AWESOME ASTRONOMY

#51 - September 2016


Listen Later

The Discussion: Jeni's astronomy research yields its first results in the hunt for exoplanet phase variation and we revisit our Star Wars podcast extras with a listener's book review.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

  • An 'Earthlike planet detected by ESO around our nearest stellar neighbour
  • The upcoming launch of OSIRIS Rex to sample an asteroid
  • That bump in the data at CERN turns out to be a false hope
  • That alien megastructure story just won't foxtrot oscar
  • The Cassini spacecraft spots methane filled canyons on Saturn's moon Titan
  • A meteorite lands in Yorkshire garden. Real or fake?

Woobusters: Continuing our quest to debunk the myths and conspiracy theories that persist in every dark corner of the news and the internet. This month's topic, picked at random from Paul's festering Hat of Woo: Area 51 – the remote and secret installation in the Nevada desert where sanity gets dissected and reason is left to die.

Q&A: Listeners' questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month we get a question that probes certainty in science and how high certainty discoveries can still turn out to be wrong:

Why when the Bicep two team found the evidence for primordial gravitational waves did they claim it was a five sigma result, and later wasn't it shown the result was not accurate? I thought a five sigma had a 1 in 350million chance of being wrong! There has to be something I don't understand about the sigma scale or the Bicep results? Rodney Cuthbertson.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

AWESOME ASTRONOMYBy Paul & Dr Jeni

  • 4.7
  • 4.7
  • 4.7
  • 4.7
  • 4.7

4.7

116 ratings


More shows like AWESOME ASTRONOMY

View all
The Infinite Monkey Cage by BBC Radio 4

The Infinite Monkey Cage

1,951 Listeners

The Naked Scientists Podcast by The Naked Scientists

The Naked Scientists Podcast

599 Listeners

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science by The Planetary Society

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

1,349 Listeners

SpaceTime with Stuart Gary by Stuart Gary

SpaceTime with Stuart Gary

322 Listeners

Ask a Spaceman! by Paul M. Sutter

Ask a Spaceman!

837 Listeners

Astronomy Cast by Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay

Astronomy Cast

2,882 Listeners

Universe Today Podcast by Fraser Cain

Universe Today Podcast

563 Listeners

The Quanta Podcast by Quanta Magazine

The Quanta Podcast

545 Listeners

Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries by Professor Fred Watson and Andrew Dunkley

Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

231 Listeners

BBC Inside Science by BBC Radio 4

BBC Inside Science

412 Listeners

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

4,169 Listeners

Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe by iHeartPodcasts

Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

2,366 Listeners

The Supermassive Podcast by The Royal Astronomical Society

The Supermassive Podcast

323 Listeners

The World, the Universe and Us by New Scientist

The World, the Universe and Us

116 Listeners

Why This Universe? by Dan Hooper, Shalma Wegsman

Why This Universe?

383 Listeners