now cram three stars into it.

Three stars.

That's, I mean, that's insane.

Stars are enormous.

They are.

And yet astronomers have just confirmed a system

called TIC120362137,

where exactly that is happening.

Three stars all bigger and hotter than our sun,

packed into a volume smaller than Mercury's orbit

around our star.

And then, as if that weren't enough,

there's a fourth star orbiting all three of them

at a distance comparable to where Jupiter sits

in our solar system.

So it's a triple star system with a shaperone.

That's genuinely the best way of her to describe it.

The research was published in Nature Communications

and led by astronomer Tamas Borkovitz

at the University of Seguid in Hungary.

His team used data from NASA's test satellite,

originally designed to hunt for exoplanets,

alongside ground-based telescopes in Hungary, Arizona,

the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

73 spectra from the Fred Whipple Observatory

in Arizona alone.

How do you even spot something like this?

It starts with dips in starlight.

The stars eclipse each other as a orbit

causing tiny periodic drops in brightness.

What initially looked like a simple pair of stars

eclipsing every 3.3 days turned out on closer inspection

to be hiding a third star, too.

And then the fourth was teased out

using a clever algorithm that isolated

each star's spectral fingerprints individually.

This system is in the constellation's sickness, the swan,

and its technical classification is a 3 plus 1 type quadruple.

Three interstars in a tight mutual orbit

with a fourth outer companion.

The outer star's orbital period is just 1046 days.

The shortest ever recorded for this type of system.

And the team was also able to model

the system's eventual fate.

Over billions of years, the heavyweight stars

will exhaust their fuel, swell into giants,

and shed their outer layers.

The whole thing will likely end up

as a pair of white dwarfs orbiting each other,

a slow, quiet fade into stellar retirement.

From cosmic chaos to cosmic peace,

I find that oddly comforting.

It's a reminder that our own son,

lone, solitary, planetarily well-behaved

might actually be the weird one.

Most stars in the galaxy have at least one companion.

Some apparently have three.

Right, this next one is for the cosmology nerds,

but we're going to make it make sense for everyone

because it is genuinely important.

The Hubble tension.

It sounds like a minor bureaucratic disagreement,

but it's actually one of the biggest unsolved problems

in modern physics.

So here's the setup.

We know the universe is expanding.

The question is how fast?

And when astronomers use two different methods

to measure that expansion rate called the Hubble constant,

they get two different answers that stubbornly refuse to agree.

One method uses the early universe,

the cosmic microwave background,

the leftover light from shortly after the Big Bang.

Other methods use nearby cosmic distance markers

like sephid variable stars and type 1a supernovae.

Both methods are solid,

both have been refined for decades,

and they still don't match.

The gap between them is only about eight or 9% numerically,

but that small discrepancy is a massive heavy

because it suggests either our measurements are wrong

or more excitingly, there's new physics we don't understand yet.

And now scientists are proposing a third,

completely independent method.

Gravitational waves.

When two massive objects like black holes

or neutron stars spiral together and merge,

they send ripples through the fabric of space time itself.

These gravitational waves carry precise information

about the distance to the event

and how fast a universe is expanding at that point.

The beautiful thing is gravitational wave detectors

like LIGO and Virgo don't rely on the same assumptions

as the other methods.

So if gravitational wave measurements

can pin down the Hubble constant independently,

we'll finally have a referee in this argument.

We don't have enough events yet to be definitive.

Gravitational wave astronomy is still young,

but as detectors improve and we observe more mergers,

this could be the key that unlocks

one of cosmology's greatest mysteries.

Physics, still keeping us humble since always.

A genuine milestone in the history of astronomy this week.

The MoV telescope, the world's first privately owned

commercial space telescope has captured its first observation

and it's the first star.

This is a big deal.

MoV is operated by a London-based startup

called Blue Sky's Space and it launched back in November

aboard a SpaceX ride-share mission.

It's a small satellite about the size of a suitcase,

weighing under 19 kilograms,

but what it can do is genuinely unique.

MoV is designed to observe stars in ultraviolet light,

wavelengths that are completely blocked by earth atmosphere,

so you simply cannot study them from the ground.

The last dedicated ultraviolet space observatory

was the International Ultraviolet Explorer,

which was retired back in 1996.

So there's been a three-decade gap in this kind of science.

And the science it's doing matters enormously

for the search for life.

