PODCAST · science
The Star Spot
by Justin Trottier
The Star Spot, with Justin Trottier, is a space themed podcast and radio show focusing on all aspects of astronomy and space exploration. Episodes feature news and interviews with guests of wide-ranging background: scientists, engineers, artists, politicians, and entrepreneurs. Topics are broad, from the latest space mission to how the universe began to why humans explore.
Episodes
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Episode 185: Did a Supernova Cause a Mass Extinction?, with Brian Fields
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 period of domination that had lasted 167 million years. But asteroids are not the only harbingers of doom that lurk in the darkness of space. Today we're joined…
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Episode 184: The Milky Way's First Fast Radio Burst, with Sandro Mereghetti
Feature Guest: Sandro Mereghetti Fast radio bursts are a new mystery in astronomy. These highly energetic events of unknown origin were first discovered in 2007 out in deep space. Now a team is reporting the first fast radio burst to emanate from our own Milky Way Galaxy. Today we're joined here…
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Episode 183: COVID-19 Meets the NASA Space Apps Challenge, with James Slifierz
Feature Guest: James Slifierz The NASA Space Apps Challenge is a feverish annual hackathon engaging teams of coders, scientists and storytellers around the world. Each year thousands of participants in over 75 countries compete to solve real-world problems in Earth and in space. As the Challenge...
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Episode 182: Planet Nine or Black Hole One, with Jakub Scholtz
Feature Guest: Jakub Scholtz We've long believed that membership in the solar system's planetary family was limited to those eight planets we learned about in grade school. But then astronomers began to raise the possibility of a new super-Earth-sized planet, five to ten times the mass of Earth,...
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Episode 181: Reports of Betelgeuse's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, with Emily Levesque
Feature Guest: Emily Levesque In December 2019, amateur and professional astronomers held their breath as the red supergiant Betelgeuse started dimming beyond anything on record, a sign the behemoth might be preparing to go supernova. But over the ensuing few months, things seemed to be returning...
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Episode 180: Wormholes through Space and Time, with John Cramer
Feature Guest: John G. Cramer They are the stuff of science fiction, but wormholes are also the subject of intense scientific debate. Can wormholes provide a mechanism for faster than light travel through space and, even more intriguing, do they open the door to travel through time? Today we're...
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Episode 179: Dreams of Floating Cities, with Geoffrey Landis
Feature Guest: Geoffrey A. Landis When we think of terraforming, we probably envision turning the Red Planet blue. But Mars isn't the only world in our solar system that ambitious scientists have considered transforming. Imagine a network of floating cities in the clouds of Venus, or sailing…
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Episode 178 Sibling Rivalry at the Centre of the Galaxy, with Smadar Naoz
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 the mass of the sun. But now researchers are discovering galaxies with more than one supermassive black hole at their centre. To understand the implications...
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Episode 177: The Case of the Missing Dark Matter, with Guo Chi
Feature Guest: Guo Qi Dark matter vastly overshadows ordinary matter in our universe. Wherever astronomers turn their telescopes they find galaxies dominated by dark matter. But all that changed recently with the first discoveries of dwarf galaxies suspiciously deficient in dark matter. To make...
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Episode 176: Second Genesis, with Jay Melosh
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 to be the result of a second genesis, those creatures truly alien in the most profound sense. That startling conclusion follows...
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Episode 175: The Truth is Out There (at the University of Manitoba)
Feature Guest: Shelley Sweeney The University of Manitoba has just acquired the largest collection of UFO related material. Prominent Canadian ufologist Christ Rutkowski has made a donation of over 30,000 documents, photos, artifacts and government reports, including files relating to the famous...
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Episode 174: Fuzzy Dark Matter, with Lachlan Lancaster
Feature Guest: Lachlan Lancaster Quantum mechanics is strange. Until recently we could comfort ourselves with the belief that its odd properties were safely confined to the world of the microscopic. But what if quantum mechanical effects were suddenly magnified to cosmological scales. Imagine the...
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Episode 173: Discovering an Ancient Oasis, with William Rapin
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. It's a common vista on this world, and while the world in question is not our home, ancient Mars may well have been someone's...
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Episode 172: The Hubble Not-So Constant
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 missing something big in our understanding of the universe. Today we're joined here at The Star Spot by Sherry Suyu, who leads the...
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Episode 171: Ploonets: When Moons Go Rogue, with Jorge Zuluaga
Feature Guest: Jorge Zuluaga Astronomers have yet to confirm a single detection of an exomoon, that is a moon orbiting a planet outside our solar system. Now it turns out at least part of the explanation is that we may have been looking in the wrong place all this time. Introducing ploonets. No…
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Episode 170: The Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts, with Vikram Ravi
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's total output in 80 years. Yet we still haven't figured out what causes these so-called Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs. I don't want to say it's aliens, but... no,...
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Episode 169: Science at the Limits (Part 2)
Feature Guest: Dan Falk Scientists are finding themselves increasingly squeezed between academics sounding the limits of science and a public increasingly taken in by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Today we conclude our review of science under attack with science writer Dan Falk. Current…
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Episode 168: Celebrating Apollo + Science at the Limits (Part 1)
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 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landing of humans on the moon and the internationalism of that critical moment. But then, 50 years after this triumph of...
