Supernova Countdown and Auroral Insights: The Cosmic Show Ahead

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This is Spacetime Series 29 episode 27 for broadcast on the 4th of March, 2026.

Coming up on Spacetime is a supernova about to explode in our skies.

Messes new cinema mission to study a rural activity.

And NASA moves Artemis 2 back into the hangar.

All that and more coming up on Spacetime.

Welcome to Spacetime with Stuart Gary.

Astronomers are breaking up the popcorn and sloopies, as one of the largest known stars in the universe is starting to show the first signs of getting ready to explode as a supernova.

Supernovae mark the cataclysmic death of stars.

The result in explosions so bright, it can easily outshine and tie a galaxy.

In this case, the star being watched is WHG64.

It was first discovered back in the 1970s, 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy orbiting around our own galaxy the Milky Way.

WHG64 is one of the brightest and most massive stars known, with a luminosity around 282,000 times that of the sun and roughly 20 times the sun's mass.

Right now, the star is a red supergiant.

The end result of a former main sequence blue star that ceased fusing hydrogen into helium in its core and has begun fusing helium into progressively heavier and heavier elements.

Eventually, the star will try to fuse iron, which it can't name it how big it is.

And so the great balancing act between gravity crushing the star's mass inwards and energy from nuclear fusion pushing outwards suddenly ceases.

And gravity wins, causing the entire mass of the star to quickly collapse down into the stellar core, resulting in a supernova explosion.

Back in 2014, WHG64 was seen to undergo a dramatic transformation, turning from a red supergiant into a rare yellow hypergiant.

The findings reported in the journal Nature Astronomy suggest that this may all be a sign of an impending supernova explosion.

Now this star is not only extremely luminous and massive compared to the sun, it's also one of the physically biggest ever discovered, some 1500 times the size of the sun.

The star is right now shedding off its outer layers, shrinking as it heats up and moving closer to the end of its life.

In 2024, WHG64 was the first step beyond our galaxy ever photographed in detail, using the interferometer on the European Southern Observatory's very large telescope, the VL-10, Chile.

That image showed a clear duster cocoon around the giant star, confirming that it was losing mass as it aged.

WHG64 has an estimated age of a bit less than 5 million years. Now that's far younger than the 4.6 billion-year age of our sun.

You see, big stars like this one are often referred to as the James Deans of the Universe, that's because they live fast and die young, burning through their nuclear fuel supplies far quicker than their less massive counterparts.

Now, not all supergiants become hypergiants. It's hypothesized that this only happens when really extremely massive stars burn through their core hydrogen unusually quickly.

During this transition, the star start to shed off their outer layers while the cores begin to shrink inwards.

Once a star becomes a hyperstar, it's destined for a quick supernova death.

The changes seen in WHG64 back in 2014 are thought to have been caused by a large part of the original supergiants surface being ejected into space, away from the stellar core.

Now, this may have been caused by some sort of gravitational perturbation, following a close encounter with a companion star.

Another idea is that the changing color and size is caused by a pre-supernova wind, caused by strong internal pulsations as the fuel in the core is quickly spent.

As for when the blast occurs, well, it could be today, maybe tomorrow, or in a few thousand years from now.

We'll just have to wait and see. This is space time.

Still to come, this is new cinema mission to study a rural activity, and the item is tuned mission to bring humans back to the moon suffers another setback as the massive rocket is moved back into the hangar.

All that and more still to come, on space time.

This is a new mission to explore Earth's spectacular auroras and how the planet's mysterious magnetotail affects them.

The cross-scale investigation of Earth's magnetotail and aurora, or cinema for short, will launch in 2030.

This northern and southern aurora lights, the aurora borealis and aurora astralis, are generated by charged particles from the sun slamming into the Earth's upper atmosphere and interacting with the atoms and molecules located there.

That causes the kaleidoscope of colored curtains observed, with the different colors generated by different gases being hidden in the atmosphere.

But Earth's mysterious magnetotail also plays a part in the celestial sky show.

Much of what we see as auroras near the northern and southern magnetic poles begins as plasma currents in its magnetotail, the part of the planet's magnetosphere that stretches behind the Earth, sort of like a wind suck generated by the solar wind.

