Hide and Seek - The Faintest Planet Ever Imaged, Pluto's Landslides & Starlink's 355,000 Dodges

About this episode

The episode discusses the discovery of the faintest exoplanet ever imaged, new findings on Pluto, and Starlink's collision avoidance maneuvers.

Anna and Avery kick off with a decade-long game of cosmic hide-and-seek that has finally ended: Beta Pictoris d, the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from Earth, found lurking in more than ten years of archival images — and orbiting a star in the southern constellation Pictor. Then it's the completion of VLASS, the sharpest radio map of the whole sky ever made, arriving just as the Rubin Observatory's optical survey switches on. The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a supermassive black hole feeding itself in the Centaurus Cluster — the missing link in a decades-old mystery. A Pluto system double bill follows: the first landslides ever identified on Pluto, and evidence written in Charon's mountains that the big moon once spun more than ten times faster than it does today — both delivered by New Horizons data from 2015. Finally, SpaceX's latest FCC filing reveals Starlink satellites made over 355,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres in the past year — nearly one dodge per satellite per week — and experts are warning about where the trend leads. Plus dark-sky Southern Hemisphere stargazing and a Starship Flight 13 launch reminder. Chapters • 00:00 — Intro & billboard •…

People in this episode

Hosts: Anna, Avery

Topics covered

• exoplanets
• radio astronomy
• black holes
• Pluto
• collision avoidance
• stargazing

Keywords

• Beta Pictoris d
• VLASS
• supermassive black hole
• Pluto landslides
• Charon's spin
• Starlink
• collision avoidance

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: James Webb Space Telescope, New Horizons, SpaceX, FCC

Places: Pictor, Centaurus Cluster, Pluto, Charon

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