PODCAST · science
syzygy
by Chris Stewart & Emily Brunsden
Join astronomer Dr Emily Brunsden and enthusiastic not-astronomer Dr Chris Stewart as they explore the universe.
Episodes
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s3e5: Signals Through Silence
We've talked a lot about life in the universe in this season — from where we might look, to what it might conceivably be, to the question of what even we mean by the word "life" anyway. And now, finally, it's time to grapple with the huge problem of what astronomers are actually looking for: the...
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s3e4: What IS Life, Anyway?
Finaly — finally! — Chris and Emily get to the meat of the matter in this season on life in the universe. Very special guest Dr Kelly Redeker from the Department of Biology at the University of York breaks down the principles of life, both on Earth and on other worlds (or "slimy rocks" as Emily...
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s3e3: Solar System Sanctuaries
In this season on life in the universe, it's time to look closer to home: what are the chances we will find evidence of life — present or past-tense — in the Solar System, our own back yard? Emily's fabulous colleague Dr Clément Moissard, plasma physicist at the University of York, joins us to...
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s3e2: Habitats in the Void
Having established that the hunt for life in the galaxy ought to begin with an appropriate star, Emily turns our attention towards suitable planets. But what makes a hospitable home for life? It’s complicated, and it seems whatever way we look at it, we don’t have a lot of candidates to choose...
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s3e1: First, You Need Light
We're back with Season 3! For the next six episodes we're talking life in the universe, and so far we have N=1: we know there's life on Earth, but nowhere else as yet. Those are challenging statistics. In this episode Emily makes the case that to explore the possibility of life elsewhere in the...
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s2e6: Experimental Extraterrestrial Exo-Observatory
According to one survey, around one-third of Australians think aliens not only exist, but have actually visited Earth. That's ... a bit fraction. In this final episode of season 2, we ask how we'd even find out if life exists around other stars. Emily introduces the Habitable Worlds Observatory…
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s2e5: Exotelescope Expeditions
Exo-planets, sure. Exo-moons and -comets? Fine. But exo ... telescopes?! Emily is going out on a limb in this episode, expanding the definition of telescope to include things that measure stuff in space, and we're here for it! Which means we really do have a few telescopes out there beyond the...
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s2e4: Exoplanet Extrapolation
We know, we know — we did exoplanets last time. But that was the current state-of-play and a 2024 exoplanets wrapped update. In this episode, Emily looks to the future! She does a deep dive into the promise of the just wonderful JWST, as it prods exoplanets in ways they’ve never been prodded...
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s2e3: Exoplanets ExoWrapped
It couldn't be a season of exo-stuff without taking a good hard look at the current state of exoplanets, the OG exo-thing. Emily sums up the state of exoplanet research in 2024 — her Exoplanets 2024 Wrapped, if you like — then lines up her top three exoplanets of the year, and considers what's...
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s2e2: Exocomet Excitation
Exoplanets, sure. Exo-moons too, apparently. But exo ... comets?! Yes indeed, they're a real thing, and we've known about them for ages! How do you spot something so tiny around another star, so far away? Emily has the insider knowledge, because it's something she's genuinely investigating in her...
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s2e1: Exomoon Expectation
Way, way back in the early epochs of Syzygy (ep 19 in Oct 2018 if you must know) we talked about the exciting prospect of spotting the first exomoon — a moon orbiting a planet orbiting a star that is not our own. It seemed reasonable to expect that six years later exomoons would be a thing we've...
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Introducing Syzygy Season Two!
A short announcement: Syzygy is now seasonal! From now on we're going to release the podcast in seasons, and we're excited to announce the imminent release of the first episode of Syzygy Season Two. Yep. Two. Season One is everything we've done so far. Trust us, it's easier this way. Season Two…
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122: Syzygy Live! — The Power of Seeing It For Yourself
Live from York's Festival of Ideas*, in front of an audience of ... what, had to be a few hundred thousand people, right? ... Emily and Chris discuss some awesome astronomy that you can go outside and see with your own eyes. In particular, they go deep on the incredible May 2024 aurora, and show...
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121: Dark Bubbles of Weakness
A huge team of astronomers — and their even-huger team of tiny, fibre-obtic-wielding robots — are zeroing in on one of the great questions of cosmology: just what the heck is going on with Dark Energy? We know the Universe is expanding. Apparently, it's expanding faster. But maybe it is expanding...
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120: Biggest Small Black Hole
This week, a new Black Hole Record (kinda), and with it a nice conundrum. the GAIA mission has found the biggest black hole ... of the stellar-mass variety ... in our galaxy. A lot of caveats there, but the fun thing is, it's just next door, which makes us wonder if that's coincidence or a...
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119: Astrocampus Turns Ten!
