Welcome to Astronomy Daily S05E87 — Saturday, April 18, 2026. Today Anna and Avery bring you six incredible space and astronomy stories.
COMET MAPS DIES AT THE SUN — Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) did not survive its close solar encounter on April 4. We tell the full story: the discovery, the hopes, the final hours in the coronagraph, and what comes next. Plus: PanSTARRS is waiting in the wings.
ARTEMIS III ROLLS OUT — Monday April 20, NASA moves the largest section of the Artemis III SLS rocket out of New Orleans. The Moon programme is accelerating.
MONSTER GALAXY UNVEILED — JWST and ALMA have revealed ADF22.A1: a giant barred spiral galaxy from 11.5 billion years ago, hidden behind dust, spinning at 530 km/s — twice the speed of our Milky Way. How did something this big exist so early?
SHAPE-SHIFTING EXOPLANETS — The TOI-201 system contains a brown dwarf, a warm Jupiter, and a super-Earth whose orbits are all changing fast enough to watch in real time. Within 200 years, one of the planets will stop transiting its star.
PLANET PARADE TONIGHT — Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune are gathered in a 4-degree patch of pre-dawn sky. Southern Hemisphere has the best view. Peak nights: April 18-20.
33,000 HYDROGEN HALOS — HETDEX has multiplied the known count of Lyman-alpha nebulae tenfold, finding the long-sought hydrogen fuel that fed galaxy growth 10-12 billion years ago.