PBS Space Time — Season 2018

Aired 10 January 2018 • 14 min

We can now map the interiors of stars by “listening” to their harmonies as they vibrate with seismic waves.

Aired 17 January 2018 • 15 min

Learn about Horizon radiation and why it's essential for us to understand as we continue our journey towards the Unruh Effect and Hawking Radiation.

Aired 24 January 2018 • 15 min

The Sun is slowly burning through its fuel. Hydrogen is fused into helium in the Sun’s core, producing energy that keeps it shining, and keeping the Earth warm and hospitable to life. But that fuel WILL run out, after which the Sun will swell into a red giant and flash-fry the Earth. But in fact that frying – well, slow-roasting – will begin much earlier. See, the Sun is getting brighter even now. This has complex, and for the most part terrible implications for life. The end of the world will come sooner than you think.

Aired 31 January 2018 • 10 min

What happens when a star eats its planets? Find out on today’s Space Time Journal Club.

Aired 14 February 2018 • 15 min

Energy is the most powerful and useful concept in all of physics, but what exactly is it?

Aired 21 February 2018 • 13 min

What exactly will happen when the sun dies?

Aired 28 February 2018 • 9 min

Do you have what it takes to calculate the awesome power of the trebuchet?

Aired 7 March 2018 • 13 min

Will the future of space exploration be guided by public or private entities? Which is better?

Aired 15 March 2018 • 13 min

It’s the most famous prediction of perhaps the most famous genius of our time ... Stephen Hawking's theory of Hawking Radiation

Aired 21 March 2018 • 10 min

What do the first stars in the universe, dark matter, and superior siege engines have in common?

Aired 28 March 2018 • 13 min

The Andromeda galaxy is heading straight toward our own Milky Way. The two galaxies will inevitably collide. Will that be the very last night sky our solar system witnesses?

Aired 4 April 2018 • 12 min

Worried about black holes? Consider this: Every time you accelerate - you generate an event horizon behind you. The more you accelerate away from it the closer it gets. Don’t worry, it can never catch up to you, but the Unruh radiation it generates sure can.

Aired 11 April 2018 • 14 min

Our universe is prone to increasing disorder and chaos. So how did it generate the extreme complexity we see in life? Actually, the laws of physics themselves may demand it.

Aired 18 April 2018 • 13 min

Now that gravitational waves are definitely a thing, it’s time to think about some of the crazy things we can figure out with them. In some cases we’re going to need a gravitational wave observatory - in fact, we've already built one.

Aired 25 April 2018 • 12 min

It’s been conjectured that the center of the Milky Way is swarming with tens of thousands of black holes. And now we’ve actually seen them.

Aired 2 May 2018 • 12 min

If we, or any conscious being is around to witness the very distant future our galaxy, what will they see? How long will life persist as the stars begin to die?

Aired 9 May 2018 • 11 min

The great advances in any science tend to come in sudden leaps. April 25th of 2018 marks the beginning of just such a leap for much of astronomy. In the early hours of the morning, the Gaia mission’s second data release dropped. Our understanding of our own galaxy will never be the same again.

Aired 16 May 2018 • 14 min

Conservation laws are among the most important tools in physics. They feel as fundamental as you can get. And yet they’re wrong - or at least they’re only right sometimes. These laws are consequences of a much deeper, more fundamental principle: Noether’s theorem.

Aired 23 May 2018 • 14 min

If you have perfect knowledge of every single particle in the universe, can you use the laws of physics to rewind all the way back to the Big Bang? Is the entire history of the universe perfectly knowable? Or has information somehow lost along the way?

Aired 13 June 2018 • 15 min

We’ve established by now that black holes are weird. The result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon- not matter, not light, not even information.

Aired 20 June 2018 • 16 min

We’ve established by now that black holes are weird. The result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon- not matter, not light, not even information.

Aired 27 June 2018 • 12 min

The days of oil may be numbered, but there’s another natural resource that’s never been touched, Asteroids.

Aired 4 July 2018 • 14 min

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson, physicists have searched and searched for any hint of new particles. That search has been fruitless. Until, perhaps, now. Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll look at a paper that reports a compelling hint of a new particle outside the standard model: the sterile neutrino.

Aired 11 July 2018 • 14 min

In simple terms a gauge theory is one that has mathematical parameters, or “degrees of freedom” that can be changed without affecting the predictions of the theory.

Aired 18 July 2018 • 13 min

Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics has been credited with defining the arrow of time.

Aired 25 July 2018 • 15 min

Can a demon defeat the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?

Aired 1 August 2018 • 15 min

Aired 15 August 2018 • 17 min

Let’s talk about the best evidence we have that the theories of quantum physics truly represent the underlying workings of reality.

Aired 23 August 2018 • 18 min

We live in an unusual age – the age when the stars still shine. We should count ourselves lucky – nearly all of future history will be dark. But events will still unfold in that long, cooling darkness, and civilizations may endure. So how will the universe and its far-future denizens spend eternity?

Aired 30 August 2018 • 14 min

There is no greater hero in our search for life on mars than a little robot named Opportunity.

Aired 5 September 2018 • 13 min

Black Holes should have no entropy, but they in fact hold most of the entropy in the universe. Let’s figure this out.

Aired 12 September 2018 • 17 min

There’s quite a bit of stuff in the universe, to put it mildly.

Aired 20 September 2018 • 17 min

Between them, general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to describe all of observable reality.

Aired 3 October 2018 • 16 min

Physics seems to be telling us that it’s possible to simulate the entire universe on a computer smaller than the universe.

Aired 10 October 2018 • 16 min

Physics seems to be telling us that it’s possible to simulate the entire universe on a computer smaller than the universe.

Aired 18 October 2018 • 17 min

Why strings? What are they made of? How did physicists even come up with this bizarre idea? And what’s all this nonsense of extra dimensions?

Aired 25 October 2018 • 18 min

The silence of the galaxy and the resulting Fermi Paradox has perplexed us for nearly 50 years. But our most recent surveys of the Milky Way finally allow us to draw scientific conclusions about the depressingly persistent absence of aliens.

Aired 31 October 2018 • 18 min

Let me tell you a story about virtual particles. It may or may not be true.

Aired 7 November 2018 • 17 min

Some see string theory as the one great hope for a theory of everything – that it will unite quantum mechanics and gravity and so unify all of physics into one glorious theory.

Aired 14 November 2018 • 17 min

With the large hadron collider running out of places to look for clues to a deeper theory of physics, we need a bigger particle accelerator. We have one - the galaxy.

Aired 21 November 2018 • 18 min

To repeat the space time maxim: it’s never aliens … until it is. So let’s talk about ‘oumuamua.

Aired 6 December 2018 • 19 min

How did life on Earth get started? Did life on Earth originate on another planet? Either Mars, or in a distant solar system? Could Earth life have spread to have seeded life elsewhere? Let’s see what modern science has to say about the plausibility of panspermia.

Aired 12 December 2018 • 18 min

When you look in mirror, and see what you think is a perfect reflection. You might be looking at universe whose laws are fundamentally different.

Aired 20 December 2018 • 19 min

There’s this idea that beauty is a powerful guide to truth in the mathematics of physical theory. String theory is certainly beautiful in the eyes of many physicists. Beautiful enough to pursue even if it’s wrong?