Decide To Listen • 1989 • episode "5/10" • The Sagan Series

14:04

Gamma-ray bursts are not only incredible to study, but their discovery has an epic story all its own. Today Phil takes you through some Cold War history and then dives into what we know. Bursts come in two rough varieties: Long and short. Long ones are from hypernovae, massive stars exploding, sending out twin beams of matter and energy. Short ones are from merging neutron stars. Both kinds are so energetic they are visible for billions of light years, and both are also the birth announcements of black holes.

40 • Crash Course Astronomy • 2015 • Astronomy

42:29

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are homes to the deadliest storms in our solar system, and new discoveries reveal the secrets of this hellish alien weather, helping experts understand these alien worlds better than ever.

Space's Deepest Secrets • 2019 • Astronomy

12:56

In the aftermath of a 8 – 20 solar mass star’s demise we find a weird little object known as a neutron star. Neutrons stars are incredibly dense, spin rapidly, and have very strong magnetic fields. Some of them we see as pulsars, flashing in brightness as they spin. Neutrons stars with the strongest magnetic fields are called magnetars, and are capable of colossal bursts of energy that can be detected over vast distances.

32 • Crash Course Astronomy • 2015 • Astronomy

11:20

How do astronomers make sense out of the vastness of space? How do they study things so far away? Today Phil talks about distances, going back to early astronomy. Ancient Greeks were able to find the size of the Earth, and from that the distance to and the sizes of the Moon and Sun. Once the Earth/Sun distance was found, parallax was used to find the distance to nearby stars, and that was bootstrapped using brightness to determine the distances to much farther stars.

25 • Crash Course Astronomy • 2015 • Astronomy

59:06

Horizon goes behind the scenes at NASA as they countdown to the landing of a 2.5 billion-dollar rover on the surface of Mars. In six days time, the nuclear-powered vehicle - the size of a car - will be winched down onto the surface of the Red Planet from a rocket-powered crane. That's if things go according to plan: Mars has become known as the Bermuda Triangle of space because so many missions there have ended in failure. The Curiosity mission is the most audacious - and expensive - attempt to answer the question: is there life on Mars?

Horizon • Astronomy

42:30

New discoveries help experts in their search for the first alien moon outside our solar system, which could be Earth-like worlds with the potential for life; they haven't found any, but 21st-century methods might change everything.

Space's Deepest Secrets • 2019 • Astronomy