Astronomy Cast

AstronomyCast 238: Solar Activity, by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

The Sun looks like a harmless burning ball of fire in the sky: warm, life-giving and forever unchanging. But we know better, don’t we. It’s really a massive ball of churning hydrogen plasma, encased in twisting magnetic field lines, speckled with sunspots, and constantly disgorging vast plumes of radiation and charged particles. The Sun is very active indeed.

AstronomyCast 237: Spooky Space Sounds, by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

To help you out with your halloween parties, we’ve collected together the spooky sounds of space. Every piece of audio we’re about to play might sound like it comes from a terrifying nightmare dimension, but it’s really just a natural space phenomena.

AstronomyCast 236: Einstein Was Right, by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

At least once a week we get an email claiming that Einstein was wrong. Well you know what, Einstein was right. In fact, as part of his theories of Special and General Relativity, Einstein made a series of predictions about what experiments should discover. Some explained existing puzzles in science, while others made predictions that were only recently proven true.

AstronomyCast 235: Einstein, by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

What can we say about Einstein? Albert Einstein! Lots, actually. In this show we’re going to talk about the most revolutionary physicist… ever. He completely changed our understanding of time, and space, and energy, and gravity. He made predictions about the nature of the Universe that we’re still testing out.

This is an impromptu episode of Astronomy Cast that we recorded during Dragon*Con 2011. Pamela was scheduled to speak with a panel about strange things in space, but she ended up being the only person there. So Fraser jumped in, and this was what we did. We mostly talked about unusual things in the Solar System, but a few things in the rest of the Universe.

AstronomyCast 234: Lunar Phases, by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay