Walkabout the Galaxy

Josh recounts experiencing the end of the Cassini mission and recalls more than a quarter century of involvement with the project in this episode. Then the astroquarks take a look outward toward our galaxy and its retinue of dwarf galaxies and what that may say about how typical, or not, the Milky Way is in the grand scheme of things. All that plus Cassini trivia, nerd news, and a meteorological sponsor on this episode of WtG.

Asteroid Florence with her two mini-moons pays a visit to the Earth, while Tabby's Star continues to mystify with its unpredictable fluctuations in brightness. The astroquarks also cover the latest LIGO rumors about the detection of neutron star collisions, expanding the realm of gravitational wave astronomy. Plus Nerd News and Space Trivia!

New experiments have created diamonds in the conditions expected in the interiors of Uranus and Neptune. Former Top Astroquark Tracy Becker joins Josh, Addie and Jim to discuss diamond rain deep in the atmospheres of these giant planets. Join the astroquarks for nerd news, space trivia, and a bit of planetary science for good measure.

The astroquarks tell their eclipse stories from the Great American Eclipse. The Sun and every star has weather, spots, oscillations, flares and all sorts of activity. Some of this is revealed during an eclipse to the naked eye. Now, telescopes have enabled us to map the appearance of the red supergiant, Antares. Join Josh, Addie and Jim for this stellar episode of Walkabout the Galaxy.

The weight on that box of breakfast cereal ultimately traces back to "le grand K", a metal sphere in a vault in Paris, a wonderfully archaic standard for how much stuff makes a kilogram. We'll talk about the efforts to update that standard, the next Kuiper Belt Object to be explored by the New Horizons spacecraft, eclipses and occultations, and of course Zombies. Join the astroquarks for the latest astro-news, nerd news, and this episode's trivia about the length of the month!

The Sun doesn't just shine, it rings like a bell, or a drumhead wrapped into a ginormous ball of incandescent plasma. The astroquarks talk about how helioseismology tells us about the interior of the Sun, and new research shows some surprising changes in the Sun's outer layers. And the disappointing news from the realm of cosmology is that dark matter is probably not warm and fuzzy, depriving us of endless opportunities for jokes, not to mention that it would be awesome if we had fuzzy dark matter throughout the universe. Catch up on the latest astronomy, nerd news, and space trivia with the astroquarks on this episode of Walkabout the Galaxy.

If the controversy over Pluto's planetary status weren't already enough, what do you call a planet that is not even orbiting a star? The astroquarks explore rogue planets in this episode, planets that wander interstellar space, without a fire to keep them warm. We discuss how they nevertheless have been detected. Also, Addie's favorite body (rhymes with loon) and Jim's new favorite name, nerd news, space sponsor, and space trivia.

Dr. Kristen John of NASA's Johnson Space Center joins the Astroquarks for a wide-ranging discussion on topics from Jupiter's Great Red Spot to teleportation (yes, it's a real thing) and just what that means (not at all clear, but don't get ready to step into that transporter beam just yet).

The astroquarks are joined by Dr. Phil Metzger who spends a lot of time thinking about how our civilization can make the great leap into space. We may not be that far away from truly moving off our home planet and becoming a "Type 1 Civilization" that inhabits the solar system and not just one planet. We discuss how we'll get there, how long it might take, the challenges we face, and of course the latest nerd news and trivia from the world of Pandora (the Avatar one, not Saturn's moon).

Planet 9, also known as Egotron in honor of its supporters, has never been seen. A new statistical analysis of a deep sky survey suggests that's because it doesn't exist. The object's existence has been proposed to explain an apparent clustering of the orbits of some objects that have the charming quality of actually having been directly observed. The astroquarks discuss the arguments for Egotron and how statistics and observation bias play into all this. Speaking of statistics and planets, Kepler's list of planet candidates keeps growing. Hear about the latest discoveries, nerd news, space trivia and more on this episode of Walkabout the Galaxy.