Thoroughly understanding how processes that occur hundreds of thousands of kilometers away can create specific auroral formations in the atmosphere will require measurements of particles and electric currents flowing in from the magnetotail combined with orbital auroral imaging.

And that's where the cinema spacecraft come in. Cinema Principal Investigator Robin Milan from Dartmouth University says explosive magnetospheric phenomena can have major impacts on our technological systems.

She says science fundamentally doesn't understand when the magnetotail is going to release magnetic energy, or how much impact that might have.

Cinema will comprise a constellation of nine small satellites, the first to focus on remote sensing of the magnetotail.

Milan believes that the measurements and images that cinema gathers will lead to a better understanding of the conditions that initiate some storms and how they create specific auroral forms.

When energetic particles from the solar wind strike the sunward facing bow shock of the magnetosphere, they wind up being captured by the magnetotail where some are circled back towards the Earth, creating a constant plasma convection pattern known as a dungy cycle.

Energy accumulated by the cycle is frequently disrupted by explosive magnetic events known as subs storms, which caused plasma flows to surge towards Earth, generating intense auroral activity.

Science's conception of subs storms began back in the 1950s and 60s, driven largely by measurements of ground-based all-sky imaging of auroral activity and particle measurements taken by satellites.

All-sky cameras use very wide angle lenses, allowing them to capture almost 180 degrees of the sky from horizon to horizon.

Early models which took long monochromatic exposures on film were only sensitive enough to observe broad trends.

Cinema's nine spacecraft will use advanced digital cameras capable of capturing dim auroral activity from a probe moving at some 7 km per second.

They'll take multiple short exposure images in sequence, slightly shifting each shot to compensate for the spacecraft's motion and then combining the images into a single picture.

The cinema team will focus on different auroral forms and they'll attempt to determine how they link to the structure of the magnetotail.

Then there's the issue of poleward boundary intensification, that's a sudden brightening of the poleward edge of an aurora.

It's thought to be the first sign of a magnetic reconnection event within the magnetotail itself.

These are events which occur when magnetic field lines in the magnetosphere encounter oppositely magnetized plasma in the solar wind.

Another auroral form's cinema will study is what's known as auroral streamers.

These along auroral arcs oriented north to south as opposed to the more common east to west formation.

Finally, there are things called auroral beads which as the neck suggests look like beads on a necklace.

Now all these different auroral forms which can be seen with the neck and eye may be signatures of intense plasma flows in the magnetotail.

But to find out for sure, cinema will employ a remote sensing technique to monitor the magnetic structure of the distant reaches of the magnetotail.

Cinemas magnetometers will measure electric currents flowing between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere.

And at the same time, particle detectors will measure electrons and ions flowing in from the magnetotail.

The angle of these particle flows compared to the orientation of Earth's magnetic field will reveal the structure of the magnetotail along the same magnetic field line which will then allow the cinema team to study how the magnetotail changes before explosive events like substorms.

Now it may well turn out that localized magnetic fields in the ionosphere play a much larger role in shaping auroral forms than the magnetospheric plasma flows.

But there's still a lot of disagreement among physicists over this point.

Cinemas proximity to the ionospheric magnetospheric plasma system will allow for detailed study of this region and should clarify which magnetic structures are most important to auroral formation.

Person standing at Earth's equator at midnight might be directly beneath an intense plasma flow but the associated aurora wouldn't emerge at equator.

The energy would follow a magnetic field line to the northern or southern pole where the magnetic field lines are all bottlenecked into a zone called the auroral oval.

Each cinema spacecraft will pass through the night side auroral oval about 30 times a day.

In the first phase of the science mission, the night spacecraft will follow one another in line.

This will allow observation of the evolution of plasma flows and aurora over a 45 minute period.

This series of images will then serve as a short video with associated magnetic measurements for each frame.

In the next phase of the mission, the spacecraft will reform into a 3x3 grid constellation which will allow for broader special measurements and images.

This report from SETV and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Cinema is a small explorer mission and it's nine small satellites.

The goal of cinema is to study the dynamics of Earth's magnetosphere.

So we're looking at the night side magnetosphere where the magnetic field gets stretched out and the idea is to study what are called auroral substorms when we see big auroral displays.

