The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures Podcasts

In this talk, Dr. Tori Hoehler from NASA Ames Research Center discusses the science of searching for life beyond our immediate neighborhood, and how we will seek evidence of inhabited worlds in the future. Recorded February 3, 2016.

In the past 20 years, astronomers have shown that the universe is not only expanding, but speeding up. Dr. Robert Kirshner discusses the methods used to discover cosmic acceleration. Recorded November 11, 2015.

Since 2004, Cassini has been exploring the giant planet Saturn. Dr. Carolyn Porco shows us many mission images and explains the findings from both the main orbiter and the probe that landed on Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon. Recorded October 6, 2015.

2015 marks the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s completion of his General Theory of Relativity. Dr. Jeffrey Bennett (University of Colorado) explains the basic ideas of Einstein’s work in everyday language. Recorded May 6, 2015.

In this talk, Dr. Ed Lu (Former NASA Astronaut; CEO of the Sentinel Mission) describe the threat of asteroids and discusses the Sentinel Mission, an orbiting telescope to detect and track asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit. Recorded March 4, 2015.

Dr. Marc Rayman, the Mission Director for the Dawn exploration of Vesta and Ceres, explains the unusual mission, what it found at Vesta, and what it is going to do as it gets to Ceres, the first dwarf planet discovered. Recorded April 8, 2015.

Dr. Mark Showalter describes how he discovered two of the moons of Pluto, explains what we currently know about the Pluto system, and sets the scene for the exploration that is in store. Recorded January 28, 2015.

Professor Knox shows the detailed images of the sky obtained by the Planck satellite and explains how such images provide us with our best means of studying events mere fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Recorded November 12, 2014.

Is humanity on Earth special or unexceptional? Dr. Caleb Scharf from Columbia University helps us to come to grips with the implications of some of the latest scientific research, from the microscopic to the cosmic. Recorded October 8, 2014.

Dr. Chung-Pei Ma (University of California, Berkeley) describes recent discoveries of record-breaking black holes, each with a mass of ten billion times the mass of the Sun. Recorded May 24, 2014.