Walkabout the Galaxy

Live from MegaCon 2022 in Orlando, we team up with space reporter Brendan Byrne to discuss the image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, great discoveries in store with JWST, and the Ma…

Light gets redder as it climbs out of gravitational holes, and a star near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way conveniently demonstrates this beautifully. Join us for a discussion of gravit…

As Top Quark likes to say, "You wouldn't understand: it's an early universe thing". That's why he's so excited that there's a new window into the goings on at the dawn of time by using HD. No, not hi…

Science marches onward, and the next steps in planetary science aim towards the seventh planet from the Sun, which shall not be named, and Saturn's little moon with a big ocean, Enceladus. Join us fo…

Tiny fragments of the dinosaur-killing asteroid may have been found, preserved in amber, and new analysis of old data reveals a tiny, but potentially profound error in the mass of one of the fundamen…

Mars has a thin atmosphere, so little changes in the weather, even breezes, make big relative changes in how sound travels. We speculate on the sounds of future baseball game on Mars before turning t…

What if the stuff that makes up most of the stuff in the universe is so lightweight that you could barely call it stuff? Ultralight dark matter is one possible way to explain the puzzle of the very e…

We like to think we understand ordinary matter: the stuff we're familiar with that makes up stars, planets, and donuts. Sure Dark Energy and Dark Matter are mysterious, but the rest we have a handle …

We learn how binary star systems may create a second family of planets, Saturn's aurora may be powered by the ringed planet's high speed winds, and how thinking of planetary intelligence may guide fu…

A remarkably accurate test of general relativity confirms that not only does time run slower at your feet than at your head, but it runs slower at your eyes than your eyebrows. Plus, Psyche loses som…

How special is the Earth for having a large Moon, and what can it teach us about where to look for habitable planets? In this episode we explore new research on what kind of planets are likely to get…

The Astroquarks assemble to examine the mysterious of a star that is blocked out perhaps by a giant dust cloud. Meanwhile, the Sun is passing through a Local Bubble in the Milky Way that has triggere…

We welcome 2022 with a look at the future home of the James Webb Space Telescope - Earth's L2 Lagrange point, and an exploration of Lagrange points around the solar system. New research suggests the …

One of our favorite cosmological mysteries is why there is any stuff in the universe. We're here because there was a tiny fraction more matter than antimatter created. We learn about a new observatio…

We take a deep dive into toffee planets with The Planetary Guy, Dr. Paul Byrne, who helps us explore the myriad types of exoplanets that might be lurking out there, including some with eggshell crust…

On the eve of its long-anticipated launch, we explore one of the many areas of exploration of the JWST, the early universe after the birth of the first stars and the reionization of the interstellar …