In this QA episode, Fraser wonders when the Big Rip might happen, could there be binary galaxies, what it would be like to live in higher gravity.

Mars is in the spotlight now, as both SpaceX and NASA are preparing their long range plans to send humans to the Red Planet. But Mars is an inhospitable environment, especially because of its tenuous and poisonous atmosphere of carbon dioxide.

On October 25, 2017, astronomers from NASA’s Minor Planet Center sent out an announcement that they needed help confirming the trajectory of an interesting object.

In this week’s question show, Fraser explains why almost everything in the Solar System is spinning in the same direction, is there a limit to how massive black holes can get, and do galaxies have an escape velocity?

We once thought our Solar System was normal, average. How wrong we were, how varied the planetary systems are out there. It turns out, the migration of planets played a huge role in the Solar System we see today.

Space is our future, but space is also a deadly place, with poisonous radiation and an increased risk of cancer. We’re protected here on Earth thanks to our planet’s magnetosphere, but is there a way to create an artificial magnetosphere and shield astronauts?

In this week’s question show, Fraser explains how astronomers measure the spin rate of black holes, other uses of gravitational slingshots, and why everyone is talking about Patreon.

In this week’s question show, Fraser explains his thoughts on SpaceX, what he does for his regular job, and wonders if you could use a black hole to perform gravitational slingshots, whether planets could hide in Lagrange points, and growing trees on Mars.

In order to get the large scale structure of the Universe we see today, cosmologists have proposed the idea of inflation, that the Universe expanded an enormous amount in the earliest moments. But if inflation really happened, then it has even stranger implications for the nature of the Universe and the search for multiverses.

On October 5th, 2017, US Vice President Mike Pence announced that NASA is going back to the Moon. He didn’t provide any other details, just some kind of moonward directed space exploration. And it turns out they won’t be the only ones. The Moon is going to be a busy busy place.