Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News

First starlight from Roman, a shorter fuse on the Solar System, weapons in orbit, and a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Roman opens its eye — and finds it has twice as long to look NASA has activated the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera built around eighteen detectors, with a field of view at least a hundred times larger than Hubble's infrared field — a patch of sky bigger than the full Moon in a single exposure, at Hubble-comparable sharpness. The instrument reached its operating temperature of −143 °C on 11 September; detectors and the calibration system came up across the 11th and 12th; the element wheel turned in microgravity for the first time on the 12th; the focus mechanism was verified on the 13th. Roman then took its first starlight image — deliberately out of focus, and exactly as intended: a baseline diagnostic that proves the optical path is clear and every detector is live. Sharp science images are expected by early 2027. The Coronagraph Instrument has completed initial communications checkout from Caltech/IPAC and is running 30-day decontamination cycles at room temperature. Separately, NASA published the numbers from Roman's first mid-course correction: better than 99% accurate, using about 18 kg of a 200 kg propellant budget, on a spacecraft that launched lighter than its allowance. Jamie Dunn (Goddard): Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations, against a design life of ten. Caveat kept on air: that is a fuel figure, not a funding or hardware figure. Why it matters: Roman's High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey measures cosmic expansion with Type Ia supernovae, and its High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey probes cosmic acceleration across more than 5,000 square degrees through weak lensing and galaxy clustering — two independent handles on the dark energy question that Monday's Australian-led supernova compilation sharpened but could not settle. A doubled mission means a longer lever arm in time, which in this measurement is everything. Caltech: the Solar System's dynamical fuse is far shorter than we thought Konstantin Batygin, Jim Fuller and Fred Adams (Caltech), 'Terminal instability of the Solar System triggered by stochastic solar mass loss', arXiv:2609.12494, posted 11 September and accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The standard estimate for how long the giant planets hold their architecture — about 10¹⁸ years — assumes the dying Sun sheds mass smoothly. Observations of white-dwarf recoil indicate mass is instead lost in discrete, independently directed ejections, so planetary orbits take a random walk. In simulations, roughly 40% of systems are disrupted or violently scattered before white dwarf formation and about 90% within ~3 billion years after, cutting the outer Solar System's dynamical lifetime to around a gigayear past white dwarf formation. Framed on air as a prediction to test — planetary systems around old white dwarfs should be rarer and more chaotic — with the granularity of the mass loss named as the number to go and measure. The United States says, for the first time, that it has weapons in orbit Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, speaking on the opening day of the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland on Monday 14 September: the United States now has 'on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary actions'. It is the first public US acknowledgement of offensive capability in orbit. No systems, numbers, locations or timelines were disclosed. A Space Force spokesperson defined space control as employing 'kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation and even destruction, if necessary'. Gen. Douglas Schiess, Chief of Space Operations, said the following day that 'it was time' to talk about it, citing Chinese and Russian anti-satellite advances. Covered factually, with both the deterrence and the arms-control readings presented, and with orbital debris as the physical consequence that outlasts any dispute. Australian context: Operation Olympic Defender and Defence Space Command. Rubin finds a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Aashay Pai, William Cerny, Andrew Pace, Alex Drlica-Wagner and colleagues, 'Rubin Observatory Reveals a Dust-Shrouded Halo Globular Cluster in Ophiuchus', arXiv:2609.15872, posted 14 September. Rubin-GC1 was found in Rubin's Early Data Preview 2 — not the survey proper — in the direction of the galactic bulge, behind heavy dust and a crowded foreground. It sits about 31 kiloparsecs away, roughly 100,000 light-years, out in the Milky Way's