Talking Science Podcast
Sagittarius A* – The Monster at the Milky Way's Heart
On a winter night in the Australian outback, the Milky Way rises high overhead as a bright, patchy river of light. Follow it towards the…
Articles
Space & Astronomy
Meteorites – Rocks That Fall from the Sky
Watch a dark, clear sky for long enough and you will almost certainly see a shooting star: a speck of space dust, often no bigger than a grain of…
The Cosmic Microwave Background – The Universe’s Baby Photo
Everywhere you look in the sky, in every direction, there is a faint hum of light too dim for your eyes to see. It fills the entire universe, arriving…
Pulsars – Cosmic Lighthouses
In 1967 a young researcher noticed something baffling in her data: a faint, perfectly regular pulse of radio waves arriving from deep space, ticking…
The Search for Life Beyond Earth
It may be the oldest question humans have ever asked while staring at the night sky: are we alone? For most of history it belonged to philosophers and…
Comets and Asteroids – Visitors from the Deep Past
When the solar system was forming, not every scrap of material found its way into a planet. Countless chunks of rock, metal, and ice were left over,…
Our Moon – How It Formed and Why It Matters
Step outside on a clear night and there it is, the most familiar object in the sky. We rarely give the Moon a second thought, yet it is one of the…
Galaxies – How the Milky Way Was Built
On a truly dark night, far from city lights, you can see a faint band of misty light arching across the sky. Ancient peoples told many stories about…
The James Webb Space Telescope – Seeing the First Light
Every so often, humanity builds an instrument that changes what we are able to see. The James Webb Space Telescope is one of those instruments. It is…
Saturn’s Rings – A Structure That Shouldn’t Last
There is no more instantly recognisable sight in the Solar System than Saturn wearing its rings. Point even a modest telescope at that pale golden dot…
Jupiter and Its Ocean Moons
Jupiter is the giant of our Solar System, a planet so massive that all the others could fit inside it with room to spare. It is a world of ferocious…
Mars – Why We Keep Going Back
Of all the places beyond Earth, one keeps drawing us back like no other. Mars has been visited by orbiters, landers, and rovers again and again,…
Exoplanets – Finding Worlds Around Other Stars
For almost all of human history, we knew of exactly one family of planets: our own. The Sun, its handful of worlds, and the Moon overhead were the…
Gravitational Waves – Ripples in Spacetime
Imagine the fabric of space and time as a vast, invisible sheet stretched across the universe. Now imagine two enormous objects, like a pair of black…
The Big Bang – The First Three Minutes
Everything you have ever seen, every star, every planet, every atom in your body, traces its origin to a single beginning nearly fourteen billion…
Dark Energy – Why the Universe Is Flying Apart
For most of the twentieth century, scientists assumed the universe’s expansion had to be slowing down. It seemed obvious. Everything in the cosmos…
Dark Matter – The Universe’s Missing Mass
Here is a startling fact about the universe: most of it is missing. Not missing in the sense of being lost, but missing in the sense that we cannot…
Neutron Stars – Matter at the Edge of Impossible
Picture squeezing the entire mass of the Sun into a ball small enough to fit inside a city. Picture that ball spinning hundreds of times every second,…
The Life and Death of Stars
Look up on a clear night and the stars seem eternal, fixed points that have watched over the world since the beginning of time. But stars are not…
Black Holes – What Happens at the Edge of Forever
Imagine a place where gravity becomes so overwhelming that not even light can escape. Where the fabric of space and time bends until the rules we live…