The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures Podcasts

By Foothill College

What's The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures Podcasts about?

Public lectures by noted astronomers on new developments in our exploration of the universe. These lectures are recorded at Foothill College near San Francisco.

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The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures Podcasts episodes:

10.11.2017
Will the 21st Century be the Time We Discover Life Beyond Earth?
In 2004, Craig Venter and Daniel Cohen suggested that if the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century will be the century of biology on our planet. Jill Tarter believes that their idea will be extended beyond...
06.28.2017
The ‘All-American’ Eclipse of the Sun this August
On August 21, 2017, there will be a rare eclipse of the Sun visible throughout the U.S. and North America. Andrew Fraknoi, Foothill College, describes how eclipses work and when and where the eclipse of 2017 will be best visible....
03.20.2017
The Monster Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way Galaxy
By measuring the rapid orbits of the stars near the center of our galaxy, Dr. Andrea Ghez and her colleagues have moved the case for a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way from a possibility to...
03.20.2017
Space-time Symphony: Gravitational Waves from Merging Black Holes
Prof. Cominsky presents an introduction to LIGO, to gravitational waves and how they were detected, and to the kinds of black holes that “make waves.” Recorded November 2, 2016.
03.20.2017
The Science and Non-science of Star Wars
Seth Shostak takes a look at Star Wars and other science fiction films from the point of view of a skeptical scientist, tells stories about the movies he has been asked to advise, and muses about aliens from space. Recorded...
03.15.2017
Is Anyone Out There: The $100 Million Breakthrough: Listen Project
What is the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe and how might we detect signals from alien civilizations? Dr. Werthimer describes current and future projects searching for such signals, including the new $100-million Breakthrough Prize Foundation Listen project....
02.15.2017
Beyond: Our Future in Space
Decades after we last set foot on the Moon, and several years after the Space Shuttle was retired, space activity is finally leaving the doldrums. Permanent bases on the Moon and Mars are now within reach, and a new Space...
07.25.2016
How Things in the Universe Came About and How They Ended Up Within Us
Dr. Tom Abel (Stanford University) takes us on an illustrated journey through the early stages of the universe, using the latest computer animations of how the first stars formed and died, and how stars built up the first galaxies. Recorded...
07.25.2016
Finding a New Earth: Exoplanets and the Habitable Zone
Dr. Stephen Kane (San Francisco State University) describes what the idea of a Habitable Zone means and shows examples of planets that lie in their star’s Habitable Zone (even if the star is not like our Sun.) Recorded May 11,...
06.24.2016
Innumerable Globes Like This One: The Search for Life Beyond the Solar System
In this talk, Dr. Tori Hoehler from NASA Ames Research Center discusses the science of searching for life beyond our immediate neighborhood, and how we will seek evidence of inhabited worlds in the future. Recorded February 3, 2016.
06.24.2016
Report from the Planetary Frontier: The Latest from New Horizons at Pluto
Dr. Jeff Moore from NASA Ames Research Center shows the latest photos of Pluto and Charon and fills us in on the current thinking among the New Horizons team members about Pluto and the unexplored frontier that lies beyond. Recorded...
01.19.2016
Einstein’s Blunder Undone: The Runaway Universe
In the past 20 years, astronomers have shown that the universe is not only expanding, but speeding up. Dr. Robert Kirshner discusses the methods used to discover cosmic acceleration. Recorded November 11, 2015.
01.11.2016
In the Land of Enchantment: The Epic Story of the Cassini Mission to Saturn
Since 2004, Cassini has been exploring the giant planet Saturn. Dr. Carolyn Porco shows us many mission images and explains the findings from both the main orbiter and the probe that landed on Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon. Recorded October 6,...
07.07.2015
The Sentinel Mission: Finding the Asteroid Headed for Earth
In this talk, Dr. Ed Lu (Former NASA Astronaut; CEO of the Sentinel Mission) describe the threat of asteroids and discusses the Sentinel Mission, an orbiting telescope to detect and track asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit. Recorded March 4, 2015.
07.07.2015
100 Years of Einstein's Relativity (And How it Underlies Our Modern Understanding of the Universe)
2015 marks the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s completion of his General Theory of Relativity. Dr. Jeffrey Bennett (University of Colorado) explains the basic ideas of Einstein’s work in everyday language. Recorded May 6, 2015.
05.27.2015
Now Appearing at a Dwarf Planet Near You: NASA's Dawn Mission to the Asteroid Belt
Dr. Marc Rayman, the Mission Director for the Dawn exploration of Vesta and Ceres, explains the unusual mission, what it found at Vesta, and what it is going to do as it gets to Ceres, the first dwarf planet discovered....
