The Star Spot

The Star Spot


Latest Episodes

Episode 185: Did a Supernova Cause a Mass Extinction?, with Brian Fields
September 27, 2020

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 lasted 167 million years. But asteroids are not the only harbingers of doom that lurk...

Episode 184: The Milky Way's First Fast Radio Burst, with Sandro Mereghetti
September 13, 2020

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 deep space. Now a team is reporting the first fast radio burst to emanate from our...

Episode 183: COVID-19 Meets the NASA Space Apps Challenge, with James Slifierz
May 24, 2020

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 year thousands of participants in over 75 countries compete to solve real-world...

Episode 182: Planet Nine or Black Hole One, with Jakub Scholtz
May 10, 2020

Feature Guest: Jakub Scholtz Weve long believed that membership in the solar systems planetary family was limited to those eight planets we learned about in grade school. But then astronomers began

Episode 181: Reports of Betelgeuse’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, with Emily Levesque
April 26, 2020

Feature Guest: Emily Levesque In December 2019, amateur and professional astronomers held their breath as the red supergiant Betelgeuse started dimming beyond anything on record, a sign the behemoth might be preparing to go supernova. But over the...

Episode 180: Wormholes through Space and Time, with John Cramer
April 05, 2020

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 for faster than light travel through space and, even more intriguing, do they open...

Episode 179: Dreams of Floating Cities, with Geoffrey Landis
March 01, 2020

Feature Guest: Geoffrey A. Landis When we think of terraforming, we probably envision turning the Red Planet blue. But Mars isnt the only world in our solar system that ambitious scientists have cons

Episode 178 Sibling Rivalry at the Centre of the Galaxy, with Smadar Naoz
February 02, 2020

Feature Guest: Smadar Naoz Weve 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 now researchers are discovering ga

Episode 177: The Case of the Missing Dark Matter, with Guo Chi
January 19, 2020

Feature Guest: Guo Qi Dark matter vastly overshadows ordinary matter in our universe. Wherever astronomers turn their telescopes they find galaxies dominated by dark matter. But all that changed recently with the first discoveries of dwarf galaxies...

Episode 176: Second Genesis, with Jay Melosh
January 05, 2020

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 to be the result of a second genesis, those creatures truly alien in the most...