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Episode 167: Current in Space + The Best of The Star Spot: Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt
Feature Guest: Brian Schmidt Today we offer a best of from our vault here at The Star Spot. We dug back to a fan favourite, our December 2014 interview with Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, who won the biggest prize in science for discovering the accelerating universe. The 1929 discovery of the...
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Episode 166: Nanodiamonds are Forever, with Jane Greaves
Feature Guest: Jane Greaves Remember that nursery rhyme, "Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky?" Well they were on to something, because it turns out diamonds - albeit nanodiamonds - are ubiquitous across the Milky Way galaxy. So-called diamond dust is even here in our own solar...
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Episode 165: Landing on Europa, with Cynthia Phillips
Feature Guest: Cynthia Phillips In the 1970s, the Viking landers performed historic experiments aimed at detecting life in the Martian soil. The results were disappointing although to this day still not entirely conclusive. Now over 40 years later a new lander with a next generation set of life...
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Episode 164: Jupiter's Ancient Odyssey, with Simona Pirani
Feature Guest: Simona Pirani The planet Jupiter occupies a position today that is far from its home 4.5 billion years ago, a destination resulting from a primeval migration that started way out around the current location of Uranus. Like the god for which it was named, Jupiter enjoys the company…
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Episode 163: The Ring Worlds of Saturn, with Bonnie Buratti
Feature Guest: Bonnie Buratti The spacecraft Cassini went out in spectacular fashion, travelling through Saturn's rings for a final death dive into the gas giant. Even in its final heroic moments, Cassini was relaying back data shedding light on the bizarre worlds known as the ring moons of…
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Episode 162: The End is Nowhere Near Nigh, with Fred Adams
Feature Guest: Fred Adams If you thought the far distant future of our universe was going to be bleak, dreary and dark, well, you'd be right. But remember, the universe is still just a baby and it has many new experiences ahead of it. Over the many trillions of years of its unimaginably long…
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Episode 161: The Boom Time of the Universe, with Rosemary Wyse
Feature Guest: Rosemary Wyse The universe is past its prime, by about 8 to 10 billion years. Sorry if you missed it. From the rate of star formation to the frequency of galactic mergers, the cosmos just isn't what it used to be. Yet remarkably all is not lost, for there's an astronomical…
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Episode 160: Boom to Bust Part 1: Before the Beginning, with Katrin Heitmann
Feature Guest: Katrin Heitmann The Astronomy and Space Exploration Society, a student group based at the University of Toronto, hosted its annual signature symposium event on Friday, February 15th, 2019. This year's theme was "Boom to Bust,"with three keynote speakers covering, in turn, the…
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Episode 159: Living on the Edge: Are We On the Boundary of an Expanding Universe?, with Ulf Danielsson
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 group of scientists who recently introduced a new model for the universe which for the first time links string theory with dark...
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Episode 158: Telling Space Stories, with Rayna Slobodian
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 capture the emotive drama of discovery, risk and the mystery of the unknown. Today we're joined here at The Star Spot by...
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Episode 157: How We Discovered Blazars Cause Mysterious Cosmic Rays
Feature Guest: Darren Grant A one hundred year old astronomical mystery may finally have been solved. Scientists have long wondered just what caused high energy particles called cosmic rays, which arrive on Earth from the far unknown reaches of the universe. But now we have a discovery by the…
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Episode 156: The Do-It-Yourself Spacesuit, with Cameron Smith
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 currently in use. Now enter into the picture Pacific Spaceflight. They're a grassroots team with a do-it-yourself attitude and...
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Episode 155: Artificial Photosynthesis: Taking the Sun on the Road, with Katharina Brinkert
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 sun to make life possible on long duration space missions. Introducing the concept of artificial photosynthesis. Today we're joined here at The Star Spot by...
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Episode 154: The Vatican Observatory: Astronomy and Faith in the Modern World, with Cosette Gilmour
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 Vatican observatory. The fascinating history of the Vatican Observatory stretches from the 18th century up to today,...
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Episode 153: A Reality Check on Terraforming Mars, with Bruce Jakosky
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 where humanity has colonized the Red Planet. But is it time to rethink those plans? Today we're joined here at The Star Spot by Bruce Jakosky, Principal...
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Episode 152: Alien Viruses, with Ken Stedman
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 agencies taking viruses seriously in their search for alien life. Today we're joined here at The Star Spot by astrobiologist and astrovirologist Ken Stedman…
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Episode 151: New Moons of Jupiter, with Scott Sheppard
Featured Guest: Scott Sheppard On the hunt for the solar system's elusive Planet X, a team of astronomers accidentally stumbled upon the discovery of 12 new moons of Jupiter. Oops. But it gets even better, because one of these things is not like the others and the way that moon just doesn't…
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Episode 150: At the Birth of Our First Newborn Planet, with André Müller
Featured Guest: André Müller Astronomers have taken their first image of an infant planet still developing around a newly formed star. Today we're joined here at The Star Spot by André Müller, whose team is busy studying this baby world and has already discovered evidence of an atmosphere and...
