The Star Spot

Sep 27 2020 99 ep. 37 mins 5.4k

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The astronomy and space exploration podcast

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Episode 185: Did a Supernova Cause a Mass Extinction?, with Brian Fields

Sep 27 2020 41 mins

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 team has found evidence linking s

Episode 184: The Milky Way's First Fast Radio Burst, with Sandro Mereghetti

Sep 13 2020 41 mins

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 on the hunt for the source of th

Episode 183: COVID-19 Meets the NASA Space Apps Challenge, with James Slifierz

May 24 2020 38 mins

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 the most demanding challenges of our

Episode 182: Planet Nine or Black Hole One, with Jakub Scholtz

May 10 2020 40 mins

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 you thought the concept of Plane

Episode 181: Reports of Betelgeuse’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, with Emily Levesque

Apr 26 2020 41 mins

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 mystery, a team set out to investiga

Episode 180: Wormholes through Space and Time, with John Cramer

Apr 05 2020 51 mins

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 foremost authorities on wormholes

Episode 179: Dreams of Floating Cities, with Geoffrey Landis

Mar 01 2020 28 mins

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 outer solar system. Today we’re g

Episode 178 Sibling Rivalry at the Centre of the Galaxy, with Smadar Naoz

Feb 02 2020 42 mins

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 history of the Milky Way, should

Episode 177: The Case of the Missing Dark Matter, with Guo Chi

Jan 19 2020 33 mins

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 our Milky Way’s own local dwarf g

Episode 176: Second Genesis, with Jay Melosh

Jan 05 2020 43 mins

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 it exceedingly unlikely that life