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
49: The Syzygy Planet Hunter's Guide
Some planets are easy to spot — Venus, for example, the morning star, the evening star. Others take a bit more effort to see with the naked eye, like Mercury, Mars, Jupter and Saturn. Uranus and Nept…
01:06:04 |
Wed 06 Nov 2019
48: Wobbly Stars & Exoplanets
Syzygy is all about Emily this week, as her own field of asteroseismology comes to the fore: turns out, wobbly stars can tell us a lot about exoplanets! Studying starquakes can improve our knowledge …
00:45:00 |
Sat 26 Oct 2019
47: The Milky Way Explodes!
A big win for astrophysics in the 2019 Nobel Prizes. And the new discovery that, not so long ago, the centre of the Milky Way galaxy exploded with stupendous energy, lighting up a region of our local…
00:35:45 |
Sat 19 Oct 2019
46: Dark Energy And The End Of The Universe
A century ago, Einstein had a conundrum: his brand new General Theory of Relativity, explaining gravity as warped space-time, predicted a universe either expanding or contracting — yet the cosmos see…
00:49:33 |
Fri 11 Oct 2019
45: Biggest Neutron Star Ever!
Neutron stars are weird — big balls of super-dense, stupidly energetic, rapidly rotating nuclear splodge. They're stars that, after running out of fusion fuel, have collapsed beyond the Quantum Elect…
00:46:20 |
Mon 07 Oct 2019
44: Waterworld?
Astronomers have found an exoplanet that is in its star's habitable zone, is (sorta) Earth-sized, and has water on it! ZOMG it's Earth 2.0! Alien life!! Woah there — not so fast with the hyperbole, S…
00:38:33 |
Fri 27 Sep 2019
43: Moss Piglets in Spaaace!
Did humans contaminate the Moon earlier this year? Israel sent a lander to the Moon back in April 2019 which, sadly, crashed as it attempted to land. On board, as it happens, was an archive of human …
00:38:22 |
Fri 20 Sep 2019
World's First Trans-Galactic Podcast!
We said we'd do it, and we did! On Monday 9 September Emily and Chris broadcast Episode 42 across the galaxy to the red-giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion.
Sure, it'll take 640-ish …
00:07:43 |
Mon 09 Sep 2019
42: Life, The Universe, And Everything
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a whimsical, silly, very funny and superbly inaccurately numbered trilogy of five books by Douglas Adams. The books chronicle the adventures of hapless ape-des…
00:48:15 |
Mon 09 Sep 2019
Teaser: a special Ep 42 event
Episode 42 is coming up, and this is a little heads-up. If that number has any significance to you, then you're our people! We're talking Life, the Universe and Everything, and we have a very special…
00:02:48 |
Mon 02 Sep 2019
(Live) The Great Syzygy Space Off!
Emily and Chris compete for fame, glory and nerd points in the first ever Great Syzygy Space Off! Recorded in front of a very large, very patient and very generous audience at York's Micklegate Socia…
00:53:09 |
Tue 13 Aug 2019
41: Cosmic Microwave Background (Scopes on a Balloon!)
When Chris found out in episode 36 that there was a telescope on an aeroplane, he was joking when he suggested they should try putting one on a balloon. Turns out, that's a real thing — and it leads …
00:53:00 |
Sun 28 Jul 2019
40: One Giant Leap
Fifty years ago, a human in a big puffy suit stepped off the bottom rung of a ladder and onto the surface of another world for the first time. Chris and Emily ponder the meaning of that moment, for o…
01:05:29 |
Sun 21 Jul 2019
39: Ridiculously Large Telescopes
Telescopes — can they every be big enough? With news of serious progress on the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, Emily and Chris natter about Astronomy's truly big optical scopes. First there were …
00:47:39 |
Sun 30 Jun 2019
38: Blue Twinkly Supergiants
Our Sun is a star, and because it's so close and familiar, we think that's what stars are like. But there are loads of different kinds of stars out there — small ones, cold ones, hot ones, wobbly one…
00:34:00 |
Fri 14 Jun 2019
37 (supplemental): Syzygy Film Club!
Come to Syzygy LIVE! 23 May in York, UK — check the show notes.
While recording ep. 37, Emily and Chris had a vent about a few astro-related (or astro-adjacent) hollywood movies of recent years: Gra…
00:04:16 |
Tue 14 May 2019
37: Crazy Donut Moon Theory
Come to Syzygy LIVE! 23 May in York, UK — check the show notes.
Feels like we really should understand where the Moon came from — it's so close, so connected to the Earth, so ... obvious in the sky!…
00:41:57 |
Sat 11 May 2019
36: Scopes On A Plane!
Not long after the big bang started to fade, and the glowing-hot early universe cooled down a bit, things started to clump together. Not planets, stars and galaxies — smaller, much smaller.
First, a…
00:35:49 |
Fri 03 May 2019
35: THAT Black Hole Image
We took an image of a Black Hole!
OK, we know, we know — we're a little late to the party. But we go in deep on this acclaimed image from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, to find out what …
00:46:58 |
Tue 23 Apr 2019
34: This System's Got Everything!
We're either just about to add the 4000th exoplanet to our catalogues, or we've already just done it, depending on whether you believe NASA or the Europeans. Either way — exoplanets galore!
So in th…
00:34:12 |
Fri 05 Apr 2019
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