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Episode 149: The Question of Life on Mars, with David Hamilton
Featured Guest: David Hamilton The recent discovery of a lake of liquid water beneath the Martian south pole culminates a series of stunning discoveries that are forcing us to rethink the question of habitability on the Red Planet. Now two space missions are underway aimed at sites on Mars that…
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Episode 148: Does Canada Have a Vision for Space Exploration?, with Chuck Black
Featured Guest: Chuck Black The Canadian Space Advisory Board was tasked with developing a plan to rejuvenate Canada's declining world standing in space exploration. In 2017 the Board made a bold proposal that Canada designate space a national strategic asset and increase funding necessary for…
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Episode 147: Postcards From Home
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, our solar system is no longer seen as static and isolated. It is now understood to change and evolve, to offer great environmental...
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Episode 146: Supernovae and the Evolution of Life on Earth, with Brian Thomas
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 drama unfolding elsewhere in our galaxy. But what if the course of life's evolution on Earth was intimately connected to events well beyond our solar system. It...
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Episode 145: Can Sibling Rivalry Explain This Supernova?, with Stuart Ryder
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 with its own story to tell? That's exactly what happened last month when the Hubble Telescope captured the first image of the...
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Episode 144: A Rough Upbringing: The Discovery of Stars in the Galaxy's Core, with Farhad Yusef-Zadeh
Feature Guest: Farhad Yusef-Zadeh The gravity, radiation and tidal forces at the very core of the Milky Way is kind of intense. That's why astronomers have long doubted the possibility of star formation in such a hostile environment. And then everything changed with the discovery last fall of 11...
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Episode 143: Planet Hunting Goes Extragalactic, with Xinyu Dai
Feature Guest: Xinyu Dai Last month astronomers announced the first ever discovery of extrasolar planets… in another galaxy! We've already confirmed almost 4000 planets beyond our solar system, but these have all been in a single galaxy, the Milky Way. But then last month a serendipitous…
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Episode 142: Jupiter Transformed, with Scott Bolton
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 "totally wrong" when it comes to just about everything we thought we knew about Jupiter. That's not me speaking, it's Scott Bolton, principal investigator for…
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Episode 141: The Mysterious Origin of Superpowerful Radio Blasts, with Jason Hessels
Feature Guest: Jason Hessels The one thing we thought we knew about fast radio blasts was that these mysterious one-off phenomena must be associated with some of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. Then everything changed with last month's announcement of the first ever detection of a...
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Episode 140: How Humans Are Healing the Ozone Hole… and Might Just Solve Other Environmental Problems, with Susan Strahan
Feature Guest: Susan Strahan While human activity is what created the ozone hole, scientists just announced direct evidence that human activity is now responsible for healing that damage. That makes the Montreal Protocol, which banned the emission of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, along with other...
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Episode 139: Can Alien Life Hitch a Ride on Space Dust?, with Arjun Berera
Feature Guest: Arjun Berera Many of you are familiar with the idea of panspermia, the theory that life spreads itself throughout the galaxy by travelling from one world to another. We often think of big objects like asteroids, comets or spacecraft. But a new idea has emerged, and it's must…
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Episode 138: Making Contact, with Jill Tarter
Feature Guest: Jill Tarter Alien hunting pioneer Jill Tarter often says the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a way for us to hold a mirror to ourselves. Now in a recently released biography, that statement takes on personal significance and reveals the intimate connection…
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Episode 137: An Alien Asteroid in Our Solar System, with Alan Stern
Feature Guest: Alan Stern There's an intruder in our solar system. This fall we were invaded by the first interstellar space traveller, an elongated, cigar shaped alien asteroid. The mysterious object was ejected from its distant and unknown home, travelling for millions or billions of years…
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Episode 136: So You Want to Become an Astronaut?, with Cordell Grant
Feature Guest: Cordell Grant On June 17, 2016, the Canadian Space Agency launched the nation's fourth astronaut recruitment campaign. 3,772 applications were received. One year later only two were chosen. Candidates have described the grueling selection process as the greatest challenge of their...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Star Spot, with Justin Trottier, is a space themed podcast and radio show focusing on all aspects of astronomy and space exploration. Episodes feature news and interviews with guests of wide-ranging background: scientists, engineers, artists, politicians, and entrepreneurs. Topics are broad, from the latest space mission to how the universe began to why humans explore.
HOSTED BY
Justin Trottier
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Star Spot have?
The Star Spot currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Star Spot about?
The Star Spot, with Justin Trottier, is a space themed podcast and radio show focusing on all aspects of astronomy and space exploration. Episodes feature news and interviews with guests of wide-ranging background: scientists, engineers, artists, politicians, and entrepreneurs. Topics are broad,...
How often does The Star Spot release new episodes?
The Star Spot has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Star Spot?
You can listen to The Star Spot 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 The Star Spot?
The Star Spot is created and hosted by Justin Trottier.
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