Space and Astronomy News 17th January 2026

The star Betelgeuse has a companion

Head outside tonight and check out constellation of Orion, with the famous "tea pot" in the centre. One of the "shoulders" of Orion is a bright red star, the supergiant Betelgeuse.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and ground based observatories announced this month that they've confirmed that Betelgeuse has a small companion star which has been named Siwarha. Rather than seeing the smaller star directly, it was detected by seeing the "wake" it left in the outer atmosphere of Betelgeuse during its orbit.

An Illustration of Siwarha orbiting Betelgeuse. Image via NASA, ESA, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI); Science: Andrea Dupree (CfA)

“It’s a bit like a boat moving through water. The companion star creates a ripple effect in Betelgeuse’s atmosphere that we can actually see in the data,” said Andrea Dupree, an astronomer at the CfA, and the lead study author. “For the first time, we’re seeing direct signs of this wake, or trail of gas, confirming that Betelgeuse really does have a hidden companion shaping its appearance and behaviour.”

One of the puzzling things about Betelgeuse has been changes in brightness over long periods of time. The confirmation Siwarha can help explain these changes and help understand the evolution of red giants.

"With this new direct evidence, Betelgeuse gives us a front-row seat to watch how a giant star changes over time. Finding the wake from its companion means we can now understand how stars like this evolve, shed material, and eventually explode as supernovae.” continued Dupree.

 You won't be able see Siwarha your telescope. Apart from it not being able to be spotted with amateur equipment, it's currently behind Betelgeuse. When it emerges into our line of site in 2027, astronomers plan to resume observations. 

But if you have a look at Betelgeuse tonight, remember there's another star busily ploughing through red giant's outer atmosphere.

Read more at the NASA site here.

NASA to roll out rocket for Artemis II moon mission on January 17th 2026

As we've talked about in previous blogs, humans are returning to Moon as part of the Artemis program. This is NASA's project to not just land humans on the Moon and return them to Earth along the lines of the Apollo program in the 1960s, but rather the start of a permanent presence of humans on the Moon and as a stepping stone for further exploration of the Solar System including Mars.

Artemis II fully "stacked" and awaiting crew for a mission simulation on the 20th of December 2025. Image via NASA/Joel Kowsky

With final assembly Artemis II and the Orion capsule complete, it's due this weekend to commence the 12 hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B.

“We are moving closer to Artemis II, with rollout just around the corner,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. “We have important steps remaining on our path to launch and crew safety will remain our top priority at every turn, as we near humanity’s return to the Moon.”

Once at Launch Pad 39B, Artemis II will undergo further extensive testing including a complete "wet dress" rehearsal which includes loading of all propellants.  

Launch: when?

There's a number of launch windows for Artemis II in February 2026. They start off with a possible launch date of NET (No Earlier Than) of the 6th of February.  If testing and preparation indicates more time is needed then there's a possibility of the 7th, 8th, 10th, and 11th of that month, with further dates coming up in March and April.

As the launch gets closer, we'll be delving into the mission profile and aims and also touching on Artemis III which is due to return humans to the Moon's surface in the coming years. 

Read more about the rollout of Artemis II here.

Hubble Spots an entirely new type of deep-sky object: Say hello to Cloud-9

Sometimes not finding something is where discoveries are made!

We've all heard of nebulae, galaxies, globular cluster and a wide range of other deep-sky object we see in the Milky Way and further out into intergalactic space, galaxies quasars and more.

Astronomers have thought for some time there could be large "clouds" of hydrogen gas that for some reasons did not go on to form galaxies. These Reionization-Limited H I Cloud, or a "RELHIC" are ancient fossils left over from the earliest days of the Universe.

This image shows the location of Cloud-9, which is 14 million light-years from Earth. The diffuse magenta is radio data from the ground-based Very Large Array (VLA) showing the presence of the cloud. The dotted circle shows where no stars have been found. Image via Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

“This cloud is a window into the dark universe,” said team member Andrew Fox of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy/Space Telescope Science Institute (AURA/STScI) for the European Space Agency. “We know from theory that most of the mass in the universe is expected to be dark matter, but it’s difficult to detect this dark material because it doesn’t emit light. Cloud-9 gives us a rare look at a dark-matter-dominated cloud.”

Astronomers have thought that some clouds of gas spotted previously might have been one these "failed galaxies" but it's taken data from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to establish that these regions have no stars in them.

Cloud-9 is one of several clouds astronomers have been studying. It's about 4,900 light years in diameter, with a mass of about a million Suns based on the radio waves observed.  Researchers have calculated that Cloud-9's dark matter mass to be about be about five billion solar masses.

Read more about this new type of astronomical object here.

