syzygy
Join astronomer Dr Emily Brunsden and enthusiastic not-astronomer Dr Chris Stewart as they explore the universe.
- Update frequency
- every 13 days
- Average duration
- 47 minutes
- Episodes
- 135
- Years Active
- 2018 - 2025
s2e6: Experimental Extraterrestrial Exo-Observatory
According to one survey, around one-third of Australians think aliens not only exist, but have actually visited Earth. That's ... a bit fraction. In this final episode of season 2, we ask how we'd ev…
00:49:55 |
Sat 08 Mar 2025
s2e5: Exotelescope Expeditions
Exo-planets, sure. Exo-moons and -comets? Fine. But exo ... telescopes?! Emily is going out on a limb in this episode, expanding the definition of telescope to include things that measure stuff in sp…
00:56:56 |
Fri 17 Jan 2025
s2e4: Exoplanet Extrapolation
We know, we know — we did exoplanets last time. But that was the current state-of-play and a 2024 exoplanets wrapped update. In this episode, Emily looks to the future! She does a deep dive into the …
00:50:13 |
Fri 03 Jan 2025
s2e3: Exoplanets ExoWrapped
It couldn't be a season of exo-stuff without taking a good hard look at the current state of exoplanets, the OG exo-thing. Emily sums up the state of exoplanet research in 2024 — her Exoplanets 2024 …
00:56:54 |
Thu 19 Dec 2024
s2e2: Exocomet Excitation
Exoplanets, sure. Exo-moons too, apparently. But exo ... comets?! Yes indeed, they're a real thing, and we've known about them for *ages*! How do you spot something so tiny around another star, so fa…
00:57:57 |
Thu 28 Nov 2024
s2e1: Exomoon Expectation
Way, way back in the early epochs of Syzygy (ep 19 in Oct 2018 if you must know) we talked about the exciting prospect of spotting the first exomoon — a moon orbiting a planet orbiting a star that is…
00:55:33 |
Wed 13 Nov 2024
Introducing Syzygy Season Two!
A short announcement: Syzygy is now seasonal! From now on we're going to release the podcast in seasons, and we're excited to announce the imminent release of the first episode of Syzygy Season Two. …
00:01:40 |
Fri 08 Nov 2024
122: Syzygy Live! — The Power of Seeing It For Yourself
Live from York's Festival of Ideas*, in front of an audience of ... what, had to be a few hundred thousand people, right? ... Emily and Chris discuss some awesome astronomy that you can go outside an…
01:03:07 |
Fri 19 Jul 2024
121: Dark Bubbles of Weakness
A huge team of astronomers — and their even-huger team of tiny, fibre-obtic-wielding robots — are zeroing in on one of the great questions of cosmology: just what the heck is going on with Dark Energ…
00:49:37 |
Tue 04 Jun 2024
120: Biggest Small Black Hole
This week, a new Black Hole Record (kinda), and with it a nice conundrum. the GAIA mission has found the biggest black hole ... of the stellar-mass variety ... in our galaxy. A lot of caveats there, …
00:48:31 |
Mon 29 Apr 2024
119: Astrocampus Turns Ten!
We're live from the 10th birthday celebrations for the University of York's Astrocampus, Emily's home turf and all-round fabulous teaching and outreach space. Emily fields some amazing questions from…
00:47:30 |
Thu 18 Apr 2024
118: Sextuplet Symphony
After some lengthy follow-up (the Bennu sample is open at last! And SLIM is alive!), Emily investigates possibly the most podcasty story we’ve had on the show: six planets around distant star HD11006…
01:01:25 |
Tue 30 Jan 2024
117: SLIM chance of Moon landing?
Emily and Chris tune in to JAXA’s livestream of SLIM — the Smart Lander for Investigating and Moon — as it attempted to slick the landing on the lunar surface on Friday 19 January 2023. We were prepa…
01:07:38 |
Tue 23 Jan 2024
116: Black Hole Sun
Long-time Syzygy listener Jack asks: "Hey Emily — what's the deal with quasi-stars?" (We're paraphrasing). Quasi-stars are hypothetical, enormous stellar-object-thingies that might have formed shortl…
01:01:48 |
Mon 15 Jan 2024
115: Zevatron in the Void
Astronomers routinely detect cosmic rays, the high-energy particles from space that collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a shower of secondary particles that rain down on the eart…
00:52:38 |
Fri 08 Dec 2023
114: A Burst of Tellurium
We've talked BOATs before — cosmic events that are the Brightest Of All Time — and it's always a favourite topic on the show. Recently astronomers analysed the runner-up BOAT in the Burster category,…
00:50:04 |
Tue 21 Nov 2023
113: White Dwarf Destiny
We love it any time a listener gets in touch — but the *best* is when a listener suggests a topic for an episode of the podcast. So when Zofia Szczesna got in touch (through the Syzygy website, natch…
00:54:42 |
Mon 06 Nov 2023
112: Unexpected JuMBOs
JWST is flinging out Just Wonderful observations at great speed, many already leading to new astronomical insights. Here's one that was really unexpected: the Orion Nebula is full of JuMBOs! Jupiter-…
00:58:34 |
Mon 09 Oct 2023
111: Special Asteroid Delivery
Earth got a special delivery recently: a little pod plonked down in the Utah desert, containing a few hundred grams sampled from the surface of an asteroid. This isn't the first sample return mission…
00:43:35 |
Mon 02 Oct 2023
110: Euclid's Five Big Questions
It’s always nerve-wracking waiting for a very expensive new space telescope to launch — the whole mission can literally end in a highly explosive blink of an eye. Fortunately for the Euclid mission t…
01:01:54 |
Wed 13 Sep 2023
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