Not every star is as well-behaved as our sun.

Many stars, especially the cooler, more common red dwarfs,

produce intense UV flares that could strip the atmospheres

off nearby planets, baking them uninhabitable

regardless of their distance from the star.

MoV will survey hundreds of stars

to figure out which ones are genuinely friendly to life.

The commercial model here is also interesting.

Data access is provided through annual subscriptions

to research teams, a sort of Netflix for UV astronomy data.

It's a new way of funding space science,

and if it works, Blue Sky Space plans a whole fleet of these.

The first star observed was one of the brightest stars

in the Ursa Major constellation, a calibration target

to check the instrument is working correctly, and it is.

First light achieved science operations underway.

The universe has its first commercial telescope.

I for one welcome our new private sector stargazers.

And finally, our lighter closer.

Although I'd argue there's nothing light

about the physics involved.

A new piece from the brighter side of news

has been making the rounds this week,

and it takes a long hard look at why,

despite the vastness of the universe

and the billions of potentially habitable worlds out there,

no alien civilization has ever shown up on our doorstep.

And the answer it turns out isn't conspiracy, it's physics.

Five barriers, that's the argument.

Five physical constraints that together

make interstellar contact essentially impossible.

Shall we run through them?

Let's do it.

Number one, distance.

The nearest star to us, Proxima Centari,

is 4.24 light years away.

The Parker Solar Probe, the fastest human-made object

ever built, would take around 6,600 years to reach it.

And that's our closest neighbor.

The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across.

Number two, the speed of light.

This is not an engineering problem, it's a law of reality.

Einstein's special relativity tells us

that as you accelerate anything with mass

toward the speed of light, it takes ever more energy

for ever smaller gains in speed.

To actually reach light speed would take infinite energy,

not a lot of energy, infinite.

Number three, propulsion.

Even if you accept a much lower target,

say 1% of light speed, you run straight into what's called

the rocket equation.

To accelerate, you need fuel, but fuel has mass,

which means you need more fuel to push the fuel,

which adds more mass.

It grows exponentially.

The fuel required for even a modest interstellar trip

would be staggering.

Number four, biology.

The human body evolved on Earth under Earth's magnetic field

under Earth's gravity.

Deep space is brutal.

Cosmic radiation shreds DNA.

Microgravity degrades bones and cardiovascular systems.

And we still haven't solved cryogenic preservation.

Even robots aren't immune.

Radiation degrades electronics

and over the time skills involved, entropy wins.

And number five, and this is my favorite one, timing.

Our civilization has been broadcasting radio signals

for about 100 years.

That creates a bubble roughly 100 light years across.

The Milky Way is 1,000 times wider than that.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old.

Civilizations might rise, transmit, and fall,

all before their signals even reach anyone

capable of receiving them.

The physicist Richard Feynman apparently compared it

to Fireflies blinking on different nights

in a dark forest.

They never overlap.

And what about UFOs?

The piece applies physics to claims of craft

performing impossible maneuvers.

Instant acceleration to extreme speeds,

sharp turns with no sonic signature.

The forces involved would be tens of thousands of times

Earth's gravity.

Occupants would be pulped.

Materials would fail.

The physics doesn't work.

Now, is this depressing?

I actually don't think so.

The piece ends on something beautiful.

The same laws of physics that prevent easy interstellar travel

also make the universe stable, ordered,

and ultimately life-friendly.

Light speed preserves causality.

Without it, cause and effect would unravel.

Dable atoms permit chemistry.

Stars forge the elements that build planets and people.

We might be alone in our cosmic neighborhood,

but we're made of the same star stuff

as every galaxy in the observable universe.

We're not separate from the cosmos.

We're the universe looking at itself.

I'll take that.

That's astronomy daily for Wednesday March the 4th, 2026.

Blood moons, crude moon missions, cosmic star huddles,

the universe's expansion mystery,

the dawn of private space telescopes,

and why the aliens aren't coming.

Honestly, one of my favorite episodes in a while.

If you enjoyed it, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Leave us a review.

It genuinely helps us reach more space enthusiasts

and find us on social media at AstroDailyPod.

New episodes every weekday and Saturday.

We'll see you tomorrow for more from the universe.

Gluir skies, everyone.

AstroDaily day, the star is the toe.

AstroDaily day, the star is the toe.

AstroDaily day, the star is the toe.

AstroDaily day, the star is the toe.

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