Episode 137: An Alien Asteroid in Our Solar System, with Alan Stern
Feature Guest: Alan Stern There’s an intruder in our solar system. This fall we were invaded by the first interstellar space traveller, an elongated, cigar shaped alien asteroid. The mysterious object...
View ArticleEpisode 138: Making Contact, with Jill Tarter
Feature Guest: Jill Tarter Alien hunting pioneer Jill Tarter often says the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a way for us to hold a mirror to ourselves. Now in a recently released...
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Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas everyone!
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas everyone! The Star Spot will be off for the next 2 weeks while our team enjoys some rest and relaxation over the holidays. 2017 has witnessed a remarkable year in...
View ArticleEpisode 139: Can Alien Life Hitch a Ride on Space Dust?, with Arjun Berera
Feature Guest: Arjun Berera Many of you are familiar with the idea of panspermia, the theory that life spreads itself throughout the galaxy by travelling from one world to another. We often think of...
View ArticleEpisode 140: How Humans Are Healing the Ozone Hole… and Might Just Solve...
Feature Guest: Susan Strahan While human activity is what created the ozone hole, scientists just announced direct evidence that human activity is now responsible for healing that damage. That makes...
View ArticleEpisode 141: The Mysterious Origin of Superpowerful Radio Blasts, with Jason...
Feature Guest: Jason Hessels The one thing we thought we knew about fast radio blasts was that these mysterious one-off phenomena must be associated with some of the most cataclysmic events in the...
View ArticleEpisode 142: Jupiter Transformed, with Scott Bolton
Feature Guest: Scott Bolton It’s our cosmic backyard, and yet our own solar system is still full of surprises. Now it turns out we were “totally wrong” when it comes to just about everything we thought...
View ArticleEpisode 143: Planet Hunting Goes Extragalactic, with Xinyu Dai
Feature Guest: Xinyu Dai Last month astronomers announced the first ever discovery of extrasolar planets… in another galaxy! We’ve already confirmed almost 4000 planets beyond our solar system, but...
View ArticleEpisode 144: A Rough Upbringing: The Discovery of Stars in the Galaxy’s Core,...
Feature Guest: Farhad Yusef-ZadehThe gravity, radiation and tidal forces at the very core of the Milky Way is kind of intense. That’s why astronomers have long doubted the possibility of star formation...
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Episode 145: Can Sibling Rivalry Explain This Supernova?, with Stuart Ryder
Feature Guest: Stuart Ryder When a massive star explodes in a supernova, it tends to gobble up all the attention. But what happens when that star has a binary companion with its own story to tell?...
View ArticleEpisode 146: Supernovae and the Evolution of Life on Earth, with Brian Thomas
Feature Guest: Brian Thomas We have this impression of our planet as isolated from the rest of the universe, our lives cut off from the drama unfolding elsewhere in our galaxy. But what if the course...
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Episode 147: Postcards From Home
Today we turn our telescopes back around to study ourself. Our own solar system is undergoing a conceptual revolution. From its chaotic birth to its fiery end, our solar system is no longer seen as...
View ArticleEpisode 148: Does Canada Have a Vision for Space Exploration?, with Chuck Black
Featured Guest: Chuck Black The Canadian Space Advisory Board was tasked with developing a plan to rejuvenate Canada’s declining world standing in space exploration. In 2017 the Board made a bold...
View ArticleEpisode 149: The Question of Life on Mars, with David Hamilton
Featured Guest: David Hamilton The recent discovery of a lake of liquid water beneath the Martian south pole culminates a series of stunning discoveries that are forcing us to rethink the question of...
View ArticleEpisode 150: At the Birth of Our First Newborn Planet, with André Müller
Featured Guest: André Müller Astronomers have taken their first image of an infant planet still developing around a newly formed star. Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by André Müller, whose...
View ArticleEpisode 151: New Moons of Jupiter, with Scott Sheppard
Featured Guest: Scott Sheppard On the hunt for the solar system’s elusive Planet X, a team of astronomers accidentally stumbled upon the discovery of 12 new moons of Jupiter. Oops. But it gets even...
View ArticleEpisode 152: Alien Viruses, with Ken Stedman
Featured Guest: Ken Stedman They aren’t pleasant, but viruses are the most common form life on our planet. So why aren’t the world’s space agencies taking viruses seriously in their search for alien...
View ArticleEpisode 153: A Reality Check on Terraforming Mars, with Bruce Jakosky
Featured Guest: Bruce Jakosky Don’t shoot the messenger. The terraforming of Mars has been the dream for many of us who long for a future where humanity has colonized the Red Planet. But is it time to...
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Episode 154: The Vatican Observatory: Astronomy and Faith in the Modern...
Featured Guest: Cosette Gilmour The proper relationship between science and faith is a core question for the modern age. At the centre of this debate has often been the Vatican observatory. The...
View ArticleEpisode 155: Artificial Photosynthesis: Taking the Sun on the Road, with...
Featured Guest: Katharina Brinkert On Earth, we can thank the sun for making life possible. Now what if we could harness the power of the sun to make life possible on long duration space missions....
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Episode 156: The Do-It-Yourself Spacesuit, with Cameron Smith
Featured Guest: Cameron Smith One of the challenges in building a future where humans are able to explore other worlds are the massive, clumsy and expensive spacesuits currently in use. Now enter into...
View ArticleEpisode 157: How We Discovered Blazars Cause Mysterious Cosmic Rays
Feature Guest: Darren Grant A one hundred year old astronomical mystery may finally have been solved. Scientists have long wondered just what caused high energy particles called cosmic rays, which...
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Episode 158: Telling Space Stories, with Rayna Slobodian
Feature Guest: Rayna Slobodian As we dream of space, we must remain anchored to humanity. Space exploration is a human story, and music may be the perfect medium to capture the emotive drama of...
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Episode 159: Living on the Edge: Are We On the Boundary of an Expanding...
Feature Guest: Ulf Danielsson Our universe is big. But what if all of this was just one of an unimaginably large number of bubble universes. That’s the proposal by a group of scientists who recently...
View ArticleEpisode 160: Boom to Bust Part 1: Before the Beginning, with Katrin Heitmann
Feature Guest: Katrin Heitmann The Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, a student group based at the University of Toronto, hosted its annual signature symposium event on Friday, February 15th,...
View ArticleEpisode 161: The Boom Time of the Universe, with Rosemary Wyse
Feature Guest: Rosemary Wyse The universe is past its prime, by about 8 to 10 billion years. Sorry if you missed it. From the rate of star formation to the frequency of galactic mergers, the cosmos...
View ArticleEpisode 162: The End is Nowhere Near Nigh, with Fred Adams
Feature Guest: Fred Adams If you thought the far distant future of our universe was going to be bleak, dreary and dark, well, you’d be right. But remember, the universe is still just a baby and it has...
View ArticleEpisode 163: The Ring Worlds of Saturn, with Bonnie Buratti
Feature Guest: Bonnie Buratti The spacecraft Cassini went out in spectacular fashion, travelling through Saturn’s rings for a final death dive into the gas giant. Even in its final heroic moments,...
View ArticleEpisode 164: Jupiter's Ancient Odyssey, with Simona Pirani
Feature Guest: Simona Pirani The planet Jupiter occupies a position today that is far from its home 4.5 billion years ago, a destination resulting from a primeval migration that started way out around...
View ArticleEpisode 165: Landing on Europa, with Cynthia Phillips
Feature Guest: Cynthia Phillips In the 1970s, the Viking landers performed historic experiments aimed at detecting life in the Martian soil. The results were disappointing although to this day still...
View ArticleEpisode 166: Nanodiamonds are Forever, with Jane Greaves
Feature Guest: Jane Greaves Remember that nursery rhyme, “Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky?” Well they were on to something, because it turns out diamonds - albeit nanodiamonds -...
View ArticleEpisode 167: Current in Space + The Best of The Star Spot: Nobel laureate...
Feature Guest: Brian Schmidt Today we offer a best of from our vault here at The Star Spot. We dug back to a fan favourite, our December 2014 interview with Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, who won the...
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Episode 168: Celebrating Apollo + Science at the Limits (Part 1)
Feature Guest: Dan Falk Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by science writer Dan Falk. We’ll start today’s interview with a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landing of humans on the...
View ArticleEpisode 169: Science at the Limits (Part 2)
Feature Guest: Dan Falk Scientists are finding themselves increasingly squeezed between academics sounding the limits of science and a public increasingly taken in by pseudoscience and conspiracy...
