Syzygy : an astronomically good podcast

05/06/2024

Come see us live at the Festival of Ideas! This Saturday, 6pm — details at http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/

30/01/2024

Episode 118: Sextuplet Symphony — get at it now at syzygy.fm/podcast/episode118
Lots of astronomy is very visual, which makes producing an astronomy podcast ... challenging. But then comes along 7a story like this one, with planets doing things that are just so wonderfully musical!

After some lengthy follow-up (the Bennu sample is open at last! And SLIM is alive!), Emily investigates possibly the most podcasty story we’ve had on the show: six planets around distant star HD110067, all locked into resonances that play beautiful music. Turns out if you leave a planetary system ...

23/01/2024

New episode day! Emily and Chris tuned in to the exciting JAXA livestream for the attempted Moon landing of SLIM, aka the Moon Sniper. They watched as the spacecraft descended towards the surface … cheered as the engines cut and all seemed well … and then joined the subdued confusion as JAXA tried to work out if SLIM was safely on the ground or not. Check out the episode now: syzygy.fm/podcast/episode117 and all great podcast directories!

Emily and Chris tune in to JAXA’s livestream of SLIM — the Smart Lander for Investigating and Moon — as it attempted to slick the landing on the lunar surface on Friday 19 January 2023. We were prepared for success and champagne, or failure and lessons-learned. What we didn’t expect was...

25/04/2023

25/04/2023

What's bigger than a supermassive black hole? How about an *ultra*massive black hole? This week on Syzygy episode 104, Emily talks black holes of all sizes, from the speculatively tiny to the stonkingly stupidly ludicrously huge. Go get it, kids: syzygy.fm/podcast/episode104 and all good pod players everywhere!

20/03/2023

Hey hey! It's episode day! In ep 103, Emily & Chris talk Red Dwarf — not the ridiculous* sci-fi TV show from the 80s and 90s, but the actual stars themselves. There's loads of them, most with planets, and we've got this Just Wonderful new space telescope that's perfect for looking at red things — so we're in a great position to see if there are any habitable worlds around Red Dwarf stars, right? Turns out, those types of stars are ... well, they're nasty. Get at it, people:

* Ridiculous in the laugh-out-loud, joyful, wonderful sense. Red Dwarf a big fave here at Syzygy HQ

In the hunt for life in the universe, astronomers are looking hard at the catalogue of potentially habitable exoplanets. The ones orbiting Red Dwarf stars seem promising — Red Dwarfs are really common, and we've just launched a shiny new space telescope that's perfect for observing them, th

23/01/2023

Ep:100 is here! So Whad'd I Miss? A Year of JWST? Can't be that much to talk anbout??!! Oh right this may be the first of many catching up on the Just Wonderful things going on in space. It's good to be back! https://www.syzygy.fm/podcast/episode100

Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser, L. Calçada

21/04/2022

This, this is truly awesome: a solar eclipse (a no less!), from the surface of Mars.

Love your work, Percy the Rover!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKK7vS2CHC8

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera system to shoot video of Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons, eclipsing the Sun. It’s the most zoomed-in,...

10/04/2022

It's New Episode Day! In Syzygy 95, we're talking Baby Planets — and a story hot off the presses of a protoplanet imaged in the process of formation around star AB Aurigae.

And, for bonus proto-points, Emily brings to the pod the possibility that astronomers have spotted a proto-*moon* around a protoplanet. I mean, what?

Get at it, over on syzygy.fm/podcast/episode95 and where all god podcasts are found.

Image: NASA/ESA/Thayne Currie (Subaru Telescope), Alyssa Pagan (STSci)
Research: Currie, T., et al. Images of embedded Jovian planet formation at a wide separation around AB Aurigae. Nat Astron (2022).