Podcasts by The Star Spot
The astronomy and space exploration podcast
Further podcasts by Justin Trottier
Podcast on the topic Astronomie
All episodes
Episode 185: Did a Supernova Cause a Mass Extinction?, with Brian Fields from 2020-09-28T01:00
Feature Guest: Brian Fields
By now we are all familiar with the theory that an asteroid brought to an end the age of the dinosaurs, a peri...
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Episode 184: The Milky Way's First Fast Radio Burst, with Sandro Mereghetti from 2020-09-14T01:00
Feature Guest: Sandro Mereghetti
Fast radio bursts are a new mystery in astronomy. These highly energetic events of unknown origin were...
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Episode 183: COVID-19 Meets the NASA Space Apps Challenge, with James Slifierz from 2020-05-25T01:00
Feature Guest: James Slifierz
The NASA Space Apps Challenge is a feverish annual hackathon engaging teams of coders, scientists and storyt...
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Episode 182: Planet Nine or Black Hole One, with Jakub Scholtz from 2020-05-11T01:00
Feature Guest: Jakub Scholtz
We’ve long believed that membership in the solar system’s planetary family was limited to those ei...
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Episode 181: Reports of Betelgeuse’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, with Emily Levesque from 2020-04-27T01:00
Feature Guest: Emily Levesque
In December 2019, amateur and professional astronomers held their breath as the red supergiant Betelgeuse st...
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Episode 180: Wormholes through Space and Time, with John Cramer from 2020-04-06T03:06:11
Feature Guest: John G. Cramer
They are the stuff of science fiction, but wormholes are also the subject of intense scientific d...
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Episode 179: Dreams of Floating Cities, with Geoffrey Landis from 2020-03-02T02:00
Feature Guest: Geoffrey A. Landis
When we think of terraforming, we probably envision turning the Red Planet blue. But Mars isn’t the only...
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Episode 178 Sibling Rivalry at the Centre of the Galaxy, with Smadar Naoz from 2020-02-03T02:00
Feature Guest: Smadar Naoz
We’ve long known that most galaxies contain at their core a supermassive black hole that can be millions of times t...
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Episode 177: The Case of the Missing Dark Matter, with Guo Chi from 2020-01-20T02:00
Feature Guest: Guo Qi
Dark matter vastly overshadows ordinary matter in our universe. Wherever astronomers turn their telescopes they find...
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Episode 176: Second Genesis, with Jay Melosh from 2020-01-06T02:00
Feature Guest: Jay Melosh
If we should find creatures crawling around Titan or swimming under the ice sheets of Europa or Enceladus, they will almost certainly turn out t...
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Episode 175: The Truth is Out There (at the University of Manitoba) from 2019-12-23T02:00
Feature Guest: Shelley Sweeney
The University of Manitoba has just acquired the largest collection of UFO related material. Prominent Canadian ufolo...
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Episode 174: Fuzzy Dark Matter, with Lachlan Lancaster from 2019-11-25T02:00
Feature Guest: Lachlan Lancaster
Quantum mechanics is strange. Until recently we could comfort ourselves with the belief that its odd prop...
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Episode 173: Discovering an Ancient Oasis, with William Rapin from 2019-11-11T02:00
Feature Guest: William Rapin
Welcome to Sutton Island, here in the middle of a beautiful and rugged landscape consisting of shallow lakes filled with salts and minerals. ...
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Episode 172: The Hubble Not-So Constant from 2019-09-16T01:00
Feature Guest: Sherry Suyu
The Hubble constant, which measures the expansion rate of the cosmos, may not be a constant after all, and if that’s true it means we’re missin...
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Episode 171: Ploonets: When Moons Go Rogue, with Jorge Zuluaga from 2019-09-02T01:00
Feature Guest: Jorge Zuluaga
Astronomers have yet to confirm a single detection of an exomoon, that is a moon orbListen
Episode 170: The Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts, with Vikram Ravi from 2019-08-19T01:00
Feature Guest: Vikram Ravi
They come to us from deep space. They last a tiny fraction of a second. They contain as much energy as the sun’...
