The Astrophysics Podcast
Episodes
Dr. Charles Law -- All the Molecules in Protoplanetary Disks
01 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Just how much do we know about how the planets formed? How much of this can we learn from getting images of young solar systems? Why does it help to...
Dr. Daniel Polin -- The Biggest Digital Camera in the World
01 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Vera Rubin Observatory has just started taking its first data this month. We have a special guest (Dr. Daniel Polin) who helped in the constructi...
Dr. Gurtina Besla -- Dark Matter in the Milky Way
01 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Most of the mass in the universe is invisible. We call it "Dark Matter", and the only reason we know it's there is because we can see how it gravitati...
Dr. Abigail Polin -- Astrophysics Q & A #2
01 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What's the deal with black holes?
Dr. Kaitlin Kratter -- Building a Solar System on the Computer
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did our solar system form? More generally, how does any solar system form? We get some of our answers to these questions by looking at newly-for...
Dr. Tim Cunningham -- White Dwarfs Sometimes Eat Planets
01 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A white dwarf star is the compact, dense remnant of a once-thriving solar system. Long after the original star has died and turned into a white dwarf...
Dr. Merel van 't Hoff -- The Birth of the Planets
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did the planets form? What was going on in the first few brief million years of our solar system? And how did it impact what we see in our solar...
Dr. Wen-Fai Fong -- The Neutron Star Mash
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What kinds of things do neutron stars do? They can smash into each other, producing bright flashes of radiation and strong ripples in spacetime that ...
Dr. Daniel D'Orazio -- The Black Hole Shuffle
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Just how big can black holes get? Well, they can get super-massive! That is, millions to billions of times as massive as the sun. How do we know th...
Dr. Abigail Polin -- Astrophysics Q & A
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this week's episode, Dr. Abigail Polin joins us to answer your questions from the internet, on a variety of topics tangentially related to astrophy...
Dr. Andrea Derdzinski -- How do we see black holes?
01 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A black hole is so dense, its gravitational field prevents anything from escaping, including light. You would think that would make them the "blackes...
Dr. Jared Goldberg -- Does Betelgeuse have a Betelbuddy?
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Up in Orion's shoulder sits Betelgeuse, a supergiant star near the end of its life. The surface of Betelgeuse has been roiling and pulsing for centuri...
Dr. Yvette Cendes -- Black Holes on the Radio
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when a black hole eats up a star? Apparently a lot of things happen, and if you wait around awhile and look in the radio, even more thin...
Dr. Maxim Lyutikov -- How do you make a Fast Radio Burst?
01 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Some things happen out in the universe that are too powerful to make in a lab. Other phenomena are so coherent and well-ordered, we can't figure out ...
Dr. Lindsey Kwok -- The Forensic Science of Supernovae
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do we know so much about supernovae, when all we see is this little point of light getting brighter and then dimmer over time? Given this minimal ...
Dr. Paul Duffell -- The Universe on a Computer (with host Dr. Abigail Polin)
01 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How big a computer do you need to simulate a supernova? Or a planet being formed? Or a black hole swallowing gas? Many astrophysicists spend their ...
Dr. Brenna Mockler -- When Black Holes Get Hungry
01 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What do black holes like to eat? Sometimes a steady diet of interstellar gas just isn't enough and a black hole needs to snack on a whole star. No j...
Dr. Dan Milisavljevic -- Into the Time Domain
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our universe isn't just a static, unchanging backdrop. It is constantly changing in time and we now have the technology to image it over and over aga...
Dr. Katelyn Breivik -- How Binary Stars Evolve
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What would our solar system be like if we had two suns? Actually, this situation could be more common than you might think, as most stars are in bina...
Dr. Kyoungsoo Lee -- Our Galactic Neighborhood
01 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What's the biggest thing in the universe, besides the universe itself? Well, stars live in galaxies, and galaxies live in large collections called ga...
Dr. Jason Wang -- Taking a Photo of an Exoplanet
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, all that we have known about planets was confined to our own solar system, and its occasionally-changing number of planets (eight as of...
Dr. Rosalba Perna -- The Neighborhood of a Supermassive Black Hole
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Planets orbit stars, and moons orbit planets, so what orbits a supermassive black hole? Possibly a whole lot of stuff, including a gaseous disk, thou...
Dr. Soham Mandal -- What Happens to Supernovae After they Explode?
01 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When a star explodes, it's not finished having an impact on its surroundings. For the next thousand years or so, we can still see it as a supernova r...
Dr. Yuan Li -- Our Turbulent Universe
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 turbul...
Dr. Ashley Villar -- Big Data in Astrophysics
01 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Dr. Frank Timmes -- Pulsing White Dwarfs, Neutrinos, and the Infrastructure of Research
01 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What are neutrinos and where do they come from? How do we know what's going on in the interior of a star when we can only see the surface? How does a ...
Dr. Erica Nelson -- Watching the First Galaxies Form
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 Jame...
Dr. Abigail Polin -- A New Type of Supernova
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 li...