AWESOME ASTRONOMY

The Discussion: Paul and Jen packed out the Star Stage at this year’s Big Bang Fair in Birmingham as Sirius Astronomy ran experiments to explain how rockets and space suits work and how space capsules protect astronauts from the heat of re-entry. Jen updates us on her astronomy research trip to South Africa next month and Ralph reviews the latest space-based sci-fi thriller, Life.

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

• A schoolboy who spotted an error in NASA data
• Are the Van Allen radiation belts weaker than always thought?
• Was Earth’s atmosphere like Titan’s 2.4 billion years ago?
• Using the sun as a gravitational lens
• NASA’s heading for Mars & evidence of an ancient Mars tsunami

The Interview: This month we have a couple of interviews with the children taking part in science challenges at the Big Bang Fair and clips of Paul & Jen creating fire hazards and projectiles around an undefended audience…

Hat of Woo: Following your comments by email and online, we’re bringing back the vile and rancid Hat of Woo this month. And we’re back with a festering sore of a conspiracy theory in the form of Immanuel Velikovsky’s laws of physics defying Worlds in Collision ‘theory’.

The Discussion: Jeni’s been teaching the teachers of Wales how to include astronomy in their classroom exercises as part of the school curriculum. Ralph takes us on a historical tour of the King’s Observatory in Richmond which was the original Prime Meridian before it found its home in Greenwich. While Paul and Jen have a date this month at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham.

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

• Hubble spies a comet breaking up around a distant white dwarf star
• A very special exoplanet discovery
• The Event Horizon Telescope takes aim
• Isolated extremophiles on Earth help with our search for alien life
• Is NASA accelerating its manned spaceflight programme?

The Interview: This month we welcome back the European Space Agency’s project scientist on the Rosetta mission to Comet Churyumov Gerasimenko, Matt Taylor, to discuss the end of the mission, the data gathered, the discovery of Philae and what’s next for ESA.

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 the Allais Effect which claims to have observed strange happenings during eclipses:

I need help understanding something called the Allais Effect. This is a phenomenon that supposedly causes pendulums to get funky during solar eclipses Matt Minter, Chicago, Illinois.

The Discussion: Paul continues his herculean travels around the UK promoting the European Space Agency and teaching people about the science of spaceflight. Ralph’s waxing lyrical about a waxing moon and Venus, while Jen has a big announcement regarding her PhD research.

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

• Another asteroid hits the news as NASA look elsewhere for future missions
• ESO’s ALMA array turns its attention to the Sun
• Making refinements on the age of the Moon
• A new star to look out for in the sky in 2022

Hat of Woo: With the hat now empty and the world still full of loons, we reach out to you to tell us what you’d like to see replace this segment of the show.

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 take a look at a listener’s submitted graph and explain the Roche Sphere:

Can you please explain why the Hill Sphere of Neptune is greater than that of Jupiter? Gavin Price, @Pillarscreatio, Wales.

The Discussion: As we welcome in the New Year Paul’s been mixing science with art, Jeni’s professional astronomy looks to be taking her to South Africa or Mexico and we read out some of our listeners’ emails

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

• The death of John Glenn – a true pioneer and legend
• ESO’s Very Large Telescopes glimpses something from nothing
• And we take a look at NASA latest release list of its spin-out technologies

Hat of Woo: In our latest and final Hat of Woo we put Astrology under the magnifying glass.

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 a recent news story covered in a previous episode:

The number of bodies in the Solar System featuring subsurface oceans seems to increase with every planetary mission sent out there. Many of these are bodies of water of great depth, with Europa and Ganymede possibly having oceans 100km deep. Given that the deepest part of our own ocean is a ‘mere’ 11km deep and barely studied, what kind of conditions could future explores expect at such depths? Would the enormous pressure at a depth of 100km cause the water to act differently and what implications would this have for life in these oceans? Steve Brown, Yorkshire, England.