JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Juana Summers.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
And I'm Scott Detrow, here with another edition of Spacing Out with our friends from Short Wave, Regina Barber and Ari Daniel. Hey there.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: Ari, you came back from more.
DANIEL: I couldn't stay away. I love Spacing Out.
BARBER: And he's even physically here.
DETROW: I know.
BARBER: Yeah. And we didn't scare him.
DETROW: And as we tape right now, a solar eclipse is happening in another country that we are not looking at but we will...
BARBER: I know. I'm a little sad.
DETROW: ...We will just push through those feelings, and we will talk about three other space stories this week. What are they?
BARBER: So first up the beauty of the Perseid meteor shower.
DANIEL: And then a fascinating new look at the surface of the sun.
BARBER: Then to round it all out, we're going to get into the news that part of a SpaceX rocket smashed into the moon.
DETROW: All right. I love a meteor shower. Let's start there. The Perseid meteor shower peaked Wednesday night. Let's start with the basics. What exactly are meteor showers?
BARBER: Right. So I just want to say real quick, there was a new moon yesterday, so the skies were really dark - great for stargazing. But, Scott, as an astronomer, I think it's fascinating that meteor showers are basically, like, the Earth traveling through a field of debris left over by comets or, in some cases, asteroids.
DANIEL: That is why the Perseids happen around the same time every year. Earth is orbiting the sun, as you know, Scott, and this is just the part of our path when we intersect with that leftover trail from the comet Swift-Tuttle.
DETROW: I appreciate your confidence in my space knowledge.
BARBER: (Laughter) Yeah.
DETROW: One thing I don't know, though, and I've actually always wanted to know is when did humans first figure out that these shooting stars that show up every year are actually from comets?
BARBER: Yeah. So let's start with, like, just meteor showers in general. 'Cause, like, I spoke with Matt Shindell, a planetary science historian with the Smithsonian. He says that the Perseids were first recorded in 36 AD in the Han dynasty of ancient China.
MATT SHINDELL: People have been observing meteor showers for as long as people have been recording history.
DANIEL: But it wasn't until the mid-1800s when astronomers started figuring out that comets might be the cause of meteor showers.
DETROW: And help me visualize this a little bit more when we're talking about debris from a comet. Is this like little bits and pieces that flaked off as it zoomed through space?
DANIEL: Yeah. So people are seeing those tiny bits of comet debris burn up in our atmosphere.
SHINDELL: Keep in mind, like, the things that you're seeing are incredibly small. Like, most of this debris is only about the size of a grain of sand. You know, that, itself, is pretty impressive, that this little thing burning up in our atmosphere is making - putting on such a big show.
DETROW: Give us some tips here. If I want to see them, what do I need to do, right?
BARBER: So, Scott, leave town. Get away...
DETROW: Get out of here.
BARBER: ...Get away from the city lights. Yeah. And then once you're in the dark, let your eyes adjust - this is really important - for about 20 to 30 minutes, then you should be able to see those faint streaks of light across the sky, those shooting stars. Almost all meteor showers are best observed after midnight, so bring a blanket, lay down, look up, but set your expectations for no more than one a minute. It's not going to be like "Star Trek," you know, like raining down.
DETROW: Not warp drive zooming by.
BARBER: No. No.
DETROW: OK.
DANIEL: Just a singular sparkle every minute.
BARBER: Yeah, basically. OK.
DETROW: Yeah. Let's turn to the topic of the surface of the sun, which I will just say - we talked about this very early on - that I had not yet read the book "Project Hail Mary." I'm now actually reading the book as we speak...
BARBER: OK.
DETROW: ...So the surface of the sun high in my mind.
BARBER: OK.
DETROW: Let's talk about it.
BARBER: I love it.
DANIEL: So we've known, Scott, that the sun creates enormous amounts of energy in its core. The surface of the sun, which is this boiling brew of hot and magnetized, charged particles, plays a key role in transporting that energy out into space.
DETROW: So it's like a giant cup of hot, ionized coffee.
BARBER: Yes.
DANIEL: You said it.
BARBER: (Laughter).
DANIEL: Now, the new results, published in the journal Nature, come from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the most powerful instrument we have to look at the sun.