halo. Half-light radius ~5 pc, absolute magnitude ≈ −2.4, placing it in the faint tail of the globular cluster luminosity function; age ≈ 9.2 billion years; moderately metal-poor. Gaia DR3 proper motions and phase-space modelling point to an origin in the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal — an accreted cluster, not one of our own. Spectroscopy is the confirming next step. Reusable framing, now used four times in a month: catalogues are detection limits, not censuses. Quick hit — Starship Flight 14 has a firm date SpaceX has published and the FAA has cleared Flight 14 for Tuesday 22 September, a 75-minute window opening 08:15 EDT / 12:15 UTC (22:15 AEST on the 22nd). This is the first orbital attempt: six orbits at about 275 km, then a Pacific splashdown west of Chile roughly ten hours after launch. The payload is 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the first flight of the next-generation satellites designed for Starship — three of them carrying cameras to photograph the ship's heat shield during re-entry. Super Heavy splashes down in the Gulf about seven minutes after liftoff. No tower catches on this flight, for either stage, confirming the correction we carried on 12 September. Skywatch — both hemispheres Tonight: a five-day-old waxing crescent Moon beside Antares — 2.5° apart and 60° up from Sydney, 5.5° apart and 18° up from Los Angeles, nearly 7° apart and 12° up from New York. The September ecliptic tilt again. Friday 18 September: Venus at greatest brilliancy, about magnitude −4.8 — brightest not when fullest but when the product of a thinning crescent (~26% lit) and a swelling disc (~39 arcsec) peaks. Steadied binoculars will show the crescent. Venus sets ~3h15m after the Sun from Sydney, ~1h20m from Los Angeles, ~1h05m from New York; northern listeners should look low in the west 20–45 minutes after sunset with a clear horizon. Mercury is a southern-only bonus at magnitude −0.4 but only 16° from the Sun: 15° up at sunset from Sydney, 3° from London. Saturn rises within about an hour of sunset everywhere and is up all night, heading for opposition on 4 October with the rings ~7° open. First quarter falls on 18 September at 20:43 UTC, setting up International Observe the Moon Night on Saturday 19 September — timed near first quarter because that is when the terminator throws long shadows. Pre-dawn belongs to the north: Mars 45–47° up at nautical dawn from Los Angeles and New York against 20° from Sydney, with Jupiter below it, and the pair closing to about 2° by mid-November. Zodiacal light returns after the 26th — false dusk in the west from the south, false dawn in the east from the north. The September equinox is a single instant, 00:05 UTC on 23 September: the evening of the 22nd in the Americas, mid-morning on the 23rd in Australia. Eye safety: never sweep the daytime sky with binoculars or a telescope while hunting Venus. Block the Sun behind a building or wall first. Eclipse glasses must carry the ISO 12312-2 certification and be undamaged, and are for looking at the Sun only. Never use optics on the Sun without proper solar filtration fitted at the front. Sources and further reading ·         NASA Roman blog — 'NASA Activates Roman's Primary Instrument, Checks Out Coronagraph' (15 Sept 2026) ·         NASA Roman blog — 'Fuel Savings Double Potential Lifetime for NASA's Roman Mission' (14 Sept 2026) ·         NASA — Roman Core Community Surveys ·         arXiv:2609.12494 — Batygin, Fuller & Adams, 'Terminal instability of the Solar System triggered by stochastic solar mass loss' (accepted, ApJL) ·         arXiv:2609.15872 — Pai et al., 'Rubin Observatory Reveals a Dust-Shrouded Halo Globular Cluster in Ophiuchus' ·         AFA Air, Space & Cyber Conference 2026 — remarks by Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, 14 September 2026 ·         SpaceX — Starship Flight 14 mission page ·         Astronomy Daily S05E193 — 'The Universe Changes Its Mind' (the dark energy lead this episode calls back to) ·         Astronomy Daily S05E187 — stellar streams (Nora Shipp co-author callback)

