## Starcast Transcript: January 11, 2026

**Jay Shaffer:** Welcome back to the Starcast for the week of January 11th, 2026. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski. Howdy, Mike. So, what's our space weather looking like over the next couple days? 

**Mike L.:** Howdy, Jay! Jay, we're coming down from a G2 class geomagnetic storm yesterday. The potential still exists for smaller G1 class storms in the wake of the CME that triggered the event. And I do note that our planetary K Index has ticked up over the last 3 hours. So, I messaged you yesterday around 1 o'clock noting that we were up at a KP of 6. That diminished to a 5 and then a 4.67 before coming back down into the non-storm range, but we're picked back up to 4.67 here in the last couple hours. 

Beyond that, we're watching Sunspot 4336, which has a beta-gamma magnetic field that could trigger M-class solar flares.  But the estimated odds right now are pretty low. There's just a 15% chance of M-class flare over the next 2 days and a mere 1% chance of an X-class flare. So, that translates here at mid-latitudes, our chances of active geomagnetic conditions are around 35% and diminishing for greater conditions. But if you happen to live at high latitude, there's a 70% chance of a severe geomagnetic storm today and a 50% chance of severe conditions tomorrow. So what's happening in the night sky this week, Jay? 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, before we get to that, I put out a time lapse last night, and I'm not sure I captured any aurora. Did you catch anything last night? 

**Mike L.:** No, I did not. I just got done watching mine, and there was some nice air glow, and a little bit of gravity waves, but no northern lights. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Okay. Did you know that yesterday, the Earth passed directly between the Sun and Jupiter? 

**Mike L.:** I saw that. 

**Jay Shaffer:** That's an event known as opposition. So, because Jupiter is now positioned exactly opposite the Sun from our perspective, it rises in the east just as the sun sets in the west and it remains visible all night long. While the exact moment of opposition occurred at 9 o'clock UTC yesterday, the 10th, the planet had actually reached its closest point to Earth on Friday, January 19th, at a distance of approximately 393 million miles, or 35 light minutes from us. 

For the next several weeks, Jupiter will be at its biggest and brightest for the year, offering a spectacular opportunity to observe its colorful cloud bands and four largest moons through even a modest pair of binoculars. And then, coming up on Monday, January 12, a significant near-Earth object or asteroid named 2005 UK1 will make a close but entirely safe approach to our planet. 

Discovered two decades ago by the Catalina Sky Survey, this asteroid is nearly a mile wide. Due to its size and its potential to come within 19.5 lunar distances of Earth's orbit, it carries the technical designation of a potentially hazardous asteroid.  However, there's no cause for concern during this pass. It is closest on Monday and it will maintain a respectable distance of 0.08 AUs, or astronomical units, which is about 32 times further away than the moon. So, Mike, what do you have for us in space news? 

**Mike L.:** On January 8th, NASA announced its decision to return the agency's SpaceX Crew-11 mission to Earth from the space station earlier than originally planned. Teams are monitoring a medical concern with a crew member who is currently living and working aboard the orbital laboratory. This person is stable, and due to medical privacy, it is not appropriate for NASA to share more details about the crew member. 

As an aside, I'm pretty sure if there was an actual alien infection, they would say the exact same thing, so we can't rule that out either. This marks the first emergency medical return in the station's 25-year history.  NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Wednesday, January 14th, for the undocking of the agency's SpaceX Crew-11 mission from the International Space Station, pending weather conditions. 

NASA astronauts Zena Kardman, Mike Vinke, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos astronaut Oleg Platinov will splash down off the coast of California at approximately 3:40 AM on Thursday, January 15th. Mission managers continue monitoring conditions in the recovery area; the undocking of SpaceX Dragon does depend on spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states, and other factors. NASA and SpaceX will select a specific splashdown time and location closer to the Crew-11 spacecraft undocking. So, Jay, what's our topic for today? 

**Jay Shaffer:** Well, Mike, you're going to explain how to look through a telescope that was created by nature and not by humans. While most of us have heard about gravitational lensing to observe distant galaxies, most of us haven't heard of microlensing. So, Mike, what is microlensing? 

**Mike L.:** Jay, I think to explain that, we should first back up for just a minute and review what a conventional gravitational lens is. So, we know that gravity can alter the path of light, and this might seem a little strange at first. We know that photons have no mass, so how does that work? Well, it's not that gravity is pulling on the photons, but rather that gravity is deforming the space through which photons are traveling. 

Astronomers have known about this effect for more than 100 years. The first observations of light bending due to gravity were made during the solar eclipse on May 29, 1919, when Arthur Eddington, Frank Watson Dyson, and other researchers observed that stars visible near the sun during the eclipse were slightly displaced. To do this, they had observers stationed in Brazil and on an island off the coast of West Africa who made simultaneous measurements to confirm this effect. 

Then in 1937, Fritz Zwicky speculated that galaxy clusters could act as gravitational lenses, and this was eventually confirmed in 1979 with the observation of a twin quasar denoted QSO-SBS 0957 plus 561. A twin quasar is actually a single quasar that is distorted by the warping of spacetime caused by a nearer galaxy. 