03.05.2015
Pluto on the Horizon: Anticipating our First Encounter with the Double Planet
Dr. Mark Showalter describes how he discovered two of the moons of Pluto, explains what we currently know about the Pluto system, and sets the scene for the exploration that is in store. Recorded January 28, 2015.
12.09.2014
Images of the Infant Universe: The Latest Results from the Planck Satellite
Professor Knox shows the detailed images of the sky obtained by the Planck satellite and explains how such images provide us with our best means of studying events mere fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Recorded November 12,...
10.30.2014
The Copernicus Complex: Are We Special in the Cosmos?
Is humanity on Earth special or unexceptional? Dr. Caleb Scharf from Columbia University helps us to come to grips with the implications of some of the latest scientific research, from the microscopic to the cosmic. Recorded October 8, 2014.
06.25.2014
Monster Black Holes: What Lurks at the Center of Galaxies?
Dr. Chung-Pei Ma (University of California, Berkeley) describes recent discoveries of record-breaking black holes, each with a mass of ten billion times the mass of the Sun. Recorded May 24, 2014.
06.05.2014
Exploding Stars, New Planets, Black Holes, and the Crisis at Lick Observatory
Lick Observatory, the first remote mountaintop observatory in the world, has had a remarkable record of discovery spanning 126 years. Dr. Alex Filippenko discusses the research areas in which Lick remains a world leader. Recorded February 26, 2014
06.05.2014
Lifting the Cosmic Veil: Highlights from a Decade of the Spitzer Space Telescope
The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in 2003 to study the cool universe with waves that are invisible to the human eye. Dr. Bicay presents highlights from Spitzer’s first decade of discovery. Recorded April 16, 2014
04.01.2014
Black Widow Pulsars: The Vengeful Corpses of Stars
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has revealed a violent high-energy universe full of stellar explosions and pulsing stars. Dr. Roger Romani describes the quest to discover the true nature of these gamma-ray sources. Recorded January 22, 2014
12.11.2013
The Chelyabinsk Meteor: Can We Survive a Bigger Impact?
Dr. David Morrison, a nationally-recognized expert about asteroids, discusses the Chelyabinsk, Russia impact of February 2013 and evaluates ways we might meet the grand challenge to protect our population from space debris. Recorded November 6, 2013
10.29.2013
How the Universe Went from Smooth to Lumpy: The Modern Origins Story
Dr. Eliot Quataert of the University of California, Berkeley, provides an overview of the modern understanding of our origins in astrophysics and how the universe has evolved to its current state. Recorded October 2, 2013
06.19.2013
Being a Mars Rover: What It's Like on the Surface of Mars
Dr. Lori Fenton of the SETI Institute gives an overview of the rover Curiosity’s capabilities, accomplishments, and plans on Mars, and describes what it’s really like on the surface of the red planet. Recorded May 15, 2013.
05.29.2013
Brown Dwarfs and Free-floating Planets: When You're Just Too Small to be a Star
Dr. Gibor Basri of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the discoverers of brown dwarfs, summarizes the progress we have made in understanding the domain of cosmic objects that don’t qualify as stars. Recorded April 17, 2013.
03.20.2013
Astronomy from the Stratosphere: NASA's SOFIA Mission
Dr. Dana Backman introduces us to SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. This remarkable airborne telescope began scientific research flights in 2010 and is already returning exciting discoveries. Recorded March 6, 2013
02.26.2013
How Galaxies were Cooked from the Primordial Soup
The lumpiness of today's universe of galaxies is a fundamental characteristic that took billions of years to grow. Dr. Sandra Faber of the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of California Observatories reviews the prevailing "Cold Dark Matter" theory...
12.19.2012
Black Holes: The End of Time or a New Beginning?
While black holes are popularly associated with death and doom, astrophysicists increasingly see them as creators, not destroyers -- playing a major role in the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets. Dr. Roger Blandford of the Kavli Institute...
11.07.2012
Finding the Next Earth: The Latest Results from Kepler
Dr. Natalie Batalha (Mission Scientist for the Kepler Mission searching for exoplanets, NASA Ames Res. Ctr.) describes the techniques used by the Kepler team to identify planets orbiting other stars and updates us on the remarkable progress they are making...
06.18.2011
Multiple Universes and Cosmic Inflation: The Quest to Understand Our Universe (and Find Others)
Our improving understanding of the cosmos points to an early epoch during which the universe expanded at a stupendous rate to create the vast amount of space we can observe. Cosmologist are now coming to believe that this "cosmic inflation"...
05.13.2011
Our Explosive Sun: New Views of the Nearest Star and the Largest Explosions in the Solar System
Recent satellite missions are giving scientists dramatic new views of the Sun and the huge magnetic explosions in its outer layers that cause flares and the ejections of huge masses of superheated gas. Dr. Thomas Berger of the Lockheed Martin...
