My next guest is an astrophysicist who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. I'm speaking about none other than my friend, Joe Eggen. Aside from being the father of my daughter's best friend, Joe is your friendly neighborhood science guy. He earned his Ph. D. in Astronomy and Physics at Georgia State University where he did his dissertation on "Optical Polarimetry and Gamma-Ray Observations of a Sample of Radio-Loud Narrow Line Seyfert 1 Galaxies." I don't know what that means, and neither do you.

Joe and I get into:

• How stars create new elements through fusion
• Neutrinos, gamma rays, and gravitational waves
• His gripe with the way people talk about geniuses
• The era of multi-messenger astronomy
• Pulsars, Quasars, and Blazars, oh my!
• And of course, his take on the most recent unexplained arial phenomenon ... the aliens.

Learn more about Joe and the work he does with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope!

References:

• Tabetha Boyajian's TED talk on The Most Mysterious Star in the Universe: https://www.ted.com/talks/tabetha_boyajian_the_most_mysterious_star_in_the_universe
• The next total solar eclipse in the Americas comes on April 8, 2024. Totality first touches Mexico, enters the United States at Texas, cuts a diagonal to Maine, and visits the maritime provinces of Canada.

Got a question? We'd love to hear from you!