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Episode 169: Science at the Limits (Part 2) from 2019-08-05T01:00
Feature Guest: Dan Falk
Scientists are finding themselves increasingly squeezed between academics sounding the limits of science and a pub...
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Episode 168: Celebrating Apollo + Science at the Limits (Part 1) from 2019-07-22T01:00
Feature Guest: Dan Falk
Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by science writer Dan Falk.
We’ll start today’s interview with a commemorati...
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Episode 167: Current in Space + The Best of The Star Spot: Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt from 2019-07-08T01:00
Episode 166: Nanodiamonds are Forever, with Jane Greaves from 2019-06-10T01:00
Feature Guest: Jane Greaves
Remember that nursery rhyme, “Up...
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Episode 165: Landing on Europa, with Cynthia Phillips from 2019-05-27T01:00
Feature Guest: Cynthia Phillips
In the 1970s, the Viking landers performed historic experiments aimed at detecting life in t...
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Episode 164: Jupiter's Ancient Odyssey, with Simona Pirani from 2019-04-29T01:00
Feature Guest: Simona Pirani
The planet Jupiter occupies a position today that is far from its home 4.5 billion years ago, a destination r...
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Episode 163: The Ring Worlds of Saturn, with Bonnie Buratti from 2019-04-15T01:00
Feature Guest: Bonnie Buratti
The spacecraft Cassini went out in spectacular fashion, travelling through Saturn’s rings for a final death ...
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Episode 162: The End is Nowhere Near Nigh, with Fred Adams from 2019-03-18T01:00
Episode 161: The Boom Time of the Universe, with Rosemary Wyse from 2019-03-04T02:00
Feature Guest: Rosemary Wyse
The universe is past its prime, by about 8 to 10 billion years. Sorr...
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Episode 160: Boom to Bust Part 1: Before the Beginning, with Katrin Heitmann from 2019-02-18T02:14:36
Feature Guest: Katrin Heitmann
The Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, a student group ...
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Episode 159: Living on the Edge: Are We On the Boundary of an Expanding Universe?, with Ulf Danielsson from 2019-01-21T02:00
Feature Guest: Ulf Danielsson
Our universe is big. But what if all of this was just one of an unimaginably large number of bubble universes. That’s the proposal by a grou...
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Episode 158: Telling Space Stories, with Rayna Slobodian from 2019-01-07T02:00
Feature Guest: Rayna Slobodian
As we dream of space, we must remain anchored to humanity. Space exploration is a human story, and music may be the perfect medium to ...
Episode 157: How We Discovered Blazars Cause Mysterious Cosmic Rays from 2018-12-24T02:00
Feature Guest: Darren Grant
A one hundred year old astronomical mystery may finally have been solved. Scientists have long wondered just w...
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Episode 156: The Do-It-Yourself Spacesuit, with Cameron Smith from 2018-11-30T03:15:06
Featured Guest: Cameron Smith
One of the challenges in building a future where humans are able to explore other worlds are the massive, clumsy and expensive spacesuits cu...
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Episode 155: Artificial Photosynthesis: Taking the Sun on the Road, with Katharina Brinkert from 2018-11-12T02:00
Featured Guest: Katharina Brinkert
On Earth, we can thank the sun for making life possible. Now what if we could harness the power of the ...
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Episode 154: The Vatican Observatory: Astronomy and Faith in the Modern World, with Cosette Gilmour from 2018-10-29T01:00
Featured Guest: Cosette Gilmour
The proper relationship between science and faith is a core question for the modern age. At the centre of this debate has often been the V...
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Episode 153: A Reality Check on Terraforming Mars, with Bruce Jakosky from 2018-10-15T01:00
Featured Guest: Bruce Jakosky
Don’t shoot the messenger. The terraforming of Mars has been the dream for many of us who long for a future ...
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Episode 152: Alien Viruses, with Ken Stedman from 2018-10-01T01:00
Featured Guest: Ken Stedman
They aren’t pleasant, but viruses are the most common form life on our planet. So why aren’t the world’s space...
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Episode 151: New Moons of Jupiter, with Scott Sheppard from 2018-09-17T01:00
Featured Guest: Scott Sheppard
On the hunt for the solar system’s elusive Planet X, a team of astronomers accidentally stumbled upon the d...
