{"podcast":{"title":"Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News","slug":"astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676","podcast_index_feed_id":5658676,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/5648921/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://www.astronomydaily.io","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/3ef2bb90b641d3f09a10b0a281912ff3.jpg","author":"bitesz.com","episode_count":901,"summary":"Join hosts Anna and Avery for daily Space & Astronomy news, insights, and discoveries . Give us 20 minutes and we'll give you the Universe! For more visit, our website and sign up for the free daily newsletter and check out our continually updated newsfeed. http://astronomydaily.io . Follow us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, YouTube and TikTok ...just search for AstroDailyPod . Enjoy! Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support .","last_synced_at":"2026-09-19T16:18:05.091830+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676"},"episode":{"title":"Betelgeuse Is Not Alone!","slug":"betelgeuse-is-not-alone","published_at":"2026-07-29T09:30:02+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/betelgeuse-is-not-alone","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676","url":"https://www.astronomydaily.io","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/mgln.ai/track/op3.dev/e/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/73230805/betelgeuse_is_not_alone.mp3","summary":"Astronomy Daily · S05E153 · Wednesday 29 July 2026. Four stories from the frontier of space and astronomy, plus a both-hemispheres look at the sky — and news of our brand-new website. In this episode • Betelgeuse is not alone. ESO’s VLT/SPHERE has captured the clearest direct image yet of Betelgeuse B, the long-suspected companion to the famous red supergiant — ending a roughly century-long search. Published 28 July 2026 in Astronomy & Astrophysics (Montargès, Boccaletti et al.). The companion is more massive than predicted (≈2–3 solar masses), likely paces Betelgeuse’s ~6-year brightness cycle, and may eventually spiral into the supergiant. • Swift catches a wandering black hole. TDE 2025abcr — the most off-centre tidal disruption event ever seen — reveals a ~1-million-solar-mass “wandering” black hole ~30,000 light-years from its galaxy’s core, ~750 million light-years away. First flagged by the Zwicky Transient Facility (Nov 2025) and pinned down with NASA’s Swift; an AI sifted ~500,000 nightly flashes to find it. Published 27 July 2026 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (Stein et al.; Carney et al.). • Roman is fuelled for launch. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope completed fuelling on 25 July (≈290 gallons of hydrazine) and holds its mission-preview briefing today — one month from a 30 August launch, roughly eight months ahead of schedule. Roman will survey ~50× as much sky as Hubble in five years, probe dark energy, and is expected to find 100,000+ exoplanets via microlensing. • Swift’s rescue mission is in trouble. Katalyst’s LINK servicing spacecraft — launched 3 July to boost the decaying Swift observatory — began spinning over the weekend; two of three reaction wheels are non-operable, with some cold-gas thruster degradation. LINK remains powered…","meta_description":"Astronomy Daily · S05E153 · Wednesday 29 July 2026. Four stories from the frontier of space and astronomy, plus a both-hemispheres look at the sky — and n…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1271,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/episodes/betelgeuse-is-not-alone/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/betelgeuse-is-not-alone.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}