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An Australian-led team has rebuilt thirty years of supernova observations into one consistent catalogue — and it adds fresh weight to the idea that dark energy is not constant. We also ask whether the young Sun swallowed a super-Earth, find out why a quiet Sun is bad news at thirty-five thousand feet, and watch JWST run the most sensitive exomoon search ever attempted. Plus a Crew-13 update and a skywatch with a live aurora alert for both hemispheres. In this episode ·         Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four Type Ia supernovae, rebuilt from Pantheon+ and the Dark Energy Survey's full five-year sample into a single internally consistent catalogue by Ryan Camilleri and Professor Tamara Davis at the University of Queensland, with ANU, Swinburne and international colleagues. ·         On their own the supernovae give a matter density of 0.310 for flat ΛCDM. Combined with the CMB and baryon acoustic oscillations, a tension appears under constant dark energy — and eases when dark energy is allowed to evolve. Preference: 2.5–3.1 sigma. ·         Why that is interesting but not a discovery, and why a second independent line of evidence pointing the same way as DESI changes the shape of the argument. ·         Professor Mutlu Yildiz (Ege University) on whether the young Sun engulfed a planet of 5–10 Earth masses — and whether that single event explains both the solar sound-speed discrepancy and the Sun's missing lithium. ·         Yaniv, Yair and Price on six balloon flights to 35 km: cosmic radiation at cruising altitude runs 40–60% higher at solar minimum, with an anticorrelation of r = −0.71 against solar activity. ·         David Kipping stacks twelve JWST transits of LP 890-9c and excludes moons down to 0.1 Earth radii across the entire Hill region — the most sensitive exomoon search on record. ·         Crew-13 now targeting no earlier than late September after an oxidiser leak in Dragon's propulsion system. ·         Skywatch: a coronal-hole stream arriving today with aurora chances at both ends of the planet, Venus at greatest brilliancy on 18 September, Mars past Pollux, Saturn towards opposition, International Observe the Moon Night on the 19th, and the equinox on the 22nd. Sources ·         University of Queensland — 'Big supernova dataset challenges dark energy theory', 8 September 2026 ·         Camilleri, Lee, Davis, Rubin, Shah, Scolnic, Lidman et al., 'Supernovae Unite: Combining Pantheon+ and DES-SN5YR', Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia — arXiv:2609.05053; companion host-mass paper arXiv:2609.05321 ·         Royal Astronomical Society — ''Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet', 10 September 2026. Yildiz, MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1527 ·         Yaniv, Yair & Price, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, September 2026 — cosmic radiation at aviation altitudes across the solar cycle ·         Kipping, 'JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet', arXiv:2609.05301, 4 September 2026 ·         NASA Space Station blog — 'NASA, SpaceX Adjust Crew-13 Launch Date', 29 August 2026; Canadian Space Agency update, September 2026 ·         EarthSky sun news and NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center outlooks, 12–14 September 2026 ·         NASA Science — 'What's Up: September 2026 Skywatching Tips'

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Today's episode — The Weekend Wrap, Saturday 12 September 2026: OUR LEAD: A SMALLER MERCURY Mercury has been contracting for four and a half billion years as its huge iron core cools, and it writes the record on its own surface — in long lobe-fronted cliffs called lobate scarps, where one slab of crust has ridden up over another. Add up all that shortening and you get the total contraction. The trouble was that the surface record always gave a smaller number than thermal models predicted. New work led by Gaku Nishiyama at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, published in Geophysical Research Letters and released by the American Geophysical Union on 10 September, explains the gap — and the explanation is beautifully simple. Impact debris buries the cliffs. Using MESSENGER imagery reworked with stereophotogrammetry, the team showed that the rougher the terrain, the fewer shortening structures you can find per unit area. Since faults don't know what the surface above them looks like, that correlation isn't geology — it's a detection limit. Correct for it and Mercury's total loss of diameter rises by 10–30%, from a range topping out near 16 km to as much as 23 km. That points to a larger metal core, fewer light elements in it, or a hotter start — and it closes the long-standing mismatch with the physics. BepiColombo is about ten weeks from gravity capture at Mercury, carrying a far better laser altimeter and a much less eccentric orbit. If Nishiyama is right, it should find the missing small scarps in exactly the rough ground where today's maps look suspiciously empty. Some of that data will come home through ESA's New Norcia station in Western Australia, run in partnership with CSIRO. THE WEEK THAT WAS ·         Monday — Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reached orbit from Andøya Spaceport in Norway on 