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Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily.
I'm Anna.
And I'm Avery.
It's Wednesday, February 25th, 2026,
and you are listening to Season 5 episode 48.
Big show today.
NASA's moon rocket is on the move again.
James Webb has achieved a genuine first
in a history of astronomy.
And we're going to talk about a world out there
that is becoming increasingly difficult
to explain without considering the word life.
Plus, the sun is taking a quiet day
for the first time in years.
There's some grippy new detail
from China's incredible space emergency last year.
And we close with something
that might just make you want to send a letter.
All that coming right up.
Let's get into it.
We start with an update on a story
we've been following closely all week.
And today, there's a genuinely new angle
that caught a lot of people off guard.
Right, so Artemis II.
As of this morning, the enormous space launch system rocket
and the Orion spacecraft have physically begun
their four mile journey from Launchpad 39B
back to the vehicle assembly building
at Kennedy Space Center.
That rollback started around 9 a.m. Eastern time
and could take up to 12 hours.
The reason, as we've covered,
is a helium flow interruption in the rockets upper stage.
Helium is critical.
It pressurizes the propellant tanks
without that working perfectly.
You cannot fly.
March is now completely off the table.
The next realistic opportunity opens on April 1st.
But here's what's new today.
And it's a bit of a talking point.
Last night, the four Artemis II crew members,
Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch
and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hanson,
they were sitting in the gallery at the US Capitol
for President Trump's State of the Union.
They were guests of House Speaker Mike Johnson.
And the speech ran for nearly two hours.
The president praised the Space Force extensively.
He called it, quote, his baby.
But he made no mention of the four astronauts
sitting right there in the room
and no mention of the Artemis program at all.
Which was noticed.
These are the first people who will travel
beyond low-earth orbit since the Apollo era.
And they were in the chamber.
Some in the space community found the omission
quite striking.
The crew have now been released
from their pre-launch quarantine
since there's no imminent launch.
NASA has said the whole the media briefing
in the coming days to lay out the path forward.
For now, April 1st is the earliest emission could fly,
pending successful repairs,
a likely second wet dress rehearsal,
and the clean flight readiness review.
We will absolutely keep you updated as this develops.
The mission itself is still on.
It's just going to take a bit longer.
This story has still got a long way to go, me thinks.
Now, this next story is a genuine landmark in astronomy.
Something researchers have been waiting years for.
It has to do with supernovae,
those spectacular explosions
that marked the depths of massive stars.
Astronomers have long wanted to look back
at archival images after a supernova occurs
and find the star that caused it,
the so-called progenitor star.
But for many of the most massive stars,
they just weren't there.
They seem to be missing.
Well, now we know why, and it's thanks to James Webb.
On June 29th, last year,
an automated sky survey detected a new supernova
in a galaxy called NGC 1637,
about 40 million light years away.
The explosion was designated 2025 PhD,
and a team at Northwestern University
immediately did something color.
Instead of pointing their telescopes at the new supernova,
they went to the archives
to images Webb had already taken of that same galaxy.
And there it was, a single red supergiant star
sitting exactly where the supernova now shines.
This is the first published detection
of a supernova progenitor by the James Webb telescope ever.
And here's the key thing, Hubble couldn't see it.
The star was completely invisible in Hubble images.
It was surrounded by so much dust
that shorter wavelengths of light were blocked entirely.
Only Webb's infrared instruments could pierce that veil.
Lead author Charlie Kilpatrick
from Northwestern described it as, quote,
the reddest, most dusty red supergiant
we've seen explode as a supernova.
And there was another surprise, the dust composition.
The expected silicate rich dust,
the kind astronomers usually find,
instead it was carbon rich.
The team thinks that carbon may have been dredged up
from deep inside the star
in its final moments before death.
This has direct implications for what's called
the mystery of the missing red supergiant.
Theory predicts these massive stars
should be easy to spot before they explode.
They should be bright and luminous.
But historically, they've often not shown up
in pre-supernova images at all.
Now we have a compelling answer.
They're there, they're just hidden in dust.
The findings are published in the astrophysical journal letters.
The team is now looking for similar dusty red supergiant
that might be the next to explode.
And Webb's successor missions,
including the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman's telescope,
should help that search enormously.
A beautiful piece of detective work.
From stellar deaths to potential life,
because our next story is one
that keeps getting more interesting
every time new data comes in.
The exoplanet K218B.
If you've been following exoplanet science
over the last couple of years, you'll know this name.
K218B is located 124 light years away
in the constellation Leo,
sitting squarely in the habitable zone
of its red dwarf host star,
and James Webb has been staring at it.
What Webb found was an atmosphere rich
in both carbon dioxide and methane.
That chemical combination is significant.
It points strongly towards what astronomers call
a high sea in world.
The idea is a planet with a warm liquid water ocean
beneath a thick hydrogen rich atmosphere.
And the intrigue doesn't stop there.
Earlier analyses of K218B's atmosphere
had also hinted at possible traces of dimethyl sulfide.
A molecule that, on Earth,
is produced almost exclusively by marine life.
Now, that hasn't been confirmed
and scientists are appropriately cautious.
There are non-biological explanations being explored.
But the ongoing analysis of Webb data
is continuing to add layers to the story.
The carbon dioxide and methane combination
is precisely what you'd expect
if there were a liquid ocean beneath that atmosphere.
The current focus is whether those chemical signatures
could have a biological origin.
And that's one of the most consequential questions
in all of science.
K218B is one of the most watched targets
in astrobiology right now.
And with Webb continuing to accumulate data,
we should expect more updates in the months ahead.
If it turns out there is life on K218B,
then everything changes.
That's all I'll say.
Okay, something a little different now.