We're live from the 10th birthday celebrations for the University of York's Astrocampus, Emily's home turf and all-round fabulous teaching and outreach space. Emily fields some amazing questions from kids and adults attending the event, and gives some of Astrocampus's highlights and achievements...
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118: Sextuplet Symphony
After some lengthy follow-up (the Bennu sample is open at last! And SLIM is alive!), Emily investigates possibly the most podcasty story we’ve had on the show: six planets around distant star HD110067, all locked into resonances that play beautiful music. Turns out if you leave a planetary system...
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117: SLIM chance of Moon landing?
Emily and Chris tune in to JAXA’s livestream of SLIM — the Smart Lander for Investigating and Moon — as it attempted to slick the landing on the lunar surface on Friday 19 January 2023. We were prepared for success and champagne, or failure and lessons-learned. What we didn’t expect was …...
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116: Black Hole Sun
Long-time Syzygy listener Jack asks: "Hey Emily — what's the deal with quasi-stars?" (We're paraphrasing). Quasi-stars are hypothetical, enormous stellar-object-thingies that might have formed shortly after the Big Bang. They're so huge they might have formed with black holes at their cores. If...
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115: Zevatron in the Void
Astronomers routinely detect cosmic rays, the high-energy particles from space that collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a shower of secondary particles that rain down on the earth below. But every so often — like, less than once a decade — they spot a cosmic ray smashing into...
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114: A Burst of Tellurium
We've talked BOATs before — cosmic events that are the Brightest Of All Time — and it's always a favourite topic on the show. Recently astronomers analysed the runner-up BOAT in the Burster category, an astoundingly violent, weirdly long-lasting, and oddly-located neutron star merger, and…
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113: White Dwarf Destiny
We love it any time a listener gets in touch — but the *best* is when a listener suggests a topic for an episode of the podcast. So when Zofia Szczesna got in touch (through the Syzygy website, natch) and asked about white dwarf stars, Emily put her research hat on and dug into the amazing...
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112: Unexpected JuMBOs
JWST is flinging out Just Wonderful observations at great speed, many already leading to new astronomical insights. Here's one that was really unexpected: the Orion Nebula is full of JuMBOs! Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects, that is — pairs of giant planets (or planetty-things, the definition isn't...
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111: Special Asteroid Delivery
Earth got a special delivery recently: a little pod plonked down in the Utah desert, containing a few hundred grams sampled from the surface of an asteroid. This isn't the first sample return mission, but it's definitely the biggest. The little parcel of asteroid dirt inside is now being very...
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110: Euclid's Five Big Questions
It’s always nerve-wracking waiting for a very expensive new space telescope to launch — the whole mission can literally end in a highly explosive blink of an eye. Fortunately for the Euclid mission team, their gleaming new spacecraft left the Earth in one piece, and made its way to L2 to begin…
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109: Something From Nothing?
Every so often, a Syzygy listener writes in with a cracking question that sends Emily and Chris off spelunking down the deep, deep sinkholes of astronomy and cosmology. This time, listener Eve asked an absolute cracker, to wit: Just how much energy is there in the universe right now? A simple...
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108: Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!
Everyone's favourite bonkers red giant is back in the news again, and it has the supernova spotters in a froth. Last time we talked about Betelgeuse, it had gone unusually dim. Never fear, it's back with a vengeance — not just brighter, but pulsing twice as fast! Is the end nigh? Can we expect it...
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107: Biggest Bang Ever! (Again?)
Astronomers have spotted what seems to be a supermassive black hole devouring a huge gas cloud — and in the media it's being claimed as the Biggest Explosion in the History of Explosions. Except, is it though? And didn't we already talk about this, way back in Episode 61? And anyway, what does...
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106: Star Eats Planet
Like many of us, as some stars get older, they get bigger. Like, really big. Big enough to swallow up any planets orbiting near by. Astronomers have known this for a while now, but they'd never actually seen it happen ... until now. Emily explains what's going on, what's been observed, why a...
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105: Back To The Moon (2023 Edition)
In 2023, the Moon is where it’s at — so many rockets taking so many little orbiters and landers and rovers and boxes full of weird trinkets ... just in the coming few months! And that’s before you even count the missions aimed at pushing human footprints into the lunar dust for the first time…
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104: Biggest Black Hole
The biggest black hole ever has been found — not supermassive, but *ultra*massive. Emily takes Chris on a tour of all the types of black hole, from the speculative minis, through the solar and intermediate mass kinds, to the stonking supermassive and frankly ludicrous ultramassive. And we ask…
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103: Red Dwarf Paradox
In the hunt for life in the universe, astronomers are looking hard at the catalogue of potentially habitable exoplanets. The ones orbiting Red Dwarf stars seem promising — Red Dwarfs are really common, and we've just launched a shiny new space telescope that's perfect for observing them, their...