03.24.2011
Saturn's Moon Titan: A World with Rivers, Lakes, and Possibly Even Life
Titan, Saturn's largest satellite, is the only moon with a thick atmosphere. In many ways, Titan is a cold twin of the Earth, with liquid methane playing the same role there as water plays on our planet. Life on Earth...
02.04.2011
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had it Coming
Dr. Michael Brown of Caltech shares the inside story of how he discovered "other Pluto's" out there beyond Neptune, including Eris, which is now known to be about the same size as Pluto. He named that new world for the...
01.10.2011
Catching Shadows: Kepler's Search for New Worlds
NASA's Kepler spacecraft, launched in March 2009, is a mission designed to survey a slice of the Milky Way Galaxy to identify planets orbiting other stars. Kepler has the advantage that it can find planets as small as Earth in...
11.23.2010
The Ultimate Fate of the Solar System (and the Music of the Spheres)
The long-term fate of the planets in our Solar System has intrigued astronomers and mathematicians for over 300 years. Although the planetary orbits are often held up as a model of clockwork regularity, the Solar System is in truth an...
08.03.2010
Hearts of Darkness: Black Holes in Space
Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape! No longer confined to the imaginations of science-fiction writers and theoretical physicists, black holes have recently been discovered in large numbers by...
05.11.2010
A Scientist Looks at "Doomsday 2012" and the Rise of Cosmophobia
Many people have heard the rumors that the world will end in 2012 -- and that some astronomical event or alignment is to blame. Dr. David Morrison of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and SETI Institute discusses the public fears...
04.12.2010
The Many Mysteries of Antimatter
Antimatter is just like matter with all its properties reversed. Scientists think there may have been equal amount of matter and antimatter in the early universe, and yet today we have lots of matter and very little antimatter. How and...
03.10.2010
The Search for Intelligent Life Among the Stars: New Strategies
A half-century ago, astronomers began trying to "eavesdrop" for radio messages from nearby star systems. However, today, SETI researchers continue to point their telescopes at individual stars, on the assumption that technically advanced societies will inhabit a watery world like...
01.21.2010
Life at the Edge: Life in Extreme Environments on Earth and the Search for Life in the Universe
Astrobiologist Dr. Lynn Rothschild of the NASA Ames Research Center has gone from the Bolivian Andes to the Rift Valley of Kenya searching for the hardiest of organisms in the most extreme environments for life. By getting to know life...
11.13.2009
Hubble Breakthrough: The First Photos of a Planet Orbiting Another Star
Paul Kalas was the leader of the team who managed the long-sought feat of actually taking a photograph of a planet orbiting another star. Before this, all the planets outside our solar system were found by indirect means. He describes...
06.30.2009
The Dark Side of the Universe: Dark Matter and Dark Energy
In the last decade or so, astronomers have been forced to accept two mysterious observations. About a quarter of the universe is made of "dark matter," which attracts things with its gravity, but is otherwise invisible. And roughly two-thirds of...
05.27.2009
Planetary Protection and Hitchhikers in the Solar System: The Danger of Mingling Microbes
Scientists searching for life elsewhere have to worry about avoiding harmful cross contamination during the exploration of planets and their moons. We don't want to take Earth microbes to Mars or bring back alien microbes to Earth. In this timely...
04.01.2009
The Dawn of Creation: The First Two Billion Years
All the great islands of stars got their start in the first billion years after the beginning of time, the Big Bang. Every deep picture of the sky reveals thousands of these galaxies, each made up of billions of stars...
02.17.2009
Prospecting for Water on the Moon: The Upcoming LCROSS Mission
In 2009, NASA will purposely crash two spacecraft into one of the Moon's polar regions. The impacts should raise huge plumes of material, visible even to smaller telescopes on Earth. Dr. Anthony Colaprete (NASA Ames Research Center), the Principal Investigator...
01.14.2009
Saturn's Restless Rings: Latest Results from the Cassini Mission
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has entered its fifth year exploring the planet Saturn, its rings, and its moons. Dr. Mark Showalter (SETI Institute), a key member of the Cassini science team, shares some of the marvelous results from Saturn and recent...
11.07.2008
The Black Hole Wars: My Battle with Stephen Hawking
Black holes, the collapsed remnants of the largest stars, provide a remarkable laboratory where the frontier concepts of our understanding of nature are tested at their extreme limits. For more than two decades, Professor Leonard Susskind of Stanford University and...
06.19.2008
The Allen Telescope Array: The Newest Pitchfork for Exploring the Cosmic Haystack
Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute is the leader of the main project looking for radio signals from alien civilizations (she was also the model for the character Jodie Foster played in the movie "Contact.") She updates us on...

