Astronomy Cast

And now we reach the end of our tour through the electromagnetic spectrum. Last stop: gamma rays. These are the most energetic photons in the Universe, boosted up to incredible energies in the most violent places in the Universe. Gamma rays are tricky to catch, but they can reveal the most dramatic events in the Universe.

Can our Sun generate a solar flare that would wipe out life on Earth? Has the Large Hadron Collider answered any questions about the Higgs boson? And what would happen if you shined your flashlight out the front window of a spaceship going almost the speed of light? If you've got a question for the Astronomy Cast team, please email it in to [email protected] and we'll try to tackle it for a future show. Please include your location and a way to pronounce your name.

If you've ever broken a bone, X-rays are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Doctors use X-rays to study the human body, and astronomers use X-rays to study some of the hottest places in the Universe. So let's put on our X-ray specs, and see what we can see.

Pamela was lucky enough to attend the NorthEast Astronomy Forum, and while she was there she held a live questions show. And now you get to join in an hear the interesting questions, and Pamela's interesting answers. If you've got a question for the Astronomy Cast team, please email it in to [email protected] and we'll try to tackle it for a future show. Please include your location and a way to pronounce your name.

Our next visit in this tour through the electromagnetic spectrum is the ultraviolet. You can't see it, but anyone who's spent a day out in the hot sun without sunblock has sure experienced its effects. Ultraviolet radiation is associated with the birth of stars and some of the hottest places in the Universe.

Optical astronomy; now this is the kind of astronomy a human being was born to do. In fact, until the last century, this was the only kind of astronomy anybody ever did. Now we've got the whole electromagnetic spectrum to explore, but our heart still belongs to optical astronomy. Of course, with bigger telescopes, better optics and more sensitive detectors, even optical astronomy has come a long way.

If there was enough mass to cause a big crunch, would inflation go backwards too? How do spacecraft know that hydrogen is bonded to water? And why can't we see everything that's ever fallen into a black hole? If you've got a question for the Astronomy Cast team, please email it in to [email protected] and we'll try to tackle it for a future show. Please include your location and a way to pronounce your name.

Today we continue our unofficial tour through the electromagnetic spectrum, stopping at the infrared spectrum - you feel it as heat. This section of the spectrum gives us our only clear view through dusty material to see newly forming planetary systems and shrouded supermassive black holes. And infrared lets us look out to the most distant regions of the observable universe, when the first building blocks of galaxies came together.

Last week we examined the largest wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum: radio. This week we get a little smaller… but not too small! And look at the next step in the spectrum, the submillimeter. Astronomers have only recently began exploiting this tiny slice of the spectrum, but the payoff has been huge.

This week we wonder if you can made a black hole by accelerating a mass, but then can you un-make it again? Will the Earth ever be tidally locked to the Sun? And can dark matter crush an unsuspecting space ship? If you've got a question for the Astronomy Cast team, please email it in to [email protected] and we'll try to tackle it for a future show. Please include your location and a way to pronounce your name.