syzygy

We're live from the 10th birthday celebrations for the University of York's Astrocampus, Emily's home turf and all-round fabulous teaching and outreach space. Emily fields some amazing questions from kids and adults attending the event, and gives some of Astrocampus's highlights and achievements over the past decade, as well as some plans for the future!

After some lengthy follow-up (the Bennu sample is open at last! And SLIM is alive!), Emily investigates possibly the most podcasty story we’ve had on the show: six planets around distant star HD110067, all locked into resonances that play beautiful music. Turns out if you leave a planetary system alone for long enough, gravity tends to pull everything into simple harmonies. Maybe

Emily and Chris tune in to JAXA’s livestream of SLIM — the Smart Lander for Investigating and Moon — as it attempted to slick the landing on the lunar surface on Friday 19 January 2023. We were prepared for success and champagne, or failure and lessons-learned. What we didn’t expect was … ambiguity, uncertainty and WE ARE STILL CHECKING THE STATUS SO PLEASE WAIT. Did SLIM

Long-time Syzygy listener Jack asks: "Hey Emily — what's the deal with quasi-stars?" (We're paraphrasing). Quasi-stars are hypothetical, enormous stellar-object-thingies that might have formed shortly after the Big Bang. They're so huge they might have formed with black holes at their cores. If they existed at all, it would explain why astronomers keep finding intermediate-mass b

Astronomers routinely detect cosmic rays, the high-energy particles from space that collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a shower of secondary particles that rain down on the earth below. But every so often — like, less than once a decade — they spot a cosmic ray smashing into the planet with just stupid amounts of energy. The sort of energy you associate wi

We've talked BOATs before — cosmic events that are the Brightest Of All Time — and it's always a favourite topic on the show. Recently astronomers analysed the runner-up BOAT in the Burster category, an astoundingly violent, weirdly long-lasting, and oddly-located neutron star merger, and measured the amount of afterglow Tellurium to learn more about fast neutron processes. Wha

We love it any time a listener gets in touch — but the *best* is when a listener suggests a topic for an episode of the podcast. So when Zofia Szczesna got in touch (through the Syzygy website, natch) and asked about white dwarf stars, Emily put her research hat on and dug into the amazing astrophysics of these amazing little entities. In this episode she lists her three favourit

JWST is flinging out Just Wonderful observations at great speed, many already leading to new astronomical insights. Here's one that was really unexpected: the Orion Nebula is full of JuMBOs! Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects, that is — pairs of giant planets (or planetty-things, the definition isn't terribly clear ...) floating free in space, in quantities that aren't possible based on

Earth got a special delivery recently: a little pod plonked down in the Utah desert, containing a few hundred grams sampled from the surface of an asteroid. This isn't the first sample return mission, but it's definitely the biggest. The little parcel of asteroid dirt inside is now being very carefully handed out to researchers across the globe, and we're going to learn loads of im

It’s always nerve-wracking waiting for a very expensive new space telescope to launch — the whole mission can literally end in a highly explosive blink of an eye. Fortunately for the Euclid mission team, their gleaming new spacecraft left the Earth in one piece, and made its way to L2 to begin it's new job. It’s mission? Oh, just to solve five huge mysteries of the universe,