What's The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures Podcasts about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures Podcasts episodes:

Will the 21st Century be the Time We Discover Life Beyond Earth?

The ‘All-American’ Eclipse of the Sun this August

The Monster Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way Galaxy

Space-time Symphony: Gravitational Waves from Merging Black Holes

The Science and Non-science of Star Wars

Is Anyone Out There: The $100 Million Breakthrough: Listen Project

Beyond: Our Future in Space

How Things in the Universe Came About and How They Ended Up Within Us

Finding a New Earth: Exoplanets and the Habitable Zone

Innumerable Globes Like This One: The Search for Life Beyond the Solar System

Report from the Planetary Frontier: The Latest from New Horizons at Pluto

Einstein’s Blunder Undone: The Runaway Universe

In the Land of Enchantment: The Epic Story of the Cassini Mission to Saturn

The Sentinel Mission: Finding the Asteroid Headed for Earth

100 Years of Einstein's Relativity (And How it Underlies Our Modern Understanding of the Universe)

Now Appearing at a Dwarf Planet Near You: NASA's Dawn Mission to the Asteroid Belt

Pluto on the Horizon: Anticipating our First Encounter with the Double Planet

Images of the Infant Universe: The Latest Results from the Planck Satellite

The Copernicus Complex: Are We Special in the Cosmos?

Monster Black Holes: What Lurks at the Center of Galaxies?

Exploding Stars, New Planets, Black Holes, and the Crisis at Lick Observatory

Lifting the Cosmic Veil: Highlights from a Decade of the Spitzer Space Telescope

Black Widow Pulsars: The Vengeful Corpses of Stars

The Chelyabinsk Meteor: Can We Survive a Bigger Impact?

How the Universe Went from Smooth to Lumpy: The Modern Origins Story

Being a Mars Rover: What It's Like on the Surface of Mars

Brown Dwarfs and Free-floating Planets: When You're Just Too Small to be a Star

Astronomy from the Stratosphere: NASA's SOFIA Mission

How Galaxies were Cooked from the Primordial Soup

Black Holes: The End of Time or a New Beginning?

Finding the Next Earth: The Latest Results from Kepler

Multiple Universes and Cosmic Inflation: The Quest to Understand Our Universe (and Find Others)

Our Explosive Sun: New Views of the Nearest Star and the Largest Explosions in the Solar System

Saturn's Moon Titan: A World with Rivers, Lakes, and Possibly Even Life

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had it Coming

Catching Shadows: Kepler's Search for New Worlds

The Ultimate Fate of the Solar System (and the Music of the Spheres)

Hearts of Darkness: Black Holes in Space

A Scientist Looks at "Doomsday 2012" and the Rise of Cosmophobia

The Many Mysteries of Antimatter

The Search for Intelligent Life Among the Stars: New Strategies

Life at the Edge: Life in Extreme Environments on Earth and the Search for Life in the Universe

Hubble Breakthrough: The First Photos of a Planet Orbiting Another Star

The Dark Side of the Universe: Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Planetary Protection and Hitchhikers in the Solar System: The Danger of Mingling Microbes

The Dawn of Creation: The First Two Billion Years

Prospecting for Water on the Moon: The Upcoming LCROSS Mission

Saturn's Restless Rings: Latest Results from the Cassini Mission

The Black Hole Wars: My Battle with Stephen Hawking

The Allen Telescope Array: The Newest Pitchfork for Exploring the Cosmic Haystack