The Astrophysics Podcast

What kinds of things do neutron stars do? They can smash into each other, producing bright flashes of radiation and strong ripples in spacetime that can be detected across the universe! Or, a neutr…

Just how big can black holes get? Well, they can get super-massive! That is, millions to billions of times as massive as the sun. How do we know this? We've detected these supermassive black hole…

In this week's episode, Dr. Abigail Polin joins us to answer your questions from the internet, on a variety of topics tangentially related to astrophysics! Questions range from the basic and fundame…

A black hole is so dense, its gravitational field prevents anything from escaping, including light. You would think that would make them the "blackest" things in the universe; how in the world do we…

Up in Orion's shoulder sits Betelgeuse, a supergiant star near the end of its life. The surface of Betelgeuse has been roiling and pulsing for centuries, as long as humans have recorded its modulated…

What happens when a black hole eats up a star? Apparently a lot of things happen, and if you wait around awhile and look in the radio, even more things happen! Dr. Yvette Cendes tells us what it's …

Some things happen out in the universe that are too powerful to make in a lab. Other phenomena are so coherent and well-ordered, we can't figure out how they can be made without a lab! Fast radio b…

How do we know so much about supernovae, when all we see is this little point of light getting brighter and then dimmer over time? Given this minimal data, we can often say what type of star exploded…

How big a computer do you need to simulate a supernova? Or a planet being formed? Or a black hole swallowing gas? Many astrophysicists spend their time developing computational models to simulate …

What do black holes like to eat? Sometimes a steady diet of interstellar gas just isn't enough and a black hole needs to snack on a whole star. No judgment, we all get that way sometimes. But it c…

Our universe isn't just a static, unchanging backdrop. It is constantly changing in time and we now have the technology to image it over and over again to explore all those changes. This is called …

What would our solar system be like if we had two suns? Actually, this situation could be more common than you might think, as most stars are in binary systems. If a star is in a binary pair, how d…

What's the biggest thing in the universe, besides the universe itself? Well, stars live in galaxies, and galaxies live in large collections called galaxy clusters. Astronomers can study these titan…

For centuries, all that we have known about planets was confined to our own solar system, and its occasionally-changing number of planets (eight as of now). But in the past several decades, astronom…

Planets orbit stars, and moons orbit planets, so what orbits a supermassive black hole? Possibly a whole lot of stuff, including a gaseous disk, thousands of stars and more "normal size" black holes…

When a star explodes, it's not finished having an impact on its surroundings. For the next thousand years or so, we can still see it as a supernova remnant, when the explosion has expanded to large …

What is turbulence? You've probably experienced it before on a plane (or perhaps on a river) but you might not know precisely what it is. But turbulence is all around us, and in particular we find …

Astronomers deal with huge datasets, and they are about to get even bigger with the construction of the Vera Rubin Observatory. When you can detect a million supernovae per year, how do we make sens…

What are neutrinos and where do they come from? How do we know what's going on in the interior of a star when we can only see the surface? How does a paper get accepted into a scientific journal? We …

How did the galaxies form and how can we learn about them? Professor Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado, Boulder tells us how we use the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look back in tim…