syzygy
Join astronomer Dr Emily Brunsden and enthusiastic not-astronomer Dr Chris Stewart as they explore the universe.
Episodes
Finaly — finally! — Chris and Emily get to the meat of the matter in this season on life in the universe. Very special guest Dr Kelly Redeker from the Department of Biology at the University of York breaks down the principles of life, both on Earth and on other worlds (or "slimy rocks" as Emily insists on calling them). Do you need a Frankenstein-esque spar...
In this season on life in the universe, it's time to look closer to home: what are the chances we will find evidence of life — present or past-tense — in the Solar System, our own back yard? Emily's fabulous colleague Dr Clément Moissard, plasma physicist at the University of York, joins us to discuss the search for life on Mars, on the icy moons of Ju...
Having established that the hunt for life in the galaxy ought to begin with an appropriate star, Emily turns our attention towards suitable planets. But what makes a hospitable home for life? It’s complicated, and it seems whatever way we look at it, we don’t have a lot of candidates to choose from. Emily discusses earth-like rocky planets, ocean worlds, an...
We're back with Season 3! For the next six episodes we're talking life in the universe, and so far we have N=1: we know there's life on Earth, but nowhere else as yet. Those are challenging statistics. In this episode Emily makes the case that to explore the possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos, you need planets — and to have planets, you need stars. ...
According to one survey, around one-third of Australians think aliens not only exist, but have actually visited Earth. That's ... a bit fraction. In this final episode of season 2, we ask how we'd even find out if life exists around other stars. Emily introduces the Habitable Worlds Observatory, an incredible new space telescope that's just in the early design phase an...
Exo-planets, sure. Exo-moons and -comets? Fine. But exo ... telescopes?! Emily is going out on a limb in this episode, expanding the definition of telescope to include things that measure stuff in space, and we're here for it! Which means we really do have a few telescopes out there beyond the Solar System, in the shape of Voyagers 1 and 2, with a few more waiting in t...
We know, we know — we did exoplanets last time. But that was the current state-of-play and a 2024 exoplanets wrapped update. In this episode, Emily looks to the future! She does a deep dive into the promise of the just wonderful JWST, as it prods exoplanets in ways they’ve never been prodded before.
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It couldn't be a season of exo-stuff without taking a good hard look at the current state of exoplanets, the OG exo-thing. Emily sums up the state of exoplanet research in 2024 — her Exoplanets 2024 Wrapped, if you like — then lines up her top three exoplanets of the year, and considers what's coming up next in this exo-ploding field.
Exoplanets, sure. Exo-moons too, apparently. But exo ... comets?! Yes indeed, they're a real thing, and we've known about them for ages! How do you spot something so tiny around another star, so far away? Emily has the insider knowledge, because it's something she's genuinely investigating in her job as an actual, real-life astronomer.
On the web: syzygy.fm
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Way, way back in the early epochs of Syzygy (ep 19 in Oct 2018 if you must know) we talked about the exciting prospect of spotting the first exomoon — a moon orbiting a planet orbiting a star that is not our own. It seemed reasonable to expect that six years later exomoons would be a thing we've discovered, and maybe even started a catalogue. But turns out, observing a minute signal on top of an already minute signal is ...
A short announcement: Syzygy is now seasonal! From now on we're going to release the podcast in seasons, and we're excited to announce the imminent release of the first episode of Syzygy Season Two. Yep. Two. Season One is everything we've done so far. Trust us, it's easier this way. Season Two is all about Exo-Stuff — exo-planets, exo-moons, exo-comets ... are they a thing? Apparently, yes. So keep an eye out in the day...
Live from York's Festival of Ideas*, in front of an audience of ... what, had to be a few hundred thousand people, right? ... Emily and Chris discuss some awesome astronomy that you can go outside and see with your own eyes. In particular, they go deep on the incredible May 2024 aurora, and show what the 2024 total eclipse across the USA looked like, with a preview of amazing eclipses to look forward to in the coming years. Chris f...
A huge team of astronomers — and their even-huger team of tiny, fibre-obtic-wielding robots — are zeroing in on one of the great questions of cosmology: just what the heck is going on with Dark Energy? We know the Universe is expanding. Apparently, it's expanding faster. But maybe it is expanding faster, slower? Tiny robots measuring breathtakingly-huge cosmic bubbles may give us an answer.
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This week, a new Black Hole Record (kinda), and with it a nice conundrum. the GAIA mission has found the biggest black hole ... of the stellar-mass variety ... in our galaxy. A lot of caveats there, but the fun thing is, it's just next door, which makes us wonder if that's coincidence or a harbinger of more big black holes to come in GAIA's data dumps! Plus, a riddle: why do we keep spottin...
We're live from the 10th birthday celebrations for the University of York's Astrocampus, Emily's home turf and all-round fabulous teaching and outreach space. Emily fields some amazing questions from kids and adults attending the event, and gives some of Astrocampus's highlights and achievements over the past decade, as well as some plans for the future!
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After some lengthy follow-up (the Bennu sample is open at last! And SLIM is alive!), Emily investigates possibly the most podcasty story we’ve had on the show: six planets around distant star HD110067, all locked into resonances that play beautiful music. Turns out if you leave a planetary system alone for long enough, gravity tends to pull everything into simple harmonies. Maybe our ...
Emily and Chris tune in to JAXA’s livestream of SLIM — the Smart Lander for Investigating and Moon — as it attempted to slick the landing on the lunar surface on Friday 19 January 2023. We were prepared for success and champagne, or failure and lessons-learned. What we didn’t expect was … ambiguity, uncertainty and WE ARE STILL CHECKING THE STATUS SO PLEA...
Long-time Syzygy listener Jack asks: "Hey Emily — what's the deal with quasi-stars?" (We're paraphrasing). Quasi-stars are hypothetical, enormous stellar-object-thingies that might have formed shortly after the Big Bang. They're so huge they might have formed with black holes at their cores. If they existed at all, it would explain why astronomers keep finding intermediate-mass black ...
Astronomers routinely detect cosmic rays, the high-energy particles from space that collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a shower of secondary particles that rain down on the earth below. But every so often — like, less than once a decade — they spot a cosmic ray smashing into the planet with just stupid amounts of energy. The sort of energy you associat...
We've talked BOATs before — cosmic events that are the Brightest Of All Time — and it's always a favourite topic on the show. Recently astronomers analysed the runner-up BOAT in the Burster category, an astoundingly violent, weirdly long-lasting, and oddly-located neutron star merger, and measured the amount of afterglow Tellurium to learn more about fast neutron processes....
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