Neutron stars are weird — big balls of super-dense, stupidly energetic, rapidly rotating nuclear splodge. They're stars that, after running out of fusion fuel, have collapsed beyond the Quantum Electron Squashing Limit (a real thing), and have entered the Quantum Neutron Squooshing Regime (also a real thing). But there's a limit to how big they can be ... and, in an amazing series of coincidences, astronomers have just found a neutron star so close to that limit, it makes us wonder if something weird's going on.

Astronomers have found an exoplanet that is in its star's habitable zone, is (sorta) Earth-sized, and has water on it! ZOMG it's Earth 2.0! Alien life!! Woah there — not so fast with the hyperbole, Scooter. It's an exciting discovery, for sure, but not for the reasons the media thinks. Detecting water on other planets is indeed important, but don't jump to conclusions about finding signs of life just yet ...

Did humans contaminate the Moon earlier this year? Israel sent a lander to the Moon back in April 2019 which, sadly, crashed as it attempted to land. On board was an archive of human knowledge and samples of earth life ... including some tiny, but extremely hardy little critters known as tardigrades (a.k.a. Moss Piglets, or Water Bears). So have we polluted the pristine lunar surface with Earth biology now? Nah — we've been doing that for years, apparently ...

We said we'd do it, and we did! On Monday 9 September Emily and Chris broadcast Episode 42 across the galaxy to the red-giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion.

Sure, it'll take 640-ish years to get there, and our technology might not be exactly cutting edge. But we're totally claiming this as a world-first, boldly going where no podcast has gone before!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a wonderfully silly trilogy of five books by Douglas Adams, chronicling the adventures of Earth human Arthur Dent, who is rescued by his alien friend Ford Prefect just before the Earth is demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. 

It's a ... complicated story. Anyone familiar with the books knows the centrality of the number 42 to the plot: it is no less than the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Clearly then, syzygy episode 42 deserves special treatment. In honour of Adams’s creation, Emily and Chris consider the possibilities of other intelligent life in the galaxy, and dive deep into the Drake equation, a back-of-the-envelope calculation to work out how many intelligent civilisations there are in the Milky Way that might get in contact with us.

Episode 42 is coming up, and this is a little heads-up. If that number has any significance to you, then you're our people! We're talking Life, the Universe and Everything, and we have a very special event planned for the occasion. Listen to this teaser and, if you want to be a part of the plans and help Syzygy be the best it can be, head over to patreon.com/syzygypod

Emily and Chris compete for fame, glory and nerd points in the first ever Great Syzygy Space Off! Recorded in front of a very large, very patient and very generous audience at York's Micklegate Social in May 2019.

Made possible by our wonderful Patreon patrons — thanks all!

It took us a while to get to editing this one, and yes we know the audio isn’t great in places. But it was a fun night, hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

When Chris found out in episode 36 that there was a telescope on an aeroplane, he was joking when he suggested they should try putting one on a balloon. Turns out, that's a real thing — and it leads to a deep-dive into one of the most fascinating discoveries in all of astronomy, the fingerprint of the Big Bang itself: the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Fifty years ago, a human in a big puffy suit stepped off the bottom rung of a ladder and onto the surface of another world for the first time. Chris and Emily ponder the meaning of that moment for our species, for science, and for the future of space exploration.

Telescopes — can they every be big enough? With news of serious progress on the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, Emily and Chris natter about Astronomy's truly big optical scopes. First there were a slew of Large Telescopes. Then came the VLT, the Very Large Telescope. That wasn't large enough, so we got the Extremely Large Telescope. The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope was planned for a while, but then got cancelled, which sounds like it might have been a good thing. The technology is awesome, the science is astounding — the next decade is going to be a great one for optical astronomy.