Universe Today podcasts with Fraser Cain

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft are traveling on an escape trajectory from the Sun, and are now on a journey that will take them through the outer reaches of the Solar System and out into the Milky Way Galaxy.

This week, my guest will be science writer and futurist George Dvorsky, from Gizmodo and io9.

In this week's questions show, I wonder if planets could form from the wreckage around dead stars, who don't all stars collapse immediately into black holes, and where did my new channel pic come from?

Today I'm joined by Chad Weber, the video editor for the Guide to Space and other videos we do here on Universe Today. Chad was also the audio editor for Astronomy Cast and other Astrosphere projects.

All that waiting has paid off. Here it is, the first ever image of a black hole.

We now know of thousands of confirmed exoplanets, with many more candidates. And there are now dozens of planet hunting telescopes on Earth and in space, using a range of techniques to find tens of thousands more. There’s a new class of instruments and missions in the works that’ll give us an incredible understanding about the planets orbiting other stars. One of these will be the one to find Earth 2.0.

My guest today will be Dr. Brian Keating, a professor of physics and the author of the recent book "Losing the Nobel Prize". Brian was on the BICEP2 team that announced the discovery of primordial gravitational waves; a discovery that turned out to be dust.

In this QA episode, I wonder if there could be a galactic panspermia, why I'm always stealing articles from Fraser Cain from Universe Today, and where the Universe came from.

My guest today will be Dr. Ian O'Neill. Ian is an astrophysicist and journalist, and has been covering space and astronomy news for more than a decade.

Aircraft make some of the best platforms for science here on Earth. From weather balloons to study the high atmosphere to aircraft that fly into the hearts of hurricanes. From surveys of Antarctic ice sheets to drones.

This week I'm joined by Frank White, author of the Overview Effect. His new book is the Cosma Hypothesis, which talks about humanity's role in the larger cosmos..

In this week's QA, we discuss infecting Mars with diarrhea, if life evolved more than once, and why other countries don't help explore space.

It’s too bad Mars is such an interesting place, because it’s actually one of the most difficult places to visit in the Solar System, especially if you want to bring along a lot of luggage. That planet is a graveyard of missions that didn’t quite make it.

This week's guest is Dr. Jessie Christiansen, aka the Aussie Astronomer. Jessie is an exoplanet researcher working at NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech. We'll talk all things exoplanets.

I was a guest on the Space Junk Podcast from Oceanside Photo and Telescope. Subscribe to their podcast! When it comes to end of the world theories, NASA conspiracies or astronomy hoaxes Fraser has seen or heard them all. This episode picks apart those ideas and we talk about whether anything should or could be done to combat them.