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Space

🚀 Space Pulse · 2026-07-07 22:01 UTC

SPACE PULSE

Tuesday, July 8, 2026 | Your daily space and astronomy briefing

⚡ TL;DR

An arXiv paper reports the first confident detection of a planetary-mass exomoon orbiting a substellar companion, a landmark in exoplanet science that has eluded astronomers for decades. [1] It is a busy 24 hours: a successful rideshare launch, a solar radio burst, New Horizons back online, Webb galaxy imagery, Euclid ancient quasars, and Roman moving to vertical all compete for attention. [2] [3] [4]

🚀 LAUNCHES

RECENT

  • SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 carried the Transporter 17 dedicated SSO rideshare — dozens of microsatellites and nanosatellites for commercial and government customers — successfully to sun-synchronous orbit on July 7 at 07:12 UTC. [2]

UPCOMING

  • China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation's Long March 10B Demo Flight is Go for Launch, targeting July 10 at 05:20 UTC in its first-ever test flight. [5]
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 will fly Starlink Group 10-45, a batch of 29 satellites, Go for Launch on July 14 at 07:15 UTC. [6]
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 will fly Starlink Group 15-14, a batch of 24 satellites, Go for Launch on July 13 at 22:38 UTC. [7]
  • SpaceX Starship Flight 13 — the second flight of the Starship V3 configuration — is To Be Confirmed, currently targeting July 14 at 22:45 UTC. [8]
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 will carry nine Globalstar 2-R Mission 1 satellites to a 1,410 km orbit at 52 degrees inclination; date is To Be Determined around July 31. [9]

🔭 DISCOVERIES

  • ESA's Euclid space telescope has found 31 of the oldest quasars ever documented, with two dating back to when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age, representing the most ancient quasars ever observed. [10]
  • NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, celebrating its fourth science anniversary, has imaged an unusual galaxy shaped by a cosmic collision, with Webb's infrared sensitivity cutting through dust to reveal structure never seen before. [4]
  • NASA's COFFIES DRIVE Science Center has made a breakthrough toward explaining why the Sun's tachocline — the thin boundary layer critical to generating space weather — is so remarkably thin, a long-standing solar mystery.
  • NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has emerged from its longest hibernation ever, nearly one year, in good health as of June 23, and is ready to begin transmitting science data collected in the distant Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto. [3]
  • JAXA's Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully conducted a flyby of asteroid Torifune and captured images of the body.
  • NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been raised from horizontal to vertical at Kennedy Space Center, a milestone ahead of instrument processing, with launch now nine months ahead of the original schedule.

🛰️ MISSIONS

  • NASA's CAPSTONE spacecraft has completed its extended mission in cislunar space, having validated autonomous navigation and communication technologies that future Moon-bound missions will rely on without constant Earth contact.
  • The Artemis II crew attended the dedication of an Apollo 14 Moon tree — a second-generation loblolly pine — at the Lunar Receiving Park at NASA's Johnson Space Center on June 25, 2026.
  • ESA's Meteosat Third Generation Imager 2 (MTG-I2), weighing 3,800 kg, has begun its launch campaign with final inspections underway before integration into an Ariane 6 fairing for a launch targeted toward the end of summer 2026.
  • JAXA's LEV-2 transformable lunar rover, deployed from the SLIM lander, has had its lunar demonstration results published in Science Robotics.
  • NASA released a draft Request for Proposals seeking industry input on the second phase of commercial space stations, aimed at ensuring a seamless low Earth orbit transition as the ISS era winds down.
  • Expedition 74 crew aboard the ISS kicked off the week with cartilage engineering and blood pressure experiments alongside spacesuit maintenance and cargo operations.

☀️ SPACE WEATHER

  • NOAA SWPC issued a Type II Radio Emission alert at 14:43 UTC on July 7, with the event beginning at 14:20 UTC and an estimated shock velocity of 593 km/s, indicating an associated coronal mass ejection is likely.
  • A Type IV Radio Emission alert followed at 14:56 UTC on July 7, beginning at 14:35 UTC, consistent with an ongoing energetic solar eruption and post-flare particle trap.
  • These radio signatures follow a strong solar flare that peaked at 4:41 p.m. ET on July 4, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory; such flares can affect radio communications and power grids.
  • A high-energy electron flux alert (ALTEF3) has been in continuation since July 6 at 11:49 UTC, with the 2 MeV integral flux exceeding 1,000 pfu and peaking at 1,936 pfu on July 6, indicating elevated radiation belt activity.

📄 RESEARCH

EXOMOON BREAKTHROUGH

  • An arXiv paper reports the detection of a planetary-mass object orbiting a substellar companion to a star — effectively the first confidently detected exosatellite — a milestone given that no exomoon has ever been unambiguously confirmed despite more than 6,000 known exoplanets. [1]

ANCIENT UNIVERSE: LYMAN-ALPHA HALOS

  • Researchers compared Lyman-alpha halos around faint galaxies at redshift z greater than 6 (the epoch just after reionization ended) with a reference sample at z around 3, probing how hydrogen gas glows around the earliest star-forming galaxies.

T CORONAE BOREALIS: PREDICTING THE NEXT NOVA

  • A new method for predicting eruption cycles in the recurrent nova T CrB (T Coronae Borealis), which last erupted in 1946, is presented, using the known 1866 and 1946 outbursts to forecast the timing of the next event in this famous symbiotic nova system.

FIREBALL SURGE DEBUNKED

  • A statistical analysis of fireballs reported to the American Meteor Society in Q1 2026, when the AMS announced a surge of large fireballs with radiant clustering and delayed sound reports, finds the data set is consistent with null results — no anomalous source is supported.

COLLIDING-WIND BINARIES AND GAMMA RAYS

  • Using 18 years of Fermi-LAT data in a stacking analysis, researchers set limits on GeV gamma-ray emission from a population of massive colliding-wind binaries; only eta Carinae is unambiguously detected, leaving the population-level GeV signal unconfirmed.

COSMIC HYDROGEN BARELY CHANGING

  • Using HI spectral stacking from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) across redshifts 0 to 0.41, a study finds the cosmic atomic hydrogen density has evolved only weakly over the past 4.5 billion years, even as the star formation rate has dropped sharply.

SPACE PULSE is compiled from NASA, ESA, JAXA, NOAA SWPC, arXiv astro-ph, and Launch Library 2. All times UTC.

📎 Sources

  1. Planetary-Mass Exosatellite Detected Around the Substellar Com… — arXiv astro-ph
  2. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Transporter 17 (Dedicated SSO Rideshare) — Launch Library 2
  3. NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes from Hibernation in Good … — NASA Science
  4. NASA Webb Uncovers Unusual Galaxy Shaped by Cosmic Collision — NASA News Releases
  5. Long March 10B | Demo Flight — Launch Library 2
  6. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 10-45 — Launch Library 2
  7. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 15-14 — Launch Library 2
  8. Starship | Flight 13 — Launch Library 2
  9. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Globalstar 2-R Mission 1 (x 9) — Launch Library 2
  10. ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope Finds Universe’s Most Ancient Qua… — NASA Science

Curated from official sources — NASA/ESA/JAXA/ESO/NOAA/arXiv/Launch Library. Informational only.
Serial 20260707-22-v20 · 2026-07-07 22:01 UTC · pulse.uzylab.com

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