5 September, the first vehicle ever to do it from Western European soil, carrying five university cubesats. ·         Tuesday — giant-impact simulations including temperature-dependent rock strength can produce an intact Moon in about five hours rather than a slowly accreting debris disc. A sensitivity result, not a new origin story. ·         Wednesday — Hubble and Webb together found 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects down to about 5 km, and the small ones keep the colours of their birth population rather than looking like collision fragments. ·         Thursday — 109 localised fast radio bursts were used to measure how far galactic feedback has smoothed the clumpiness of matter, finding more cool gas in big haloes than X-ray surveys see. ·         Friday — population synthesis suggests magnetars are roughly half of all neutron stars at birth, not one in a hundred, which doubles the Galactic supernova rate and makes magnetar central engines affordable. ALSO IN THIS EPISODE ·         The Sun's superflare potential — new work from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research with the University of Colorado, released 10 September. Scaling the 300 strongest modern solar flares against the size of their active regions, then applying that relation to the giant sunspot group of 1947 — the largest in four centuries of observation — gives a region with enough stored magnetic energy to power a superflare. Potential, not prediction: the caveats are covered properly on air. ·         Rocket Lab has filed a protest with the US Government Accountability Office over NASA's ~$700M Mars Telecommunications Network award to Blue Origin, on eligibility and technical-evaluation grounds. A GAO decision is due around mid-December. ·         Starship Flight 14 has slipped to no earlier than 18 September — and the tower catch of the ship is deferred to a later flight, which corrects how we framed it earlier this month. SKYWATCH — BOTH HEMISPHERES ·         The Moon and Venus about half a degree apart in front of Spica on the evenings of 13–14 September — Southern Hemisphere observers get the better geometry. ·         Venus reaches greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. ·         SN 2026aaiv, a Type Ia supernova in NGC 7331 in Pegasus, around magnitude 12 — the week's best observing target, and far easier from North America than from Sydney. ·         Saturn building towards its 4 October opposition, with Dione and Tethys events in the small hours for northern telescope owners. ·         Mars passing 6° south of Pollux pre-dawn on 18 September. ·         The zodiacal light — an evening object in the west from the Southern Hemisphere, a pre-dawn object in the east from the Northern. Best chance until early October. ·         Eye safety: never point binoculars or a telescope near the Sun when hunting daylight Venus or twilight Mercury. Solar filters must be certified to ISO 12312-2, fitted over the front of the instrument, and inspected every time. Links & sources ·         Mercury contraction — Geophysical Research Letters: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL124067 ·         Mercury contraction — AGU Newsroom release: https://news.agu.org/press-release/mercury-is-shrinking-more-than-we-thought ·         Superflares — Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research: https://www.mps.mpg.de/news ·         Superflares — release summary: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143231 ·         Rocket Lab GAO protest: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/rocket-lab-protests-nasas-decision-to-award-blue-origin-usd700-million-mars-orbiter-contract ·         Starship Flight 14 schedule: https://www.spacelaunchschedule.com/launch/starship-flight-14/ ·         SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331: https://www.rochesterastronomy.org/sn2026/sn2026aaiv.html ·         Magnetar fraction — Nature Astronomy: https://www.nature.com/natastron/articles?year=2026 ·         Sky this week: https://www.astronomy.com/the-sky-this-week/the-sky-this-week-from-september-11-to-18-2026/ ·         ESA deep space ground stations: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/New_era_for_New_Norcia_deep_space_antenna More at astronomydaily.io — full back catalogue, news feed, newsletter sign-up and listener contact form. Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E191, Friday September 11, 2026: Main story: A population-synthesis study published in Nature Astronomy on 10 September argues that magnetars make up roughly half of all neutron stars, not the one-in-a-hundred implied by the catalogues. Celsa Pardo-Araujo and Nanda Rea (Institute of Space Sciences, ICE-CSIC, Barcelona) with Michele Ronchi (ASTRON) and Vanessa Graber (Royal Holloway) modelled the whole isolated-neutron-star population as one family rather than four separate classes, evolving spin-down, magneto-thermal decay and Galactic dynamics together, then filtering the simulated population the way real surveys filter the sky. Of the 24 known neutron stars younger than 2,000 years, magnetars and central compact objects are about 59%; the derived birth fraction averages ~50% (40–70% or 30–50% depending on the assumed birth-field distribution, which peaks at 1–2.5 × 10^14 gauss). Two consequences: the Galactic core-collapse supernova rate has to be higher than assumed, around two per century, and magnetar central-engine models for superluminous supernovae, gamma-ray burst plateaus and fast radio bursts finally have the supply to work. Caveats: it is a model rather than a census, the anchor sample is 24 objects, and 'magnetar' is defined by a field threshold. Southern thread: the field began with SGR 0526−66 in the Large Magellanic Cloud on 5 March 1979, and the same Barcelona group modelled GLEAM-X J162759, found with the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia. The rest of the news: ·         Chariklo's rings: The first stellar occultation ever planned specifically for JWST — 18 October 2022 — has been published in Science Advances, led by Yücel Kılıç, Pablo Santos-Sanz and Celia Navas (IAA-CSIC) with Nicolas Rambaux, Bruno Sicardy and Josselin Desmars (LTE) and Damya Souami (LIRA). Against the 2017 ground-based occultations, the inner ring C1R is about 50% more opaque and the outer ring C2R about 60% less, with the ring positions unchanged. Chariklo is the largest known centaur at ~125 km radius; the rings sit at 390 and 405 km and are a few km wide. Candidate explanations: material loss from C2R, material arriving at or collisions grinding down C1R — or a wavelength effect, since infrared is being compared with visible light. The rings were discovered in 2013 by an occultation campaign across Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. ·         Mercury under bombardment: Kilpua et al. report in Nature Astronomy (8 September) that BepiColombo's fourth Mercury flyby in September 2024 — 165 km above the surface, closer than its eventual science orbit — coincided with a major solar particle eruption. The Finnish-built SIXS instrument watched energetic electrons and protons penetrate Mercury's magnetosphere and precipitate onto the surface over a wide area. That bombardment both sputters atoms off the surface and drives the X-ray fluorescence used to read its composition, and Mercury's small, weak magnetosphere makes it a stand-in for Earth during an extreme solar storm. The spacecraft separated its transfer module on 3 September; gravity capture is 21 November. ·         Europe buys a way home: ESA has awarded The Exploration Company a contract worth up to €760M under ALADDIN (Autonomous LEO Accelerated Demo Docking to ISS Node) — €310M for the demonstration mission, with ESA funding 60% and the company 40%, plus €450M in options for two further flights. The Nyx capsule flies on Ariane 6 and must dock with the ISS no later than Q2 2029, with up to €50M in additional incentive for using European launch vehicles. Europe has flown cargo up before, with the five ATVs, but has never returned anything from orbit. CEO Hélène Huby: 'It is the first time in Europe that a five-year-old space startup wins a contract worth hundreds of millions of euros.' The company's Mission Possible capsule survived reentry in June 2025 but was lost before splashdown — a partial success in its own words. Thales Alenia Space Italy remains in a parallel tender. ·         Parker Solar Probe: NASA reports the spacecraft completed its 29th close approach on 4 September, again matching the record set on Christmas Eve 2024 — 430,000 mph and 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, for the eighth time. The encounter ran 30 August to 9 September with nine days of autonomous operation and a beacon tone on the 7th; this pass targeted structures near the Sun's north pole, sampling nearly 40% of the solar circumference in a day. Telemetry began flowing on 11 September, science data 13–27 September. The mission is extended through 2029. ·         Skywatch: New Moon on 11 September at 14:27 AEST makes tonight and tomorrow the darkest nights of the month. Southern Hemisphere — Venus low in the west after sunset, building to greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8, with a very thin crescent Moon sweeping past on the 13th and 14th (about half a degree apart on the 14th, near Spica); EarthSky notes the Southern Hemisphere gets the better view. Saturn