🚀 Space Pulse · 2026-09-12 22:01 UTC

SPACE PULSE

Saturday, 13 September 2026 | Edition 247

⚡ TL;DR

The Event Horizon Telescope's fresh two-month campaign on M87* is yielding the first time-resolved black-hole image sequence, the week's headline science result. An active launch corridor opens Tuesday with three vehicles queued, and elevated energetic-particle flux continues unabated since 10 September.

🚀 LAUNCHES

UPCOMING THIS WEEK

• Vega-C carrying ESA's Sentinel-3C ocean-monitoring satellite and the FLEX fluorescence mapper lifts off Tuesday 15 September at 01:21 UTC, operated by Avio S.p.A. ^[1]
• Kuaizhou 11 with an undisclosed payload is set for Go-for-Launch by ExPace on Thursday 17 September at 02:35 UTC. ^[2]
• Long March 2D carrying an unknown payload is scheduled by CASC for Saturday 19 September at 10:50 UTC. ^[3]

NOTE ON FLEX: the Fluorescence Explorer will map plant photosynthesis globally from orbit, the first satellite dedicated to that measurement, flying alongside Sentinel-3C as a joint ESA Earth Explorer mission. ^[1]

🔭 DISCOVERIES

EXOPLANETS AND STAR CATALOG ADDITIONS

• NASA's Exoplanet Archive added four new microlensing host stars today: KMT-2025-BLG-2272L, KMT-2025-BLG-0030L, KMT-2025-BLG-0026L, and OGLE-2016-BLG-0261L, expanding the census of planetary systems found via gravitational lensing. ^{[4] [5] [6] [7]}
• Two additional catalog entries posted for HD 278555 and HD 715 round out today's NASA exoplanet star-catalog updates. ^{[8] [9]}

CHANDRA GALACTIC MERGER

• NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory released an August 25 image of the merging galaxy pair II Zw 096, with Chandra's magenta-coded X-ray data pinpointing powerful black hole activity inside the colliding system. ^[10]

EXOMOON MYSTERY OBJECT

• ESO's VLT detected a moon-like body in the CD-35 2722 system that orbits a brown dwarf rather than a planet, blurring the definition of "moon" and raising new classification questions.

PLANET FORMATION IN PROGRESS

• ESO telescopes confirmed a second planet forming in the protoplanetary disc around young star WISPIT 2, giving astronomers a rare two-planet formation laboratory.

FAINTEST DIRECTLY IMAGED PLANET

• Beta Pictoris d, a third planet in the Beta Pic system, was imaged from the ground after more than a decade of effort; it is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b and among the lightest planets ever directly imaged.

EXOPLANET MAGNETISM HINTS

• Using ESO's VLT and Gemini North, researchers measured anomalous wind speeds on seven hot Jupiters as the strongest evidence yet that some exoplanets carry magnetic fields.

MILKY WAY CHEMISTRY MAP

• ALMA produced its largest image to date of the Milky Way's central region, resolving a complex filament network in molecular gas that will anchor future studies of star formation near the galactic center.

🛰️ MISSIONS

ISS AND CREW-12

• NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 crew — Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — will hold a press conference from the International Space Station on 16 September at 14:45 EDT ahead of their return.
• Expedition 75's seven-person crew spent 11 September on exercise-microgravity research, cargo transfers, Earth observations, hardware inventory, and life-support maintenance.

ARTEMIS ACCORDS AND OPEN SCIENCE

• All 71 Artemis Accords signatory nations are now committed to openly sharing every Moon rock sample, lunar dataset, and discovery produced under NASA's Artemis program.

LUNAR BASE PROGRAM

• NASA's Moon Base program manager Carlos García-Galán confirmed ongoing construction planning for humanity's first long-duration lunar surface habitat in the Houston We Have a Podcast episode released 11 September.

CITIZEN SCIENCE FOR ROMAN AND EUCLID

• NASA launched Artifact InSPECtor, a citizen-science project asking volunteers to flag artifacts in space telescope data, directly supporting the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and ESA's Euclid mission.

