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
33: Goldilocks Zones around Binary Stars
We wish York’s Astrocampus a very Happy 5th Birthday, and welcome our very first guest star to the podcast: Bethany Wootton, recent graduate who has published an actual, proper research paper from he…
00:38:04 |
Thu 21 Mar 2019
32: A Mysterious Box of Asteroid Stuff
Right now, the Japanese space agency JAXA has a spacecraft, Hayabusa2, in orbit around a near-earth asteroid called Ryugu — and they're doing some crazy stuff up there.
First, they're shooting it wi…
00:38:39 |
Fri 15 Mar 2019
31: LIGO Gets An Upgrade
If space-time can curve, then it can also wiggle. Spotting those wiggles, turns out, is *really hard*.
A hundred years ago or so, Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity which said that s…
00:57:20 |
Fri 22 Feb 2019
30: Stardust, or Cosmic Poo?
Happy International Year of the Periodic Table, everyone! We’re celebrating 150 years since Mendeleev brought some order to the unruly mess of the elements of matter, organising all of the types of a…
00:39:31 |
Fri 15 Feb 2019
29: The Serendipitous Rings of Saturn
Saturn. There's no denying, it's gorgeous. And for 13 years the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, a joint mission by NASA, the ESA and the ASI, orbited the ringed planet, sending back stunning images of th…
00:39:05 |
Fri 08 Feb 2019
28: All Exoplanets Are Exciting
We're back for 2019! Welcome to another year of awesome astronomy. In this episode we chat about the Super Wolf Blood Moon (a.k.a. "January-lunar-eclipse-that-was-slightly-bigger-than-average") and t…
00:46:16 |
Fri 25 Jan 2019
27: Up A Mountain In NZ
Emily went back to New Zealand for Christmas. Chris is in Yorkshire. One of them is surrounded by summer sunshine and Middle-Earth mountains. One of them ... isn't. Emily reports from the final day o…
00:23:16 |
Tue 25 Dec 2018
26: How To Build A Solar System
The Earth and the Sun and all the other planets feel like familiar friends who've been around forever. Wind the clock back a few billion years though, and things were very different. The infant Sun w…
00:40:42 |
Wed 19 Dec 2018
25: Picture The Sky
Ever since early humans gazed in wonder at the majesty of the night sky, astronomy has been a particularly visual science. Modern astronomers deal in vast quantities of data, measuring the cosmos wit…
00:48:53 |
Mon 10 Dec 2018
24: Black Holes Feeding On Colliding Galaxies
There are a lot of galaxies in the universe — billions and billions of them, in fact. And many of them are in the process of collision: some collided long ago, some are merging right now, and some wi…
00:38:30 |
Fri 23 Nov 2018
23: Syzygy Live! from YorNight 2018
A very special live event from YorNight 2018, the University of York's celebration of research at beautiful King's Manor. We talked about exoplanets — that is, planets around other stars — and Emily …
00:41:24 |
Mon 19 Nov 2018
22: How To Measure The Universe
We've been so comfortable throwing around facts like "the Sun is 8 light seconds away" and "the nearest star is 4 light years away", it's easy to forget that measuring cosmic distances isn't as simpl…
00:48:44 |
Fri 09 Nov 2018
21: BepiColombo goes to Mercury
Mercury: closest planet to the Sun, a small, uninteresting lump of rock ... or, an enigma, with a strange tidally-locked orbit, a core that's way too big, and a mysterious origin story that astronome…
00:45:45 |
Fri 02 Nov 2018
20: Photo of a Black Hole
At the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy lies a super-massive black hole. We know it's there, we can detect its effects on the galaxy and see nearby stars whipping around it at high speed. Last year, a …
00:38:18 |
Fri 26 Oct 2018
19: Moons, Exomoons & Moonmoons
The Kepler mission found loads of exoplanets, and now astronomers are digging deeper into the data in the search for exo*moons* around those planets. All of which sends Chris and Emily on a deep dive…
00:42:55 |
Fri 19 Oct 2018
18: Mysterious Planet 9
We're back from our summer hiatus with an appropriately Hallowe'eny story about a goblin. Or rather, The Goblin, a tiny lump of rock far out in the Solar System that might just point to the existence…
00:40:50 |
Fri 12 Oct 2018
17: Quantum Conspiracy Theory
Summer holidays are over, though Emily is still running around overseas enjoying the astronomer lifestyle. So Chris shares a story that tickled him this week, about a bunch of physicists and astronom…
00:12:02 |
Fri 28 Sep 2018
Episode 16: Einstein at the Heart of the Galaxy
There’s a monster deep in the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. Even though we can’t see it, we know it’s there ... because it has to be.
Over two decades, astronomers have pointed very large telescope…
00:37:36 |
Fri 10 Aug 2018
Episode 15: A Salty Lake on Mars
Stop me if you've heard this one before: astronomers announced in July that they'd found water on Mars.
No, seriously. I know they've said something that sounds like that before, but this is differe…
00:34:19 |
Fri 03 Aug 2018
Episode 14: Total Eclipse of the Moon
Around 9pm (local UK time) on Friday 27 July 2018, the full moon will rise over the horizon. But this full moon will be a bit special: it’ll be a deep red colour, because we’re going to experience a …
00:37:43 |
Thu 26 Jul 2018
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