Fraser Cain
Universe Today
Dr. Pamela Gay
CosmoQuest
Day by day, we’re losing our connection with the night sky. Already 1/3rd of humanity lives in so much light pollution that they can’t see the Milky Way without a drive. And now satellite constellations are adding additional light pollution, even in the darkest skies on Earth.
Today, we gaze into the future of space and astronomy. What upcoming missions and events are we excited about?
Pamela has told us in the most flowery terms about the diffuse dust across inner solar system. Leftover from the formation the inner planets. Well, it turns out, she was wrong. Super wrong. Time to update.
You’ve probably heard of dark matter and dark energy, but maybe you don’t fully understand what they are. Or maybe the idea itself just rubs you the wrong way and you’d like to know why scientists think they can just make stuff up like this. So you’d like to overturn cosmology? Here’s all you need to do.
Recent Episodes
This is our second installment in our series of student questions shows and these questions come to us from Curtis High School. Thanks to GLAST, Astronomy Cast is now able to provide equipment to send to high school teachers who want to Pamela and Fraser to do a...
After the big bang, all we had was hydrogen, a little bit of helium, and a few other trace elements. Today, we've a whole periodic table of elements to enjoy, from oxygen we breathe to the aluminium cans we drink from to the uranium that powers some people's homes....
Sometimes, we don't get to decide what our show's about. So many threads come together at the same time driving the decision for us. This is one of those situations. We've gotten so many questions from listeners in just the last week about antimatter that our show had...
We've been so crazy following our own whims through the universe that we've neglected your questions. That ends today. It's time to dig deep into our overflowing email box to retrieve the puzzling questions our listeners have sent in. Episode 73: Questions Show #8...
We're going to return back to a long series of episodes we like to call: Radiation that Will Turn You Into a Superhero. This time we're going to look at cosmic rays, which everyone knows made the Fantastic Four. These high-energy particles are streaming from the Sun...
When he put together his theories of relativity, Einstein made a series of predictions. Some were confirmed just a few years later, but scientists are still working to confirm others. And one of the most fascinating is the concept of gravitational waves. As massive...
Now that you've got your career in astronomy, obviously the next goal is to win a Nobel prize. We're here at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, which is just one tiny step that a person has to take before you get that Nobel prize. Before you get that...
Thanks to GLAST, Astronomy Cast is now able to provide equipment to send to high school teachers who want to Pamela and Fraser to do a special questions show just for their class. We will be making this shows available on the feed on days other than Monday (that's...
When it was first developed, the standard model predicted a collection of particles, and thanks to more and more powerful colliders, physicsists have been able to find them all except one: the Higgs-Boson. It's an important one because it should explain how objects...
This week we're going to study some of the most ancient objects in the entire Universe; globular clusters. These relics of the early Universe contain hundreds of thousands of stars, held together by their mutual gravity. Since they formed together, they give...
With all the enthusiasm that's being generated with astronomy, it's had a bit of a strange side-effect. We've been causing some of our listeners to have midlife crises about their careers. We've had other people who just want advice - they're moving into college for...
Astronomy is one of the few sciences where amateurs make meaningful contributions to discoveries. Many professional researchers work hand-in-hand with teams of amateurs to make discoveries that just wouldn't be possible without this kind of collaboration. In fact,...
All good things come to an end - we now find ourselves in the outer reaches of the solar system where our Sun is hard to distinguish from the other bright stars in the sky. But we're not done with the solar system, there's some stuff that's leftover. This week, we...
It's been a long journey, 64 episodes, but now we're back where we began: Pluto. Last time we talked about how Pluto lost its planethood status, so we won't go over all that again. This time we're going to talk about Pluto, its moons, the Kuiper belt, and the other...
We've reached Neptune, the final planet in our tour through the solar system - but don't worry! The tour's not over, but after this week we'll be all out of planets. Neptune has a controversial story about its discovery, some of the strongest winds in the solar system...
This week, we're on to the next planet in the solar system. We don't know a whole lot about this blue gas planet, but today we'll cover some of the neat stuff we do know, including it's faint rings, sideways axis of rotation and its rocky core - a first in the gas...
We know that delaying this show one more week would be too dangerous, so here you go: Saturn's moons. These are some of the most interesting objects in the Solar System, from the spongy Hyperion, to the geysers on Enceladus, to the rainy, misty, oceany Titan. They've...
It's about time for a question show again, so we'll have one last interruption to our planetary tour, to deal with the questions that arose from our inflation show. So if you still don't understand inflation, take a listen to this week's show and as always, send us...
Returning to our tour of the solar system, let's voyage away from the largest planet to the second largest, Saturn. Once again, we'll break up our visit because there's lots to talk about. This week, we talk about Saturn and its famous rings. Next week, we'll discuss...
We interrupt this tour through the solar system to bring you a special show to deal with one of our most complicated subjects: the big bang. Specifically, how it's possible that the universe could have expanded faster than the speed of light. The theory is called the...