Walkabout the Galaxy

Juno reveals a surprise about the interior of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, and the OG young variable star T Tauri is getting ready to fade from view thanks to its dusty neighbors to the south. Speakin…

The discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope keep coming. After showing that galaxies formed far earlier than we thought, we now have a better understanding of what was going on in the early u…

Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, orbit each other with gazes lovingly fixed on each other, held in place by a romantic tidal attraction. But Charon's large size has always been difficult to explai…

We kick off 2025 with oddities from quasi particles, to cosmic rays, to the moons of Pluto. What has mass when it moves in one direction and doesn't when it moves in another direction? How do thunder…

We know about extinct comets and active asteroids, but now we've got something in between: dark comets, whose orbits indicate cometary activity, but we can't see it! We'll get the scoop on these inte…

Top quark Jim Cooney explains why making big blobs is hard and how new observations are helping us understand how the universe made big immensely big blobs more commonly known as giant elliptical gal…

It's a good news bad news story with the detection of the neutrino fog. This signal from solar neutrinos may confound our search for certain dark matter candidates, but at least we know our detectors…

If you're speaking English, not Latin, do you really have to say "supernovae" instead of "supernovas"? Also, they are, in some sense, created equally: explosion of a white dwarf, but the outcomes are…

New observations contradict earlier studies about the possibility of another belt of comets orbiting the Sun twice as far away as Pluto. We'll take a look at what's what in the outer solar system and…

Join Strange and Down quarks for a close look at Trojan asteroids, the forgotten asteroids of the solar system. NASA's Lucy mission is en route to take our first close look at these denizens of the o…

We get a tour of our place in the grand cosmological scheme of things with new mapping of the local Basin of Attraction. Spoiler: also Jim's new stage name. And we explore the final frontier of In Si…

Original Top Quark Dr. Tracy Becker returns to her old stomping grounds to hang with the Walkabout crew and send Europa Clipper on its way to Jupiter. Join us for a preview of this mission's ambitiou…

We’ve got mini black holes as potential dark matter candidates and monstrous black holes spewing jets to cosmological scales. Who better than Top quark Jim Cooney to take us through these black holes…

Gravitational waves may provide a new way to observe supernovae in our own Milky Way galaxy and determine when they produce black holes and when they result merely in neutron stars. Closer to home, s…

Tiny samples brought back from the Moon hint at surprisingly recent volcanic activity. What's up with that?! Elsewhere in the galaxy, a detailed study of over 100,000 stars identifies the metallicity…

The Astroquarks are joined by former NASA astronaut, PhD Chemist, and retired USAF Colonel Cady Coleman at Dragon Con 2024 for a wide ranging discussion of space flight, institutional challenges, tra…

Recent (astronomically speaking, of course!) perturbations to Mimas's orbit may be the explanation for the surprising presence of a global subsurface ocean in this tiny moon of Saturn. Meanwhile, the…

When Frank Drake created his famous eponymous equation to estimate the number of advanced communicative civilizations in the Milky Way, we had little more than educated guesses for most of the factor…

The astroquarks assemble for their 365th episode, about 10 years after their first, with a look at a canceled mission to the Moon and tantalizing observations from an ongoing mission at Mars. The Per…