An irreverent and informative tour of the latest, greatest, and most interesting discoveries in astronomy.
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Strange and Top are at it again with a deep dive on the physics, psychology, and philosophy of the big questions: is there technologically advanced life out there in the galaxy, and if so, we will ever know? Will we make it out of the solar system, and if so, what would that look like? Join us for all that and a physics question disguized as a trivia question.
Supermassive have such voracious appetites that they create an energetic mess when eating which has a tendency to shoot their food off at very high speeds. New observations show the second course for these monsters as material falls back into them. A rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone has a confirmed atmosphere, checking another box for finding worlds that may have life. Join us for a whimsical…
Quasars, the energetic engines driven by the voracious appetite of supermassive black holes, have been observed in the very early universe, upending ideas about how long it took to form these behemoths in the first place. New results on a peculiar object tagging along around the Sun with the Earth casts doubt on its origin as a possible fragment of the Moon. And the climate takes a swipe at…
The astroquarks examine the oft-asked question of why the Moon sometimes looks huge and other times, not so much, and we take a look at the cool mission to grapple and boost the NASA Swift space telescope into a higher orbit. Plus, new observations reveal that the sky is much brighter at radio wavelengths than previously assumed, teaching us something about the population of free electrons. Join…
OG Top Quark Tracy Becker joins us with an update on water plumes from Jupiter's moon Europa, plus intriguing new data of interstellar comet 3I shows it is even older than we thought, with an age approaching that of the Milky Way galaxy itself. A new field of tektites has been discovered, pointing to a previously unknown major impact on the Earth. Join us for all this, space news, trivia and more.
Exquisitely detailed measurements of the ripples in spacetime from the mergers of black holes now show that some of these merging black holes were, themselves, created by an earlier black hole merging event. While this had been suspected to take place, we now have clear evidence of it. On a less dramatic scale but much closer to home, new simulations of the early solar system suggest the large…
Mysterious bright blue flashes from relatively empty parts of the universe have a new possible explanation involving, what else, black holes. We explore this new idea to explain Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients (LFBOTs) with black hole collisions, take a peek at the black hole in our own Milky Way, and discuss some puzzling observations of two of the rings of Uranus. Plus, we have a stupid…
A Plutino, an object that shares Pluto's orbit but which is much smaller than Pluto, appears to have a very thin global atmosphere. We discuss the detection and how such a small body could hold onto even a thin atmosphere, as well as a new model that describes many of Saturn's peculiarities with a recent collision between its big moon Titan and a precursor to the sponge-y moon Hyperion. Join us…
Gravitational waves and light combine to reveal what is suspected to be a superkilonova which is much cooler than the name suggests. Cool in the cool way, not the temperature way. Learn about splitting neutron stars and, in our Artemis II recap, we revisit the highs (awesome mission, great astronauts) and lows (broken space toilet) of the mission that took people a record distance from the Earth,…
Gravitational Wave observatory LIGO has seen a signature that looks like the merger of primordial (pre-stellar, big bang (not big band!) era) black holes. If confirmed with future observations, this would tell us a lot about the early universe and potentially shed light on dark matter. Finally! Plus, closer to home, the BLOBs in the Earth's mantle help us untangle the complicated past of our…