rises soon after sunset heading for its 4 October opposition with the rings ~7° open, and the Milky Way core is still high in the early evening. The zodiacal light is an evening object here — 'false dusk' in the west after full darkness, through early November. North America — the zodiacal light is a pre-dawn object in the east ('false dawn'), well flagged around the 15th; Jupiter dominates the pre-dawn east closing on Regulus with Mars near Castor and Pollux; Saturn is ~50° up in the south after midnight, and early Saturday morning Dione transits Saturn's north polar region around 2:55 a.m. EDT with Tethys entering Saturn's shadow around 2:10 a.m. EDT. Space weather has eased to quiet-to-unsettled after two minor G1 storms on the 8th and 9th. Eye safety: never point optics near the Sun without a purpose-built front-mounted solar filter; eclipse glasses must be ISO 12312-2 certified and are for naked-eye use only, never with binoculars or a telescope. Links & sources ·         Pardo-Araujo, Rea, Ronchi & Graber, 'Magnetar fraction in Core-Collapse Supernovae', Nature Astronomy (10 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16159 ·         ICE-CSIC — Institute of Space Sciences, magnetar population release (10 Sept 2026) — https://www.ice.csic.es/ ·         Kılıç, Santos-Sanz, Navas, Rambaux, Sicardy, Desmars & Souami, 'JWST stellar occultation reveals unexpected changes in Chariklo's ring system', Science Advances (Sept 2026) — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh4794 ·         Observatoire de Paris / LTE — The James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Chariklo's Invisible Rings Are Changing (9–10 Sept 2026) — https://lte.observatoiredeparis.psl.eu/The-James-Webb-Space-Telescope-Reveals-That-Chariklo-s-Invisible-Rings-Are ·         Sky & Telescope — Webb Space Telescope Discovers Surprising Changes in an Asteroid's Rings (10 Sept 2026) — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/webb-space-telescope-discovers-surprising-changes-in-an-asteroids-rings/ ·         Kilpua et al., 'Planetary shielding and surface precipitation of solar energetic particles during BepiColombo's close Mercury flyby', Nature Astronomy (8 Sept 2026) — https://www.nature.com/natastron/research-articles ·         University of Helsinki / SIXS — BepiColombo measures Mercury's particle bombardment up close (10 Sept 2026) — https://phys.org/news/2026-09-bepicolombo-mercury-particle-bombardment.html ·         ESA — Press Release N° 47–2026: ESA awards service contract to The Exploration Company (10 Sept 2026) — https://www.esa.int/Newsroom/Press_Releases ·         European Spaceflight — ESA Awards The Exploration Company a €760M Space Station Cargo Contract (10 Sept 2026) — https://europeanspaceflight.com/esa-awards-the-exploration-company-a-e760m-space-station-cargo-contract ·         NASA — After Latest Swing Past Sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe Checks In (10 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/parker-solar-probe/ ·         EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ ·         EarthSky — Zodiacal light: everything you need to know — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-zodiacal-light-or-false-dawn/ ·         Astronomy.com — The Sky This Week from September 11 to 18 — https://www.astronomy.com/the-sky-this-week/the-sky-this-week-from-september-11-to-18-2026/ Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E190, Thursday September 10, 2026: Main story: 109 fast radio bursts have been used to measure how much galactic feedback has smoothed out the matter in the universe. A fast radio burst lasts about a millisecond, and on its way to us it is dispersed — low radio frequencies slowed more than high ones by free electrons along the path, exactly the way a prism separates white light. The size of that delay counts the ordinary matter the burst passed through. Writing in Nature Astronomy on 8 September, a team led by Kritti Sharma at Caltech, with Vikram Ravi, Liam Connor and Elisabeth Krause (University of Arizona), used 109 bursts localised to host galaxies out to redshift ~0.3 — most of them from Caltech's DSA-110 — to constrain the suppression of matter clustering by feedback, and the gas fractions of groups and clusters between 10^13 and 10^15 solar masses. They find more gas retained than the X-ray picture implies: gas fractions about 1.9σ above stacked eROSITA measurements, and slightly above the Atacama Cosmology Telescope's kSZ constraints, consistent with the bursts counting cool gas that X-rays miss. The constraint is already competitive with both of those far larger experiments, cutting the uncertainty on clustering at these scales by roughly a factor of