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Episode 150: At the Birth of Our First Newborn Planet, with André Müller from 2018-09-03T01:00
Featured Guest: André Müller
Astronomers have taken their first image of an infant planet still developing around a newly formed star. Tod...
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Episode 149: The Question of Life on Mars, with David Hamilton from 2018-08-20T01:00
Featured Guest: David Hamilton
The recent discovery of a lake of liquid water beneath the Martian south pole culminates a series of stunni...
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Episode 148: Does Canada Have a Vision for Space Exploration?, with Chuck Black from 2018-08-06T01:00
Featured Guest: Chuck Black
The Canadian Space Advisory Board was tasked with developing a plan to rejuvenate Canada’s declining world sta...
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Episode 147: Postcards From Home from 2018-07-23T01:00
Today we turn our telescopes back around to study ourself. Our own solar system is undergoing a conceptual revolution. From its chaotic birth to its fiery end, ou...
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Episode 146: Supernovae and the Evolution of Life on Earth, with Brian Thomas from 2018-05-28T01:00
Feature Guest: Brian Thomas
We have this impression of our planet as isolated from the rest of the universe, our lives cut off from the dr...
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Episode 145: Can Sibling Rivalry Explain This Supernova?, with Stuart Ryder from 2018-05-16T23:06:25
Feature Guest: Stuart Ryder
When a massive star explodes in a supernova, it tends to gobble up all the attention. But what happens when that star has a binary companion w...
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Episode 144: A Rough Upbringing: The Discovery of Stars in the Galaxy’s Core, with Farhad Yusef-Zadeh from 2018-04-02T01:00
Feature Guest: Farhad Yusef-Zadeh
The gravity, radiation and tidal forces at the very core of...
Episode 143: Planet Hunting Goes Extragalactic, with Xinyu Dai from 2018-03-19T01:00
Feature Guest: Xinyu Dai
Last month astronomers announced the first ever discovery of extrasolar planets… in another galaxy! We’ve already...
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Episode 142: Jupiter Transformed, with Scott Bolton from 2018-02-19T02:00
Feature Guest: Scott Bolton
It’s our cosmic backyard, and yet our own solar system is still full of surprises. Now it turns out we were “t...
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Episode 141: The Mysterious Origin of Superpowerful Radio Blasts, with Jason Hessels from 2018-02-05T02:00
Feature Guest: Jason Hessels
The one thing we thought we knew about fast radio blasts was that these mysterious one-off phenomena must be ...
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Episode 140: How Humans Are Healing the Ozone Hole… and Might Just Solve Other Environmental Problems, with Susan Strahan from 2018-01-22T02:00
Feature Guest: Susan Strahan
While human activity is what created the ozone hole, scientists just announced direct evidence that human act...
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Episode 139: Can Alien Life Hitch a Ride on Space Dust?, with Arjun Berera from 2018-01-08T02:00
Feature Guest: Arjun Berera
Many of you are familiar with the idea of panspermia, the theory that life spreads itself throughout the galax...
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Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas everyone! from 2017-12-24T20:08:33
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas everyone!
The Star Spot will be off for the next 2 weeks while our team enjoys some rest and relaxation over the holidays. 2017 has witnessed a remarkab...
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Episode 138: Making Contact, with Jill Tarter from 2017-12-11T02:00
Feature Guest: Jill Tarter
Alien hunting pioneer Jill Tarter often says the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a way for u...
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Episode 137: An Alien Asteroid in Our Solar System, with Alan Stern from 2017-11-27T02:00
Feature Guest: Alan Stern
There’s an intruder in our solar system. This fall we were invaded by the first interstellar space traveller, an...
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Episode 136: So You Want to Become an Astronaut?, with Cordell Grant from 2017-11-12T19:42:01
Feature Guest: Cordell Grant
On June 17, 2016, the Canadian Space Agency launched the nation’s fourth astronaut recruitment campaign. 3,77...
