Walkabout the Galaxy

Supermassive have such voracious appetites that they create an energetic mess when eating which has a tendency to shoot their food off at very high speeds. New observations show the second course for these monsters as material falls back into them. A rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone has a confirmed atmosphere, checking another box for finding worlds that may have life. J...

Quasars, the energetic engines driven by the voracious appetite of supermassive black holes, have been observed in the very early universe, upending ideas about how long it took to form these behemoths in the first place. New results on a peculiar object tagging along around the Sun with the Earth casts doubt on its origin as a possible fragment of the Moon. And the climate t...

The astroquarks examine the oft-asked question of why the Moon sometimes looks huge and other times, not so much, and we take a look at the cool mission to grapple and boost the NASA Swift space telescope into a higher orbit. Plus, new observations reveal that the sky is much brighter at radio wavelengths than previously assumed, teaching us something about the population of ...

OG Top Quark Tracy Becker joins us with an update on water plumes from Jupiter's moon Europa, plus intriguing new data of interstellar comet 3I shows it is even older than we thought, with an age approaching that of the Milky Way galaxy itself. A new field of tektites has been discovered, pointing to a previously unknown major impact on the Earth. Join us for all this, space ...

Exquisitely detailed measurements of the ripples in spacetime from the mergers of black holes now show that some of these merging black holes were, themselves, created by an earlier black hole merging event. While this had been suspected to take place, we now have clear evidence of it. On a less dramatic scale but much closer to home, new simulations of the early solar system...