Pythagorean Astronomy

Edward and Chris discuss the recent Northern Lights show seen across the UK, the discovery of new free-floating planets, massive black holes and the completion of the largest camera ever built. Ian Harrison joins us to report on the latest tensions in cosmology, and the potential solutions to a problem that has been concerning cosmologists for the last few years.

Edward Gomez and Chris North discuss names going to Jupiter on the Europa Clipper mission, which is currently being assembled. Then there is a new cannibal star, suspected of eating its own planets, and the detection of new "Galactic Streams" of stars that all formed together but have since spread out through the Galaxy. Finally, we move onto planet formation and the detection of ices in...

This month Edward and Chris talk the recent lunar missions - Astrobotic's Peregrine and Japan's SLIM. There's also the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars on what turned out post-recording to be it's final flight! Further afield we talk mega-structures on a galactic scale and asteroids crashing to Earth. January also saw the first light from the XRISM satellite, the latest X-ray satellite...

Chris North and Edward Gomez review some stories from 2023, with asteroid missions, lunar rovers and aurora sightings. Plus a look forward to 2024, including launches of missions to asteroids and Jupiter's moons, and more commercial missions to the moon.

Chris and Edward discuss the announcement of the detection of a highly energetic cosmic ray, dubbed "Amerterasu" or the "What the Heck" particle. Elsewhere, there is a new study of star formation in "pristine" dwarf galaxies, and the first every discovery of a disc around a star in another galaxy!

Recorded in late October, Chris and Edward discuss recent proposals for an all-British mission to space, the launch of Psyche to...erm...Psyche, and Edward's involvement with the detection of something called a Synestia - planets bashing together. Cardiff University also hosted Prof Duncan Lorimer, who was jointly awarded the 2023 Shaw Prize for the detection of "Fast Radio Bursts"....

Chris and Edward discuss some recent stories, such as tantalising possible (emphasis on the possible) detections by JWST of interesting molecules on an exoplanet which coul (emphasis on the could) indicate signs of life. There's also new data on Europa, also from JWST, showing carbon dioxide on its surface - what does this mean? And further afield, astronomers have used ALMA to measure magneti...

Dr Ian Harrisonreports from the National Astronomy meeting, which we held in Cardiff back in July. You can hear a couple of interviews we conducted on the previous episode, but in this episode we have a bit of a deep dive into machine learning with Ashley Spindler, what we mean by a modelling in astrophysics with Niall Jeffrey, and what we're learning from the cosmic microwave background with...

July marked the UK's annual National Astronomy Meeting, which this year took place in Cardiff. Chris North, Edward Gomez and Ian Harrison discuss a few recent stories from this month and at the conference, including the Euclid space telescope launch, India's Chandrayaan 3 moon mission, gravitational waves from supermassive black holes, feeding black holes and exoplanets with metal rain. We...

In 2020 astronomers spotted an object slowly getting brighter, but it wasn't until 2021 tha they quite understood how unusual it was. In 2021, they studied it in more detail, and found that it was something we don't think has ever been seen before. It was also the most energetic single event ever witnessed. Going by the catchy name of AT2021lwx, or simply "lwx" to its friends, th...

A news roundup of the last couple of months with Chris North and Edward Gomez. With a few failures - the SpaceX Starship launch, iSpace's moon landing and Virgin Galactic's bankruptcy, it might seem things are going wrong. But it's not all bad news - ESA's JUICE spacecraft has successfully launched on its way to Jupiter! Elsewhere in the Solar System, archives of data from the Mage...

In terms of what might be called “pure science”, there’s one topic that tends to get people excited, and that's black holes. A few weeks ago, in February 2023, a pair of papers came out that linked theories about black holes to dark energy – something we really don’t understand. If correct, this could mean that black holes, by their very nature, could explain the accelerating expansion of the...

