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3.18 Happy Space News

3.18 Happy Space News

This week, we take a closer look at the weirdly twisty search for a possible planet in our outer solar system. We'll also take in the happy science of aurorae here, at Jupiter, and over Neptune, as well as a bunch of weird discoveries that has some people screaming...

S1 Ep 20: Satellite Constellations and Early Warning Systems

While putting together this show, I often find myself thinking “Wow, this release is like that science fiction plot line” or “Oooo, this is new… I hope someone uses this in a story.” Most of the time, when I think things like that, I’m reading about black holes, star...

3.18 Happy Space News

S1 Ep19: The Universe is (Still) Trying to Murder Us

A few years ago, an audience member pointed out that I always seem a little too happy when discussing death and destruction from the sky. I’m not actually excited about our universe trying to kill off humanity, I’m excited about science, and it just turns out that a...

3.18 Happy Space News

S1 Ep18: Once and Future Life on Venus, Earth, and Mars

Each week, when we set off to do this show, we start with one core idea: We want to tell you what is new in space and astronomy… and remember Earth is a planet too. When we select stories, we try to find the ones we’re excited to talk about over coffee, or the ones we...

3.18 Happy Space News

S1 Ep17: Earth Science is Planetary Science

In this episode, we need to take one of our periodic looks at our planet's science and understand what it means to life as we know it. But we will only look at Earth for the first two segments. Then we’re going to race away to enjoy an interview by Beth Johnson with...

S1 Ep16: A New Space Race?

Space science isn’t where the money is… at least not yet. Astronomy and planetary science in the U.S. are funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and a variety of smaller foundations and extremely wealthy individuals. And this means that sometimes science can...

S1 Ep15: The History of Life

S1 Ep15: The History of Life

In this week's episode, we’re going to look at how we now work to understand the history of life - including human life - on Earth by studying the geology of our planet, and we’re going to take those lessons learned and apply them to Mars, and exoplanets beyond our...

S1 Ep15: The History of Life

S1 Ep14: Meteors, Meteor Showers, and their Parent Bodies

In today’s show, we’re going to be talking more about meteors - including the source of the Geminids meteor shower, asteroid Phaethon - as well as hot planets, hungry black holes, and how we’re working to uncover the identity of dark matter.

S1 Ep15: The History of Life

S1 Ep13: SETI and the Very Large Array

While we could spend an entire episode on Earth, there is just too much going on in the universe to linger anywhere too long. From our world, we journey out to look at the super massive black hole in the core of M87, and then Beth Johnson will join us with an...

3.18 Happy Space News

S1 Ep12: Do Not Look Directly at this Podcast

This episode features the kind of news week where we looked at the April 20th eclipse in the South Pacific and decided it just wasn’t a huge priority. Between watching Starship's “will it won’t it” launch attempts and getting news of discoveries in cosmology and new...

3.18 Happy Space News

S1 Ep11: In Venus VERITAS

For decades now, our planetary science news cycles have been dominated by Mars. Mars is relatively close, and we have a lot of experience landing there and science goals to pursue. But it has left our other closest neighbor, Venus, off the mission list. That is, until...

3.18 Happy Space News

S1 Ep10: Pareidolia, Pattern Matching, and AI Art

Humans are the ultimate pattern matchers - at least for now. I have to admit I’m looking forward to the day I can give some new AI a set of images and ask it to tell me what animals it can find among the nebulae. The software isn’t there yet… But we’re also going to...

S1 Ep9: The Search for Life on Other Worlds

Right now, humans are tantalizingly close to being able to search for life on other worlds where it is reasonable to think life could exist. We can’t do it yet - at least not in a way that would be safe for any potential life, but this is a long game, and as we’ll...

S1 Ep8: Will Asteroid 2023 DW Collide with Earth in 2046? (Probably no)

A new asteroid has been discovered with an orbit that crosses our own planet’s orbit. In general, this object and Earth are very good and not trying to occupy the same space at the same time, and we’ve managed to coexist for a fair amount of time. We are going to have...

S1 Ep7: Is 2023 the Year of Io?

In general, the kind of year we’ll experience gets its label at the end of the year. 2005 was the year of the never-ending hurricane season. 2017 was the year we experienced an eclipse and lost Cassini. 2020 was the year satellite constellations went from a handful to...

S1 Ep6: Bring on the JWST Science Results

OK so this is actually episode six, but our producer Ally numbered the episodes weird and we got mixed up. This week, thanks to the support of so many, we’re going to be looking at earthquakes, early results from JWST, spherical novae, the Dark Side of the Moon, and a...

S1 Ep5: Is This How We Get Cylons?

In this show, we’ll go through more than 20 studies and observations ranging from planetary climates to galaxy mergers, and we’ll take a closer look at how Artificial Intelligence is being asked to play a role in every area of this research. And we’ll ask, “Is this...

S1 Ep4: Cosmology: From Particles to Galaxy Clusters

We live at a time when technological advances are allowing us to explore ideas faster than ever before. So today, we bring you lab results on ice that affect how we see the outer solar system, and observations of galaxies that affect our understanding of the...

S1 Ep3: Mass Extinction, Volcanoes, and Rings Around an Asteroid

In this episode, we discuss one mass extinction, three stories with volcanoes, star formation, galaxy dissolution, and space mission synchronized observing. We also take a closer look at dark energy and dark matter and how giant galaxies in the early universe seem to...