Interstellar comet 3I ATLAS has 40× more heavy water than Earth's oceans | Night Sky News May 2026
AD - Donate to Farm Kind today at farmkind.giving/drbecky and your monthly donation gets a 50% boost. It takes seconds, but transforms the lives of thousands of farmed animals. | Welcome back to Night Sky News for May 2026! In this episode we’re chatting about the latest on interstellar comet 3I Atlas and it’s heavy water ratio that’s very different to the solar system, the extension to the dark energy spectroscopic survey, whether Pluto should be made a planet again, and the massive cuts to NASA’s budget that have once again been proposed for next year...
The Planetary Society ‘Save Nasa Science’ Hub - https://www.planetary.org/save-nasa-s...
President’s ‘Skinny Budget’ FY2027 - https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content...
DESI Completes Planned 3D Map of the Universe and Continues Exploring - https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirl...
DESI Collaboration (2025) - https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14738
Luis E. Salazar Manzano et al. (2026) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155...
Previous videos
Night Sky News May 2025 with FY2026 NASA Cuts - • How bad are Trump's cuts to NASA? And is t...
Initial DESI results - • MORE evidence for DARK ENERGY changing wit...
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Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: [email protected]
Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst
00:00 - Introduction
01:00 - Stargazing
07:23 - NASA Budget cuts AGAIN
13:26 - Is Pluto going to be a planet again?
15:05 - DESI survey completed!
17:32 - Comet 3I/ATLAS alien water
25:04 - Bloopers
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👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. 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.
http://drbecky.uk.com