The Open Universe

Photons traveling through spacetime are cosmic messengers carrying with them rich stories of the past history of our cosmos. Find out how an otherwise innocuous observation of distant quasars in 1965 transformed our understanding of the composition of intergalactic space, and the phases of evolution our Universe underwent billions of years ago.

For years, astronomers have been puzzled by the mysterious bursts of cosmic radio emission, until recently, two teams identified the origin of these events as extremely magnetic stars -- strong enough to disrupt credit cards on the moon!

Relive the story of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who, as a 19-year old, came to a remarkable realization on board a ship journeying to start his physics scholarship in England. This discovery would lead to a bitter spat with one of the most eminent luminaries in the world of astronomy, and eventually reveal an astonishing feature of time and space – the existence of black holes.

The vastness of space was unfathomable until a pioneer of "Big Data" found a regularity in the way some stars change brightness, a discovery which has ever since allowed us to precisely measure distances to stars throughout the Milky Way and beyond.

Our universe appears to be an ever-expanding, or an open universe. Join us on a journey into the future to discover what this means for all the planets, stars, and galaxies.

Discovering small planets like the Earth orbiting other stars like the Sun is hard, but blobs of gas surfacing from stellar interiors can help.

We hit our mid-life crises early and started a podcast about astronomy.