The 365 Days of Astronomy

What’s so special about Wolf-Rayet stars? Do we even know how they work? And what does this all have to do with Paris? I answer these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

Follow all the show updates at askaspaceman.com, and help support the show at patreon.com/pmsutter!

Keep those questions about space, science, astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology coming to #AskASpaceman on Twitter@PaulMattSutter and Facebook/PaulMattSutter for COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE OF TIME AND SPACE! Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain.

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEF-plQHjIM

Streamed live on Feb 8, 2016

Fraser & Pamela talk about all the ways astronomers use gravity in their observations. It's a surprisingly large number of ways it's used!

Visit the Astronomy Cast Page to subscribe to the audio podcast!
We record Astronomy Cast as a live Google+ Hangout on Air every Monday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch here on Universe Today or from the Astronomy Cast Google+ page.

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1604/

This show is dedicated to astrophysicist-to-be Ben Ventura of North Carolina.

Astronomers have taken an image that shows new planets being born around a distant young star! Now this has been done before, most notably with HL Tauri in the constellation Taurus the Bull. Google it. It's an amazing image.

In this case the astronomers calculated the temperature of the dust disk where the baby planets are forming and it's surprisingly cold.

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

Description: The LSST is a new kind of telescope. With a light-gathering power among the largest in the world, it can detect faint objects with short exposures. Its uniquely wide field of view allows it to observe large areas of the sky at once; compact and nimble, it can move quickly between images. Taking more than 800 panoramic images each night, it can cover the sky twice each week. In this podcast, LSST Director Dr. Steve Kahn describes the project and its upcoming construction.

http://www.noao.edu

http://twitter.com/#!/NOAONorth 

http://www.lsst.org/

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xORB1X-JJo

Streamed live on Feb 5, 2016

Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain)
Special Guest: Dr. Or Graur, Research Associate at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University; Researches what type of star leads to a thermonuclear, or “Type Ia,” supernova. http://www.ccpp.nyu.edu/orgraur/ & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIgVe1LcRk
Guests:
Carolyn Collins Petersen ( thespacewriter.com / space.about.com / @spacewriter )
Morgan Rehnberg ( cosmicchatter.org / @MorganRehnberg )
Jolene Creighton ( fromquarkstoquasars.com / @futurism )
Alessondra Springmann ( @sondy )
Their stories this week:
- NASA’s shaky plans for Mars
- How dense are Saturn’s rings?

- 67P is fluffy to its core

- Creating the Moon in a Head-on Collision

- Oh, those cunning, Earth hiding stars

- NASA's shaky plans for Mars…

- Space Chimps
- Black hole emits jet 3 times longer than milky way
We’ve had an abundance of news stories for the past few months, and not enough time to get to them all. So we’ve started a new system. Instead of adding all of the stories to the spreadsheet each week, we are now using a tool called Trello to submit and vote on stories we would like to see covered each week, and then Fraser will be selecting the stories from there. Here is the link to the Trello WSH page (http://bit.ly/WSHVote), which you can see without logging in. If you’d like to vote, just create a login and help us decide what to cover!
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Friday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Google+, Universe Today, or the Universe Today YouTube page.
You can also join in the discussion between episodes over at our Weekly Space Hangout Crew group in G+!

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

If we do establish a permanent settlement on the Moon or Mars, it will be a transition as profound as when we left Africa for the first time. The colonists will be a young offshoot of the human tree, with the potential to evolve into a different species. Having left home, they might one day set their sights far beyond, to the stars.

Dr. Chris Impey is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He most recent book, Beyond, covers the future of space travel and was published recently by Norton.

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

Note from your 365 Days of Astronomy Producer/Editor: You may (but hopefully will not) experience a problem at 29m50s into the Awesome Astronomy program. I tried several times to re-encode the program and eventually got it to play here on my computer. The file error problem, however, may not be gone altogether. If your audio player experiences a problem you will have to go to the Awesome Astronomy website and listen to the program there with your computer's browser. I hope there's no trouble for you, though.

RIchard Drumm

Paul Hill, Ralph Wilkins and Jenifer Millard host. Damien Phillips and John Wildridge produce.

Summary of content: 

The Discussion: As we lament the passing of some great people we remember how lucky we are to live in an age of great discovery. We discuss British astronaut Tim Peake’s spacewalk with American Tim Kopra outside the International Space Station and take a look back at the annual festival of TV astronomy StargazingLIVE.

The News: There’s a packed news section in this month’s show as we discuss:

Have astronomers discovered another planet in our solar system?

LIGO’s possible detection of gravitational waves

Does an irregular star host evidence for alien life?

A possible explanation for the ‘Wow signal’

The most powerful supernova ever detected

Poor Philae gives up the ghost

Attempting to photograph a black hole

The Interview: This month Jen bags herself an astronaut. While celebrating the launch of Tim Peake, Jen grabs an interview with Spanish/ESA astronaut Pedro Duque: a veteran of two space missions having flown the Shuttle, Soyuz and the International Space Station.

WooBusters: With a long back catalogue to call upon to understand objects and concepts in astronomy, Paul calls it a day on his 5 Minute Concept. In its place comes WooBusters! Send in your suggestions for conspiracy theories, bonkers ideas and general pseudoscientific nonsense and we’ll add them to Paul’s Big Hat of Woo.

This month we kick off WooBusters with a debunking of alien abductions.

http://www.awesomeastronomy.com

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

Hosted by Dr. Paul Matt Sutter.

This week I chat with Fraser Cain of Universe Today about scientific publishing, science news on social media, and . . . more mermaids.

Special thanks to the The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics for hosting this recording session.

You can find more information at realspacepodcast.com or by following me on Facebook or Twitter!

Theme song "Live Long and Podcast" by Nick Bain, Into The Machine Recordings (http://intothemachine.bandcamp.com) 2015, all rights reserved.

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40etx-p0S-k

Streamed live Feb 3, 2016.

Join +Fraser Cain  and +Pamela Gay for a live episode of Astronomy Cast. We'll record our 30-minute show, and then stay tuned for them to answer questions!

What do Pamela and Fraser think will happen or be discovered in 2016? What would they like to see in the near future?

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!

https://youtu.be/kw1XnGmmR_M?t=4h7m49s - Part 6 4h 7m 49s

Hosted by Dr. Pamela Gay and Dr. Nicole Gugliucci.

Our guests for this portion of the Hangout-a-Thon are President & CEO Chris Lewicki and Marketing Director Caitlin O'Keefe of Planetary Resources, a company that plans to mine asteroids. They describe in detail their Arkyd spacecraft and the mission they plan to launch to the challenging environment of deep space.

Do go visit http://astrogear.spreadshirt.com/ for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness!

http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.

Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!)

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. http://www.astrosphere.org/

Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at [email protected].

While you're at it, do support our Learning Space educator training program by going to this site:

https://www.patreon.com/LearningSpace

Please help us keep training the trainers! Learning Space is a weekly G+ Hangout on Air about topics in astronomy education, outreach and other ways to share science both in the school setting and outside it. We bring you interviews, hands-on demonstrations, lists of our favorite educational resources and more!