Astronomy Cast

AstronomyCast 392: The Standard Model

by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

Have you ever been doing thermodynamics in a closed system and noticed that there’s a finite number of ways that things can be arranged, and they tend towards disorder? Of course you have, we all have. That’s entropy. And here in our Universe, entropy is on the rise. Let’s learn about entropy in its specific, thermodynamic ways, and then figure out what this means for the future of the Universe.

AstronomyCast 391: Entropy

by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

AstronomyCast 390: Occam's Razor & the Problem with Probabilities

by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

I’m not saying it’s aliens, but it’s aliens. Actually, it’s almost certainly not aliens, or a wormhole, or a multiverse. When scientists discover something unusual, they make guesses about what’s happening. But Occam’s Razor encourages us to consider the probabilities of different events before making any concrete predictions.

While Pamela and Fraser were at Ohio State University for a symposium in October, they caught up with Paul M. Sutter from Astronomical Observatory of Trieste, who is a visiting scholar at the OSU Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. His specialty is cosmic voids. Paul also hosts the podcast “Ask a Spaceman.”

AstronomyCast 388: Megastructures

by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

AstronomyCast 389: Roundtable with Paul M. Sutter

by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

This week astronomers announced an unusual transit signal from another star. Although it’s most likely a natural phenomenon, one remote possibility is that this is some kind of alien megastructure. Freeman Dyson and others have considered this idea for decades. Today we’ll talk about the kinds of structures that aliens might want to build.

AstronomyCast 387: Water on Mars (Again)

by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay