Walkabout the Galaxy

The astroquarks talk haboobs. Unfortunately Jim is not with us to giggle, but Dr. Katariina Nykyri joins Strange and Charm to explain space weather and magnetospheric slingshots, and the Perseverance rover provides new insights into the generation of those famous Martian dust storms. Or haboobs.

Live from MegaCon 2022 in Orlando, we team up with space reporter Brendan Byrne to discuss the image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, great discoveries in store with JWST, and the Mars Insight lander going out with a quake, if not a bang.

Light gets redder as it climbs out of gravitational holes, and a star near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way conveniently demonstrates this beautifully. Join us for a discussion of gravitational redshift, a sci-fi discussion of time travel and body shifting, and a bit of Messier trivia.

As Top Quark likes to say, "You wouldn't understand: it's an early universe thing". That's why he's so excited that there's a new window into the goings on at the dawn of time by using HD. No, not high definition displays, but Hydrogen Deuteride! Oh boy, do we have fun with Deuteride on this episode. We also take a look at the crazy shuffling of planets in our own solar system, and much more.

Science marches onward, and the next steps in planetary science aim towards the seventh planet from the Sun, which shall not be named, and Saturn's little moon with a big ocean, Enceladus. Join us for a review of the new directions for planetary science research in the next decade, space news, and Uranus trivia.

Tiny fragments of the dinosaur-killing asteroid may have been found, preserved in amber, and new analysis of old data reveals a tiny, but potentially profound error in the mass of one of the fundamental particles, the W boson. It's not all small, as we also take a look at the largest comet nucleus and the most powerful laser.

Mars has a thin atmosphere, so little changes in the weather, even breezes, make big relative changes in how sound travels. We speculate on the sounds of future baseball game on Mars before turning to a fortuitous glimpse of the light from an individual star when the universe was less than a billion years old.

What if the stuff that makes up most of the stuff in the universe is so lightweight that you could barely call it stuff? Ultralight dark matter is one possible way to explain the puzzle of the very early formation of supermassive black holes. We explore this and the intriguing origins of Ceres, and much more.

We like to think we understand ordinary matter: the stuff we're familiar with that makes up stars, planets, and donuts. Sure Dark Energy and Dark Matter are mysterious, but the rest we have a handle on. Or do we? The New Horizons mission adds to a growing puzzle about the Cosmic Optical Background, not to be confused with the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is a beast of an entirely different color!