The astronomy and space exploration podcast
…
continue reading
A talk show about the new age of baseball. Bringing the conversation from the industry leaders to the everyday player. Hosted by Justin Gervais of @gervais_baseball and Coach Gary Trottier of @coachtrott.
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 185: Did a Supernova Cause a Mass Extinction?, with Brian Fields
41:51
41:51
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
41:51
Feature Guest: Brian Fields By now we are all familiar with the theory that an asteroid brought to an end the age of the dinosaurs, a period of domination that had lasted 167 million years. But asteroids are not the only harbingers of doom that lurk in the darkness of space. Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by Brian Fields, whose research t…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 184: The Milky Way's First Fast Radio Burst, with Sandro Mereghetti
41:06
41:06
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
41:06
Feature Guest: Sandro Mereghetti Fast radio bursts are a new mystery in astronomy. These highly energetic events of unknown origin were first discovered in 2007 out in deep space. Now a team is reporting the first fast radio burst to emanate from our own Milky Way Galaxy. Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by Sandro Mereghetti, whose team is …
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 183: COVID-19 Meets the NASA Space Apps Challenge, with James Slifierz
38:33
38:33
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
38:33
Feature Guest: James Slifierz The NASA Space Apps Challenge is a feverish annual hackathon engaging teams of coders, scientists and storytellers around the world. Each year thousands of participants in over 75 countries compete to solve real-world problems in Earth and in space. As the Challenge celebrates its 10 year anniversary it faces one of th…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 182: Planet Nine or Black Hole One, with Jakub Scholtz
40:21
40:21
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
40:21
Feature Guest: Jakub Scholtz We’ve long believed that membership in the solar system’s planetary family was limited to those eight planets we learned about in grade school. But then astronomers began to raise the possibility of a new super-Earth-sized planet, five to ten times the mass of Earth, orbiting far off in the outer solar system. Now if yo…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 181: Reports of Betelgeuse’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, with Emily Levesque
41:30
41:30
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
41:30
Feature Guest: Emily Levesque In December 2019, amateur and professional astronomers held their breath as the red supergiant Betelgeuse started dimming beyond anything on record, a sign the behemoth might be preparing to go supernova. But over the ensuing few months, things seemed to be returning to normal for this fascinating star. To solve the my…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 180: Wormholes through Space and Time, with John Cramer
51:18
51:18
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
51:18
Feature Guest: John G. Cramer They are the stuff of science fiction, but wormholes are also the subject of intense scientific debate. Can wormholes provide a mechanism for faster than light travel through space and, even more intriguing, do they open the door to travel through time? Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by one of the world’s for…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 179: Dreams of Floating Cities, with Geoffrey Landis
28:05
28:05
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
28:05
Feature Guest: Geoffrey A. Landis When we think of terraforming, we probably envision turning the Red Planet blue. But Mars isn’t the only world in our solar system that ambitious scientists have considered transforming. Imagine a network of floating cities in the clouds of Venus, or sailing ships plying the oceans of a newly thawed moon in the out…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 178 Sibling Rivalry at the Centre of the Galaxy, with Smadar Naoz
42:44
42:44
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
42:44
Feature Guest: Smadar Naoz We’ve long known that most galaxies contain at their core a supermassive black hole that can be millions of times the mass of the sun. But now researchers are discovering galaxies with more than one supermassive black hole at their centre. To understand the implications of this discovery and what it could mean about the h…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 177: The Case of the Missing Dark Matter, with Guo Chi
33:56
33:56
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
33:56
Feature Guest: Guo Qi Dark matter vastly overshadows ordinary matter in our universe. Wherever astronomers turn their telescopes they find galaxies dominated by dark matter. But all that changed recently with the first discoveries of dwarf galaxies suspiciously deficient in dark matter. To make sense of this baffling finding and how it relates to o…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 176: Second Genesis, with Jay Melosh
43:54
43:54
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
43:54
Feature Guest: Jay Melosh If we should find creatures crawling around Titan or swimming under the ice sheets of Europa or Enceladus, they will almost certainly turn out to be the result of a second genesis, those creatures truly alien in the most profound sense. That startling conclusion follows from a series of groundbreaking simulation that found…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 175: The Truth is Out There (at the University of Manitoba)
41:46
41:46
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
41:46
Feature Guest: Shelley Sweeney The University of Manitoba has just acquired the largest collection of UFO related material. Prominent Canadian ufologist Christ Rutkowski has made a donation of over 30,000 documents, photos, artifacts and government reports, including files relating to the famous 1967 Falcon Lake Incident, involving a purported phys…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 174: Fuzzy Dark Matter, with Lachlan Lancaster
33:21
33:21
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
33:21
Feature Guest: Lachlan Lancaster Quantum mechanics is strange. Until recently we could comfort ourselves with the belief that its odd properties were safely confined to the world of the microscopic. But what if quantum mechanical effects were suddenly magnified to cosmological scales. Imagine the quantum mechanical interference pattern spread acros…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 173: Discovering an Ancient Oasis, with William Rapin
43:44
43:44
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
