You've heard of supernovae, the just stupidly big explosions that mark the end of some stars' lives. Maybe you know there are different kinds of supernovae — type 1a, type II ... Did you know that, smaller than a super nova, there's just a plain, vanilla nova? Or that, even bigger than super, there's hyper-novae? Well, hold onto your hats, because there's a new nova in town, and it's ... really quite small. On the nova scale, anyway. Emily gives all the goss on cute little micronovae. Plus, we school astronomers on the tricky subject of communicating large quantities of energy.

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Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

·      The micronova paper

·      A good article (with a bad analogy) about the research

·      Novae types: classical, recurrent, and dwarf

·      Supernovae and their types

·      The Cosmic Distance Ladder and Standard candles, and Dark Energy

·      Hypernovae!

·      TESS, everyone’s favourite space telescope

·      Phobos, potato moon