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Episode 135: Studying Cosmic Alchemy with Gravitational Waves, with Michael Landry from 2017-10-30T01:00
Feature Guest: Michael Landry
The alchemists never did succeed in turning elements into gold and silver, and now we know why. It takes the...
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Episode 134: Searching for Aliens All-Sky All-the-Time, with Bill Diamond from 2017-10-02T01:00
Feature Guest: Bill Diamond
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is undergoing a revolution. There was once a time when ...
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Episode 133: Discovering an Asteroid Family Unchanged Since the Birth of the Solar System, with Marco Delbo from 2017-09-18T01:00
Feature Guest: Marco Delbo
The main belt asteroids are among the most ancient of all bodies in the solar system. This summer astronomers a...
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Episode 132: Does Titan Harbour the Building Blocks of Life?, with Ravi Desai from 2017-09-03T16:47:11
Feature Guest: Ravi Desai
It was recently reported that Saturn’s moon Titan harbours complex chemistry the likes of which we’ve never befo...
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Episode 131: Heavy Metal Explosion: The Rockstars of the Supernova World, with Matt Nicholl from 2017-08-21T01:00
Feature Guest: Matt Nicholl
If you thought a supernova was powerful, time to meet its bigger brother, the superluminous supernova. They’ve...
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Episode 130: There Are How Many More Comets!?, with James Bauer from 2017-08-07T01:00
Feature Guest: James Bauer
A team of astronomers studying long-period comets has just reached a startling conclusion. The solar system is home to seven times more of thes...
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Episode 129: Building on Gravitational Wave Astronomy, with Danny Steeghs from 2017-07-24T01:00
Feature Guest: Danny Steeghs
Gravitational wave astronomy was born less than 2 years ago when scientists made the first ever detection of...
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Episode 128: A Shocking Theory About the Multiverse, with Dan Falk from 2017-07-10T01:00
Feature Guest: Dan Falk
What if everything we see in our universe is not all that there is. The concept of the multiverse has captured the...
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Episode 127: When Day Becomes Night, with Dan Falk from 2017-06-26T01:00
Feature Guest: Dan Falk
They once portended the collapse of civilization. Well the solar eclipse visiting North America this summer proba...
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Episode 126: SpaceX: A New Paradigm for Space Exploration, with Chris Prophet from 2017-06-12T01:00
Feature Guest: Chris Prophet
SpaceX has blasted into the aerospace world, seemingly overnight, bringing with it a new low cost model for a...
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Episode 124: The Best Candidate for Life, with Jason Dittmann from 2017-05-15T01:00
Feature Guest: Jason Dittmann
Just last month, April 2017, astronomers announced the discovery of an extrasolar planet that has the best s...
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Episode 123: Dark Matter Bridging the Galaxies, with Michael Hudson from 2017-05-01T01:00
Feature Guest: Michael Hudson
If you’re like most people you probably think of galaxies as islands of stars, separate and isolated cities of our universe. But it turns ou...
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Episode 122: What if the Sun had a Sibling?, with Quinn Konopacky from 2017-04-17T01:00
Feature Guest: Quinn Konopacky
The 14th annual Expanding Canada’s Frontiers symposium was hosted on January 27th, 2017 by the Astronomy an...
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Episode 121: Scary Resolutions to the Fermi Paradox, with David Kipping from 2017-03-20T01:00
Feature Guest: David Kipping
The 14th annual Expanding Canada’s Frontiers Listen
Episode 120: When Galaxies Collide, with Gurtina Besla from 2017-03-06T02:00
Feature Guest: Gurtina Besla
The 14th annual Expanding Canada’s Frontiers symposium was hosted on January 27th, 2017 by the Astro...
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Episode 119: From Knots to Donuts: Exotic Possibilities for the Shape of Our Universe, with Paul Sutter from 2017-02-20T02:00
Feature Guest: Paul Sutter
Imagine travelling a very long way in space only to return just where you started, but upside down. Or conside...
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Episode 118: The Sun: Our Local Mystery, with Terry Kucera from 2017-02-06T02:00
Feature Guest: Terry Kucera
We see it there in the sky every day of our lives. And yet our own local star, the sun, is still in many ways ...
