The Astroholic Explains – Details, episodes & analysis

Chris and I decided to find out when humans realized that meteorites came from beyond Earth: it could be a lot older than it was once thought! Egyptologist Dr Victoria Almansa-Villatoro joins us to discuss meteorite artifacts and intriguing hieroglyphs from Ancient Egypt.

We are talking about ancient aliens. (No, not the racist conspiracy theory!) We look into the concept of extraterrestrials over history and how it originated. Who were the first recorded people who pondered about life outside Earth?

I'm writing a book all about the astronomy we do with the light we cannot see with our own eyes. It's called Invisible Rainbows and features astronomers from all around the world.

If you are interested in finding out more and maybe pledge for a copy, click on this link.

In this episode, Alfredo and Chris are joined by cosmologist Professor Peter Coles. Together they explore the limits of the visible universe, whether finite or infinite, why there is no center, and what might be beyond the most distant region we can see.

We don't know and will likely never know what happened before the Big Bang, but Chris is curious about it, so we take a journey in the land before time and space!

Conspiracy theories and misconceptions about the Moon extend far beyond the Moon-landing! In this episode, we take a trip 4.5 billion years into the past to witness how Luna came to be.

We sat down with KeShawn Ivory to talk about satellite galaxies, something weird happening around the Milky Way, and how it feels to win a major award from the Royal Astronomical Society!

This episode starts with a whimsical question of what could we grow on Mars that we could use in a cocktail or mocktail, but we quickly expand on some important topics like what future space travelers might need in order to survive and ways to make agriculture on Earth more sustainable. And it all starts with a delicious cocktail designed by a team at NASA for The Astroholic Explains (here is the recipe).

When we think of asteroid impacts, we often just picture Chicxulub and the mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, 66 million years ago. But asteroid impacts can be less impactful to life, like the Popigai and Chesapeake impactors - not as big as Chicxulub but still big enough to create craters of over 80 kilometers across, way back around 35 million years ago. Cosmic material could even actually help life bloom.

We talk about everything, everywhere all at once as we enter the multiverse! In this episode, we describe some ideas that scientists have proposed to explain things we see in the universe with no explanation, or simply to indulge in the idea of parallel dimensions.