Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Green Flash at Sunset: Real Physics Behind the Sailor's Myth
Episode 11603
Pirate movies turned the green flash into a sign of a soul returning from the dead, but the burst of green light at the last sliver of sunset is a re…
4 days, 17 hours ago
William Herschel: The Oboist Who Discovered Uranus and Infrared
Episode 11602
For thousands of years Saturn marked the edge of the known solar system, until a teenage military deserter who made his living playing the oboe doubl…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Mimas: Saturn's Death Star Moon Hiding a Newborn Ocean
Episode 11601
Mimas looks identical to the Death Star in photographs, and its heat signature from the Cassini orbiter glows in the shape of Pac-Man. This episode e…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Yuri Gagarin and Vostok 1: The Terrifying Truth of April 12, 1961
Episode 11600
The first human spaceflight ended with a man in a bright orange suit parachuting into a farm field in the Saratov region and having to convince a sta…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Nancy Grace Roman: The Mother of Hubble Who Defied Prejudice
Episode 11599
Before she mapped out the entire United States space astronomy program and paved the way for the Hubble Space Telescope, Nancy Grace Roman had to fig…
4 days, 17 hours ago
The Kuiper Belt: Mapping the Icy Frontier Beyond Neptune
Episode 11598
For over 70 years Pluto looked like the lonely last outpost of the solar system. This episode explores how astronomers discovered that it is actually…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Daniel Barringer and the Meteor Crater Fortune That Vaporized
Episode 11597
Daniel M. Barringer spent 27 years and roughly $500,000 of his own money, about $9 million today, drilling into a giant bowl in the northern Arizona …
4 days, 17 hours ago
Edwin Hubble: The Man Who Proved the Universe Is Expanding
Episode 11596
The Hubble Space Telescope sends back images from the edge of the observable universe, yet Edwin Hubble himself lies in a secret, unmarked grave in C…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Saturn V: The Biography of the Rocket That Carried Humans to the Moon
Episode 11595
In the 1960s, an engine test 15 miles away shattered a bank window in Picayune, Mississippi. The machine behind that roar was the Saturn V. This epis…
4 days, 17 hours ago
OSIRIS-REx: How NASA Grabbed a Piece of Asteroid Bennu and Brought It Home
Episode 11594
Imagine spending seven years and over a billion dollars to build a cosmic vault, then watching your sample leak into space because you grabbed too mu…
4 days, 17 hours ago