Walkabout the Galaxy

We never get tired of Einstein being right, and once again his general theory of relativity is up to the challenge. The astroquarks take you on a tour to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way for another test of Einstein's theory of gravity, while closer to home the Japanese Hayabusa-2 mission has successfully grabbed some more asteroid rubble. Dr. Zoe Landsman, aka Beauty Astroquark, joins Josh and Jim on this walkabout with spaceships being propelled by sunlight, nerd news, and Apollo trivia.

A thousand bonus Trekkie points for getting the reference of the title of this episode, and another 1000 points for connecting it to our main science topic (spoiler alert): voids in space. Space is very empty, and some parts are emptier than others. Giant voids are helping us narrow down the rate of expansion of the universe. NPR's Brendan Byrne, space reporter for WMFE 90.7, joins us to give a peak behind the scenes of NASA's plans to send people to the Moon, plus some physics-y space trivia and much more.

Supermassive black holes lurk in nearly every galaxy, and stellar-mass black holes are making news with mergers that we see with our gravitational wave observatories. But what about the black hole middle class? And just how massive are these things anyway? Plus, Hollywood director and astroquark brother K.C. Colwell ("Deep Impact", "The Mummy", "The Wolverine", "The Walking Dead") joins the astroquarks to talk about science and special effects in movies. And we honor the 50th anniversary of the amazing achievement of Apollo 11 with bonus Apollo trivia.

We're going back to Saturn! NASA has selected the Dragonfly mission to the planet-moon Titan to explore its atmosphere and carbon-rich chemistry with a dual quadcopter capable of flying several km at a time. Work continues on the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter's own Ocean World. The astroquarks catch you up on these new missions, plus some nerdy sci-fi trivia, Josh mangles French, and, as always, be sure to listen through to the end for a unique and surprising outro to the show.

There is no center of the universe, no top or bottom (except for our astroquarks!), but all sorts of things in the universe have a definite handedness, and this includes fundamental particles, whose left-ness or right-ness is captured in a quantum property called spin. Top astroquark Jim Cooney takes us for a spin around new results looking into why there is a preference for certain directions of spin. Closer to home we look into the spin of the early Sun and how it ties into the early evolution of life and rocks on the Moon! So take the universe for a spin with us, and get a tangential trivia and all your space news on Walkabout the Galaxy.

The universe began in a hot, dense state, as the song goes, and we can, oddly, see that heat from the thing that we are still in. The universe. Strange stuff. The radiation leftover form the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, has cooled off, but analysis of measurements of this radiation by the Planck spacecraft point to some odd hot and cold halves of the universe. The astroquarks take a deep dive into the CMB, plus lots of new spaceflight news and of course your Walkabout trivia.

The astroquarks take a stroll through the extrasolar planetary zoo where there are new members of the close-to-Earth-sized club and a peculiar Neptune-y thingy orbiting super close to its star. Meanwhile there are rapid developments in NASA's renewed focus on sending astronauts to the Moon, and we revisit the strange case of quarks, anti-quarks, and the existence of matter in the universe. Plus a very deep dive into Forbidden Planet-inspired trivia.

NASA unveils a new accelerated timeline to get astronauts forward (not back, get it?) to the Moon in 2024 with the new Artemis program. The astroquarks bring you up to speed on the latest space exploration news, and are joined by author Dennis Taylor of the "Bobiverse" trilogy of science fiction novels ("We are Legion", "For We Are Many", and "All These Worlds"). This gets us into Von Neumann machines, the Fermi paradox and the Great Filter, and bonus Bob trivia.

The astroquarks discuss news about lunar quakes and Venus... volcanoes. But volcanoes doesn't rhyme with quakes, so I sacrificed alliteration for rhyming. Venus may be volcanically active, at least on relatively recent geological timescales. If only we could go back in time to see! Top quark Jim Cooney will bring us up to date on a new experiment that fiddles with the direction of time's arrow. All that, plus space news and bonus trivia on this episode of Walkabout.

From a human-made crater (well, spacecraft-made) on an asteroid, to the Moon-forming impact, to an accelerating pace of black hole merger detections, the astroquarks survey the latest news in astronomical collisions. The asteroid Apophis has a close date with Earth in 2029, and what episode of Walkabout would be complete without some general relativistic frame dragging? Zoe Landsman joins us while Charm quark Addie Dove is off launching things into space! Plus space news and a historical/avengical trivia.