Universe Today Podcast

We’ve now passed the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and all eyes are back on the Moon. NASA is planning to return to the Moon by 2024 with its Artemis mission, the Chinese have put the Moon firmly in their plans for space exploration, and even SpaceX thinks the Moon is the perfect destination to test out the capabilities of its Starship.

But what can you do with the Moon? Refuel spacecraft with resources drawn from the lunar regolith? Mine its helium 3 for your fusion reactors? Build a lunar amusement park?

In fact, the far side of the Moon might make one of the best platforms we have for radio telescopes. One side of the Moon is completely blocked from Earth’s constantly increasing radio traffic, giving it the perfect view to the most sensitive radio signals in the Universe.

This week I'm joined by Professor Greg Eghigian, from Penn State University to talk about the history of UFO sightings and claims of alien contact.

You can read a recent essay by Dr. Eghigian on Smithsonian's Air and Space Magazine:

https://www.airspacemag.com/space/year-ufos-180973965/

And learn more about his work here:
https://history.la.psu.edu/directory/gae2

On Monday, January 6th, 2020, another SpaceX Falcon 9 blasted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying another 60 Starlink internet communications satellites, bringing the full size of the constellation to 180. With just three launches, SpaceX becomes the largest satellite operator in the world.

But the company is just getting started. They’re planning to do this again every couple of weeks during 2020, bringing the total number of satellites in the constellation to about 1440, which is enough to provide high-speed internet services to the United States and parts of Canada.

Shortly after launch, as the satellites are raising their altitude, they’re clearly visible to the eye as they streak across the sky in a close train.

Astronomers aren’t happy.

In this week's questions show, I've got another expert guest answerer. Space News reporter and Space Review editor Jeff Foust answers your tricky spaceflight questions. Could we attach telescopes to Starlinks? What impact will these megaconstellations have on astronomy? What can humans do that robots can't? And more...

Thanks to our good friends at Oceanside Photo and Telescope, our livestreaming telescope is back online. I featured a couple of quick pics I took with the telescope during a test stream on Twitch Sunday night.

I also answered questions about our trip to the AAS in Hawaii, if it's possible to make a more powerful telescope out of smaller telescopes, and why the ISS doesn't have an artificial magnetosphere.

Once again, at the AAS Meeting in Hawaii, I got a chance to sit down with another astronomer to talk about their research. This time it was Dr. David Kipping from Columbia University's Cool World's Lab. We talked about how easy it'll be for aliens to know our planet is inhabited, and some ways we might be able to hide the evidence of our existence.

At the American Astronomical Society's meeting Honolulu I got a chance to talk with Adam Frank about new research he's worked with Caleb Scharf, Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback and Jason Wright about the Fermi Paradox. They calculated how difficult it would be for aliens traveling at 10% the speed of light to settle the entire Milky Way, and it turns out, it's not as simple as you might think.

In this week's Open Space QA, I respond to complaints about my Betelgeuse video, wonder about alien civilizations stuck in heavy gravity, and consider whether we could terraform Earth to make it better.

This week's questions show was recorded at the 235th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was lucky enough to have 3,500 astronomers, space scientists and others to talk with. Ethan Siegel from "Starts with a Bang" is back, and this time he's answering your questions about space and astronomy.

In this week's questions show I explain how we'll ever study 100 million planets, what's the business case for space exploration, and how I pull the questions together for these shows.

Over the last weekend, astronomy Twitter started noting that the red giant Betelgeuse, the prominent shoulder of Orion was looking visibly dimmer in the sky, and I had a few people reach out to me and ask me if it was really happening and if I knew what was going on.

This is exciting, of course, because Betelgeuse is living on borrowed time, and it could explode as a supernova any day now. Or, it might not detonate for another 100,000 years. We just don’t know.

What’s Betelgeuse up to? Is this a sign that it’s about to explode? And what would it mean if it did?

This week I'm joined by Andrew Rader, a game designer and mission manager at SpaceX. Andrew's new book is called Beyond the Known and it's all about the history and future of space exploration.

As I’m recording this video near the end of 2019, the total number of confirmed exoplanets stands at 4,104. We’ve come a long way since the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star back in 1995 with 51 Pegasi b.

And the reality is that the race to find new exoplanets is only accelerating. New ground and space-based telescopes are turning up planetary candidates at an increasing rate. New techniques will find planets in entirely new ways. The bottom line is that over the next few decades, this mere 4000ish will multiply by orders of magnitude.

So let’s run the clock forward and try to calculate what the future holds for exoplanets. How many worlds will we know about 3 decades from now, in the year 2050?

How old is the Universe? In order to figure that out, all you have to do is figure out how quickly it’s expanding, and then the clock backward until everything is crunched together.

And astronomers have measured the rate that the Universe is expanding with tremendous precision at various times in its history; at the beginning, and much more recently. The problem is, these expansion rates disagree, but they’ve both been measured so accurately that their error bars don’t overlap.

In other words, there are multiple, highly accurate estimates for the age of the Universe, and they disagree.

In this week's questions show, I explain why I don't think we always need to be realistic, if galaxies in the local group are bound together gravitationally, and what we should call Earth-moving equipment on Mars.

Extending humanity to other worlds in the Solar System is at the very limits of our modern technology. And unless there are dramatic discoveries in new propulsion systems or we learn how to build everything out of carbon nanotubes, the future of space exploration is going to require living off the land.

The technique is known as In-Situ Resource Utilization or ISRU, and it means supplying as much of your mission from local resources as possible.

And many of our future exploration destinations, like Mars, have a lot to work with. Let’s look at the raw materials on Mars that missions can use to live off the land and the techniques and technologies that will need to be developed to make this possible.