An aurora is essentially a glow of light that you see in the sky and it's created when charged particles, electrons or ions, stream in from out in space and impact Earth's upper atmosphere.

When they impact it, they heat it up and cause it to glow.

The whole magnetosphere is full of plasma so charged particles and the energy is kind of moving through the magnetosphere.

When the energy is moving through the system, it can either move kind of in a steady way or it can move explosively and also that's when we get the most spectacular auroral displays.

Cinema is designed to study three different kinds of aurora.

The first one is called a poleward boundary intensification and we think that this is kind of the first step to that large scale energy transfer in the magnetosphere.

The second type is called neuroral streamer and these are interesting because they're aligned north-south rather than east-west and these are thought to be connected to intense plasma flows out in the magnetosphere.

And finally, auroral beads and those two often happen right before sort of the most explosive energy releases.

Cinema is the first mission that is combining auroral imagery, magnetic field measurements and particle detections on a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit.

The particle detector in the magnetometer is going to measure the dynamic of the same magnetic field line that is stretched all the way to the magnetoteel and at the same time our camera is going to take a picture on those aurora.

And it's going to be really amazing what we learn about our magnetosphere.

But the data set that we're generating is going to enable the whole helio physics community to do lots of other kinds of science.

And in that report from NASA TV and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, we heard from Cinema Mission Principal investigator Robin Milan, Cinema Mission Aroral Imaging Instrument Team member Claire Gasco, and Cinema Mission Aroral Imaging Instrument Operator Haiangyu Wu.

This is space time. Still to come. Well, it's scrubbed for now as NASA moves the giant Artemis 2 moon rocket back into the hangar.

And later in the science report, a new study shows that climate change is even affecting tropical plants. All that and more still to come. On space time.

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I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan. Hey, how's it going today? It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.

I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm. That's pretty awesome.

I think I saw billboarded years recently that said 20 billion one. 20 billion is an insane number.

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think, somewhere north probably closer to 22, 23 after this year.

And each year we get bigger and better and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

Awesome. So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?

Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. It's pound 529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call.

24-7-365. Wow, Dan Morgan. From Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show. Thanks for having me.

Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

NASA has been forced to roll its giant 98-meter tall Artemis 2 moon rocket back into the vehicle assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA had targeted March the 6th as the launch date for the Artemis 2 mission, which will return humans to lunar orbit for the first time in more than half a century.

But it wasn't to be. The rollback follows the discovery of a problem with the helium system and the Space Launch System SLS rockets up a stage.

Helium is an inert gas. It's used to maintain pressure in the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion systems as the fuel is used up.

This launch had already been delayed by problems with the liquid hydrogen fuel system, which was allowing the cryogenically cooled liquid to leak out.

There are also minor issues with the pressurization valve that needed replacing on the Orion spacecraft's crew hatch, as well as both communications and camera dropouts.

And while all of these issues have now been sorted out following a second successful wet launch stress rehearsal on the pad, the new helium problems have come out of the blue.

The system had worked nominally during both wet stress rehearsals.

But during a routine repressurization operation, mission managers suddenly discovered they couldn't get helium flow through the vehicle.

Interestingly, a similar issue developed during the Artemis 1 mission.

Now the problem could be a filter in the ground to vehicle umbilical, or it could be a quick disconnect interface, or an internal check valve on the rocket itself. That's what happened to Artemis 1.

Problem is, all these components are inaccessible on the launch pad, meaning repairs can only be done once the rockets back inside the vehicle assembly building, hence the rollback.

While the Artemis 1 mission was an unmanned test flight around the moon and back, Artemis 2 will carry a crew of four.

After they launch, they'll spend a day in an Earth orbit testing system support the Orion spacecraft, including life support, avionics, maneuverability and docking ability, as well as crew radiation protection.

Now for all that goes well, they'll ignite the Orion's main engine and undertake a trans lunar injection burn which will send them on the four day journey to the moon.

A number of experiments and the deployment of five satellites will take place during the flight.

Orion will then travel around the moon, swinging out to between six and a half and nine and a half thousand kilometers beyond the lunar far side, which will be the furthest humans have ever traveled from Earth.

They'll have several hours to study and image the lunar far side before undertaking another engine burn to bring them back home again.

