The Astrophysics Podcast

What is turbulence? You've probably experienced it before on a plane (or perhaps on a river) but you might not know precisely what it is. But turbulence is all around us, and in particular we find it on some of the largest scales in the universe. Professor Yuan Li talks about turbulence and also a little unrelated bit about Mira, an unusual star with a tail!

Astronomers deal with huge datasets, and they are about to get even bigger with the construction of the Vera Rubin Observatory. When you can detect a million supernovae per year, how do we make sense of this data and decide which ones are the "most interesting" to study? Professor Ashley Villar at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian has made her career out of developing machine learning techniques to answer this very question.

What are neutrinos and where do they come from? How do we knw what's going on in the interior of a star when we can only see the surface? How does a paper get accepted into a scientific journal? We discuss these questions and more with Frank Timmes, professor at Arizona State University and Associate Editor-in-Chief of a number of scientific journals run by the American Astronomical Society.

How did the galaxies form and how can we learn about them? Professor Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado, Boulder tells us how we use the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look back in time and learn about the initial formation of structure in the universe.

How do stars explode? It turns out there's more than one way, and Professor Abigail Polin has discovered a totally new way that stars can end their lives. We talk with Professor Polin about how that works and how scientists look at a supernova to figure out what caused the explosion.