We feature an interview with astronomer and author Dr. Emily Levesque about her book, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers. In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Levesque about the history and future of astronomy. We hear about how astronomical observing at some of the premier telescopes in the world has changed over the decades, and we get a preview of what the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory has in store for the next generation of astronomers.
We feature an interview with astronomer and author Dr. Emily Levesque about her book, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers. In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Levesque about how one becomes an astronomer and what a typical – and sometimes not so typical – night’s work is like at an observatory with highly sophisticated scientific instruments in very remote and difficult locations.
On this week’s show – part of the annual KGNU Spring Fund Drive – we play excerpts of an upcoming interview with astronomer and author Dr. Emily Levesque about her book, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers. The book is a modern history of observational astronomy, and shares an inside look at the lives and stories of astronomers past, present, and possible future.
Thanks to independent publisher Source Books for offering several copies to KGNU to help with the fund drive, and to those listeners who donated and received copies of the book.
Hosts: Joel Parker, Susan Moran Headlines: Benita Lee, Beth Bennett
Show Producer & Engineer: Joel Parker
Executive producer: Susan Moran
This special edition of How on Earth is produced in conjunction with the Conference on World Affairs. Our guest a participants of the Conference: Dr. Michelle Thaller, assistant director of science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Her path has taken her from Harvard to Georgia State University to Caltech to NASA. Dr. Thaller has studied hot stars, colliding stellar winds, binary star evolution, evolved stellar companions, and infrared astronomy. She is one of the regular hosts of the Discovery Science Channel shows: “How the Universe Works” and “Space’s Deepest Secrets” and hosts the podcast “Orbital Path” on public radio.
Host / Producer / Engineer / Executive Producer: Joel Parker
Chasing Shadows [starts at 9:40] Astronomy is a science that depends on watching things happen in the universe that we don’t have control over: supernovae, formation of stars, orbits of planets, and the spectacle of solar eclipses. You can’t grab a distant galaxy and bring it into the lab for experiments, so astronomers have to depend on studying the light that fortuitously comes to them from distant objects. However, by studying just that light, we can learn much about the objects in the universe and how they formed and evolved. For example, studying solar eclipses have taught us about the corona of the sun and about general relativity. To make those observations and measurements, scientists have to chase the shadow and set up their laboratory in remote places to catch it. In this edition of How on Earth we talk with one such shadow-chaser: astronomer Dr. Marc Buie from the Boulder office of the Southwest Research Institute. Marc organized a set of expeditions around the Earth to observe occultations of the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69, which is is the next flyby target of the New Horizons space mission that flew past Pluto in July 2015. He explains the science of occultations, what can be gleaned from these shadowy observations of 2014 MU69, and talks about planning for observation expeditions to remote places around the world.
Hosts: Joel Parker, Chip Grandits Producer / Engineer: Joel Parker Executive Producer: Alejandro Soto
Today’s show offers the following feature: Extraterrestrial intelligence? (start time: 6:30): It’s mid-summer, a time when many of us like to spend leisurely time outside at night, gazing at the stars and planets, and asking the big existential questions, such as, Are we alone? Is there intelligent life waaay out there? Our guest today, science writer Sarah Scoles, has pondered these questions for several years. She discusses with hosts Susan Moran and Joel Parker her just-published biography, Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Tarter, an astronomer, directed the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research. Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact” illustrates Tarter’s astronomical work. In the 1997 movie Contact (stemming from Sagan’s novel) actor Jodi Foster played a character who was loosely based on Tarter.
Hosts: Susan Moran, Joel Parker Producer: Susan Moran Engineer: Joel Parker Executive Producer: Alejandro Soto
This special edition of How on Earth is produced in conjunction with the Conference on World Affairs. Our guests are two of the participants of the Conference: astrobiologist Dr. David Grinspoon and physicist Dr. Sidney Perkowitz. In keeping with the traditional format of the conference panels, our guests will start by talking about their interpretation of the topic “Across the Universe – You Can’t Get There From Here”, and we’ll go from there and see where in the universe we end up.
Interview with LIGO Scientist Dr. Matt Evans (6:22): The recent big news in physics was the announcement of the first direct detection of gravitational waves. The detection was made by the LIGO project, which stands for “Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory”. Reports have said that this is a confirmation of general relativity and a new way to view the universe. To help us understand that, and why this is such a significant achievement, we have on the phone Dr. Matthew Evans, an Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT. Dr. Evans is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the chair of the Advanced Interferometer Configurations working group. His research focus is on gravitational wave detector instrumentation, and the fundamental sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors.
We talk with astronomer Travis Metcalfe about finding the oldest known planetary system in the Galaxy, and what it means about the formation of planets, the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, and how does one actually find planets around other stars? Headlines include switches in the man-made biological organisms that could possibly be used for bioterrorism, and the finding that chronic malaria infection in migrant great reed warblers damages telomeres, shortening life in both the adult bird and its offspring.
Hosts: Joel Parker and Beth Bennett Producer: Beth Bennett Engineer Beth Bennett with help from Kendra Kruger Additional Contributions: Jane Palmer, Shelly Schlender Executive Producer: Kendra Krueger