Walkabout The Galaxy

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 unusual size but also its composition appears to have a huge amount of water that may be in liquid form. We'll also check in with Up Quark Hannah Sargeant in the Artemis Corner, and cover a lot of space news and trivia.

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 thousand years ago. This tells us how massive the star is and how far along it is in its evolution to a supernova. Closer to home, another clever bit of detective work gives a new history to ancient lunar craters by examining the Moon’s gravitational lumpiness. Cool!

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 star system in our own galaxy appears to be making a giant planet that’s less than two million years old, while the ages of distant galaxies observed by JWST are now a controversy. Catch up with us on all the latest and greatest space news and discoveries.

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 creation of three W bosons is a bit high. Do you ever feel that there’s something wrong with the world? Maybe the LHC is getting a glimpse of new physics. Join us for all that, space chorizo, and the Jeans length with a full set of four astroquarks.

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 define the edge of something as ordinary as a planetary system, like our own solar system. And from that discussion is born Gravity Man and Electromagnetism Woman! Tune in to learn more!

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 time in a stunning look back toward the big bang. Join us for a geek-out session over this amazing sneak preview of what is to come in the years ahead from this reminder that humans can do cool things too.

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 interesting crater produced by space debris, and a field of rogue stars lost in intergalactic space. 

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's atmosphere goes through dramatic seasonal pulses that may explain its odd, reddish polar cap, while Arrokoth has the density of a fluffy snowbank 30 km long. There's some crazy stuff out there.

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 outgassing on Io and the incredible hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris and its huge stellar eruptions. Plus, the European Space Agency is building a probe to hideout in space hoping to catch a passing rogue or long period comet. Join us for all that, plus space news and trivia.

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, to discuss the origin of a diffuse gamma ray glow from galactic central park as possibly due to a large population of pulsars. Also, don't forget the trivia and fake sponsors!

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 rover provides new insights into the generation of those famous Martian dust storms. Or haboobs.

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 Mars Insight lander going out with a quake, if not a bang.

A new type of nova has been confirmed. One million times fainter than a nova, these thermonuclear runaway explosions are confined to the polar regions of white dwarf stellar embers. Closer to home, researchers at the University of Florida have grown plants in lunar soil returned from the Apollo missions. Supply your own fertilizer. We have astro-historical-etymological trivia and sponsor message. 

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 gravitational redshift, a sci-fi discussion of time travel and body shifting, and a bit of Messier trivia.

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 high definition displays, but Hydrogen Deuteride! Oh boy, do we have fun with Deuteride on this episode. We also take a look at the crazy shuffling of planets in our own solar system, and much more.

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 for a review of the new directions for planetary science research in the next decade, space news, and Uranus trivia.

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 fundamental particles, the W boson. It's not all small, as we also take a look at the largest comet nucleus and the most powerful laser.

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 to a fortuitous glimpse of the light from an individual star when the universe was less than a billion years old.

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 early formation of supermassive black holes. We explore this and the intriguing origins of Ceres, and much more.

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 on. Or do we? The New Horizons mission adds to a growing puzzle about the Cosmic Optical Background, not to be confused with the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is a beast of an entirely different color!