The Star Spot

Feature Guest: Jason Dittmann

Just last month, April 2017, astronomers announced the discovery of an extrasolar planet that has the best shot at harbouring life outside our solar system. To find out …

Feature Guest: Michael Hudson

If you’re like most people you probably think of galaxies as islands of stars, separate and isolated cities of our universe. But it turns out these cities are connected …

Feature Guest: Quinn Konopacky

The 14th annual Expanding Canada’s Frontiers symposium was hosted on January 27th, 2017 by the Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, a student group based at the Uni…

Feature Guest: David Kipping

The 14th annual Expanding Canada’s Frontiers symposium was hosted on January 27th, 2017 by the Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, a student group based at the Unive…

Feature Guest: Gurtina Besla

The 14th annual Expanding Canada’s Frontiers symposium was hosted on January 27th, 2017 by the Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, a student group based at the Unive…

Feature Guest: Paul Sutter

Imagine travelling a very long way in space only to return just where you started, but upside down.  Or consider living in an exotic donut-shaped universe, or one with far …

Feature Guest: Terry Kucera

We see it there in the sky every day of our lives. And yet our own local star, the sun, is still in many ways a mystery. What causes the solar cycle? How does the sun’s ou…

Feature Guest: Matt Malkan Was the early universe green? That’s the startling discovery by a team of UCLA astronomers studying the youngest galaxies in our universe. Why green? That’s what I’ll try t…

Feature Guest: Suzanna Nagy

Suzanna Nagy is President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Vancouver Centre. In May 2016 she took advantage of a rare and unusual aerial phenomena - a clear s…

Feature Guest: Dan Werthimer

Physicist Enrico Fermi once asked, if aliens exist in the galaxy, then just where is everybody. And for nearly 40 years the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or S…

Feature Guest: Roberto Abraham

Imagine a galaxy that has a similar mass and volume to our own but where somebody turned off most of the stars. Meet Dragonfly 44, the most famous member of a new categ…

Feature Guest: William Sparks

Extraterrestrial life might be erupting into space from the surface of Europa. And a NASA mission to the icy world could fly right through it. Today I’m joined here at T…

Feature Guest: Shawn Bishop

We’ve long known we’re made of star stuff, but now it turns out that life on Earth might be even more intimately connected to events in deep space than we imagined. Scient…

Feature Guest: Nico Hamaus

Astronomers are no longer avoiding the void. Between the overdense zones of our universe, where most galaxies live, there exist vast regions of near emptiness that can stre…

Feature Guest: Gerardo Aldana

No the ancient Maya did not predict the end of the world. But they were among the world’s most advanced astronomers. Now some anthropologists believe they’ve found evide…

Feature Guest: Guillem Anglada-Escudé

Recently headlines buzzed with news of the discovery of the nearest exoplanet that we will ever find. And it looks like it could very well be habitable. Proxima …

Feature Guest: Ludovic Van Waerbeke

Large scale surveys of the universe are quickly becoming key to making new discoveries at the cutting edge of astronomy. Case in point is the Cosmic Evolution Surv…

Feature Guest: Zachary Fejes

Imagine a starship that could take us out into the galaxy. Meet Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit foundation working to achieve interstellar travel by the year 2100. Is th…