All eyes are on the Moon. We’re going back, this time to stay… right? One of the best resources on the Moon will be the lava tubes that crisscross the subsurface of the Moon. These can provide protection from space, and a look into the geologic history of the Moon. And they can be enormous.
As astronomers are finding even more new extrasolar planets, they’re starting to discover entirely new categories. There are classes of planets out there that we just don’t have any analog here in the Solar System. Let’s talk about them.
With a sample of asteroid Bennu firmly inside OSIRIS-REx’s return capsule, it’s time to bring this treasure home so scientists can study the composition and history of the space rock. But it’s not the only sample return mission out there, with Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission also bringing asteroid debris home. Today, let’s talk about the missions and what we’ve learned so far.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three brilliant researchers who worked out some of the secrets of black holes. Today we’re going to talk about the chain of discoveries that led to this award.
Did you hear the news? Nobel Prizes for black holes. We know there are stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes, but how do you get from one to the other? How do black holes get more massive?
You’d think that a white dwarf star is the end of a stellar life. It’s all downhill from there. A long, slow cool down towards the end of everything. But in some situations, even dead stars can get exciting again, briefly becoming some of the brightest objects in the Universe. And just maybe, the last exciting thing that ever happens in the Universe.
I’ve got some bad news for you: stars die. At some point in the next few billion years or so, our Sun is going to start heating up, using up all the fuel in its core, and then eventually die, becoming a white dwarf. It will then slowly cool down to the background temperature of the universe, becoming a black dwarf.
Have you heard the big news? Of course you have, evidence of phosphine on Venus which could be a biosignature of life on our evil twin planet. There have been a lot of surprising stories about Venus, so let’s get you all caught up.
Every two years or so, Mars lines up nicely with the Earth. It only takes two minutes to communicate with rovers, you can see the polar ice caps in a small telescope, and it’s the best time to send spacecraft to the red planet.
Not only have astronomers discovered thousands of exoplanets, but they’re even starting to study the atmospheres of worlds thousands of light-years away. What can we learn about these other worlds, and maybe even signs of life.
We’re all looking forward to the next generation of exoplanetary research, where we get to see pictures of planets directly. But astronomers are already making great strides in directly observing newly forming planets, helping us understand how our Solar System might have formed.
We’re familiar with regular binary stars. Two stars orbiting each other. Simple. Of course, the Universe has come up with every combination of things orbiting other things. And this week we look at the extreme version of this.
Discovering comets is one of the fields that amateurs can still make a regular contribution to astronomy. But more and more telescopes are getting found by spacecraft, automated systems and machine learning. This week, we’ll talk about how comets are discovered and how you can get your name on one.
As everyone knows, the Universe owes us a bright comet. There have been a lot of promising candidates, but in the end, they always fail to live up to our expectations. Comets keep on breaking up with us.
So much of our Solar System has been shaped by enormous collisions early on in our history. Seriously, the nature of every planet in the Solar System has some evidence of massive impacts during some point in its history.
You might be surprised to hear that we’ve never done an episode of Astronomy Cast featuring Betelgeuse. Well, good news, this is that episode. Let’s talk about the star, why it might be dimming, and what could happen if it explodes as a supernova.
A brand new telescope has completed on Maui’s Haleakala, and it has just one job: to watch the Sun in unprecedented detail. It’s called the Daniel K. Inouye telescope, and the engineering involved to get this telescope operational are matched by the incredible resolution of its first images.
For the longest time astronomers could only study the skies with telescopes. But then new techniques and technologies were developed to help us see in different wavelengths. Now astronomers can study objects in both visible light, neutrinos, gravitational waves and more. The era of multi-messenger astronomy is here.
This week we’re live at the American Astronomical Society’s 235th meeting in Honolulu, Hawai’i. We learned about new planets, black holes and star formation, but the big issue hanging over the whole conference is the protests and politics over the new Thirty Meter Telescope due for construction on Mauna Kea.
Before we discovered other planets, our Solar System seemed like a perfectly reasonable template for everywhere. But now we see massive planets close to their stars, which leads you to the question, how does it all get there. Do the planets form in place or do they migrate around?
Things used to be so simple. Comets were snowballs from the outer Solar System, and asteroids were rocks from the inner Solar System. But now everything’s all shades of grey. Astronomers have found asteroids that behave like comets and comets that behave like asteroids.
Once again, another place where the Universe is going to make this difficult for us. Proving, once and for all that there’s alien life on another world. It should be straightforward, look for biosignatures, but it looks like there are natural sources that could explain almost any chemical we could hope to search for.
As astronomers started to discover planets orbiting other stars, they immediately realized that their expectations would need to be tossed out. Hot jupiters? Pulsars with planets? We’re now decades into this task, and the Universe is continuing to surprise us.
How old are Saturn’s rings? They could be brand new, or they could be as ancient as the Solar System itself. Planetary scientists thought they knew the answer thanks to new data from Cassini, but new ideas are calling even that into question.
Thanks to all the work from Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx, astronomers are getting a much better look at the smaller asteroids in the Solar System. It turns out, they’re piles of rubble… but fascinating piles of rubble. Let’s talk about what we’ve learned so far.