syzygy Chris Stewart & Emily Brunsden
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- Science
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Join astronomer Dr Emily Brunsden and enthusiastic not-astronomer Dr Chris Stewart as they explore the universe.
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120: Biggest Small Black Hole
This week, a new Black Hole Record (kinda), and with it a nice conundrum. the GAIA mission has found the biggest black hole ... of the stellar-mass variety ... in our galaxy. A lot of caveats there, but the fun thing is, it's just next door, which makes us wonder if that's coincidence or a harbinger of more big black holes to come in GAIA's data dumps! Plus, a riddle: why do we keep spotting black holes that are too big to make? Did we break physics? Emily has a few explanations.
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119: Astrocampus Turns Ten!
We're live from the 10th birthday celebrations for the University of York's Astrocampus, Emily's home turf and all-round fabulous teaching and outreach space. Emily fields some amazing questions from kids and adults attending the event, and gives some of Astrocampus's highlights and achievements over the past decade, as well as some plans for the future!
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118: Sextuplet Symphony
After some lengthy follow-up (the Bennu sample is open at last! And SLIM is alive!), Emily investigates possibly the most podcasty story we’ve had on the show: six planets around distant star HD110067, all locked into resonances that play beautiful music. Turns out if you leave a planetary system alone for long enough, gravity tends to pull everything into simple harmonies. Maybe our own solar system has a song to sing in the far future?
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117: SLIM chance of moon landing?
Emily and Chris tune in to JAXA’s livestream of SLIM — the Smart Lander for Investigating and Moon — as it attempted to slick the landing on the lunar surface on Friday 19 January 2023. We were prepared for success and champagne, or failure and lessons-learned. What we didn’t expect was … ambiguity, uncertainty and WE ARE STILL CHECKING THE STATUS SO PLEASE WAIT. Did SLIM and its fabulous little transformer rovers make it to the Moon OK or not?! Join us for all the anticipation, the wonder, and the confusion in this special syzygy episode.
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116: Black Hole Sun
Long-time Syzygy listener Jack asks: "Hey Emily — what's the deal with quasi-stars?" (We're paraphrasing). Quasi-stars are hypothetical, enormous stellar-object-thingies that might have formed shortly after the Big Bang. They're so huge they might have formed with black holes at their cores. If they existed at all, it would explain why astronomers keep finding intermediate-mass black holes in gravitational wave experiments. And as a bonus for you, Jack, Emily presents Hawking stars: otherwise ordinary stars that could be hiding a tiny black hole deep in their core. Could the Sun be a Hawking star? The mind boggles.
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115: Zevatron in the Void
Astronomers routinely detect cosmic rays, the high-energy particles from space that collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a shower of secondary particles that rain down on the earth below. But every so often — like, less than once a decade — they spot a cosmic ray smashing into the planet with just stupid amounts of energy. The sort of energy you associate with hitting a golf ball or maybe dropping a brick on your foot, but definitely NOT a single subatomic particle. Not only do astronomers have no idea what could produce these Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays, one was spotted recently that seems to have originated in one of the emptiest regions of the universe. Emily explains the Strange Mystery of the Cosmic Zevatron.
Customer Reviews
For the podcast algorithm gods
Great chemistry. not jargon-y
To future podcast lister. If you read this, and listen, after enjoyed the show you must comment and 5 stars. Give ‘em a reward for the hard work they put into the episode.
Charming
Great content, very knowledgeable, and yet casual and easy to understand.
Alaska JDW
Love the topics. Well informed