Walkabout the Galaxy

Europa’s got miniature tectonic activity, and a dark matter candidate may real itself through micro-gravitational lensing events. Dr. Audrey Martin joins us to discuss the strange spectra of the Troj…

Artemis 1, the most powerful rocket to ever leave the Earth, is up and on its way to the Moon after more hydrogen leaks than we care to remember, and Up Astroquark Dr. Hannah Sargeant signs off on he…

The Mars Insight lander detected an impact that produced a stadium-sized crater on the red planet, and the 30-year magnetospheric mission Geotail comes to an end. An experiment deep underground on Ea…

Join us for a special reunion of all the astroquarks with a fresh look at some of our favorite topics, from hunting for biosignatures on Venus and plumes on Europa to the quivering of space-time meas…

We absolutely definitely have not seen any life on Mars. That said, new research suggests that over 3 billion years ago there may have been a certain kind of habitable climate on Mars for some little…

Astronomers have new evidence of the gaseous remnants of the supernova of a population III star from just 700 million years after the big bang. Speaking of big bangs, DART smacked Dimorphos and produ…

Humanity gets a bit of payback on asteroids for the rude destruction of the dinosaurs and almost all life on Earth 65 million years ago with the DART spacecraft’s successful impact on a teensy-weensy…

There are lots of explosions in this episode, beginning with the upcoming planned impact of the DART mission into a teeny-weeny asteroid to test planetary protection techniques. Then we take a look a…

The Astroquarks venture into the belly of the beast with our first live recording at the amazing DragonCon in Atlanta. Join us for a look ahead at upcoming Moon missions beyond Artemis, dragon trivia…

We take a journey to the Radius Valley to explore an exoplanet larger than the "Super Earths" and smaller than Neptune and Uranus. This one in particular is interesting not only because of its unusua…

We return to two of our favorite topics, the red giant star Betelgeuse, and of course the Moon. Some clever historical detective work has revealed that Betelgeuse was not red, but yellow, two thousan…

Lightning generally goes cloud to cloud or cloud to ground, but sometimes it shoots up to the ionosphere at the edge of space. We take a close look at strange lightning with lightning trivia. A baby …

Korea sends its first mission to the Moon, and Mars sent a very old piece of itself to Earth. Meanwhile, the Large Hadron Collider is finding more odd collisional products than expected: the rate of …

In this episode we explore clouds at the edge of space in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and discoveries of galaxies far more distant than we have seen before. We also explore why it’s so difficult to …

We survey the initial five data releases from the JWST, from squiggly lines showing the composition of a distant planet’s atmosphere, to turbulent star forming regions, and the depths of space and ti…

We’ve had more experience flying to the Moon than you might think, and done some odd things with it, like feeding it to cockroaches. Join us for a look at the history of flights to the Moon, an inter…

Journey with us to the far reaches of the outer solar system where we take a closer look at two small objects explored by New Horizons: Pluto's moon Charon and the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth. Charon…

What does Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io have in common with one of the largest stars in the galaxy? Both are belching sulfur compounds, though for very different reasons. We learn about sulfuric outgass…

Pulsars are becoming the astrophysical version of big collisions for planetary scientists: they are explaining, perhaps, more and more things. Tune into this episode, where we welcome back Adam LaMee…

The astroquarks talk haboobs. Unfortunately Jim is not with us to giggle, but Dr. Katariina Nykyri joins Strange and Charm to explain space weather and magnetospheric slingshots, and the Perseverance…