Episode list

Dr. Becky

Unsolved Mystery in Physics: Fast Radio Bursts
As of this release 'fast radio bursts' are one of the latest mysteries in cosmology. It is expected these high energy, millisecond long radio pulses are associated with events on compact, highly magnetized objects such as magentars or the MIlky Way's central black hole. Relatively few are know at present though archival searches are expanding the pool greatly.
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How Did Saturn's Hexagonal Polar Vortex form?!: Space is Weird
Planetary polar storms are the norm rather than exception. Earth has one over Antarctica. Saturn has two but the storm at the north pole is strangely shaped like a regular hexagon. The best thinking is that it is a standing wave caused by differing wind speeds on either side of the hexagon. The gradient is perfect to create a hexagon. The same effect was created in the laboratory along with a number of other regular polygons depending on the size of the gradient.
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Do black holes contain dark matter?
Intuitively dark matter should be pulled into a black hole. But the mechanism by which black holes accrete normal matter does not seem to apply to dark matter,
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The Cartwheel Galaxy | Space is Weird
Apart from their beauty, the bright clusters in the ring of the Cartwheel Galaxy have drawn the interest of astronomers as potential locations of the long sought intermediate black hole.
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An Astrophysicist's Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries
Becky shares ten common questions asked of her and favorites of her own. They all turn out to have a very dark theme involving dark energy, dark matter, the big bang and, of course, Becky's favorite, black holes. Spoiler alert: the answer to all the questions is 'we don't know'. Not yet anyway.
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Galactic Cannibalism in NGC 474: Space is Weird
NGC-474 looks like a huge shell galaxy but with star trails on its outskirts and a big spiral galaxy, NGC-240, hanging around watching. Becky thinks it's a fossil of a group of galaxies that all merged together except the one remaining spiral which may be set to join the rest soon.
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An astrophysicist watches 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' for the first time
Critics, and enthusiasts, have been pointing out Star Trek's foibles for six or is it seven generations. So why shouldn't an astrophysicist take a moment to comment. Dr. Becky spots some sound and interesting physics that she explains, some errors that are better understood in the thirty years since the series aired, and a couple really odd things with no basis in reality.
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How we plan to solve the
The Hubble constant is the rate of expansion of the universe. Unfortunatly, the value measured using red shifts and the theoretical value from the best cosmological model don't agree. Not even close. That is the crisis in cosmology. Fortunately a method of measuring the constant using gravity wave detectors has emerged on the scene. Once enough neutron star mergers have been observed cosmologists hope to know which Hubble constant is correct.
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An astrophysicist reacts to Carl Sagan's Contact
Dr. Becky has a few pretty serious technical issues with Contact but truly enjoyed it. Some of her reactions are rather emotional ranging from shock and outrage to sentimentality and curiosity. She shares some real world parallels to some of the events in the film.
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An Astrophysicist reacts to The Expanse
Becky's commentary on The Expanse is overall positive. She sees accurate attention to detail in ways most people wouldn't think of. There are even a couple technologies that stumped her until she did a web search for an explanation. There is also a human physiology concept backed up by real data.
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Why you should believe the HYPE for the James Webb Space Telescope
Becky is excited, really, about the James Webb Telescope. It is an infrared telescope with a huge 6.5 meter mirror that will be ideal for looking at the composition of exoplanet atmospheres and newly formed stars within dust clouds. Ironically, due to the red-shift of distant galaxies, The telescope will be able to produce optical images of galaxies the Hubble telescope couldn't see.
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What's 'inside' a black hole?
Becky begins by dispelling a few myths and misconceptions about black holes. Then she presents a few basics about light. escape velocity and everyone's favorite general relativity. No we can tackle three possibilities; a singularity, exotic matter or still don't know.
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Was the Big Bang a WHITE hole?
Following a quick review of what black holes and white holes are, Dr. Becky explains the subtle sounding but radical difference between a white hole and the big bang.
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Why can't LIGO detect mergers of supermassive black holes?
The LIGO uses interferometry to detect gravitation waves that stretch space and hence the arms of the detector by different amounts. The 4 km length of the detector arms give the observatory that ability to detect fairly short gravitational waves whereas collisions of super massive black holes generate much longer waves.
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An astrophysicist's live reaction to the first JWST science images
Dr. Becky expresses the awe experienced by all astrophysicists at seeing the incredible detail of the first images and spectra from the James Web Space Telescope. Images include: SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster with substantial gravitational lensing, the atmospheric spectra of planet Wasp 96b, Southern Ring 'planetary' Nebula and its central binary star, Stephan's Quintet interacting galaxy group and the star form region of the Carina Nebula .
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Has JWST shown the Universe is TWICE as old as we think?!
A 2023 paper resurrects Fritz Zwicky's hypothesis known as "Tiered Light" and combines it with the lambda cold dark matter model to explain the super massive black holes and large galaxies detected in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope. This work calculates an age of the universe that is double the currently accepted value.
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How do we know how much dark matter there is in the Universe?
Dark matter is matter that responds to, and causes, gravity but not electromagnetism, e.g. light, which is why it is dark. Even though it can't be seen cosmologists have measured how much there is is several very different ways and, remarkably, all the methods agree.
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Can gravitational waves Interfere with each other?
Investigating a viewer's question about gravitational wave interference, Becky found there is indeed evidence that gravitational waves interfere just like every other wave we know of. Then she shares the implications for quantum gravity.
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