Pythagorean Astronomy
>Astronomy news and interviews with scientists involved in the discoveries.
- Update frequency
- every 29 days
- Average duration
- 33 minutes
- Episodes
- 118
- Years Active
- 2014 - 2024
Space Environmentalism
In the 65 years since Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, the number of artificial satellites in orbit has been increasing. In the last two years, the number of satellites has doubled, largely thanks to …
00:52:19 |
Thu 02 Jun 2022
Routine Spaceflight?
It's not often that a new astronomical phenomenon is named, but this month we have a new one. The name might not be that original, but there have been the first observations of something known as a "…
00:21:37 |
Thu 05 May 2022
Shadow of War
With the invasion of Ukraine casting a shadow over the world, Chris North and Edward Gomez look at the impact of the war on astronomy and space science, mindful that these pale in importance when com…
00:28:07 |
Thu 31 Mar 2022
Venus resurfaces
Back in September 2020, the new broke that an unexpected gas, phosphine had been discovered in the atmosphere of Venus. While plans for making further measurements are progressing, the theoreticians …
00:28:19 |
Thu 03 Mar 2022
Radio repeater
When a mysterious signal was found by an undergraduate student, Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker was perplexed. It was hiding in archival data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a large network of rad…
00:41:49 |
Mon 07 Feb 2022
Mysterious travellers bearing gifts
The first interstellar object to be discovered was 'Oumuamua, detected in 2017. Joined by Comet 2I/Borisov a couple of years later, astronomers are eagerly awaiting further discoveries of such object…
00:33:58 |
Thu 30 Dec 2021
The Cosmic Webb
The world of astronomy is eagerly awaiting the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope later in December. The telescope is not without controversy, but is set to revolutionise observations of the co…
00:48:37 |
Mon 06 Dec 2021
Lucy in the Sky with Trojans
Back in 2015 the New Horizons spacecraft whizzed past Pluto on its way out of the Solar System. A few years later, as it continued on its way through the Kuiper Belt, it passed by a snowman-shaped ob…
00:41:31 |
Thu 04 Nov 2021
Supernova Detective Story
Way back in 1181 AD, astronomers in China and Japan recorded a "guest star" - something that we'd now call a supernova. Over 800 years later, astronomers made a connection between this ancient observ…
00:22:31 |
Thu 30 Sep 2021
It's the Small Things - Exomoons
The last month or so has seen several cases of small things being discovered. The first is an asteroid, 2021 27PH, which gets closer to the Sun than Mercury. What could we learn about fundamental sci…
00:32:47 |
Wed 08 Sep 2021
Herding Megacomets
In late June an interesting object was discovered heading inwards from the outer solar system, identified in archival images from a survey of the sky. It was initially thought to be worth keeping an …
00:34:17 |
Fri 30 Jul 2021
Cosmic Developments
Our understand of the Universe has changed a great deal in the last 100 years. From Einstein's theories of relativity and measurements of the expanding Universe, to the discovery of the Cosmic Microw…
00:28:48 |
Thu 01 Jul 2021
Learned Societies and Society Learning
This month, we're joined by two people who've just been elected to prestigious roles in science here in the UK. Professor Mike Edmunds has just become President-elect of the Royal Astronomical Societ…
00:47:25 |
Wed 02 Jun 2021
Revisting Venus
Last September, a team of scientists led by Professor Jane Greaves announced the detection of a rare gas, phosphine, in the atmosphere of Venus. With no plausible explanations of how it could be ther…
00:24:49 |
Thu 29 Apr 2021
Catching a Shooting Star
Where were you on 28th February 2021, just before 10pm? If you were in parts of Wales, or the west of England, you may have seen a bright flash streaking in the sky. This was a fireball - a bright ki…
00:38:58 |
Tue 30 Mar 2021
Astrobiology and Technosignatures
The idea of life elsewhere is not a new one. Hundreds of years ago it was assumed that there were beings everywhere, before such views were considered heretical, and the determination that places lik…
00:37:12 |
Wed 03 Mar 2021
The Martian Triple
Over the course of the next month, we'll see the arrival at Mars of not one, not two, but three spacecraft: Nasa’s Perseverance Rover, with its little helicopter Ingenuity; the Chinese Space Agency's…
00:50:17 |
Tue 02 Feb 2021
Review of the decade and Galactic dynamics
With the end of one of the craziest years in living memory, we start with astronomical reflections on the last 12 months - and how far we've come over the course of the last decade.
A new results ha…
00:26:06 |
Thu 31 Dec 2020
Watery Worlds and Tumbling Telescopes
A show of two halves, this month, starting with watery moons. One isn't so surprising - Jupiter's icy Europa. Known to have an ocean under the thick ice shell, models suggest that the plumes that hav…
00:38:15 |
Sat 28 Nov 2020
Asteroid Tagging and Stellar Spaghettification
Chris North and Edward Gomez give a round-up of the month in astronomy.
Towards the end of October, NASA's Osiris Rex spacecraft grabbed a sample from the asteroid Bennu. What happens next, and what…
00:30:14 |
Thu 29 Oct 2020
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