Do you want to major in Astrophysics? Are you thinking about becoming (or ever just wondered how one becomes) an Astrophysicists? Do you want to know Matt O’Dowd’s origin story? Then buckle up and enjoy the ride and try your astrophysics...

The Kepler telescope recently noticed a strange partial eclipse that some have speculated could be a Dyson Sphere. Are Dyson Sphere's possible? Are they practical? What other alternatives to futuristic energy capture do we have to choose...

The holy grail of physics is to connect our understanding of the tiny scales of atoms and subatomic particles with that of the vast scales of planets, galaxies, and the entire universe. To connect quantum physics with Einstein’s general...

Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the perpetual motion machine. No working perpetual motion machine has ever been experiment verified. All break the laws of...

Astronomers are the worst at naming things. Dark energy AND dark matter? Who can remember which is which. But perhaps one astronomer has just fixed it, with a theory that says perhaps actually they are they same stuff.

The power of Dark Energy may be increasing as the universe ages. Subtle clues are emerging that the accepted model for the nature of dark energy and dark matter may not be all that. We saw the first such clue recently in our recent...

Our universe seems pretty complicated. We have a weird zoo of elementary particles, which interact through very different fundamental forces. But some extremely subtle clues in nature have led us to believe that the forces of nature were...

What do we do to protect ourselves from extinction level events? And what if some of those events are unavoidable? Can we survive adrift in space? Find out in this episode of Space Time.

We already have the technology to bring humans safely to Mars and set up small settlements - or at least could do within a generation. But those settlements will need to be cocooned - shielded against the deadly cold, intense radiation,...

The universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. We don’t know what’s causing that acceleration, but that hasn’t stopped us from giving it a name. We call this unknown influence dark energy. The observed acceleration is,...

Reality has cracks in it. Universe-spanning filaments of ancient Big Bang energy, formed from topological defects in the quantum fields, aka cosmic strings. They have subatomic thickness but prodigious mass and they lash through space at...

We humans have always been explorers. The great civilizations that have arisen across the world are owed to our restless ancestors. These days, there’s not much of Earth left to explore. But if we look up, there’s a whole universe out...

Our universe started with the big bang. But only for the right definition of “our universe”. And of “started” for that matter. In fact, probably the Big Bang is nothing like what you were taught. A hundred years ago we discovered the...

We know that gravity must cause clocks to run slow on the basis of logical consistency. And we know that gravity DOES cause clocks to run slow based on many brilliant experiments. But I never explained WHY or HOW gravity causes the flow...

Planck's Length is the length below which the concept of length loses its meaning. What exactly does that mean and what are the incredible implications this fact has upon our reality? To find out check out this episode of Space Time...

Now that we have a primer on the aspects of the Big Bang Theory that we know definitely happened, let’s look further into what we don’t yet know, and how the theory could progress in the future. Since there is a discrepancy between...

The double slit experiment radically changed the way we understand reality. Find out what the ramifications of this experiment were and how we can use it to better comprehend our universe.

Recently, the oldest quasar ever seen was discovered by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, as well as the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. In this first episode of the...

Kinetic and potential energy are defined as combinations of more basic quantities: position, velocity and mass. These combinations are chosen so that their sum is conserved. It’s actually remarkable that there’s any such combination of...

Throughout history, there has been much speculation about what the fate of the universe would be. Many theorized that the universe would eventually succumb to the pull of gravity, and reverse its expansion in what was being called ‘The...

So, how do you take a picture of a black hole? The beast in question is the supermassive black hole in the center of this – the M87 elliptical galaxy. It has an estimated mass of several billion times that of the Sun, which gives it an...

In astronomy we study things that are very far away. It’s a powerful challenge because even the brightest objects are almost impossibly faint when you view them from the other side of the universe. But there’s an up side. If the light...

Fast Radio Bursts were puzzling physicist for quite some time. They were thought to be the result of large cataclysmic events such as supernovae, but this theory was proven wrong when it was discovered that they could repeat themselves....

How do you see the unseeable - how do you explore the inescapable? Our cleverest astronomers have figured out ways to catch light that skims the very edge of black holes. Let’s find out what they learned. A few weeks ago a story made the...