Space and Astronomy News for the 7th of June 2025

iSpace RESILIENCE lunar lander appears lost

Japan's iSpace appears to have failed in its second attempt to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon's surface near a region called Mare Frigoris or the "Sea of Cold" on its northern hemisphere. Contact was lost during the spacecraft's descent, about 20km from the Lunar surface.

In a statement about the final moments of the landing attempt, iSpace said:

"Based on the currently available data, the Mission Control Center has been able to confirm the following: The laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values. As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface."

The failed mission included the Tenacious rover, the first European vehicle to explore the Moon.

An illustration of the Tenacious rover next to the Resilience lander on the moon. Image via: ESA/ispace

You can read more about this via the ispace statement here. 

It's taken more than two centuries to discover about 1.5 million asteroids. That number could double in two years.

There are eight known planets in our Solar System, and well over a million smaller bodies of sizes that range from dwarf planets such as Pluto or Ceres down to tiny objects a few metres across.  These are all largely unchanged since the early part of the Solar System's history and astronomers already regard them as fossil records that are key to understanding its past. 

Now the team at Sorcha have produced a simulation of how many more Solar System bodies instruments at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will discover in the coming years and the predicted results are staggering. This new telescope will photograph the entire night sky visible from its location in Chile every three nights and will build over the next decade a catalogue not just of the sky, but also capture changes in the sky or transient phenomena.  It's in the final stages of testing with first images set to be revealed to the world on the 23rd of June 2025. (And most certainly yes - we'll be featuring these!)

The Simonyi Survey Telescope inside the Rubin Observatory dome on Cerro Pachón in Chile. Image via: RubinObs/NOIRLab

The combined size of telescope along with observations of the same part of the sky on frequent basis with different filters means faint Solar System bodies can be discovered and identified on a large scale for the first time. 

The simulations suggest that the results could mean:

Visit the Sorcha website here to learn more about their estimations and some background on the different types of Solar System bodies. It's certainly an exciting time for astronomy.

Are the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies going to merge?

Maybe not, but it now looks like we're on course to merge with the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the next two billion years.

It's long been thought that the two largest members of our local group of galaxies, our own Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) are likely to merge together in the distant future. Unlike other galaxies which have a redshift in the light coming from them, meaning they're moving away, M31 is heading towards us and is blue shifted at some 109 km per second. In fact, we'd known this even before M31 was recognised as being another galaxy. 

Given the speed of M31 towards us and the size of our two respective galaxies, the collision seemed inevitable and unavoidable. 

How the night sky could appear from Sydney in 3.75 billion years around 9.30pm daylight saving times. Image via NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel

Now astronomers have delved deeper in the movements of other galaxies in the local group. They've found there's a high chance of the orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) running perpendicular to the Milky Way, along with the movement of third largest member of the local group, M33 called the Triangulum Galaxy has reduced the chance of the collision to around 50%.

"The future collision - if it happens - would be the end of both the Milky Way and Andromeda, with the structure of both being destroyed and a new galaxy with an elliptical shape arising from the merger." said University of Helsinki astrophysicist Till Sawala, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"If a merger happens, it is more likely to occur 7-8 billion years in the future. But we find that based on the current data, we cannot predict the time of a merger, if it happens at all," Sawala said.

Given how far apart star systems are in galaxies, the chances of planets or stars or even black holes running into each are remote. Think of it more like two ultra-thin, vast clouds of smoke merging. 

You can read more here.

Massive planet found around a tiny star

The theories about how planets form around stars might have to be fine tuned after the discovery of a large gas planet called TOI-6894b, about 53 times the mass of the Earth, orbiting a red dwarf star. 

For some time, astronomers have thought that low mass stars less, than one third the mass of our Sun, would not have enough material bound to them by the star's gravity to form planets. Large planets pull in or accrete matter via gravity from the region around the host star. This was likely the case with Jupiter for example, but current thinking puts this as unlikely to have occurred around a red dwarf.

This discovery plus a number of other examples are challenging this theory and pointing towards the need for new theories about how planets are formed.

Using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) astronomers identified 15 potential giant planets orbit low mass stars.  The red dwarf hosting TOI-6894b has about 20% of the mass of the Sun and the planet orbits the star every three days. 

You can read more here.

Antares scoots behind the Moon

Finally for this week, the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius, the red giant Antares, will slide behind the Moon on the 10th of June 2025 at 7.23pm Sydney time and reappear a little later at 8.41pm. 

This event, called an occultation, will be visible in the western sky when the Moon is almost full.

The Moon from as seen from Sydney on the 10th of June 2025 around 7.30pm

You can observe this with your eyes or binoculars, although even a small telescope will let you see Antares approach and disappear behind the Moon. 

More here, where you can also check the timing for other locations.

Cheers,

Earl White 

BINTEL

7th June 2025