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102: Breaking The Universe
"These six galaxies break cosmology!" scream the headlines. Yeah, nah — yeah, astronomers have found some galaxies in the JWST data that are crazy old, and yet seem to be just way too big. But nah: this doesn't mean cosmology is broken. As usual, the scientists ignore the click-baity headlines,...
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101: Spin Down Earth
The Earth's core has been acting weird for at least 70 years now. We're not sure why, but sometimes it's spinning faster than the surface, sometimes slower. Emily explains how we know what's happening down in the core, which is impressive enough ... but then she shows how astronomers do the same...
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100: Just Wonderful To Be Back!
Emily's back from New Zealand, Chris is ... still just around, really. And Syzygy returns from hiatus with Episode 100, looking back on a huuuuuge year for the Just Wonderful Space Telescope. Emily takes us through the five "first-light" images released from JWST several months ago — plus one...
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99: Black Holes & Big News
Not wanting to overshadow this week's exciting supermassive black hole image release or anything, but Emily has news of her own. A short episode, in which Chris delves into the new Sag A* image a bit, before dropping the news bomb you've all *really* been waiting for ... Syzygy Merch! Get it at…
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98: New Nova
You've heard of supernovae, the just stupidly big explosions that mark the end of some stars' lives. Maybe you know there are different kinds of supernovae — type 1a, type II ... Did you know that, smaller than a super nova, there's just a plain, vanilla nova? Or that, even bigger than super,...
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97: Biggest Comet Ever!
Astronomers have spotted the biggest comet ever! And it's heading for Earth! Except (a) it's not heading towards Earth — it's closest approach to us will be beyond Saturn's orbit — and (b) it's not technically the biggest. But it's still cool! Emily's here with loads of info about comets, big...
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96: Space Particles Probe Pyramids
A very different story this week: using high-energy particles, originating from violent supernovae and supermassive black holes, to scan the insides of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Physicists are teaming up with Egyptologists to check some tantalising results from 2017 thaty suggest there just...
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95: Baby Planets (& Moons!)
For the latest — and last? — baby-themed episode, we talk baby planets and how they're made. And sure, we've talked about this before in previous episodes, but this time Emily comes with brand new research that shows an actual protoplanet forming from the stellar disk. And even better, the...
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94: A Star Is Born
We’ve done the baby universe, and baby galaxies, and the very first baby stars ... and *those* were a bit nasty, a bit grumpy. So this week, we're talking baby stars again, but in the modern era — stars being born now, as we speak. Mind you, just because they've got more than H and He to buiold...
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93: Baby Galaxies
This week, it's baby galaxies — the very, very ancient, and the surprisingly brand new. Emily looks back at the earliest things-we-might-consider-galaxies, and the competing models for how they formed. Then we take a peek into the beautiful M81 galaxy, which is, as we speak, sloughing off some of...
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92: Baby First Stars
Continuing our theme of baby-related astronomy, Emily picks up the story from last episode — we'd just finished making the universe and watching its insane growth spurt, and then ... the first stars turned on! And wow, were those first stars weird. Even weirder, there might still be some of them...
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91: Baby Universe
We're back! Emily has some exciting news, and in regonition of this, we're starting a series of episodes on a theme — starting with the birth and infancy of the Universe! From the earliest physically-sensible moments, through the explosive growth spurt of Inflation, to the creation of forces,...
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90: Touching The Sun
While the James Webb Space Telescope waits patiently for its new scheduled liftoff on Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe has been doing amazing things, whizzing through the outer edges of the Sun's corona for the very first time. Emily explains what we do — and staggeringly don't — know about...
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89: Diverting Dimorphos with DART
Every year, thousands of decent-sized chunks of rock hurtle past — and often into — the Earth. Of the ones that do hit, most burn up leaving a pretty trail. Occasionally, a bigger one explodes with a boom that shatters windows. More rarely, a big one wipes leaves a large smoking crater and...
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88: Galaxy Munchies
Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store. Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York. On…
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87: Star Go Boom!
Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store. Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York. On…
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86: Extragalactic X-Ray Exoplanet
Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store. Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York. On…
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85: Lucy In The Sky With Trojans
Syzygy Merch! Get it at the store. Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York. On…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does syzygy have?
syzygy currently has 139 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is syzygy about?
Join astronomer Dr Emily Brunsden and enthusiastic not-astronomer Dr Chris Stewart as they explore the universe.
How often does syzygy release new episodes?
syzygy publishes regularly with 139 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to syzygy?
You can listen to syzygy on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts syzygy?
syzygy is created and hosted by Chris Stewart & Emily Brunsden.
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