365 Days of Astronomy - Weekly Edition – Details, episodes & analysis

Streamed live on Nov 11, 2024.

Hosted by: Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela L. Gay.

Another day, another space telescope! Today we’re looking at the newly launched Einstein Probe. A collaboration between the Chinese Space Agency and the European Space Agency. The mission has been operating since January searching the cosmos for short, bright flashes of X-rays. 

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Thanks to: Andrew Poelstra, BogieNet, Brian Cagle, David, David Truog, Ed, Gerhard, Schwarzer, Jeanette Wink, Siggi Kemmler, Stephen Veit 

Streamed live on Nov 5, 2024.

Last week we talked about the mission. This week we’ll talk about Euclid of Alexandria, the ancient Greek mathematician who inspired the mission. Let’s learn about his life and the ground breaking work that made so much of our modern mathematics possible.

Hosted by: Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela L. Gay.

Streamed live Jun 20, 2024.

Fraser & Pamela list their favorite books! Take notes!

I also have a favor to ask - I'm working on a research project with my collaborator Sanlyn Buxener on what factors help and hinder people learning and doing science. Can you please take our survey?
bit.ly/AstEco THANK YOU! - Pamela

Computers are a big part of astronomy, but mostly they've been relegated to doing calculations. But recent developments in machine learning have changed everything, giving computers the ability to do jobs that humans could only do in the past.

We think of space as a vacuum, but there are regions of different density. There are winds blowing from stars and other objects that clear out vast bubbles in space, and look absolutely fantastic in pictures. And they might have been critical for Earth to even exist in the first place.

As astronomers look out across the Universe. They see various objects spewing jets of material light years into space. What causes these jets? And what impact do they have on the Universe?

The Milky Way is a vast grand spiral today, but how did it get this way? Astronomers are starting to unravel the history of our galaxy, revealing the ancient collisions with dwarf galaxies, and how they came together to build the modern Milky Way.

We've always assumed that habitable planets would need to be like Earth; a terrestrial planet orbiting a sunlike star. But now astronomers have been discovering planets in the habitable zone around very much non-sunlike stars. What strange places could be habitable?

A recent image from the South African MeerKAT Telescope blew our minds. It was a high resolution image of the center of the Milky Way showing delicate filaments and other structures. What was so mind blowing is that this was an image from a radio telescope. Today we’re gonna talk about why this was such an accomplishment and what the future holds for radio astronomy.

https://www.sarao.ac.za/media-releases/new-meerkat-radio-image-reveals-complex-heart-of-the-milky-way/

Pulsars are the rapidly spinning degenerate husks of dead stars, turning hundreds of times a second. But they're also handy clocks, spinning with such certainty and accuracy that astronomers can use them for all kinds of stuff. We might even use them to navigate the cosmos.