43:44
Feature Guest: William Rapin Welcome to Sutton Island, here in the middle of a beautiful and rugged landscape consisting of shallow lakes filled with salts and minerals. It’s a common vista on this world, and while the world in question is not our home, ancient Mars may well have been someone’s home. Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by Will…
…
continue reading
Feature Guest: Sherry Suyu The Hubble constant, which measures the expansion rate of the cosmos, may not be a constant after all, and if that’s true it means we’re missing something big in our understanding of the universe. Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by Sherry Suyu, who leads the aptly named H0LiCOW project which uses the phenomenon o…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 171: Ploonets: When Moons Go Rogue, with Jorge Zuluaga
41:49
41:49
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
41:49
Feature Guest: Jorge Zuluaga Astronomers have yet to confirm a single detection of an exomoon, that is a moon orbiting a planet outside our solar system. Now it turns out at least part of the explanation is that we may have been looking in the wrong place all this time. Introducing ploonets. No, I did not just mispronounce the word planet. Today we…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 170: The Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts, with Vikram Ravi
42:24
42:24
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
42:24
Feature Guest: Vikram Ravi They come to us from deep space. They last a tiny fraction of a second. They contain as much energy as the sun’s total output in 80 years. Yet we still haven’t figured out what causes these so-called Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs. I don’t want to say it’s aliens, but... no, it’s probably not aliens. Today we’re joined here at…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 169: Science at the Limits (Part 2)
46:53
46:53
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
46:53
Feature Guest: Dan Falk Scientists are finding themselves increasingly squeezed between academics sounding the limits of science and a public increasingly taken in by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Today we conclude our review of science under attack with science writer Dan Falk. Current in Space NASA is looking to make space exploration a …
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 168: Celebrating Apollo + Science at the Limits (Part 1)
38:22
38:22
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
38:22
Feature Guest: Dan Falk Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by science writer Dan Falk. We’ll start today’s interview with a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landing of humans on the moon and the internationalism of that critical moment. But then, 50 years after this triumph of science, we’re going to confront head on a set of old …
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 167: Current in Space + The Best of The Star Spot: Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt
31:30
31:30
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
31:30
Feature Guest: Brian Schmidt Today we offer a best of from our vault here at The Star Spot. We dug back to a fan favourite, our December 2014 interview with Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, who won the biggest prize in science for discovering the accelerating universe. The 1929 discovery of the expanding universe by Edwin Hubble forever changed our pi…
…
continue reading
Welcome to the Chatter Box Podcast hosted by Coach Justin Gervais of @gervais_baseball and Coach Gary Tottier @coachtrott!
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 166: Nanodiamonds are Forever, with Jane Greaves
28:07
28:07
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
28:07
Feature Guest: Jane Greaves Remember that nursery rhyme, “Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky?” Well they were on to something, because it turns out diamonds - albeit nanodiamonds - are ubiquitous across the Milky Way galaxy. So-called diamond dust is even here in our own solar system. Today we’re joined at The Star Spot by Profes…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 165: Landing on Europa, with Cynthia Phillips
52:33
52:33
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
52:33
Feature Guest: Cynthia Phillips In the 1970s, the Viking landers performed historic experiments aimed at detecting life in the Martian soil. The results were disappointing although to this day still not entirely conclusive. Now over 40 years later a new lander with a next generation set of life detection equipment is under assessment by NASA. This …
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 164: Jupiter's Ancient Odyssey, with Simona Pirani
33:30
33:30
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
33:30
Feature Guest: Simona Pirani The planet Jupiter occupies a position today that is far from its home 4.5 billion years ago, a destination resulting from a primeval migration that started way out around the current location of Uranus. Like the god for which it was named, Jupiter enjoys the company of thousands of followers, the so-called trojan aster…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 163: The Ring Worlds of Saturn, with Bonnie Buratti
40:52
40:52
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
40:52
Feature Guest: Bonnie Buratti The spacecraft Cassini went out in spectacular fashion, travelling through Saturn’s rings for a final death dive into the gas giant. Even in its final heroic moments, Cassini was relaying back data shedding light on the bizarre worlds known as the ring moons of Saturn. The origin of these small bodies, which manage to …
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 162: The End is Nowhere Near Nigh, with Fred Adams
36:42
36:42
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
36:42
Feature Guest: Fred Adams If you thought the far distant future of our universe was going to be bleak, dreary and dark, well, you’d be right. But remember, the universe is still just a baby and it has many new experiences ahead of it. Over the many trillions of years of its unimaginably long life, new processes will take over, new forms of galactic…
…
continue reading
![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
1
Episode 161: The Boom Time of the Universe, with Rosemary Wyse
32:24
32:24
Play later
Play later
Lists
Like
Liked
32:24
Feature Guest: Rosemary Wyse The universe is past its prime, by about 8 to 10 billion years. Sorry if you missed it. From the rate of star formation to the frequency of galactic mergers, the cosmos just isn’t what it used to be. Yet remarkably all is not lost, for there’s an astronomical archeology available to us. It turns out stars retain a memor…
…
continue reading