Well, in all the mission will last ten days, with splashed out taking place in the North Pacific Ocean off the California coast.

This is spacetime.

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I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan.

Hey, how's it going today?

It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.

I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.

That's pretty awesome.

I think I saw Billboard years recently that said 20 billion won.

20 billion is an insane number.

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think, somewhere north probably closer to 22, 23 after this year.

And each year we get bigger and better and our army grows.

So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

Awesome.

So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan?

What would I do if I got into an accident?

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Thanks for having me.

Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

And Tom Metatik, another brief look at some of the other stories making using science this week.

With the Science Report.

A new study has shown that climate change is even affecting tropical plants,

which weren't expected to be influenced because tropical temperatures don't fluctuate that much over the course of a year,

despite global warming conditions.

The findings reported in the Journal Plus 1 examined data from museum collections comprising 33 species from across more than two centuries.

Scientists found some tropical plants are now flowering either earlier or later than what they used to.

In some cases, by a matter of weeks or even months.

The author say this shift is similar to changes previously found in plants that live in cooler climates.

While the ecological impacts are not yet fully understood, scientists warned there's a growing risk of mismatches between tropical plants

and the animals that spread their pollen or eat their fruit.

Fossils of an ancient marine amphibian that once stalked the coasts of Western Australia 252 million years ago

have been rediscovered after having gone missing from museum collections for over half a century.

The fossils were originally discovered back in the 1960s and 70s,

and identified as a species of marine amphibian called euthro-bractors known Cabinensis.

A crocodile-like relative of modern salamanders and frogs that grew to over two metres in length

and lived at the beginning of the age of the dinosaurs.

The fossils were found mislabeled in a museum collection in California.

Now a report on the journal vertebrate paleontology says a reanalysis of the fossils shows they actually belong to two different marine amphibians,

euthro-bractors and afemorama.

The author say euthro-bractors has a roughly 40 centimetre head and was likely a broad-headed top predator

while afemorama was similar in size but with a long thin snout designed for catching small fish.

A new study claims that people really do consider deeper voices more attractive.

The findings reported in the Journal of the Royal Society of Open Science

showed both women and gay men find deeper, more masculine voices to be hard.

The authors say most studies in the vocal preferences have been done using straight people only,

finding that men prefer more feminine voices while women prefer more masculine ones.

So in two experiments testing how different these preferences were for gay people,

researchers recruited two sets of 180 adults with equal numbers of gay women,

gay men, straight women and straight men.

They asked the first group to rate the attractiveness of a series of voice recordings digitally altered

to sound more masculine or feminine,

while the second group rated recordings of people who altered their own voices

to sound more masculine or feminine.

The results show that gay men and gay women as well as straight women

were all more likely to prefer masculine voices or straight men prefer feminine ones.

Samsung's new S26 Ultra Smartphones just been released

and it's loaded with a range of upgraded features.

But its new privacy display which can be turned off and on depending on your preferences

is what's getting all the attention.

With the details, we're joined by technology editor Alex R. Avroyd

from TechAdvice Start Life.

The world has been waiting for Samsung to launch its next generation flagship models,

the Galaxy S26 range,

and they're saying that it's the most intuitive Galaxy AI phone yet.

Now clearly, you would expect things like improved camera system

and intuitive AI experiences.

I mean, one of the things I've done,

besides continuing their efforts with Google's Gemini,

is to integrate complexity.

Complexity is one of the AI services that's battered off

by showing you the sources and really making an effort

to see where it got its information from.

And now all of the AI companies do that.

They have had to.

I mean, they needed to match what electricity was doing.

The chip insight is to stamp Dragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

And this is a special version for Galaxy.

This has been the case for the past few years where there's an extra special version made for

Samsung's top tier devices.

Now, there's also a redesigned vapor chamber inside,

which is with thermal interfaced material position

along the size of the processes.

This allows heat to spread more efficiently across a larger service area.

And you want to see improvements in this heat dissipation

because heat is one of the things that causes the CPU.

And I guess the GPU and the NPU,

the neural processing unit, to throttle.

You know, when things get too hot, now we do have Chee 2 charging.

But unfortunately, there's no magnetic ring,

as you've got with the Pixel series,

where they call their version of Apple's Magsave.

