Walkabout the Galaxy

An instrument on the International Space Station that can help us understand more about antimatter is getting an upgrade, and we review that old sci-fi staple: the wormhole. Somehow we manage to do this without talking about Star Trek (mostly), but we have nerd news and space updates together with trivia and a new discovery about some of the many moons in our solar system. 

Yes, it's just as bad as the title suggests, because when a supermassive black hole in a galactic center really gets going it can shut down star formation in the galaxy by blasting out all the raw star materials also known as atoms. The astroquarks explore galaxies with large and small star formation rates, plus we catch up on space news with Voyager 2 and the return to the Moon, and some throwbac...

Some clever detective work has found one of the smallest black holes known. The astroquarks also take a look at the puzzling mess of the Hubble Constant and the disagreement over its value. Plus, the interstellar comet's supply of water seems consistent with our own solar comets, and the Lagrange Points (the musical quintet, not the set of gravitational potential equilibria in an orbiting two-body...

The astroquarks are joined by Dr. Renee Weber from NASA's Mars Insight mission to bring us the skinny on that spacecraft's mole's struggles to burrow into Mars. We also check in on polluted white dwarf stellar remnants and what they are teaching us, remarkably, about the interiors of exoplanets, plus spacecraft trivia, philosopher wars, and of course yet another sponsor for Walkabout the Galaxy.

The astroquarks are joined by Dr. Adam Burgasser from the Cool Star Lab at the University of California San Diego to talk about the mysterious members of the astrophysical menagerie that lie between planets and stars. Brown dwarfs are lurking in the dark, sometimes closer than we might think. We also have spaceflight history trivia, 20 new moons, and a spot about G.

The astroquarks spin around the universe, from an ancient tree's rings providing clues to magnetic reversals on Earth to planets wandering among the stars and the first detection of the filamentary structures of hydrogen gas strung between clusters of galaxies. Plus space news, nerd news, and Star Wars Lego trivia! This episode is a veritable Kessel Run.

The astroquarks welcome Stephanie Jarmak from UCF to discuss the study of gluons, the hilariously named force-carriers that hold quarks together, Trojan asteroids sharing Jupiter's orbit, eyeball planets and snowball planets, and more. All this plus space news, nerd news, and relativistic trivia on the latest episode of Walkabout the Galaxy.

Ever wonder what goes on at an international meeting of planetary scientists? Who hasn't?! This special episode of Walkabout comes to you from a hotel room in Geneva Switzerland following the joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's planetary science division and the European Planetary Science Congress. Josh and Addie are joined by original Top Quark Dr. Tracy Becker and Dr. Bonnie Mei...

The astroquarks revisit the importance of H2O on the Moon, even if it is tied up inside rocks, before taking a visit to the realm of the Milky Way's gigantic bubbles of plasma emanating, it seems, from the central black hole. Plus, artificial intelligence reaches a milestone, while the astroquark intelligence is just hanging on. Tune in and decide for yourself.

Hurricanes are regular visitors to the Walkabout Studios at the University of Central Florida, but not to the planet Venus, whose slow rotation makes for rather dull weather. High of 900 degrees is forecast for Venus for the foreseeable future. But there are some mysteries in its upper atmosphere. We'll also talk about the mysteries of quantum gravity, which doesn't exist yet, and the role of supe...

Join us for a special musical episode of Walkabout the Galaxy with guest Adam LaMee as we take a look at a nearby giant exoplanet and a very distant supernova of a type that has never been seen before. 

Astronomy and cosmology challenge our perceptions of space and time, make us ponder our place in the universe, and give us wonders from the infinitesimal to the nearly-infinite. Then there's Walkabout the Galaxy, where we attack the question of which is a bigger relative bite: when the Sun in its red giant phase swallows the Earth, or when Jim Cooney in his fishing phase swallows a gnat. For that...

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, join...

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 pe...

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 astroq...

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 alway...

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...

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 as...

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...

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 mach...

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. Al...

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...

Scientists have been chasing methane on Mars for years. It's a slippery little molecule that doesn't stick around very long and has several biological (as well as non-biological) sources. The armada of spacecraft at Mars have conflicting measurements of the presence or absence of methane in Mars' atmosphere. Fortunately the astroquarks are here to make sense (or fun) of it. Plus, we discuss a cool...

We discuss the dramatic first view of a black hole in a special episode recorded in front of a live audience. In addition to the Event Horizon Telescope's image, bonus nerd trivia, and an abundance of space news, we review the latest in space impacts, including the dramatic fossil field in North Dakota revealing the death and mayhem just minutes after the catastrophic asteroid impact that wiped ou...

Just when you thought Dark Energy couldn't get any stranger, new measurements of the history of the expansion of the universe show an era well after the big bang and inflation but long, long ago when the rate of expansion was different than today. We are running out of dark names for the unknown. Closer to home the astroquarks discuss evidence for rain and water on Mars at a surprisingly recent (w...