HAYABUSA2 RECORDS (CONTEXT)

• JAXA confirmed that Hayabusa2 set a new record for closest approach during a Solar System body flyby and achieved a world-first laser ranging during an asteroid flyby on 5 July 2026, underscoring the spacecraft's extended mission milestones.

ELT FIRST-LIGHT INSTRUMENT MICADO

• Two arXiv papers this week report validation of MICADO's Point Spread Function Reconstruction software against real data ahead of first light at ESO's Extremely Large Telescope.

☀️ SPACE WEATHER

ENERGETIC PARTICLE FLUX — ONGOING ELEVATED ALERT

• NOAA SWPC's continued ALTEF3 alert (Serial 3742) reports that the 2 MeV electron integral flux has exceeded 1,000 pfu without interruption since 10 September 13:04 UTC, with a peak of 7,008 pfu recorded on 11 September at 13:55 UTC — significantly above the alert threshold.
• This elevated particle environment has persisted for more than 48 hours as of edition time and poses a radiation risk to satellites in high-altitude orbits and to astronauts in the ISS's higher-inclination orbital plane.

EARLIER SOLAR RADIO BURST

• A Type II radio emission on 3 September (Serial 1527) indicated a shock-driving CME traveling at an estimated 1,359 km/s, one of the faster events of the current solar rotation.

NOTE: The most recent geomagnetic storm watch on file in today's dataset (G2 moderate, issued 26 August) has expired; no active geomagnetic storm watch is currently in force.

📄 RESEARCH

EHT TARGETS M87 BLACK HOLE IN REAL TIME

• Starting March 2026, the Event Horizon Telescope ran a two-month campaign specifically designed to produce the first time-resolved image sequence of M87* and constrain the physical properties of the relativistic electrons powering its jet.

BALLOON-BORNE VLBI PATHFINDER

• Two complementary papers describe BVEX, a balloon-borne 22 GHz VLBI telescope with a custom RFSoC digital backend and precision timing system, designed to circumvent atmospheric water vapor that limits ground-based high-frequency interferometry.

JWST FOUNDATION MODEL FOR DEEP FIELDS

• FM-JADES-v1, a self-supervised AI trained on 482,444 objects from the JWST JADES Data Release 5, can discover new galaxy populations and measure photometric redshifts with morphological awareness — a step toward automated large-scale JWST science.

CME-CME INTERACTION OBSERVED IN THE HELIOSPHERE

• Using Solar Orbiter, STEREO-A, and Wind in-situ data, researchers traced an interplanetary CME that interacted with a preceding CME, producing a magnetic-cloud-like ejecta configuration with a field-rotating front region — relevant for forecasting compound geomagnetic storms.

WASP-12b ORBITAL DECAY MECHANISM RULED OUT

• A new analysis shows that planetary obliquity tides cannot be responsible for WASP-12b's observed orbital decay: such tides would damp the obliquity before driving significant inspiral, leaving the mechanism behind one of the best-known shrinking hot-Jupiter orbits still unexplained.

WIDE BINARIES SUPPRESS PLANETARY ACCRETION

• Using metal-polluted white dwarfs from DESI Data Release 1, astronomers found that stars in wide binary systems show lower rates of planetary debris accretion onto their white-dwarf remnants, suggesting binary companions suppress long-lived planetary systems.

END OF EDITION

Space Pulse is published daily. All findings are preliminary until peer-reviewed publication. Space weather conditions can change rapidly; consult NOAA SWPC for real-time updates.

📎 Sources

1. Vega-C | Sentinel-3C & FLEX — Launch Library 2
2. Kuaizhou 11 | Unknown Payload — Launch Library 2
3. Long March 2D | Unknown Payload — Launch Library 2
4. KMT-2025-BLG-2272L — NASA Science
5. KMT-2025-BLG-0030L — NASA Science
6. KMT-2025-BLG-0026L — NASA Science
7. OGLE-2016-BLG-0261L — NASA Science
8. HD 278555 — NASA Science
9. HD 715 — NASA Science
10. NASA’s Chandra Spots Galactic Gem — NASA Science

Curated from official sources — NASA/ESA/JAXA/ESO/NOAA/arXiv/Launch Library. Informational only.
Serial 20260912-22-v79 · 2026-09-12 22:01 UTC · pulse.uzylab.com