From Dr. Becky.
AD – Download Opera for free and try it today: https://opr.as/Opera-browser-drbecky | Hello and welcome to this episode of Night Sky News for March 2026 with me astrophysicist, Dr Becky Smethurst. This is the show where we chat about what you should look out for in the night sky in the next month, and what’s been happening in space news in the past month. In this episode we’re chatting about the newly launched alerts from the Rubin Observatory, the science proposals which were awarded time on the James Webb Space Telescope, the changes to the Artemis missions, the new type of exoplanet that’s been discovered, and the evidence for transfer of material from one asteroid to another!
Check your equilux vs equinox dates here – https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/
Rubin alerts from Laisar – https://lasair.lsst.ac.uk/
JWST successful proposals Cycle 5 – https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-programs/general-observers/cycle-5-go
My previous video breaking down the science in Project Hail Mary – https://youtu.be/lYHCTEnYOr4?si=3bO7qFcM6v0NikaS
Nicholls et al. (2026) – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02815-8
Gressier et al. (2024) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.15855
Zhou et al. (2023) – https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09526
Kostov et al. (2019) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08017
Sunshine et al. (2026) – https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ae3f27
More on the DART mission – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dart/
0:00 – Introduction
1:00 – Night Sky in the next month
7:15 – Rubin Observatory Real Time Results
8:37 – JWST Observing Proposals Announcement
9:50 – Artemis Mission Updates
11:40 – Discovery of a new type of exoplanet
15:20 – Transfer of material between two asteroids – DART mission update
19:28 – Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
