The Star Spot

The Star Spot


Latest Episodes

Episode 165: Landing on Europa, with Cynthia Phillips
May 26, 2019

Feature Guest: Cynthia Phillips In the 1970s, the Viking landers performed historic experiments aimed at detecting life in the Martian soil. The results were disappointing although to this day still not entirely conclusive. Now over 40 years later a...

Episode 164: Jupiter's Ancient Odyssey, with Simona Pirani
April 28, 2019

Feature Guest: Simona Pirani The planet Jupiter occupies a position today that is far from its home 4.5 billion years ago, a destination resulting from a primeval migration that started way out around the current location of Uranus. Like the god for...

Episode 163: The Ring Worlds of Saturn, with Bonnie Buratti
April 14, 2019

Feature Guest: Bonnie Buratti The spacecraft Cassini went out in spectacular fashion, travelling through Saturn’s rings for a final death dive into the gas giant. Even in its final heroic moments, Cassini was relaying back data shedding light on the...

Episode 162: The End is Nowhere Near Nigh, with Fred Adams
March 17, 2019

Feature Guest: Fred Adams If you thought the far distant future of our universe was going to be bleak, dreary and dark, well, you’d be right. But remember, the universe is still just a baby and it has many new experiences ahead of it. Over the many...

Episode 161: The Boom Time of the Universe, with Rosemary Wyse
March 03, 2019

Feature Guest: Rosemary Wyse The universe is past its prime, by about 8 to 10 billion years. Sorry if you missed it. From the rate of star formation to the frequency of galactic mergers, the cosmos just isn’t what it used to be. Yet remarkably all...

Episode 160: Boom to Bust Part 1: Before the Beginning, with Katrin Heitmann
February 17, 2019

Feature Guest: Katrin Heitmann The Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, a student group based at the University of Toronto, hosted its annual signature symposium event on Friday, February 15th, 2019. This year’s theme was “Boom to Bust,”with...

Episode 159: Living on the Edge: Are We On the Boundary of an Expanding Universe?, with Ulf Danielsson
January 20, 2019

Feature Guest: Ulf Danielsson Our universe is big. But what if all of this was just one of an unimaginably large number of bubble universes. That’s the proposal by a group of scientists who recently introduced a new model for the universe which for...

Episode 158: Telling Space Stories, with Rayna Slobodian
January 06, 2019

Feature Guest: Rayna Slobodian As we dream of space, we must remain anchored to humanity. Space exploration is a human story, and music may be the perfect medium to capture the emotive drama of discovery, risk and the mystery of the unknown. Today...

Episode 157: How We Discovered Blazars Cause Mysterious Cosmic Rays
December 23, 2018

Feature Guest: Darren Grant A one hundred year old astronomical mystery may finally have been solved. Scientists have long wondered just what caused high energy particles called cosmic rays, which arrive on Earth from the far unknown reaches of the...

Episode 156: The Do-It-Yourself Spacesuit, with Cameron Smith
November 29, 2018

Featured Guest: Cameron Smith One of the challenges in building a future where humans are able to explore other worlds are the massive, clumsy and expensive spacesuits currently in use. Now enter into the picture Pacific Spaceflight. They’re a...