Author: Damien Phillips

The Discussion: In a month when the European Space Agency succeeded and failed in the first part of their Exomars saga, we go through the glory and the debris of Mars exploration, hanging out with astronauts Tim Peake and Tim Kopra, conducting exoplanet research, provide some advice about studying astrophysics and explain why the effects of dark matter aren’t witnessed in our own solar system.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

• Exomars, round one
• Another look at the Viking mission data that may have discovered Martian life
• Hubble discovers that the universe contains 10 times more galaxies than thought
• A philosophical discussion about the chances of life existing elsewhere
• Venus was habitable when life began to flourish on Earth
• Elon Musk’s plans for colonising the solar system
• The ethics of colonising other planets
• An update of NASA’s Juno mission at Jupiter
• And the latest taikonauts and astronauts.

The Hat of Woo: Paul’s Hat of Woo is the repository for all festering and rancid conspiracy theories that have no basis in truth and yet persist in any dark and stinking corner of the internet.

This month we pull one of the biggies out of the putrid hat: Evil aliens and a reptilian rival for the title of overlord.

The Interview: This month we return to writer, broadcaster and researcher Dr Chris North from Cardiff University to answer a listener’s question on Chris’ interview in last month’s episode.

Dr North mentioned that we can see Gravitational Waves to discover all sorts of information from these waves, such as size, distance & velocity, which I can understand (through Amplitude and frequency and rate of change of the signal), but how is it also possible to infer things like the spin and spin rate from the wave signal? (ignoring the question of how does a black hole spin if it has mass but no matter as Dr North mentions, and how do events happen inside a black hole since as you get closer to the event horizon doesn’t time appear to us to slow down to us as an outside observer?) Mark de Vrij in Poland.

The Discussion: If you enjoy our attention to scripting, our professional quality audio and our stringent editing, then you’re bang out of luck! This show comes from our AstroCamp stargazing event in Wales and we’re making it up as we go along.

This month we take you through the delights of dark sky stargazing among friends, Jeni becomes a paid scientist and we get the reactions of the gang as we reveal signed movie poster mock ups that we’re emailing to listeners.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

• Gravity Spy – hunt for gravitational waves in this new citizen science project
• More details on NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission
• The first data from ESA’s Gaia spacecraft wows us all

The Interview: This month we welcome back writer, broadcaster and researcher Dr Chris North from Cardiff University to discuss Gravitational Waves: what this means for the future of professional astronomy and what we can expect from this new field of astronomy in the future.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month we’re tackling a question about exoplanet detections with a back of the envelope calculation – and Jeni’s making Ralph do the maths. It’s fair to say, he’s not happy about it:

A big hello from your Antipodean fan from Melbourne to all Martian superior beings in the UK (or something like that)… Whilst listening to your eagerly awaited last instalment of the show I was intrigued by Jeni’s (who I believe has been to Australia…) exoplanet research. I am familiar with the concept of observing transits and teasing the dip of brightness out of the data flood. So far so good. That means that we, Earth and Mars of course have to be in the same plane in order to be able to get an observable transit. Is there any data or knowledge if there is a general orientation of planetary systems in relation to us or the galactic plane? Meaning if we know that can we extrapolate somehow how many planets are really out there as we obviously can only observe a fraction of the existing systems? Bit hard to explain but with your superior minds I am sure you will get the idea… :)? Clem Unger, Melbourne, Australia.

The Discussion: Jeni’s astronomy research yields its first results in the hunt for exoplanet phase variation and we revisit our Star Wars podcast extras with a listener’s book review.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

• An ‘Earthlike planet detected by ESO around our nearest stellar neighbour
• The upcoming launch of OSIRIS Rex to sample an asteroid
• That bump in the data at CERN turns out to be a false hope
• That alien megastructure story just won’t foxtrot oscar
• The Cassini spacecraft spots methane filled canyons on Saturn’s moon Titan
• A meteorite lands in Yorkshire garden. Real or fake?

Woobusters: Continuing our quest to debunk the myths and conspiracy theories that persist in every dark corner of the news and the internet. This month’s topic, picked at random from Paul’s festering Hat of Woo: Area 51 – the remote and secret installation in the Nevada desert where sanity gets dissected and reason is left to die.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month we get a question that probes certainty in science and how high certainty discoveries can still turn out to be wrong:

Why when the Bicep two team found the evidence for primordial gravitational waves did they claim it was a five sigma result, and later wasn’t it shown the result was not accurate? I thought a five sigma had a 1 in 350million chance of being wrong! There has to be something I don’t understand about the sigma scale or the Bicep results? Rodney Cuthbertson.

The Discussion: We’re cheering Jeni’s graduation with a first class masters in astrophysics and looking at the PhD options she has as she chases the dream of becoming Dr Millard! Paul & Ralph make preparations for September’s dark sky AstroCamp stargazing event and educate Jeni on computers from the 80s.

The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we have:

• A new dwarf planet is discovered in our solar system
• The doomed Hitachi spacecraft reveals streams of intergalactic plasma
• A new moon around Earth discovered
• Detective work reveals what caused the moon’s Imbrium Basin
• Tatooine gets outshone by a planet with three stars
• The first observation of a snowline in a forming solar system

Woobusters: Continuing our quest to debunk the myths and conspiracy theories that persist in every dark corner of the news and the internet. This month’s topic, picked at random from Paul’s festering Hat of Woo: Chemtrails – those quite normal jet exhaust trails that some people think are spraying mind control agents

The Interview: For the interview this month we visit Dr Helen Sharman from Imperial College London, who because Britain’s first astronaut in 1991:

• Tim Peake’s slight embarrassment at often being called Britain’s 1st astronaut
• An unconventional route to space
• Training to be an astronaut at Russia’s Star City
• The Mir space station compared to the International Space Station
• Excitement for the future of human spaceflight
• Uncertainty over space and science funding in the Brexit era.
• The full interview with Helen will be available as a podcast extra later in the month

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month we get a question that follows the theme of our introduction and looks directly at the point Helen Sharman raised in this month’s interview:

What does Brexit mean for the UKs involvement in things like ESA and ESO? Andrew Burns, United Kingdom