Regina Barber

speaker

5,686 appearances 196 recordings 8 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 4d ago

Regina Barber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 128 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 33.

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Short Wave · Salty Clouds aren’t the only strange thing about this object in space · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

Yeah, this might not even be a planet that we're talking about here.

There is a debate over this object, GJ504b.

It's roughly 25 times larger than Jupiter, and astronomers are uncertain how to define it.

Is it a planet like Jupiter, or is it a failed star?

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, huge Jupiter-like planets and a failed star, they do look super similar.

But how they get there is different.

Stars need a lot of mass to ignite fusion and turn on.

And without enough mass, the star doesn't turn on, basically.

It failed.

Yeah, and that temperature affects what kind of weather it has.

Like, there are exoplanets that are so hot, the clouds are made up of gemstones.

Yeah, and our Jupiter is so cold that the clouds are ammonia ice, and beneath that, water vapor.

Yeah, there's still a lot of questions astronomers like the lead author Anish Babaraj have, like... We still don't know how big planets can get.

So uncovering as much as possible can help astronomers make better models for how planets and stars are born.

All right.

So in 2013, archaeologists discovered more than a thousand human-like fossils, so like bones and teeth, in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa.

And one big thing jumped out.

All the reconstructed skeletons looked oddly the same size.

which surprised scientists because in most primate species, there's a clear difference in size between the sexes.

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