The Star Spot

Episode 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 last

Episode 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

Episode 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

Episode 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 sch

Episode 181: Reports of Betelgeuse's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, with Emily Levesque

Feature Guest: Emily Levesque In December 2019, amateur and professional astronomers held their breath as the red supergiant Betelgeuse started dimming beyond anything

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

Episode 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 tha

Episode 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 no

Episode 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 ma

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

Episode 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 Rutkowsk

Episode 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

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

Episode 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 miss

Episode 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 o

Episode 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. Ye

Episode 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 p

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 anniversar

Episode 167: Current in Space + The Best of The Star Spot: Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt

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 laure

Episode 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 d