Now Playing
Swift's Legacy, Triple Black Holes & Starship's Next Catch
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Swift Observatory ends a 22-year mission, JWST finds three supermassive black holes in one ancient galaxy, and SpaceX targets November 13 for Starship Flight 15's historic upper-stage catch. Plus ESA's Hera closes in on Dimorphos and a 46-million-year-old North Sea crater confirms what mid-sized asteroids really do to Earth.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory re-entered Earth's atmosphere on November sixth, over Indonesia, ending a mission that ran eleven times longer than anyone planned. That's not a rounding error.
One of the most recent discoveries building on that legacy comes from a different observatory entirely. JWST has identified three actively feeding supermassive black holes inside a single ancient galaxy called J0148-4214, located twelve and a half billion light-years away.
Planetary defense is moving on two fronts this week. ESA's Hera spacecraft captured its first resolved images of the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid pair on October eighteenth.
SpaceX has announced November thirteenth as the target date for Starship Flight fifteen, and this one has a specific objective: catch the ship with the tower arms at orbital velocity. Three booster catches have already succeeded.
One story that ties everything together in a quieter way: scientists have confirmed that a crater sitting seven hundred metres below the North Sea floor was created by a one hundred and sixty-metre asteroid striking forty-three to forty-six million years ago. The impact triggered a tsunami exceeding one hundred metres.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.