In the last month there was a show of the Northern Lights - or aurora - visible from the UK. If you didn't get to see it (spoiler: neither did we!), then you might get a chance in the future if there's another outburst. Edward Gomez and Chris North discuss how to increase your chances of seeing them next time there's an alert. In science news, some new thoughts on how the Moon could have formed, a...

Chris North and Edward Gomez discuss the first attempt to launch a rocket from UK soil, albeit via a piggyback on (or under) a plane. There's also an interesting supernova, the first exoplanet confirmation from JWST. Meanwhile, on Mars, does no news mean bad news for China's Zhurong rover? We also speak to Dr Ian Harrison, from Cardiff University, and Dr Bob Watson, from the University of Manchest...

The 25th December marks an anniversary in the world of astronomy (as well as Sir Isaac Newton's birthday, of course) - the launch of JWST, the infrared space telescope launched to explore the Universe in unprecedented detail. One year on from launch, Chris North and Edward Gomez look at a few of the results that have come in, on top of those we've covered previously. From our own solar system, to...

With the Artemis I mission mid-mission (at the time of recording), Chris North and Edward Gomez look at what this means for the future of human space exploration, and more ambitious missions to the Moon (and beyond). Meanwhile, back here on Earth, the European Space Agency have announced their next crop of astronauts. The list includes three British astronauts, and in particular John McFall, the f...

At the end of September, NASA's DART mission was deliberately crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos. Not carelessness, but a deliberate act with a view to testing planetary defense. After all, if we discover something large heading towards Earth, we might want to be able to nudge it off course. Here in Wales, the Comet Chasers team took a diversion from observing comets to looking at Dimorphos with...

This is the second part of a gravitational field trip to the LIGO Hanford Observatory in Washington State, in the US. Last month we talked about how the detectors work, and the scientists and engineers who operate them. This time, we take a longer-term look, not just into the future but also into the past, and ask what it took to get here, and what the future holds. Dr Mike Landry, Head of LIGO Ha...

This month, we go on a field trip to the LIGO Hanford Observatory, one of a number of detectors that are searching for gravitational waves. In part one of this trip, we hear from a number of people working at the detector. Dr Mike Landry, Head of the LIGO Hanford Observatory, explains how, and crucially why, the experiment exists. Dr Fred Raab, Associate Director for Operations for LIGO, looks bac...

Amateur astronomers regularly make important contributions to astronomy research. That can be through observations of meteor showers, or images of solar system objects. But it's not always about pretty pictures, and some amateurs also make measurements that feed into our understanding of a broad range of astronomical phenomena, providing a network of telescopes that far outnumbers the professional...

In the 65 years since Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, the number of artificial satellites in orbit has been increasing. In the last two years, the number of satellites has doubled, largely thanks to the huge "constellations" launched by companies such as SpaceX. The number of satellites has a detrimental impact on astronomical observations, both with professional telescopes and by amateur astronom...

It's not often that a new astronomical phenomenon is named, but this month we have a new one. The name might not be that original, but there have been the first observations of something known as a "micronova". Lasting just a few hours, a micronova is much fainter than a typical "nova", making them much harder to detect, and much less likely to be picked up. Chris North and Edward Gomez discuss wh...

With the invasion of Ukraine casting a shadow over the world, Chris North and Edward Gomez look at the impact of the war on astronomy and space science, mindful that these pale in importance when compared with the death and destruction taking place on the ground. From the international collaboration taking place on board the International Space Station, to the use of Russian rockets. Also at stake...

Back in September 2020, the new broke that an unexpected gas, phosphine had been discovered in the atmosphere of Venus. While plans for making further measurements are progressing, the theoreticians have been hard at work modelling the atmosphere, and trying to explain how life could possibly exist in such a harsh environment Dr William Bains, of Cardiff University and MIT, is part of a team who h...

When a mysterious signal was found by an undergraduate student, Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker was perplexed. It was hiding in archival data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a large network of radio antennas in Western Australia. Based at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Natasha started to loop deeper. Repeating every 18 minutes, and initially found at only one frequency,...