Our big, beautiful moon - According to the rare Earth hypothesis, see episode 59, a large moon is needed for the development of complex life. Our moon isn’t the biggest moon in our solar system; but the moons that are bigger are orbiting much larger p...

Why do big ones orbit so strangely? - Today, we consider all the large planets orbiting stars other than our sun, and their tendency to adopt eccentric orbits. The possible reasons include close encounters with other stars,

Let’s keep it round - According to the “rare earth” hypothesis, see episode 59, one of the requirements for the development of complex life is a stable, and nearly circular orbit. If the orbit is too eccentric,

not quite a star, not quite a planet, not quite life - After a somewhat disjointed primer on organic chemistry, we talk about how the radiation of a protostar, bathing the protoplanetary disk, See the previous episode,

The bumpy road to becoming a star - As a nebula collapses, there are forces which resist the collapse. Things like rotation, ionization and heat can overwhelm gravity and keep a given chunk of dust and gas from ever managing to start nuclear fusion an...

Oh where o where did our sun come from? - In episode 59, we talked about the “rare Earth hypothesis.” According to that school of thought, when and where a star is born, and when and where it lives, matters.

How to make a mind—part2 - What we need is our rare and wonderful Earth, and approximately 4.54 billion years. Of course, that begs the question. How did we end up with our Earth, and how important is it that a planet is like our Earth to create intel...

Can’t we just look at it? - In episode 56 and episode 57, we looked at a couple of methods of detecting planets that are orbiting around stars other than our own sun. These methods involve a good deal of analysis and inference. Today,

The hunt for planet tomato - Unlike the method described in the previous episode, the transit method allows one to look at many stars at a time. When a planet crosses between us and the star it’s orbiting, the star’s light dims very slightly.

The stars wibble and wobble as their planets go round - There are several ways of detecting planets that orbit stars other than our sun. One method, called Doppler spectroscopy, relies on the fact that an orbiting planet causes its star to wobble.