The Black Hole Wars: My Battle with Stephen Hawking
With Dr. Leonard Susskind (Stanford University) Black holes, the collapsed remnants of the largest stars, provide a remarkable laboratory where the frontier concepts of our understanding of nature are...
15 Apr 20241h 34min
Black Holes and the Technology to Find Them
A Non-technical Talk by Dr. Jessica Lu (University of California, Berkeley) on March 13, 2024 The population of black holes, objects left over from dead stars, is almost entirely unexplored. Only ab...
10 Apr 20241h 2min
Exploring the Gravitational Wave Universe
Speaker: Dr. Brian Lantz (Stanford University) Feb. 7, 2024 Measuring gravitational waves is a revolutionary new way to do astronomy. They were predicted by Einstein, but it was not until 2015, that ...
21 Feb 20241h 9min
Water Above, Water Below: The Many Roles of Water in Making Planets Habitable
Dr. Laura Schaefer (Stanford University): Water is everywhere. Its atoms, hydrogen and oxygen, are the first and fifth most abundant elements in the universe. Water is found in abundance in many envir...
5 Dec 20231h 14min
The Peril and Profit of Near-Earth Objects
A Talk by Dr. Robert Jedicke (U of Hawaii) Oct. 11, 2023 Near-Earth objects present both an existential threat to human civilization and an extraordinary opportunity to help our exploration and expan...
29 Okt 20231h 10min
SPECIAL: An Interview with Frank Drake: The Founder of SETI Science (conducted by Andrew Fraknoi)
June 2012 Frank Drake (1930-2022) was known as the "father of SETI science" -- he was the scientist who conducted the first radio survey for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, and came up wi...
17 Juli 202344min
Ashes to Ashes, Earth to Earth, Dust to Dust: The Birth and Death of Worlds
with Dr. Eugene Chiang (University of California, Berkeley)June 21, 2023We now know that our solar system is but one of countless others. Where did all these planets come from? What are their fates, a...
14 Juli 20231h 5min
An Eclipse Double-Header: Two North American Eclipses of the Sun in 2023 & 2024 (with Andrew Fraknoi)
North America will be treated to two eclipses of the Sun in the 2023-24 school year: an annular eclipse on Oct. 14, 2023 and a total eclipse on Apr. 8, 2024. Some 500 million people will be in a posi...
18 Maj 20231h 2min
