365 Days of Astronomy - Weekly Edition

Recorded during the Astrotour to Costa Rica, Fraser talks to Dr. Paul Matt Sutter about the nature of dust and BICEP 2's claim of discovering primordial gravitational waves.

We always focus on the missions, but there's an important glue that holds the whole system together. The Deep Space Network. Today we're going to talk about how this system works and how it communica…

This is our second episode in a two part series where we look at Transients in astronomy. In last week's episode, we talked about things that change here in our own Solar System. Now we'll talk abou…

Astronomers have found that sometimes the Universe changes. Things move, things explode, things get brighter or dimmer. In fact, knowing this has helped astronomers discover some very important aspec…

We always say the Universe is trying to kill us. But there was this one time, when the Universe used our own fear of nuclear attack against us, nearly setting off a global nuclear war. Nice try Unive…

One of the most influential astronomers in the 20th Century was Fritz Zwicky. He had his hand in the discovery of dark matter, gravitational lensing, supernovae and neutron stars. And he also worked …

It's cold right now. Okay, fine, here on Vancouver Island, it's actually pretty warm. But for the rest of Canada and big parts of the US, it's terrifyingly cold. Colder than Mars or the North Pole co…

Space is a hostile environment in so many ways. But one of its worst features is the various kinds of radiation you can find. When astronauts go back beyond the protective environment of the Earth's …

As we send rovers and landers to other worlds, we have to think about the tiny microbial astronauts we're sending along with us. In fact, NASA is so concerned about infecting other worlds that it has…

The Sun. It's a big ball of fire, right? Apparently not. In fact, what's going on inside of the Sun took us some time and knowledge of physics to finally figure out: stellar fusion. Let's talk about …

Finding planets is old news, we now know of thousands and thousands of the places. But the terrible irony is that we can only see a fraction of the planets out there using the traditional methods of …

We did it, we made it through 2018 in space. Now let’s look forward to the incredible launches, discoveries and astronomical events happening in 2019.

2018 was an incredible year in space news. Rockets launched, landers landed, spacecraft were born and died. We learned tremendous new things about Universe around us, and today we're here to look bac…

The technology of 3D printing is taking off. From tiny home-based 3D printers to larger manufacturing. And of course, 3D printing is going to space with the International Space Station and beyond.

We did it, we made it to the end of another year. Once again it's time to wonder what gifts to get your beloved space nerds. We've got some suggestions. Some are brand new this year, others are class…

Ion engines are a mainstay of science fiction, featured in both Star Trek and Wars. But this is a very real technology, successfully used on several missions out there in the Solar System right now. …

Did you hear that astronomers from Harvard think that the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua was actually an alien solar sail? Is it aliens? Of course it's not aliens. But some day, it'll actually be ali…

We're always interested in the surface features of the planets and moons in the Solar System, but that's only skin deep. It turns out, these worlds have an interesting inner life too. Thanks to the s…