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Episode 117: The Universe is Going Green, with Matt Malkan from 2017-01-23T02:00
Feature Guest: Matt Malkan
Was the early universe green? That’s the startling discovery by a team of UCLA astronomers studying the yo...
Episode 116: The Transit of Mercury, with Suzanna Nagy from 2017-01-09T02:00
Feature Guest: Suzanna Nagy
Suzanna Nagy is President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Vancouver Centre. In May 2016 she took...
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Episode 115: Searching for Aliens with the World’s Biggest Telescopes, with Dan Werthimer from 2016-12-26T02:00
Feature Guest: Dan Werthimer
Physicist Enrico Fermi once asked, if aliens exist in the galaxy, then just where is everybody. And for nearl...
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Episode 114: The Milky Way's Dark Matter Twin, with Roberto Abraham from 2016-12-12T02:00
Feature Guest: Roberto Abraham
Imagine a galaxy that has a similar mass and volume to our own but where somebody turned off most of the st...
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Episode 113: Astronomical Observatories of Ancient Britain, with Gail Higginbottom from 2016-11-14T02:00
Feature Guest: Gail Higginbottom
The British gave us the world’s first parliament. And now it turns out the ancient British may have...
Episode 112: Geysers on Europa, with William Sparks from 2016-10-31T01:00
Feature Guest: William Sparks
Extraterrestrial life might be erupting into space from the surface of Europa. And a NASA mission to the icy...
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Episode 111: Can Supernovae Cause Extinctions!?, with Shawn Bishop from 2016-10-17T01:00
Feature Guest: Shawn Bishop
We’ve long known we’re made of star stuff, but now it turns out that life on Earth might be even more intimate...
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Episode 110: Peering Into the Void, with Nico Hamaus from 2016-10-03T01:00
Feature Guest: Nico Hamaus
Astronomers are no longer avoiding the void. Between the overdense zones of our universe, where most galaxies live, there exist vast regions of...
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Episode 109: Rethinking Ancient Mayan Astronomy, with Gerardo Aldana from 2016-09-19T01:00
Feature Guest: Gerardo Aldana
No the ancient Maya did not predict the end of the world. But they were among the world’s most advanced astr...
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Episode 108: The Closest Exoplanet Could Be Habitable, with Guillem Anglada-Escudé from 2016-09-05T01:00
Feature Guest: Guillem Anglada-Escudé
Recently headlines buzzed with news of the discovery of the nearest exoplanet that we will ever find...
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Episode 107: Surveying the Cosmos, with Ludovic Van Waerbeke from 2016-08-22T01:00
Feature Guest: Ludovic Van Waerbeke
Large scale surveys of the universe are quickly becoming key to making new discoveries at the cutting ...
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Episode 106: Is Our Solar System Unique? The Complex Process of Planetary Formation, with Aaron Boley from 2016-08-08T01:00
Feature Guest: Aaron Boley
Is our solar system unique? That's becoming a major question for researchers. It turns out solar system formation is a far more complex p...
The Star Spot Episode 105: Ad Astra?, with Zachary Fejes from 2016-07-25T01:00
Feature Guest: Zachary Fejes
Imagine a starship that could take us out into the galaxy. Meet Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit foundation w...
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The Star Spot Episode 104: The Great Terraforming Mars Debate: The Dream, with Chuck Black from 2016-07-11T01:00
Feature Guest: Chuck Black
Ever consider moving to Mars? The Star Spot did. Along with the University of Toronto Astronomy and Space Explo...
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The Star Spot Episode 103: The Great Terraforming Mars Debate: The Ethics, with John Rummel from 2016-06-27T01:00
Feature Guest: John Rummel
Ever consider moving to Mars? The Star Spot did. Along with the University of Toronto Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, we co-host...
Episode 102: The Great Terraforming Mars Debate - Part 2: The Biology, with Olathe MacIntyre from 2016-05-30T01:00
Feature Guest: Olathe MacIntyre
Ever consider moving to Mars? The Star Spot recently did. Along with the University of Toronto Astronomy a...
