AWESOME ASTRONOMY

The Discussion: This month we take a look at the recent supermoon and what it takes to make the moon ‘super’; Jeni goes teaching kids about space and hones her exoplanet hunting skills; while Paul’s been hosting events with British astronaut Tim Peake.

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

• An update on Blue Origin’s spaceflight ambitions
• More on Shiaparelli and Exomars part 1
• A NASA Director’s worries about science in a Trump administration
• An Ocean like the Dead Sea under Pluto’s ice sheets
• The roundest object in space
• Could dark energy actually be an emergent property of entropy?
• The dinosaur-killing asteroid may have turned planet Earth inside out

The Hat of Woo: Delving into the rank and putrid world of conspiracy theories to debunk the nonsense that lies within. This month Paul pulls Project Pegasus out of his fetid hat where a young President Obama was part of a team of juveniles used in the 1980s to teleport to Mars and into the past. No, really!

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 go back to Tycho Brahe:

What is a plain regular (non-super) nova? Doug, @DesRon94, Detroit Michigan

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.