Walkabout the Galaxy

A thousand bonus Trekkie points for getting the reference of the title of this episode, and another 1000 points for connecting it to our main science topic (spoiler alert): voids in space. Space is v…

Supermassive black holes lurk in nearly every galaxy, and stellar-mass black holes are making news with mergers that we see with our gravitational wave observatories. But what about the black hole mi…

We're going back to Saturn! NASA has selected the Dragonfly mission to the planet-moon Titan to explore its atmosphere and carbon-rich chemistry with a dual quadcopter capable of flying several km at…

There is no center of the universe, no top or bottom (except for our astroquarks!), but all sorts of things in the universe have a definite handedness, and this includes fundamental particles, whose …

The universe began in a hot, dense state, as the song goes, and we can, oddly, see that heat from the thing that we are still in. The universe. Strange stuff. The radiation leftover form the big bang…

The astroquarks take a stroll through the extrasolar planetary zoo where there are new members of the close-to-Earth-sized club and a peculiar Neptune-y thingy orbiting super close to its star. Meanw…

NASA unveils a new accelerated timeline to get astronauts forward (not back, get it?) to the Moon in 2024 with the new Artemis program. The astroquarks bring you up to speed on the latest space explo…

The astroquarks discuss news about lunar quakes and Venus... volcanoes. But volcanoes doesn't rhyme with quakes, so I sacrificed alliteration for rhyming. Venus may be volcanically active, at least o…

From a human-made crater (well, spacecraft-made) on an asteroid, to the Moon-forming impact, to an accelerating pace of black hole merger detections, the astroquarks survey the latest news in astrono…

Scientists have been chasing methane on Mars for years. It's a slippery little molecule that doesn't stick around very long and has several biological (as well as non-biological) sources. The armada …

We discuss the dramatic first view of a black hole in a special episode recorded in front of a live audience. In addition to the Event Horizon Telescope's image, bonus nerd trivia, and an abundance o…

Just when you thought Dark Energy couldn't get any stranger, new measurements of the history of the expansion of the universe show an era well after the big bang and inflation but long, long ago when…

We are joined by asteroid expert and "b" quark Dr. Zoe Landsman to discuss the remarkable discovery by the OSIRIS-REx mission that the asteroid it is orbiting, Bennu, is spitting pebbles and rocks ou…

Our guest, André Bormanis, has spent a considerable amount of time thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence, as well as warp travel, holodecks, artificial life forms, and more. Having spent more …

Science Fiction great Joe Haldeman ("The Forever War", "Marsbound", "The Hemingway Hoax", "Worlds") joins the astroquarks for a wide-ranging discussion from microwave-plasma-grapes to cosmic rays, sc…

Sometimes it seems like you can't count on anything, and now the Earth's north pole is on the move at a dramatically accelerated rate, more than 30 miles per year. Of course, that's not the rotation …

The astroquarks welcome Professor Mohamed Noor from Duke University, author of "Live Long and Evolve" to talk about evolution of humans and aliens, interspecies sex, and what we can learn about the b…

Hold on to your solar system, the Milky Way may be in store for a galactic collision sooner than anticipated. And speaking of collisions, evidence from craters on the Moon as well as an apparent dear…

2019 began with the successful flyby of Ultima Thule (2014 MU69 - more on the name in the show!) by the New Horizons spacecraft, but there's much more to talk about, including a discovery of more Fas…

The astroquarks look back on a momentous year for space exploration and look ahead at what to expect in 2019. Strange and Charm will have payloads flying to space, and Saturn's rings will still be ar…