Not wanting to overshadow this week's exciting supermassive black hole image release or anything, but Emily has news of her own. A short episode, in which Chris delves into the new Sag A* image a bit, before dropping the news bomb you've all *really* been waiting for ...

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

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Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

·      Article about the SagA* image — and that’ll do, you can find the rest from there 😁

You've heard of supernovae, the just stupidly big explosions that mark the end of some stars' lives. Maybe you know there are different kinds of supernovae — type 1a, type II ... Did you know that, smaller than a super nova, there's just a plain, vanilla nova? Or that, even bigger than super, there's hyper-novae? Well, hold onto your hats, because there's a new nova in town, and it's ... really quite small. On the nova scale, anyway. Emily gives all the goss on cute little micronovae. Plus, we school astronomers on the tricky subject of communicating large quantities of energy.

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

·      The micronova paper

·      A good article (with a bad analogy) about the research

·      Novae types: classical, recurrent, and dwarf

·      Supernovae and their types

·      The Cosmic Distance Ladder and Standard candles, and Dark Energy

·      Hypernovae!

·      TESS, everyone’s favourite space telescope

·      Phobos, potato moon

Astronomers have spotted the biggest comet ever! And it's heading for Earth! Except (a) it's not heading towards Earth — it's closest approach to us will be beyond Saturn's orbit — and (b) it's not technically the biggest. But it's still cool! Emily's here with loads of info about comets, big comets, things that are sort of comets, how many tails they have (hint: it's more than one), and heaps more besides.

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

·      The original paper, and the latest results

·      Article about Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein

·      Syzygy episode 50: Imposter Comet!

·      Syzygy episode 64: Almost a Good Comet

·      The Dark Energy Survey

·      Dirty snowballs

·      How many tails does a comet have?

·      The Oort Cloud

·      Famous comets: Halley, Hale-Bopp, Shoemaker-Levy 9

·      Centaurs

A very different story this week: using high-energy particles, originating from violent supernovae and supermassive black holes, to scan the insides of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Physicists are teaming up with Egyptologists to check some tantalising results from 2017 thaty suggest there just might be a previously unknown cavity — an open space — inside the Great Pyramid. Could it be a new, hidden room? A vault filled with ancient treasure? Or just somewhere they kept all the heating ducts and old pain cans? Plus, Syzygy is officially setting the agenda for astronomy research, and Emily unwraps some baby presents!

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

·      The oldest galaxy ever found

·      Get your Syzygy merch here

·      ScanPyramids misson in 2017

·      Explore Great Pyramid mission

·      The Pyramids of Giza

·      The Great Pyramid

·      Cosmic rays

·      The solar wind

·      Active Galactic Nuclei

·      Cosmic rays causing havoc in computers

·      Muons and relativity

·      Air showers of particles

·      The IceCube neutrino detector

·      Brian Cox makes a cloud chamber

For the latest — and last? — baby-themed episode, we talk baby planets and how they're made. And sure, we've talked about this before in previous episodes, but this time Emily comes with brand new research that shows an actual protoplanet forming from the stellar disk. And even better, the possibility that we can even spot a proto*moon* forming around a protoplanet. Plus, for any astronomers looking for ideas, she's got her Top 5 list of unsolved planet questions.

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

·      Oldest star ever seen!

·      Gravitational lensing

·      Syzygy 26: How to build a solar system

·      Syzygy 68: Birth of a Planet

·      And just for fun, Syzygy 19: Moons, exomoons & moonmoons

·      Far-our Super Jupiter AB Aurigae b

·      Nice article about AB Aurigae b

·      AB Aurigae in the movies

·      Protomoon around protoplanet?

·      Gravitational Microlensing

We’ve done the baby universe, and baby galaxies, and the very first baby stars ... and *those* were a bit nasty, a bit grumpy. So this week, we're talking baby stars again, but in the modern era — stars being born now, as we speak. Mind you, just because they've got more than H and He to buiold with, doesn't mean they're any less temperamental. Emily takes use from the interstellar medium, through interstellar clouds and collapsing proto-stars, to the birth of a cute little pre-main-sequence star.

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

·      The Interstellar medium and Interstellar clouds

·      Proto-stars and their windiness

·      Brown dwarfs

·      Main sequence stars

·      T Tauri stars

·      Herbig Ae/Be stars

This week, it's baby galaxies — the very, very ancient, and the surprisingly brand new. Emily looks back at the earliest things-we-might-consider-galaxies, and the competing models for how they formed. Then we take a peek into the beautiful M81 galaxy, which is, as we speak, sloughing off some of its stars and galaxy stuff, thanks to an ongoing fight with M82 next door. The fun part is, the extra stuff seems to be forming into a new galaxy — albeit one with a difficult future ahead ...

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

• The first galaxies

• Globular clusters

• Dwarf galaxies

• Galactic tides

• The tidal galaxy paper

• M81 and M82

• The Dragonfly Telescope

• WASP telescope

• Where’s JWST at now?

Continuing our theme of baby-related astronomy, Emily picks up the story from last episode — we'd just finished making the universe and watching its insane growth spurt, and then ... the first stars turned on! And wow, were those first stars weird. Even weirder, there might still be some of them about, 13 billon years later!

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

Where is the JWST?

Laporte et al’s paper on the earliest stars

A good article about the paper

The cosmic web

Stellar populations (I, II and III)

Redshift

We're back! Emily has some exciting news, and in regonition of this, we're starting a series of episodes on a theme — starting with the birth and infancy of the Universe! From the earliest physically-sensible moments, through the explosive growth spurt of Inflation, to the creation of forces, particles, nuclei and — eventuallly — atoms, we track the adorable and exciting early development of the cosmos.

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Things we talk about in this episode:

The Big Bang

Physics and Singularities

Hubble’s law

The Cosmic Microwave Background

Unification in physics

Planck time

Cosmic Inflation

Epochs in the early Universe

Big Bang nucleosynthesis

Matter-antimatter asymmetry

The Dark Ages

While the James Webb Space Telescope waits patiently for its new scheduled liftoff on Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe has been doing amazing things, whizzing through the outer edges of the Sun's corona for the very first time. Emily explains what we do — and staggeringly don't — know about our nearest star, and how Parker is going to help plug some of the more embarrassing gaps in our knowledge.

Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod

Since you’re here, you might be interested in a new, sciencey podcast: Science, possibly — science-adjacent stories by Chris Stewart and James Lees.

Things we talk about in this episode:

JWST still set for launch

The Parker Solar Probe

The Photosphere

The Chromosphere

The Corona

Coronal Mass Ejections

The Carrington Event of 1859

The Solar Storm of 1989

Parker touches the Sun!

First images from inside the corona (feat. Milky Way!)

Spaceguard!