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Episode 101: The Great Terraforming Mars Debate - Part 1: The Science, with Paul Delaney from 2016-05-16T01:00
Feature Guest: Paul Delaney
Ever consider moving to Mars? The Star Spot recently did. Along with the University of Toronto Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, ...
Episode 100: The Monster at the Centre of our Galaxy, with Feryal Özel from 2016-05-02T01:00
Celebrating 100 Episodes with you at The Star Spot!
Thank you for joining here at The Star Spot for our special 100th episode. I want to take a moment to thank the 100 ab...
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Episode 99 Pulsars and the Detection of Gravitational Waves, with Ingrid Stairs from 2016-04-18T01:00
Feature Guest: Ingrid Stairs
In February scientists announced the first ever discovery of gravitational waves, tiny distortions in the fab...
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Episode 98: What Our Beliefs About Aliens Say About Us!, With Brian Trent from 2016-04-04T01:00
Feature Guest: Brian Trent
Here’s the ultimate challenge for science fiction. How do you describe the appearance and behaviour of an intelligent alien species when we...
Episode 97: Making Life in the Lab and Its Implications for Alien Hunting, with Lynn Rothschild from 2016-03-21T01:00
Feature Guest: Lynn Rothschild
Are we alone in the universe? Think about it. Whatever the answer, it is one of the most profound and endur...
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Episode 96: Did Universe's First Moments Set the Stage for Life?, with Fred Adams from 2016-03-07T02:00
Feature Guest: Fred Adams
Could the very first moments of our universe hold the secret to the eventual emergence of life billions of years later? And can life exist i...
Episode 95: Galaxy Clusters: The Largest Structures in the Universe, with Gil Holder from 2016-02-22T02:00
Feature Guest: Gil Holder
Have you heard of the Great Attractor or the Great Wall? The universe evolved from a h...
Episode 94: What Alien Intelligence Means for Humanity, with Don Lincoln from 2016-02-08T02:00
Feature Guest: Don Lincoln
Humanoid... grey in colour… almond shaped eyes. You all know exactly what I’m describing, but have you ever wondered just how the public’s perc...
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Episode 93: Will the Electric Sail Get Us to Deep Space? with Les Johnson from 2016-01-25T02:00
Feature Guest: Les Johnson
In our last conversation, Pekka Janhunen, inventor of the electric solar sail, joined Denise at The Star Sp...
Episode 92: Inventing the Electric Solar Sail, with Pekka Janhunen from 2016-01-11T02:00
Feature Guest: Pekka Janhunen
The electric solar wind sail, or electric sail for short, is an advanced spacecraft propulsion technology th...
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Episode 91: Monster Galaxies of the Early Universe, with Henry Joy McCracken from 2015-12-14T02:00
Feature Guest: Henry Joy McCracken
Last month scientists announced the shocking discovery of 574 monster galaxies from the ancient universe. There are surprisingly ma...
Episode 90: Discovering the Furthest Object in the Solar System, with Scott Sheppard from 2015-11-30T02:00
Feature Guest: Scott Sheppard
Recently astronomers discovered an object further than anything we’ve ever found in our solar system. This dwarf planet lies all the way...
Episode 89: The Surprising Ubiquity of Ice in the Solar System and the Staggering Implications for Life, with David Paige from 2015-11-16T01:23:45
Feature Guest: David Paige
There was once a time when scientists believed that beyond the Earth there lied a largely dry, barren and inhos...
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Episode 88: Two's Company: From Binary Stars to Binary Supermassive Black Holes, with Pawel Artymowicz from 2015-11-02T02:00
Feature Guest: Pawel Artymowicz
Star Wars fans will be familiar with the planet Tatooine and its two suns. But as it turns out the ...
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Episode 87: 147 Years of Astronomy Outreach, with Randy Attwood from 2015-10-05T01:00
Feature Guest: Randy Attwood
Nearly a quarter of Americans confuse astronomy with astrology. And barely half know it takes the Earth a year to go around the Sun. Yes, you...
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Episode 86: When the Universe Began, with Wendy Freedman from 2015-09-21T01:00
Feature Guest: Wendy Freedman
A long long time ago in every place at once, all of this began. But when exactly did the universe begin? And how quickly did it expand into ...
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