astro[sound]bites

To take a break from the summer heat, Sabrina, Will, and Kiersten don their floaties and take a dive into some space fluids. Sabrina plays in the sandbox of granular instabilities, explaining how sol…

Break out your swim suits and fire up your Weber Spirit II 3-Burner Liquid Propane Grills, it’s summer vacation for those of us in the states! With their time off, Will, Kiersten, and Alex take a tri…

Episode 56: Overpowered in the Universe

In this episode, Sabrina teaches Will gamer lingo and the gang applies it to astronomy. Alex discusses a class of super-charged supernovae with bumpy and clu…

Our astro[sound]bites family has grown! New co-hosts Kiersten Boley and Sabrina Berger join Alex Gagliano and Will Saunders as the four moving forward. From now on, you’ll be hearing from three of us…

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. In her final episode as co-host, Malena reflects on her graduate school experience, research interests, and celebrity crushes. Will brings u…

Episode 54: Dusting off the Disks

We recorded this episode a few months ago and are dusting it off today. We’re leaving a bit of dust though, because that’s what makes debris disks so exciting! Mal…

What’s the opposite of high-energy astrophysics? In today’s episode, we recognize the unsung heroes of astronomy: the low-energy, sleepy objects that keep on chugging in spite of it all. Will describ…

In this episode, the gang struggles to come up with a title (and Will manages to still get it wrong in the outro). More importantly, we are joined by PhD student Sophia Lilleengen, who tells us about…

How are your sunglasses like the stars, planets, and galaxies that comprise our universe? Not only do they look cool – they’re also no stranger to polarization! In today’s episode, Will describes a m…

Pop the champagne and blow out the candles, it’s our fiftieth episode!! To celebrate, we’ve prepared a list of fifty different paths that you can take with a degree in physics or astronomy. What’s th…

For the first time ever, astro[sound]bites is holding a hiring call. We’re looking to add a new co-host to the show! Why is that? Listen to this bite-sized episode to find out, and head over to astro…

Alex and Malena sit down for a gourmet meal and Will, with curved mustache and slicked hair, pours the wine. Alex enjoys his star cluster soup as he tells us about the state-of-the-art in star format…

We’re kicking off the new year by spinning a record from a few months back, about all the ways that rotation teaches us about the universe. Malena describes a few energetic stars lurking around the M…

In today’s episode, we learn all about the clues that Kevin has benevolently placed within the Universe to teach us about the graceful and multifaceted field of galaxy evolution. Alex describes how m…

Ever misplace a brown dwarf? If re-tracing your astrophysical steps doesn’t help, it’s probably where you least expect to find it. In this episode, Alex and Malena bring us some brown dwarfs discover…

It’s time to talk radio on the radio! In this episode, we explore some of the research beaming out of the world's largest fully steerable radio dish -- the Green Bank Telescope (GBT)! We hear from Br…

All speeds are relative—especially in astrophysics. In today’s episode, we learn about the timescales of different transients and explore what the fastest and slowest events can teach us. Alex descri…

Do you enjoy reading and listening to science communication? Are you ready to get involved with it yourself? From chatting with friends to podcasting, blogging to writing magazine stories, the world …

This is Episode #42, so it might just contain the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Today we set our phasers to stun and dig into some astrophysics research that brings science fiction on…

How do we figure out the masses of astronomical objects far too large to fit on any human-made scale? In this episode, Alex tracks the paths of planets to figure out which ones are winning a gravitat…