Pythagorean Astronomy

<p>Recorded in late October, Chris and Edward discuss recent proposals for an all-British mission to space, the launch of Psyche to...erm...Psyche, and Edward's involvement with the detection of something called a...

<p>Chris and Edward discuss some recent stories, such as tantalising possible (emphasis on the possible) detections by JWST of interesting molecules on an exoplanet which coul (emphasis on the could) indicate signs of...

<p>Dr Ian Harrisonreports from the National Astronomy meeting, which we held in Cardiff back in July. You can hear a couple of interviews we conducted on the previous episode, but in this episode we have a bit of a deep...

<p>July marked the UK's annual National Astronomy Meeting, which this year took place in Cardiff. Chris North, Edward Gomez and Ian Harrison discuss a few recent stories from this month and at the conference, including...

<p>In 2020 astronomers spotted an object slowly getting brighter, but it wasn't until 2021 tha they quite understood how unusual it was. In 2021, they studied it in more detail, and found that it was something we don't...

<p>A news roundup of the last couple of months with Chris North and Edward Gomez. With a few failures - the SpaceX Starship launch, iSpace's moon landing and Virgin Galactic's bankruptcy, it might seem things are going...

<p>In terms of what might be called “pure science”, there’s one topic that tends to get people excited, and that's black holes. A few weeks ago, in February 2023, a pair of papers came out that linked theories about...

<p>In the last month there was a show of the Northern Lights - or aurora - visible from the UK. If you didn't get to see it (spoiler: neither did we!), then you might get a chance in the future if there's another...

Chris North and Edward Gomez discuss the first attempt to launch a rocket from UK soil, albeit via a piggyback on (or under) a plane. There's also an interesting supernova, the first exoplanet confirmation from JWST...

The 25th December marks an anniversary in the world of astronomy (as well as Sir Isaac Newton's birthday, of course) - the launch of JWST, the infrared space telescope launched to explore the Universe in unprecedented...

With the Artemis I mission mid-mission (at the time of recording), Chris North and Edward Gomez look at what this means for the future of human space exploration, and more ambitious missions to the Moon (and beyond)...

At the end of September, NASA's DART mission was deliberately crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos. Not carelessness, but a deliberate act with a view to testing planetary defense. After all, if we discover something...

This is the second part of a gravitational field trip to the LIGO Hanford Observatory in Washington State, in the US. Last month we talked about how the detectors work, and the scientists and engineers who operate them...

This month, we go on a field trip to the LIGO Hanford Observatory, one of a number of detectors that are searching for gravitational waves. In part one of this trip, we hear from a number of people working at the...

Amateur astronomers regularly make important contributions to astronomy research. That can be through observations of meteor showers, or images of solar system objects. But it's not always about pretty pictures, and...