View ArticleEpisode 170: The Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts, with Vikram Ravi
Feature Guest: Vikram Ravi They come to us from deep space. They last a tiny fraction of a second. They contain as much energy as the sun’s total output in 80 years. Yet we still haven’t figured out...
View ArticleEpisode 171: Ploonets: When Moons Go Rogue, with Jorge Zuluaga
Feature Guest: Jorge Zuluaga Astronomers have yet to confirm a single detection of an exomoon, that is a moon orbiting a planet outside our solar system. Now it turns out at least part of the...
View ArticleEpisode 172: The Hubble Not-So Constant
Feature Guest: Sherry Suyu The Hubble constant, which measures the expansion rate of the cosmos, may not be a constant after all, and if that’s true it means we’re missing something big in our...
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Episode 173: Discovering an Ancient Oasis, with William Rapin
Feature Guest: William Rapin Welcome to Sutton Island, here in the middle of a beautiful and rugged landscape consisting of shallow lakes filled with salts and minerals. It’s a common vista on this...
View ArticleEpisode 174: Fuzzy Dark Matter, with Lachlan Lancaster
Feature Guest: Lachlan Lancaster Quantum mechanics is strange. Until recently we could comfort ourselves with the belief that its odd properties were safely confined to the world of the microscopic....
View ArticleEpisode 175: The Truth is Out There (at the University of Manitoba)
Feature Guest: Shelley Sweeney The University of Manitoba has just acquired the largest collection of UFO related material. Prominent Canadian ufologist Christ Rutkowski has made a donation of over...
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Episode 176: Second Genesis, with Jay Melosh
Feature Guest: Jay Melosh If we should find creatures crawling around Titan or swimming under the ice sheets of Europa or Enceladus, they will almost certainly turn out to be the result of a second...
View ArticleEpisode 177: The Case of the Missing Dark Matter, with Guo Chi
Feature Guest: Guo Qi Dark matter vastly overshadows ordinary matter in our universe. Wherever astronomers turn their telescopes they find galaxies dominated by dark matter. But all that changed...
View ArticleEpisode 178 Sibling Rivalry at the Centre of the Galaxy, with Smadar Naoz
Feature Guest: Smadar Naoz We’ve long known that most galaxies contain at their core a supermassive black hole that can be millions of times the mass of the sun. But now researchers are discovering...
View ArticleEpisode 179: Dreams of Floating Cities, with Geoffrey Landis
Feature Guest: Geoffrey A. Landis When we think of terraforming, we probably envision turning the Red Planet blue. But Mars isn’t the only world in our solar system that ambitious scientists have...
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Episode 180: Wormholes through Space and Time, with John Cramer
Feature Guest: John G. Cramer They are the stuff of science fiction, but wormholes are also the subject of intense scientific debate. Can wormholes provide a mechanism for faster than light travel...
View ArticleEpisode 181: Reports of Betelgeuse’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, with...
Feature Guest: Emily Levesque In December 2019, amateur and professional astronomers held their breath as the red supergiant Betelgeuse started dimming beyond anything on record, a sign the behemoth...
View ArticleEpisode 182: Planet Nine or Black Hole One, with Jakub Scholtz
Feature Guest: Jakub Scholtz We’ve long believed that membership in the solar system’s planetary family was limited to those eight planets we learned about in grade school. But then astronomers began...
View ArticleEpisode 183: COVID-19 Meets the NASA Space Apps Challenge, with James Slifierz
Feature Guest: James Slifierz The NASA Space Apps Challenge is a feverish annual hackathon engaging teams of coders, scientists and storytellers around the world. Each year thousands of participants in...
View ArticleEpisode 184: The Milky Way's First Fast Radio Burst, with Sandro Mereghetti
Feature Guest: Sandro Mereghetti Fast radio bursts are a new mystery in astronomy. These highly energetic events of unknown origin were first discovered in 2007 out in deep space. Now a team is...
View ArticleEpisode 185: Did a Supernova Cause a Mass Extinction?, with Brian Fields
Feature Guest: Brian Fields By now we are all familiar with the theory that an asteroid brought to an end the age of the dinosaurs, a period of domination that had lasted 167 million years. But...
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