Colliding Neutron Stars, Gravity Waves, and the Origin of the Heavy Elements
with Prof. Eliot Quataert (University of California, Berkeley) In the previous decade, one third of the world's astronomers became involved in a single project -- observing a distant and violent eve...
23 Aug 20221h 21min
When Mars Was Like Earth: Five Years of Exploration with the Curiosity Rover
Speaker: Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory For five years, Curiosity explored Gale Crater, one of the most intriguing locations on Mars -- once the site of an ancient lake. I...
2 Aug 20221h 30min
Rubble Piles in the Sky: The Science, Exploration, and Danger of Near-Earth Asteroids
with Dr, Michael Busch (SETI Institute) Near-Earth asteroids are a population of small bodies whose orbits around the Sun cross or come near our planet’s orbit. They turn out to be unusual physical e...
15 Jul 20221h 2min
Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto (with Alan Stern & David Grinspoon)
In July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, revealing its surface to our view for the first time. In this program, Drs. Alan Stern and David Grinspoon give us an insider's view of how thi...
24 Jun 20221h 43min
Do Humans Have What it Takes to Thrive in this Universe?
Dr. Sandra Faber (University of California, Santa Cruz) Do Humans Have What it Takes to Thrive in this Universe? In this thought-provoking talk, cosmologist (and National Medal of Science winner) Dr....
1 Jun 20221h 22min
A Sharper Image: Seeing Colliding Galaxies with Adaptive Optics (with Dr. Claire Max)
When light from space enters Earth’s atmosphere, it is distorted and displaced, something our eyes perceive as “twinkling.” Adaptive optics can remove a great deal of this distortion, essentially res...
12 Mai 20221h 16min
Cosmobiology: Recent Progress in Cosmology, Exoplanets, and the Prerequisites for Life in the Universe
In this talk, astrobiologist Charles Lineweaver discusses the history of life on Earth and what we can deduce from our understanding of the universe about the existence and history of life elsewhere. ...
3 Mai 20221h 13min
Cosmology and Ambition: Losing the Nobel Prize (with Dr. Brian Keating)
What would it have been like to be an eyewitness to the Big Bang? In 2014, astronomers using the powerful BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole thought they’d glimpsed evidence of the period of cosmic in...
8 Apr 20221h 16min