BARBER: So researchers were able to visualize the solar surface at a resolution of almost 12 miles. That's like seeing an ant on the ground from a hundred miles away. Like - so check out these images that came out in this study.
DETROW: Do you have them up in your computer?
DANIEL: I do.
BARBER: Yeah.
DANIEL: They're right here.
DETROW: Let me see.
DANIEL: Yeah.
DETROW: Whoa.
DANIEL: And I've even got a video.
BARBER: Yeah.
DANIEL: I can show you.
BARBER: It's so cool.
DETROW: Let me see the video. Whoa.
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: It looks like amoebas or something under a microscope almost...
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: ...And this is - or like a kaleidoscope. It's beautiful.
BARBER: Like Astrophage?
DANIEL: It's really...
BARBER: (Laughter).
DANIEL: It's really stunning. We are looking at the swirls and pulses of plasma on the surface of the sun. David Kuridze, a solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, and a coauthor of the study, was blown away by what he saw.
DAVID KURIDZE: We immediately realized that we had something very, very special. The surface of the sun is much more dynamic, much more finely structured.
DANIEL: In particular, David and his colleagues notice that when different layers of plasma move past one another at different speeds, they generate subtle disturbances that grow into large swirling vortices. This turbulence happens on the edges of magnetic features on the sun's surface, which are pretty much everywhere.
BARBER: I love the magnetic fields. OK. And also, scientists have long predicted these instabilities, and this is the first time they've been observed.
DETROW: So any sense yet what this might mean for our understanding of the sun?
DANIEL: Well, first, this could help explain a pretty big mystery. Why is the corona, the outermost halo of the sun, so much hotter than the surface? And second, these vortices may help fuel explosive solar events.
DETROW: Like what?
BARBER: So like coronal mass ejections - right? - like, these solar storms that kind of come towards Earth. They are created by these twisted up magnetic fields. And this kind of solar weather can affect satellites and power grids. So this discovery opens up a new avenue of exploring how the sun creates and transports energy to its surface and sometimes towards Earth.
DETROW: The last topic, this is something I saw a lot of headlines about, and I had a bunch of questions...
BARBER: (Laughter).
DETROW: ...Is that piece of SpaceX rocket...
BARBER: Yes.
DETROW: ...That smashed into the moon?
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: Is this common?
BARBER: Well, I mean, the moon has been hit by a bunch of stuff over the billions of years it's been around - mostly meteors, natural stuff. That's why there are so many craters, Scott.
DETROW: Right. Which we saw in those beautiful pictures from Artemis II earlier this year.
BARBER: Exactly. But less frequently do human-made things hit the moon. However, when lunar missions end, like some of the Apollo missions, the spacecraft parts are intentionally, like, smashed into the moon. This SpaceX crash on August 5 was not one of those.
DETROW: What happened?
DANIEL: It was part of the Falcon 9 rocket that was launched in January 2025, and it took two landers to the moon. SpaceX says the upper rocket was supposed to be left in space, but things didn't go as planned.
BARBER: So scientists tracked this rocket part and alerted everyone months in advance that, yes, it's going to hit the moon. They figured out the date and the location.
DETROW: I mean, this still doesn't sound great, though - an unintentional crash.
BARBER: Yeah, I think that the headlines of this crash seemed to make people think that, but...
BRETT DENEVI: One person's junk is another person's treasure here. Scientists love things hitting the moon.
BARBER: That's Brett Denevi, a lunar scientist who will be working on the future Artemis missions to the moon.
DENEVI: When I saw the headline that there was going to be something hitting the moon, and we knew when and where, I was excited. That's great.
DANIEL: Scientists can use these impacts to study the lunar material that gets shot out during these collisions, which can tell them more about how the moon got all these ancient lunar craters and how the moon was even made.
DETROW: That is Ari Daniel and Regina Barber from NPR's science podcast, Short Wave. Thank you for spacing out with me.
BARBER: Yeah. I love it.
DANIEL: Thank you, Scott.
BARBER: Thank you. Space out.
(SOUNDBITE OF JIRO INAGAKI'S "PAINTED PARADISE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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