Episode 160: Boom to Bust Part 1: Before the Beginning, with Katrin Heitmann

Feature Guest: Katrin Heitmann The Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, a student group based at the University of Toronto, hosted its annual signature symposium event on Friday, February 15th, 2019. This year’s theme was “Boom to Bust,”with three keynote speakers covering, in turn, the birth, life and death of the cosmos. Once again The Star Spot was privileged to be on location to cover the event. And now in a special three episode series, we’re joined by each fascinating speaker as we take you from before the beginning into the unimaginably distant future of our universe. First up, on today’s episode Professor Katrin Heitmann tells how scientists are using the most powerful supercomputers on Earth to model the very origin of space and time, and to predict how events at the birth of the universe continue to shape its destiny. Current in Space Tony reports on the discovery of the brightest quasar ever seen in the early Universe, although its perceived brightness may be a trick of a certain phenomenon. Then Simon shocks with new research suggesting that the volatile elements essential for life on Earth were deposited during the apocalyptic planetary collision that formed the Moon. Finally, Amelia surprises with the finding of a circumbinary disk that orbits a binary star system not at the equator as expected, but at the poles! About Our Guest Dr. Katrin Heitmann is a physicist at the United States' Argonne National Lab and a Senior Member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on cosmology and in particular on extreme-scale simulations of the evolution of the universe.