This episode we get back to the objects that inspired the whole field of astrophysics -- stars. Those little points of light that first inspired us as children are incredible physics laboratories that we can still use today to learn about plasma physics, turbulence, and nuclear reactions. Dr. Jeff Gerber tells us why he made his career out of studying how stars work, and how much we still have to learn about these giant balls of plasma.
May 01, 2026•1 hr 6 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Just how much do we know about how the planets formed? How much of this can we learn from getting images of young solar systems? Why does it help to look at the disk using radio waves instead of optical wavelengths? Dr. Charles Law discusses these questions and more as we talk about radio astronomy and the birth of the solar system.
Apr 01, 2026•51 min•Season 3Ep. 4
The Vera Rubin Observatory has just started taking its first data this month. We have a special guest (Dr. Daniel Polin) who helped in the construction of the camera for Rubin. This digital camera was a major feat due to the very large amount of data contained in each exposure, requiring clever techniques for reading and transmitting data quickly. Let's find out what it takes to build the biggest digital camera in the world.
Mar 01, 2026•1 hr 15 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Most of the mass in the universe is invisible. We call it "Dark Matter", and the only reason we know it's there is because we can see how it gravitationally interacts with regular matter. For example, in our own galaxy, Dark Matter comprises most of the mass, in a large spherical "halo" that binds the smaller spiral of gas and stars that we can see. As all our stars orbit the Milky Way, they are passing through a sea of dark matter, and this should create observable consequences that allow us to...
Feb 01, 2026•1 hr 2 min•Season 3Ep. 2
What's the deal with black holes?
Jan 01, 2026•1 hr 23 min•Season 3Ep. 1
How did our solar system form? More generally, how does any solar system form? We get some of our answers to these questions by looking at newly-forming planetary systems in the first million years of their lives. But getting a complete picture also requires a lot of theoretical work, understanding each stage of solar system formation, which often entails big computational models of the early solar system. Dr. Kaitlin Kratter is a leader in the practice of building these big models and using the...
Dec 01, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Season 2Ep. 12
A white dwarf star is the compact, dense remnant of a once-thriving solar system. Long after the original star has died and turned into a white dwarf, it can still interact with its solar system. We can even see white dwarfs eating up the rocky debris that once made up their solar system, and apparently making sense of all of this requires a detailed understanding of how convection works in these dead stellar remnants.
Nov 01, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Season 2Ep. 11
How did the planets form? What was going on in the first few brief million years of our solar system? And how did it impact what we see in our solar system today? Dr. Merel van 't Hoff takes us on a journey through astrochemistry to understand the planetary wombs that house solar systems in their prenatal years.
Oct 01, 2025•58 min•Season 2Ep. 10
What kinds of things do neutron stars do? They can smash into each other, producing bright flashes of radiation and strong ripples in spacetime that can be detected across the universe! Or, a neutron star can just be sitting there, and its magnetic field might suddenly shift and produce a dramatic burst of radio waves! But mainly, neutron stars are super-dense and super-complicated, giving us a probe of fundamental physics in its most extreme limits. Dr. Wen-Fai Fong tells us all about how we ca...
Sep 01, 2025•43 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Just how big can black holes get? Well, they can get super-massive! That is, millions to billions of times as massive as the sun. How do we know this? We've detected these supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies in a number of ways, and Dr. Daniel D'Orazio has been leading the way in figuring out new ways we can detect more, especially if it's not one but two black holes orbiting one another in a binary system.
Aug 01, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 8
In this week's episode, Dr. Abigail Polin joins us to answer your questions from the internet, on a variety of topics tangentially related to astrophysics! Questions range from the basic and fundamental to the obscure and weird. Answers are totally unprepared and rambling. Our guests this week are Dr. Abigail Polin, PLUS an extra-special mystery guest!
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Season 2Ep. 7
A black hole is so dense, its gravitational field prevents anything from escaping, including light. You would think that would make them the "blackest" things in the universe; how in the world do we know they are there? Dr. Andrea Derdzinski tells us about how we detect black holes, either due to the gravitational waves they produce, or due to their interaction with material orbiting around them, which paradoxically can make them some of the brightest objects in the universe.
Jun 01, 2025•56 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Up in Orion's shoulder sits Betelgeuse, a supergiant star near the end of its life. The surface of Betelgeuse has been roiling and pulsing for centuries, as long as humans have recorded its modulated luminosity. Dr. Jared Goldberg is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Dr. Golberg has been developing computer models for Betelgeuse to help understand and interpret its oscillations over time.
May 01, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 5
What happens when a black hole eats up a star? Apparently a lot of things happen, and if you wait around awhile and look in the radio, even more things happen! Dr. Yvette Cendes tells us what it's like to be a radio astronomer and about her latest research into tidal disruption events (TDE's), when a black hole shreds up a star and eats it, producing a dramatic light show across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Apr 01, 2025•53 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Some things happen out in the universe that are too powerful to make in a lab. Other phenomena are so coherent and well-ordered, we can't figure out how they can be made without a lab! Fast radio bursts are an incomprehensible combination of both; they are extremely powerful, highly coherent, and very rapid bursts of radio emission. Dr. Maxim Lyutikov spends a lot of his time pondering how these bursts could possibly be made, and all the data seems to point to the most extreme physics imaginable...
Mar 01, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 2Ep. 3
How do we know so much about supernovae, when all we see is this little point of light getting brighter and then dimmer over time? Given this minimal data, we can often say what type of star exploded, and even some details about how the explosion took place. Supernova astronomers are a lot like forensic scientists dusting for fingerprints and getting DNA samples at the scene of a crime. But instead of a typical crime scene, they are investigating the death of an entire solar system. Dr. Lindsey ...
Feb 01, 2025•56 min•Season 2Ep. 2
How big a computer do you need to simulate a supernova? Or a planet being formed? Or a black hole swallowing gas? Many astrophysicists spend their time developing computational models to simulate these systems and learn how they evolve. We discuss these computer simulations with Purdue Professor Dr. Paul Duffell. In this first episode of season 2, Dr. Abigail Polin takes over as host.
Jan 01, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 1
What do black holes like to eat? Sometimes a steady diet of interstellar gas just isn't enough and a black hole needs to snack on a whole star. No judgment, we all get that way sometimes. But it can lead to some extremely energetic outflows, visible from across the universe. Dr. Brenna Mockler tells us all about these events, called "Tidal Disruption Events", and what we can learn from observing them.
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Our universe isn't just a static, unchanging backdrop. It is constantly changing in time and we now have the technology to image it over and over again to explore all those changes. This is called Time Domain Astronomy, and Danny Milisavljevic is an expert in this field. He spends a lot of his time on the forensic science of exploding stars, to gain clues about the underlying processes that caused the explosion in the first place.
Nov 01, 2024•55 min•Season 1Ep. 11
What would our solar system be like if we had two suns? Actually, this situation could be more common than you might think, as most stars are in binary systems. If a star is in a binary pair, how does that affect its life and death? Dr. Katelyn Breivik of Carnegie Mellon University tells us all about these systems and what scientists and other curious minds can learn from them.
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 10
What's the biggest thing in the universe, besides the universe itself? Well, stars live in galaxies, and galaxies live in large collections called galaxy clusters. Astronomers can study these titanic clusters of galaxies to learn about how they grow and merge with each other to assemble the universe we live in today. Dr. Kyoung-Soo Lee takes us on a journey to the largest scales in the cosmos.
Sep 01, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 9
For centuries, all that we have known about planets was confined to our own solar system, and its occasionally-changing number of planets (eight as of now). But in the past several decades, astronomers have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques for detecting planets outside our solar system, orbiting distant stars many light-years away. Dr. Jason Wang is an innovator who has developed powerful data analysis methods which have allowed us to take direct images of these exoplanets....
Aug 01, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Planets orbit stars, and moons orbit planets, so what orbits a supermassive black hole? Possibly a whole lot of stuff, including a gaseous disk, thousands of stars and more "normal size" black holes! Dr. Rosalba Perna tells us about all the crazy things that could be orbiting around the supermassive black holes that we detect at the center of active galaxies.
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 7
When a star explodes, it's not finished having an impact on its surroundings. For the next thousand years or so, we can still see it as a supernova remnant, when the explosion has expanded to large enough scales that we can actually resolve an image of the explosion with modern telescopes like JWST, and it's even possible to do a forensic analysis to learn more about the cause of death. We will be talking about supernova remnants with Dr. Soham Mandal, who just recently earned his PhD from Purdu...
Jun 01, 2024•51 min•Season 1Ep. 6
What is turbulence? You've probably experienced it before on a plane (or perhaps on a river) but you might not know precisely what it is. But turbulence is all around us, and in particular we find it on some of the largest scales in the universe. Professor Yuan Li talks about turbulence and also a little unrelated bit about Mira, an unusual star with a tail!
May 01, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Astronomers deal with huge datasets, and they are about to get even bigger with the construction of the Vera Rubin Observatory. When you can detect a million supernovae per year, how do we make sense of this data and decide which ones are the "most interesting" to study? Professor Ashley Villar at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian has made her career out of developing machine learning techniques to answer this very question.
Apr 01, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 4
What are neutrinos and where do they come from? How do we know what's going on in the interior of a star when we can only see the surface? How does a paper get accepted into a scientific journal? We discuss these questions and more with Frank Timmes, professor at Arizona State University and Associate Editor-in-Chief of a number of scientific journals run by the American Astronomical Society.
Mar 01, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 3
How did the galaxies form and how can we learn about them? Professor Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado, Boulder tells us how we use the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look back in time and learn about the initial formation of structure in the universe.
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 2
How do stars explode? It turns out there's more than one way, and Professor Abigail Polin has discovered a totally new way that stars can end their lives. We talk with Professor Polin about how that works and how scientists look at a supernova to figure out what caused the explosion.
Jan 01, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 1
