Walkabout the Galaxy

The galaxy has been making rocky planets for longer than we thought, and a new study shows us how black holes can tell us just how symmetric the universe is using a bumblebee field. You’ll have to li…

We welcome special guest Heather Archuletta, a NASA pillownaut, who tells us what it's like to spend weeks simulating space travel in a slightly inverted bed. While time may have seemed to slow down …

A planetary explorer in deep space turns its eyes outward and faints a brighter glow from distant galaxies than expected, while an alternative theory to dark matter suffers a blow. (Natural) radio em…

Astrometry, what is it good for? Among other things it tells us where the heck we are, and that turns out to be only 25,000 light years away from the monster black hole at the center of the galaxy. C…

We are not only star stuff, we are also Big Bang stuff! We learn about how the formation of deuterium in the first few minutes after the Big Bang has left a lingering mark on the universe and each of…

Learn about a catastrophic merger of neutron stars that resulted in a weird beast known as a magnetar. Also, your Astroquarks take a look at a new model for geysers on Jupiter's moon Europa, and chal…

A Fast Radio Burst (we like to call them Furbies) has been seen coming from a highly magnetic neutron star right here in our own galactic backyard. A new analysis of Kepler data tells us how many of …

Charm quark Addie Dove is over the Moon about the announcement that water molecules have been found in minerals all over the lunar surface. We also take a look back at our friend the Philae lander wh…

Join us for a behind-the-scenes blow-by-blow discussion of the activities of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission as it made contact with the asteroid Bennu and captured a sample of material from the ancient so…

We celebrate the Nobel Prize in Physics for Roger Penrose and Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for discoveries about black holes, but Strange quark has some grievances to air about the Netflix show Aw…

A nifty story about complexity from the simplicity of gravity helps reveal the origins of the comets in the Oort Cloud and explain their current distribution. If that's not far out enough, we also ta…

New research shows that Enceladus's ocean may have produced geysers at different locations on the small moon in the past, and the odd shapes of stellar remnants known as planetary nebulae finally get…

With all the excitement about the potential discovery of a biomarker, Phosphine, on Venus, we take a close look at the observations with Venus expert Dr. Brad Sandor who explains the challenges and p…

Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Mary Robinette Kowal joins us for a wide ranging discussion from her Lady Astronauts novels to her work as a puppeteer and writing mentor. We also have math profe…

The astroquarks go to DragonCon in this special edition of Walkabout the Galaxy. We review the latest gravitational wave discovery of the biggest small black hole seen to date and the surprising abun…

The astroquarks delve into the interiors of White Dwarfs, the relics of sunlike stars, with the help of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And the Mars Insight lander collected some intriguing …

Ceres, whatever you want to call it, seems to have a bunch of salty water near its surface. Top quark gets worked up about planet nomenclature, while Strange and Charm get worked up about how Top pro…

Low mass stars and high mass planets are the talk of the astroquarks in this episode, featuring a close-up look at the weather on Jupiter and a revisit to just what kind of stars provide the star stu…

Deep in the interior of the Sun all the energy that supports life on Earth is created by fusing hydrogen into helium. For the first time, neutrinos produced by the relatively rare CNO fusion process …

The asteroid really did kill the dinosaurs, but the universe seems to be hiding something deeper and more mysterious from us about how it evolves. Closer to home, the European Solar Orbiter reveals a…