April 18, 2011

Big, Really Big

53 minutes

The universe is big – really big.* Galaxies, for instance, are often large enough to hold a trillion stars. But how did these heavenly heavyweights come to be? Hear how still-mysterious dark matter is implicated in the birth of galaxies.

Also, gamma ray bursts - explosions more energetic than anything since the Big Bang - take place somewhere in the visible universe every day. What are they, and could they obliterate life on Earth?

And, the biggest cosmic mystery de jour: dark energy. Why new, super-size telescopes may finally reveal just what it is.

We’re living large on “Big, Really Big.”

*appreciative nod to Douglas Adams

Guests:

George Djorgovski - Astronomer, California Institute of Technology

Sandra Faber - Astronomer and Chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California at Santa Cruz; leads the CANDELS survey that uses the Hubble Space Telescope to image more than

250,000 distant galaxies

Daniel Perley - Astronomer, University of California at Berkeley

Ed Stone - Former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and physicist at the California Institute of Technology

Richard Panek - Author of The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

Descripción en español

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By Big Picture Science

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