Universe Today Podcast

SLS finally launches to the Moon. SpaceX get another contract from NASA. James Webb gets a protection plan from micrometeoroids. China continues to trash the orbit. Secret space plane returns.

How trees can tell us a story of previous solar storms? What are the chances of having another Carrington-scale event and what would it mean? How can we understand solar storms better?

How hard is it to escape the gravity wells of massive planets for other civilizations? How hard is it to make your own telescopes? How do gas clouds become stars? Can we harvest dark energy after the Heat Death?

JWST’s MIRI is fully operational again, have astronomers found the first strange star?, the first test of an inflatable heat shield, and SLS just got hit by a Hurricane.

This in an interview with Dr Brian Keating that happened on his YouTube channel. We talk about how Universe Today runs, what do I want to achieve with it, how science journalism works in general and much more.

Can we catch the next interstellar visitor? Why do black holes' accretion disks glow? Can we make spaceships out of asteroids? How do we know that dark matter and dark energy actually exist? All that in this week's episode of Q&A with Fraser Cain. And we've started the Book Club!

Historical data about solar storms carved in trees, and it's a bit worrying. Falcon Heavy's back after 40 months of absence. There's a meteor shower and a total lunar eclipse in the coming days. And JWST gave us yet another version of Pillars of Creation.

What's the current state of James Webb? What were the main technical difficulties and what does the future look like? What comes after JWST and LUVOIR? Will it be possible to ever build a quantum telescope?

If Moon was created with a big collision, where's the crater? Can we fix the space trash problem? Is doing Astronomy just a waste of money that can be better spent elsewhere? What will come after DART? All this and more in this week's Q&A.

How do we know that certain organisms can survive for millions of years in the conditions of Mars? What do we know about them? And where should we be looking for them on Mars?

There’s a monster black hole in our backyard (astronomically speaking). Life could survive underground on Mars for hundreds of millions of years. Starlink was hacked to work as GPS. Bad news for Arecibo.

All the nice space images you see on the web are processed. It's a complex process that takes the raw data from the instruments and turns them into a picture. Judy Schmidt is one of the best in this, so I talked to her about how she does it. Enjoy!

How do you clean up astronomy images and what part does Photoshop play in it? Can you make spaceships out of ice found in space? When will SpaceX carry people to Mars? What pet will be the best companion for a long space trip? And even more questions in this week's Q&A with Fraser Cain.

Dark Energy will determine how the Universe will die. With the help of Pantheon+, the most detailed survey of Type 1A supernovae, astronomers can understand more details about Dark Energy and the expansion of spacetime.

We continue to introduce the team behind Universe Today. In this episode meet Matt Williams. Fraser and Matt discussed long format writing, stories about the future of space exploration, science fiction novels Matt has written, how not to be too cynical and how to write fast and write good.

The Pillars of Creation revealed by JWST. It seems like Big Rip isn't happening after all. Black holes twisting spacetime into knots. Jets that seem to be going faster than the speed of light.