A story about our own sun behaving unusually quietly.
On February 22nd, the sun's Earth-facing disc
went completely spotless for the first time
in 1,355 days.
That ends a streak stretching all the way back
to June 8th of 2022.
For nearly four years,
you could look at the sun on any given day
and find at least one active sunspot region.
Not anymore for a few days at least.
Sunspots are regions of intense magnetic activity
on the solar surface.
And they're the source of solar flares
and the coronal mass ejections
that can send charged particles hurtling toward Earth.
We are in solar cycle 25,
which peaked in October 2024
with a sunspot count significantly higher
than scientists initially predicted.
Here's a fun wrinkle.
While Earth was looking at a blank sun,
NASA's Perseverance Rover on Mars had a different view.
From the Martian service,
Perseverance could see sunspot groups blazing away
on the far side of the sun.
Invisible to us here on Earth,
but clearly visible from Mars's position
in the solar system.
The spotless period appears to have lasted
about two to three days before a new active region
began emerging around February 24th.
So the sun isn't shutting down,
it's just having a quiet moment.
Solar activity isn't expected to reach its next minimum
until around 2030.
But this little pause is a signal
that solar cycle 25 is beginning its long slow wind down
from that October 2024 peak.
For listeners who love Aurora hunting,
the good news is there's still plenty
of solar activity ahead.
But the best years of this cycle are behind us now.
Now to a story that we've touched on the four,
but which has taken on fascinating new depth this week
with the Shenzu 20 astronauts speaking out
in remarkable detail about last year's in-orbit emergency,
China's first ever human space flight crisis.
Just to recap the situation,
China's Shenzu 20 crew,
commander Chen Dong,
along with Chen Chongrui and Wang Ye,
launched in April 2025
for what was supposed to be a standard six-month mission
to the Tiangong Space Station.
During pre-return checks on the day before
they were supposed to come home,
Commander Chen went to inspect the return capsule.
And he spotted something on the viewport window,
something triangular.
His first thought, and he shared this in a new interview
with Chinese state broadcaster, CCTV,
was that a small leaf had somehow stugged
to the outside of the glass.
And then, as he told it,
he quickly realized that couldn't happen
because they were in space.
What he was actually seeing was a crack,
a triangular scar roughly two centimeters long
in the outer layer of the three layer viewport window,
most likely caused by a debris strike.
The crew used a pen-shaped microscope
to confirm the damage,
took photos immediately
and transmitted everything to the ground.
The decision that followed was extraordinary.
The crew could not safely return in their own spacecraft.
Instead, they transferred to the Shenzu 21 vehicle
that had just arrived days earlier,
carrying their relief crew.
An uncrewed Shenzu 22 was then emergency launched
carrying a porthole repair device.
The whole response from finding the crack
to the crew's safe return to Earth
took just over 20 days.
And the damage Shenzu 20 capsule?
It was eventually brought back to Earth uncrewed
on January 19th of this year
after spending 270 days in orbit,
90 days longer than plant.
It survived reentry,
which itself was a significant engineering achievement.
Commander Chen Dong summed it up beautifully.
The unexpected window cracks
ultimately became a precious testament
to the concerted efforts
and shared commitment for safety
between our two crews
and all ground-based space personnel.
A genuinely remarkable chapter in human space light.
The space debris problem is real
and this story illustrates exactly why it matters.
And finally, something a little lighter to close the show.
Avery, have you ever wanted to send a letter
that was also technically a window to the cosmos?
I feel like that's a rhetorical question,
but yes, obviously.
Well, the US Postal Service has you covered.
Yesterday, February 24th,
the USPS officially issued two brand new priority mail stamps,
both featuring images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The first is the priority mail stamp,
priced at $11.95,
and it features the crab nebula,
the spectacular remnant of a star
that exploded in the constellation Taurus
about 6,500 light years away.
Webb captured it in the infrared,
revealing structural details
that have never been seen before.
The second is the priority mail express stamp
at $33.25,
and this one is a real showpiece.
It's a composite image called Galaxy Pair.
Two interacting spiral galaxies,
I-C-2163, and NGC-2207,
located about 80 million light years away.
The image combines Webb and Hubble data
across infrared, visible, and ultraviolet wavelengths.
It is genuinely stunning.
Kansas City, Missouri was the official city of issue,
though there was no public ceremony.
And here's a lovely detail for collectors.
You have until June 24th to send your stamps in
for a first day of issue postmark.
The Postal Service will even apply the postmark
for free up to 50 envelopes.
And this is actually the fourth consecutive year
the USPS has used Webb imagery on priority mail stamps.
In 2022, it was a forever stamp,
featuring a rendering of the telescope itself.
In 2024 and 2025,
the pillars of creation featured.
Now, the Crab Nebula and the Galaxy Pair.
Webb is becoming something of an annual tradition
at the post office.
Which, when you think about it, is rather wonderful.
A space telescope that cost $10 billion and took 30 years
to build is now sitting in people's junk drawers
next to the scissors and the tape.
That is the most poetic thing you have ever said
on this podcast.
I have my moments.
And that is Astronomy Daily for Wednesday, February 25th, 2026.
What a show.
Rollbacks, red super giants, possible ocean worlds,
a quiet sun, space debris emergencies,
and commemorative postage.
If you enjoyed today's episode,
please do leave us a review wherever you listen.
It makes a genuine difference.
And you can find us at astronomydaily.io
and on social media at AstroDailyPod.
For Avery, I'm Anna.
Stay curious, keep looking up, and we'll see you tomorrow.
Clear skies, everyone.
Astronomy Daily, the star is the toe.
The star is the toe.
The star is the toe.
The star is the toe.
Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.
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Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates

Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates

Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates
