Right now, one third of humanity lives in so much light pollution that they can’t see the Milky Way without a drive. And now satellite constellations are adding additional light pollution, even in the darkest skies on Earth.
We talk a lot about telescopes, but you really don’t need any special equipment to appreciate what the night sky has to offer. Let’s talk about what kinds of things you can see with just your eyes.
Our lives are ruled by calendars. And calendars are ruled by astronomy. Let’s discover the astronomy underlying the days, weeks, months and years that segment our lives.
Today we are gonna gaze into the future of space and astronomy. What upcoming missions & events are we excited about?
Pamela has told us in the most flowery terms about the diffuse dust across the inner solar system left over from the formation of the inner planets. well, it turns out she was wrong. Super wrong. Time to update!
You’ve probably heard of dark matter and dark energy, but maybe you don’t fully understand what they are. Or maybe the idea itself just rubs you the wrong way and you’d like to know why scientists think they can just make stuff up like this. So you’d like to overturn cosmology? Here’s all you need to do.
It’s been a while since we checked to make sure the Universe was still expanding. Yeah, apparently, that’s still a thing. But in the last few years powerful new telescopes and expansive surveys have given us much more knowledge about what’s happening. Especially at the earliest times.
You might be familiar with the cosmic microwave background, but that’s just one of the background radiations that astronomers look at. Some are well known and cataloged. While others are just starting to be possible to see at all. All of them tell us more about our Universe.
Space scientists and engineers recently went through the process of deciding on their science goals, so we thought we’d spend an episode explaining how this works, and how the next generation of spacecraft and telescopes will be selected.
This is gonna be another one of those evergreen topics where we come back again and again. Finding planets. Every time we talk about this now it seems like we’ve gained thousands of new planets. Well, buckle up! New techniques will grow that by tens of thousands and even millions!