Big, Really Big
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The universe is big – really big.* Galaxies, for instance, are often large enough to hold a trillion stars. But how did these heavenly heavyweights come to be? Hear how still-mysterious dark matter is implicated in the birth of galaxies.
Also, gamma ray bursts – explosions more energetic than anything since the Big Bang – take place somewhere in the visible universe every day. What are they, and could they obliterate life on Earth?
And, the biggest cosmic mystery de jour: dark energy. Why new, super-size telescopes may finally reveal just what it is.
We’re living large on “Big, Really Big.”
*appreciative nod to Douglas Adams
Guests:
- George Djorgovski – Astronomer, California Institute of Technology
- Sandra Faber – Astronomer and Chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California at Santa Cruz; leads the CANDELS survey that uses the Hubble Space Telescope to image more than
250,000 distant galaxies - Daniel Perley – Astronomer, University of California at Berkeley
- Ed Stone – Former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and physicist at the California Institute of Technology
- Richard Panek – Author of The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
This episode was tagged with: galaxies gamma-ray bursts telescopes great attractor astronomy cosmology physics astrobiology