They call it Pixel Snap on the Pixel Range.

Samsung is telling the case that has the rings

and you can buy any number of cases that have that ring.

But it's just a shame that it didn't build it in.

But then we have the camera system.

They've got enhanced nitrography video.

Samsung has always been very good.

As has Google Pixel, it recording a video at night.

This has improved.

There's the Supersteady capabilities,

which effectively tries to do away with you need to have a gimbal.

It also supports the APV professional grade video codecs

that they're trying to get their devices

by more cinematographers and people

who want to make more serious videos,

more than just to have this map that people take.

There's a creative studio that's built in.

This is where you can start from a sketch or a photo

or a prompt, and then you can turn those ideas

into a polyphasol.

So it's like having the ability to use some of the text

to photo capabilities of various AI systems.

But it's just built in.

There's also, I think, on now mentioned,

this is a copy of what Google's Pixel did with the Pixel 10,

where you get these timely and relevant suggestions

that just pop up so you can stay in the flow,

they say, without being distracted.

So if you've got a friend that's asking for photos

from a recent trip inside of messages,

then the Galaxy S26 can automatically suggest

to recent photos from the gallery.

So you don't have to switch between apps

or search through all sorts of different photos to find that.

It's trying to be helpful and give you the surface information

you need when you need it.

There's also a better version of now brief,

which was part of the S25 range, where you can get a briefing

of things you had to do during the day,

meetings that were coming up, traffic conditions,

other things that have thought you needed to know.

You've sort of got the circle to search with Google.

There's an upgraded Bixby, which is Samsung's own intelligent

assistant, and they're trying to make this easier

to interact with Galaxy devices by voice,

because I don't want to just hand it all off to Gemini

or to perplexity.

I mean, they want to have their own AI system.

And that's how you can also control the various Samsung devices

that are part of the whole Samsung ecosystem,

the fridges and washing machines and various other things

that they have seen.

Now, probably the big feature that everyone's talking about

is this privacy display.

So at the moment, if you want to have a screen protective

that has a privacy shield,

then you've got to buy that.

It's separate. You put it on there.

And then if someone's picking over your shoulder

or looking from the side, they just see effectively a dark image

and they can't really see what's going on,

which is why it's called a privacy display.

But here, this has been built in directly into the device.

And you can turn it on, you can turn it off.

So it's hardware and software that are working together

to protect privacy without compromising the viewing experience.

And effectively controls how pixels are dispersing light.

And unlike the regular stick on privacy films,

you can actually switch it off.

I wish I could do that on my iPhone,

because I'm showing something to somebody,

and that's sad as a look.

You have to look at it in a certain way,

because I've got the privacy shield on.

If you're looking too far from the side,

you'll just see this black image.

So I wish I could switch it on and off.

So it's cool to have that feature.

They also have things like call screening

to identify unknown callers and summarize the intent of the call.

Before you have to actually answer the call

and privacy alerts to show you in real-time an app.

So using privileges to unnecessarily attempt to access sensitive data.

I mean, we see that on iPhones when you have the little,

I think it's the orange dot showing you when the camera is on.

I think it's the green dot when the microphone is on.

Then you've got this private album,

which is supposed to have post-quantum cryptography protections

so that when quantum computers become standard,

the encryption that's on your phone,

even though quantum is supposed to break it,

this is somehow supposed to stop quantum technology breaking.

I mean, exactly how they're doing that.

I don't know if they talk about it.

So look, there's lots of different things.

The actual devices will be on cell from March 11 in Australia.

That's Alex Ahara Royte from TechAdvice.live.

And this is Spacetime.

And that's the show for now.

Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through bytes.com,

SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider,

and from Spacetime with Stuart Gary.com.

Spacetime's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio,

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And you can help to support our show by visiting the Spacetime Store

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or by becoming a Spacetime patron,

which gives you access to triple-episode commercial free versions of the show,

as well as lots of bonus audio content which doesn't go to air,

access to our exclusive Facebook page,

and you can also find the link in the description.

You can also find the link in the description below

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and other rewards.

Just go to Spacetime with Stuart Gary.com for full details.

You've been listening to Spacetime with Stuart Gary.

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