The term gravitational lens is a little bit of a misnomer. Artificial lenses that are designed by humans have a focal point, something that these natural lenses lack. But they do amplify distant light, which is how they get their name. In 2023, the James Webb Space Telescope imaged the furthest objects that humans have observed using gravitational lensing—a galaxy estimated at 21 billion light years away. This object is a so-called Einstein ring, something that Albert Einstein predicted was possible. Usually with a gravitational lens, we see a partial arc, but in this case, the object named JWST-ER1 forms a complete circle. 

To wrap up this introduction to conventional gravitational lenses, it's important to understand that we are able to observe objects that are otherwise too distant because the gravitational lens collects and amplifies that distant light, effectively acting as a giant telescope or repeater. It's also important to know that these lenses are stable for very long periods of time, think centuries or longer. 

By contrast, a microlens has the same effect, temporarily increasing the brightness of an object that is normally visible for a much shorter period of time—think of days, weeks, or months. Microlenses typically involve smaller distances and smaller objects, such as large planets or stellar-mass black holes. The source objects are usually nearby stars in our galaxy or nearby galaxies. 

The "micro" in microlensing isn't a reference to these smaller distances or objects, but to the fact that rather than resolving an image of a distant object, the microlens is just brightening something that we can see normally. And unlike traditional gravitational lens, it's not the distant light source that is actually interesting, but the intermediate gravitational body that would otherwise be invisible to us. 

What are the applications of microlensing? Well, we can find free-floating planets and isolated black holes that act as microlenses. We're using this to study sources of dark matter. A catch-all term that microlensing is uniquely suited for studying are MACHOs, or Massive Compact Halo Objects. These were originally believed to be the primary source of dark matter, and there's now been enough study that we are looking away from MACHOs towards other sources, but microlensing is uniquely suited for studying them. 

These are bodies that emit little or no radiation and drift through interstellar space outside of any planetary system. Since they don't emit light of their own, they're very hard to detect. MACHOs include black holes, neutron stars, as well as brown dwarfs and unassociated planets. White dwarfs and very faint red dwarfs have also been proposed as candidate MACHOs. 

Scientists detected the first isolated black hole in 2022 using microlensing. There are an estimated 100 million of these isolated black holes in the Milky Way, and microlensing is currently the only way we have to observe them. Microlensing also has the potential to spot exotic structures like wormholes or primordial black holes that have never been seen before. If these things do exist, this is the most likely way that we're going to notice them. 

Because microlens alignments are extremely rare and fleeting, it requires constant, large-scale monitoring of the entire sky. While traditional telescopes zoom in on specific specks in the sky, microlensing surveys must watch millions of stars at once to catch these serendipitous splashes. The field of microlensing is currently undergoing a step change in sensitivity. The NASA mission to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled for 2027 and will use microlensing to conduct a massive census of exoplanets. 

Up until now, most planets beyond our solar system have been discovered through one of two different techniques: either the transit method or the radial velocity method. The transit method looks for small dips in a star's light that occurs when a planet passes in front of it, while the radial velocity method describes the observable gravitational tugs that planets exert on their host stars. Both of these methods indirectly detect planets through effects on those host stars, and are thus biased towards much larger planets with much smaller orbits. 

Microlensing is going to change that. This is an upstart subfield that is becoming the primary tool for mapping the cold, dark, lonely objects that actually make up the majority of our universe. And that's our topic for today, Jay. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, I think that the big sea change here with microlensing and MACHOs in general is that the traditional view was that all the stars and all the mass was concentrated in galaxies. Now I think that thinking has evolved toward there being a lot more matter in the intergalaxy regions than we previously thought. And also, even in the inner planetary regions between different solar systems, there's a lot more mass than was originally thought. 

**Mike L.:** That's right, Jay, and I've wondered whether or not our nightly time lapses would be of any use in this pursuit. I mean, I'm capturing wide-field images of the sky night after night, and it would just take a little bit of image analysis to look for notable changes. This has been something that for a long time I've wanted to do and have yet to come across the tool that would make it easy for me. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, since all these stars are basically mapped out there, our smart telescopes, for example, actually use the map of the stars and they know where these stars are at to actually find other stars. So if you can compare that database of all the known stars and where they should be positioned and what their brightnesses are, and then compare that to what you're actually capturing—it would be pretty software intensive, but it should be able to actually point out where these events are occurring. This is actually how we see a lot of novas and occasionally supernovas, because we just compare the star charts with the brightness to what is actually being imaged. 

**Mike L.:** Yeah, this seems like maybe a special case of plate solving, right? 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, exactly. I was struggling for the term "plate solving" off the top of my head.  But yeah, so this is something that we can keep an eye on, and it'd be interesting to see some of this research coming out. I would imagine that the Vera Rubin Observatory, since it does a lot of wide-field imaging, is also going to be a huge resource for this microlensing. 

**Mike L.:** Yeah, I'm sure we're going to be talking about findings of this for years to come. 

**Jay Shaffer:** All right, well, we want to thank all of our listeners for checking out the podcast today. Be sure to comment, like, and subscribe, and let us know what you'd like to hear more about.  You can actually check out our individual websites. Mike's is WildernessVagabonds.com, and mine is Skylapser.com. You can also see Mike's time lapses from every night on the Mike Lewinski YouTube channel. So make sure you like and subscribe there as well, and you can check out my review of the T-Seq Star Tracker that I mentioned in our gear episode on my Skylapser YouTube channel. Our intro music is "Fanfare for Space" by Kevin MacLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Stage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Shaffer and Mike Lewinski wishing you all clear skies.