Walkabout the Galaxy

The astroquarks remember Yuri Gagarin's historic first flight in this episode before zooming off to the galactic center to see what's what with the discovery of thousands of black holes packed into t…

What do Annihilation, Buckyballs, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and an itsy-bitsy galaxy have in common? They're all topics for the latest walkabout the galaxy with the astroquarks. A sma…

The astroquarks discuss the late Stephen Hawking's first major breakthrough in astrophysics: radiation from black holes, now known as Hawking Radiation and what that means about what would happen if …

Some things are hard to see, like black holes. In this episode of Walkabout the Astroquarks discuss a couple of new observations that help us see the earliest stars in the universe and the supermassi…

The Astroquarks welcome Dr. Phil Metzger, expert on the use of local materials on the Moon, asteroids, and Mars, to tell us about the prospects for prospecting in space. Find out how to build your Mo…

"Starman" in the Tesla Roadster is headed out past the orbit of Mars, and NASA has some cool new missions in the works for exploration of the solar system. One of those, Mars 2020, is the next high-t…

It's a satellite theme on this episode, with a sparkly disco ball in space, a long-lost scientific satellite tracked down by an amateur astronomy sleuth, and space trivia about all the junk in space.…

Clues to dark matter may be buried in the relics of the oldest stars in the galaxies. The old stars probably formed when the dark matter did, so their motions are probably similar. The astroquarks di…

Thank you Australia for giving us a meteorite called Bunburra Rockhole, and not just because the name is endlessly fun to say, but also because it hints at an origin from a missing asteroid. In this …

The astroquarks kick off the new year with a look at a clever and challenging new technique to detect gravitational waves created by supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, and maybe even…

While terrestrial matters were frequently dark and depressing, 2017 was a banner year for the cosmos, or at least for our understanding of it. From Cassini's Grand Finale to LIGO's detection of neutr…

Antimatter, the stuff that lets the USS Enterprise fly about the galaxy is the topic of this episode of Walkabout the Galaxy because it's made in your garden variety thunderstorm. Lightning strikes h…

Disappointed that we don't have jetpacks and flying cars? Dr. Amanda Hendrix joins the Astroquarks to suggest an alternative: colonize Saturn's moon Titan, where a thick atmosphere and weak gravity m…

Stars have a voracious appetite, gobbling up most of the stuff in their immediate neighborhood, leaving just a few scraps to make planets. Sometimes, though, even the planets do not escape the stella…

That asteroid is rogue, and that's hyperbolic, but not hyperbole. The astroquarks welcome Dr. Dan Durda to discuss the first detection of a planetary object passing through our solar system that defi…

If two neutron stars collide in a galaxy 130 million light years away and no one has a gravitational wave observatory to detect it, does it make a sound? Well, that's a silly question, but it happene…

The astroquarks welcome noted science blogger and author Dr. Ethan Siegel whose new book Treknology takes a look at the intersection of science and science fiction. While you may already have a table…

The astroquarks welcome WMFE space reporter Brendan Byrne who recounts his flight on the SOFIA airborne observatory. They hen vent about how the Nobel Prize committee has unaccountably once again pas…

How exactly (and why) does a spacecraft get a "gravitational assist" from a planet en route to another planet? Where does that energy come from? The Astroquarks take a look at gravity assists and the…

Josh recounts experiencing the end of the Cassini mission and recalls more than a quarter century of involvement with the project in this episode. Then the astroquarks take a look outward toward our …