47: The Milky Way Explodes!

A big win for astrophysics in the 2019 Nobel Prizes. And the new discovery that, not so long ago, the centre of the Milky Way galaxy exploded with stupendous energy, lighting up a region of our local universe called the Magellanic stream — enough that our distant ancestors a few million years ago would have seen it in the sky, and maybe wondered what the heck the gods were up to ...

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Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

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Things we talked about in this episode:

The Podcast Social Club — Nov 22-23

The 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics

Original research paper on the Milky Way explosion

Joss Bland-Hawthorn’s Conversation article about the research

The structure of the Milky Way

The Magellanic Clouds

The super massive black hole at the heart of the galaxy

Agctive Galactic Nuclei

ROSAT and FERMI

The GAIA survey