Walkabout the Galaxy

A Plutino, an object that shares Pluto's orbit but which is much smaller than Pluto, appears to have a very thin global atmosphere. We discuss the detection and how such a small body could hold onto even a thin atmosphere, as well as a new model that describes many of Saturn's peculiarities with a recent collision between its big moon Titan and a precursor to the sponge-y moon Hyperion. Join us for all this, space news, astronomy trivia, and much more.

Gravitational waves and light combine to reveal what is suspected to be a superkilonova which is much cooler than the name suggests. Cool in the cool way, not the temperature way. Learn about splitting neutron stars and, in our Artemis II recap, we revisit the highs (awesome mission, great astronauts) and lows (broken space toilet) of the mission that took people a record distance from the Earth, and what's next. Plus, trivia, stumper, fake sponsor, and all the nuttiness you've come to love and miss from the astroquarks. We're back!

Gravitational Wave observatory LIGO has seen a signature that looks like the merger of primordial (pre-stellar, big bang (not big band!) era) black holes. If confirmed with future observations, this would tell us a lot about the early universe and potentially shed light on dark matter. Finally! Plus, closer to home, the BLOBs in the Earth's mantle help us untangle the complicated past of our magnetic field.

Supermassive black holes can be terrible neighbors. New research shows that their powerful jets of charged particles can shut down star formation in neighboring galaxies within the galaxy cluster, which is just plain rude. Closer to home, our own Down Quark Audrey Martin is part of a study shedding new light (with the James Webb Space Telescope) on the mysterious L type asteroids, that formed at very high temperatures early in our solar system's history.

The Earth spent some crazy amounts of time (tens of millions of years) completely frozen over. And not, in the grand scheme of things, all that long ago. New research shows the ocean was salty and super-cold. How did life survive? New techniques using radio observations reveal a complicated and twisty galactic magnetic field. Join us for an icy, winter olympics themed episode to find out all this and more.