Big Picture Science – Sunday 8 AM
2024: Our Space Odyssey
A roundup of space news
This year has been a spectacular one for celestial phenomena. The northern lights delighted in unexpected ways while a total solar eclipse cast a shadow across North America. Those events were enough to make it a memorable year, but 2024 also shook up our understanding of the universe. A new reading of Voyager 2 data may explain Uranus’s weird magnetic field. And the impressive James Webb Space Telescope has detected an early and incredibly distant galaxy. Join us in our look back at some of the top space news from 2024.
Guests:
Andrew Fraknoi – Professor of Astronomy at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco and SETI board member
Jamie Jasinski – space plasma physicist for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and author of a recent paper re-examining data from the Voyager 2 mission, published in Nature.
Phil Plait – astronomer, author, science communicator and frequent contributor at Scientific American.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Your Big Picture Science Hosts:
Seth Shostak Host and Producer, Big Picture Science – Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute
Molly Bentley Executive Producer and Co-Host, Big Picture Science
About Big Picture Science:
Big Picture Science is a weekly, one-hour radio show and podcast produced at the SETI Institute. Hosted by Seth Shostak, SETI Institute Fellow and Senior Astronomer, and science journalist Molly Bentley, Big Picture Science reports on modern science and technology with smart and humorous storytelling.
Themed episodes feature interviews with top scientists and technology innovators. All episodes try to answer the question, “so what?” Why does this research matter?
Big Picture Science topics range from the microbiome to virtual reality, from the physics of motion to the intelligence of animals. Every month one episode is devoted to critical thinking in “Skeptic Check”, which separates fact from fiction in topics such as Bigfoot and UFOs.
And of course we cover science related to the work of the SETI Institute.