Once a month, Purdue University's Professor Paul Duffell discusses astronomy and astrophysics with experts from around the world. Duffell and guests discuss supernovae, galaxies, planet formation, black holes, and the nature of space and time.
Supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant AAG-2206299.
Music by Brittain Ashford.
Produced in beautiful Lafayette, Indiana by Paul Duffell.
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Planets orbit stars, and moons orbit planets, so what orbits a supermassive black hole? Possibly a whole lot of stuff, including a gaseous disk, thousands of stars and more "normal size" black holes! Dr. Rosalba Perna tells us about all the crazy things that could be orbiting around the supermassive black holes that we detect at the center of active galaxies.
When a star explodes, it's not finished having an impact on its surroundings. For the next thousand years or so, we can still see it as a supernova remnant, when the explosion has expanded to large enough scales that we can actually resolve an image of the explosion with modern telescopes like JWST, and it's even possible to do a forensic analysis to learn more about the cause of death. We will be talking about supernova remnants with Dr. Soham Mandal, who just recently earned his PhD from Purdue University.
What is turbulence? You've probably experienced it before on a plane (or perhaps on a river) but you might not know precisely what it is. But turbulence is all around us, and in particular we find it on some of the largest scales in the universe. Professor Yuan Li talks about turbulence and also a little unrelated bit about Mira, an unusual star with a tail!
Astronomers deal with huge datasets, and they are about to get even bigger with the construction of the Vera Rubin Observatory. When you can detect a million supernovae per year, how do we make sense of this data and decide which ones are the "most interesting" to study? Professor Ashley Villar at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian has made her career out of developing machine learning techniques to answer this very question.
What are neutrinos and where do they come from? How do we know what's going on in the interior of a star when we can only see the surface? How does a paper get accepted into a scientific journal? We discuss these questions and more with Frank Timmes, professor at Arizona State University and Associate Editor-in-Chief of a number of scientific journals run by the American Astronomical Society.