eight. That matters because feedback is the confound sitting under the S8 tension — it mimics the signature of massive neutrinos and of some dark energy and dark matter models. The technique's foundation is Australian: the Macquart relation, established with ASKAP in Western Australia in 2020, is what found the universe's missing ordinary matter in the first place. The rest of the news: ·         Hypersoft X-ray sources: NASA and the Chandra X-ray Center announced a new class of object on 9 September — 84 sources across six galaxies (M31, M101 and four ellipticals) that emit more than eight times as many photons below 0.3 keV as just above it, exceeding 10^38 erg/s in that narrow band and more again in the extreme ultraviolet. Led by Mustafa Muhibullah (University of Alabama) with Jimmy Irwin and Rosanne Di Stefano (CfA), published in Nature Astronomy. They are likely compact objects accreting from companions, and may be both the long-sought progenitors of Type Ia supernovae and a significant unaccounted source of ionising radiation. ·         A rendezvous with Halley's Comet: a trajectory study circulated on 6 September by Roberto Flores and Elena Fantino (Khalifa University), Mauro Pontani (Sapienza), and Ivano Bertini and Cesare Barbieri (Padua) sets out the first Halley rendezvous achievable with proven hardware — unpowered Jupiter and Saturn gravity assists plus deep-space low-thrust arcs, a Hall-effect thruster on a standard RTG, ~2,000 kg launch mass with ~750 kg of instruments, launching August 2036 or September 2037 and arriving in 2060, about a year before Halley's 2061 perihelion. Months alongside the comet instead of Giotto's minutes at 68 km/s. ·         Apollo Maneuvers 2026: US Space Command announced on 8 September that it had completed the first live-fly orbital manoeuvre exercise of its kind, moving real operational satellites across low, medium and geosynchronous orbits with Operation Olympic Defender allies (Australia among them) and commercial operators via its Commercial Integration Cell. Named for the US Army's 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers. The practical consequence is more unpredictable objects in an already crowded region, and in-orbit refuelling becoming load-bearing. ·         Skywatch: New Moon on 11 September at 14:27 AEST (04:27 UTC) makes tonight and tomorrow the darkest nights of the month. Southern Hemisphere — the galactic core still high after dark, and Venus well placed low in the west-south-west, 7.4° from Spica and building to greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. Saturn rises about an hour after sunset for everyone, heading for its 4 October opposition with the rings about 7° from edge-on. North America — the pre-dawn sky, with Mars in Gemini passing Castor on the 12th and Pollux on the 17th, and Jupiter below it in Cancer. Plus a convoy of CMEs from AR4524 arriving since 8 September, two G1 storms already recorded and G2 possible: aurora chances at both ends of the planet, including Tasmania, coastal southern Victoria and New Zealand's South Island. Links & sources ·         Caltech — Fast Radio Bursts Poised to Help with Biggest Cosmic Mysteries (8 Sept 2026) — https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/fast-radio-bursts-poised-to-help-with-biggest-cosmic-mysteries ·         Sharma, Krause, Ravi, Connor et al., 'Signatures of Suppressed Matter Clustering revealed by Fast Radio Bursts', Nature Astronomy (8 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17162 ·         NASA — NASA's Chandra Unveils Mysterious X-ray Objects (9 Sept 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/nasas-chandra-unveils-mysterious-x-ray-objects/ ·         Muhibullah, Irwin & Di Stefano, 'Hypersoft X-ray Sources: A New Class of Luminous Cosmic Emitters', Nature Astronomy (9 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06192 ·         Flores, Beolchi, Pozzi, Pontani, Bertini, Barbieri & Fantino, 'Double Gravity-Assist Rendezvous Trajectory to Halley's Comet Using Deep-Space Low Thrust' (arXiv, 6 Sept 2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02189 ·         Air & Space Forces Magazine — SPACECOM Maneuvers Satellites Across Orbits in New Exercise (9 Sept 2026) — https://www.airandspaceforces.com/space-command-maneuvers-satellites-across-multiple-orbits-in-new-exercise/ ·         EarthSky — Sun news: series of sun blasts arriving, auroras to come — https://earthsky.org/sun/sun-news-activity-solar-flare-cme-aurora-updates/ ·         EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/ ·         TheSkyLive — Moon calendar, September 2026 — https://theskylive.com/moon-calendar?year=2026&month=09

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