From exploding rockets to burping galaxies

Pythagorean Astronomy

A news roundup of the last couple of months with Chris North and Edward Gomez. With a few failures - the SpaceX Starship launch, iSpace's moon landing and Virgin Galactic's bankruptcy, it might seem things are going wrong. But it's not all bad news - ESA's JUICE spacecraft has successfully launched on its way to Jupiter!

Elsewhere in the Solar System, archives of data from the Magellan mission to Venus have revealed further evidence of a volcanic activity on the hard-to-reach surface of Earth's evil twin planet. And there's Phaethon, the unusual asteroid that is the source of the Geminid meteor shower, and about which the mystery has deepened.

Much further afield, there's new research on what leads to quasars, the energetic "burps" of galaxies as their central black holes gorge themselves on infalling gas. And finally, there's the mystery of the "impossible galaxies" seen in one of JWST's first ever images, which turn out to be, well, less impossible!