The fastest rotating asteroid 

We chatted about the initial observations from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in a blog article back in June. Part of this first data release was the discovery of some 1,900 new asteroids. Further analysis of these new asteroids found 19 super and ultra fast rotating asteroids, with one being the fastest spinning over 50m ever seen.

The fastest spinning main belt asteroid is 2025 MN45. This is some 710m across and spins every 1.88 minutes. For this an incredible rate of rotation for comparatively large object. 

Only by taking multiple images over a very short space of time, which is something that the LSST Camera at the Vera C. Rubin is capable of capturing, could these speeds be established.

Why do we care about how fast an asteroid is spinning?

There' two main reasons.

First of all, all bodies in space, from galaxies to planets to even small space rocks tend to rotate, and this is a result of accreting or gathering the material they're made from. They also spin faster as they encounter other bodies through gravitational interactions or even collisions.  2025 MN45 is likely to have been near or hit a decent number of other objects over the course of its history and this helps astronomers piece together more of the early history of the Solar System.

Secondly, it helps us understand the composition of asteroids like 2025 MN45 simply because it's not flying apart as it spins! 

“Clearly, this asteroid must be made of material that has very high strength in order to keep it in one piece as it spins so rapidly,” says Sarah Greenstreet, NSF NOIRLab assistant astronomer and lead of Rubin Observatory’s Solar System Science Collaboration’s Near-Earth Objects and Interstellar Objects working group. “We calculate that it would need a cohesive strength similar to that of solid rock. This is somewhat surprising since most asteroids are believed to be what we call ‘rubble pile’ asteroids, which means they are made of many, many small pieces of rock and debris that coalesced under gravity during Solar System formation or subsequent collisions.”

Find out more here.

Google Co-founder funds a range of new observatories

New data and observations to be made freely available 

Illustration of the Lazuli Space Observatory

In the 19th and 20th Century, many of the world's largest telescopes were funded by wealthy individuals who wanted to leave a legacy. American philanthropists especially enabled the building of large telescopes such as the 40" Yerkes (still the largest refractor ever built), the 100" telescope at Mt. Wilson and the 200" Hale Reflector at Mt. Palomar which helped discover our place in the Universe, plus many others.

More recent observatories have largely been built by consortiums of major universities or even national space agencies due to their complexities and costs. 

Last week the co-founder of Google, Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, announced the funding of four major new observatories, with all of them due to become operational by 2029.

The Argus Array is a collection of 1,200 11" sized telescopes working together to perform like a 8m class telescope. This will aim to image the entire night sky every few days so changes and event can be captured in minutes or even minutes.

LFAST: The Large Fiber Array Spectroscopic Telescope combines groups of 76-cm telescopes observing in the near infrared.  There's a prototype of this observatory already up and running

The Deep Synoptic Array (DSA) radio telescope scope and is made up of  1,650 dishes in a radio-quiet valley in Nevada, USA. It aims to scan the sky faster than any current observatory.

What will probably get the most attention is the Lazuli Space Observatory, which is a 3m sized space telescope and will have around 70% more light collecting power the Hubble Space Telescope, but with a much lower cost.

“We are going to build a philanthropic, three-meter, off-axis telescope with capabilities that are approaching Hubble,” Pete Klupar, executive director of the Lazuli project at Schmidt Sciences, said during a session at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society to announce the observatory program. “And we’re going to do it in three years, and we’re going to do it for a ridiculously low price.”

Do you remember SETI@home? 

For many years, millions of people around the world ran the SETI@home screensaver on their PC while it analysed data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to search for any strange signals that might point to intelligence elsewhere in space.

If you ran SETI@home back in the day, did you ever wonder if anything was found?

This was an early form of distributed computing where people loaned their computer processing power to work on a larger, complex problem.  There were around 12 billion signals that were momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky according to computer scientist and project co-founder David Anderson.

These were further refined to around million and then down to a final 100 signals that can't easily be explained.  These targets are now being investigated by the China's FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope) , a massive radio telescope in the hope of finding the data again. The results are FAST aren't in yet, but researchers aren't expecting to find any signs of intelligence in the data.

“If we don’t find ET, what we can say is that we established a new sensitivity level. If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it,” said Anderson. “Some of our conclusions are that the project didn’t completely work the way we thought it was going to. And we have a long list of things that we would have done differently and that future sky survey projects should do differently.”

There’s no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs,” he said. “We have to do a better job of measuring what we’re excluding. Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water? I don’t think we know for most SETI searches, and that is really a lesson for SETI searches everywhere.”

Read more at the University of Berkley here.

Cheers,

Earl White

BINTEL

17th of January 2026