Syzygy is all about Emily this week, as her own field of asteroseismology comes to the fore: turns out, wobbly stars can tell us a lot about exoplanets! Studying starquakes can improve our knowledge of the mass and orbit of exoplanets by an astounding amount. Sadly, not all stars wobble in just the right ways, so the hunt is on for bigger and better models and methods ...

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 ...

A century ago, Einstein had a conundrum: his brand new General Theory of Relativity, explaining gravity as warped space-time, predicted a universe either expanding or contracting — yet the cosmos seemed, and was believed by all to be, static. To fix his equations, he added a simple fudge factor, the Cosmological Constant, to balance gravity and keep the universe in place. Hubble then showed that, actually, the Universe is expanding after all ... and everyone agreed that Einstein's constant wasn't necessary. Albert himself called it his "biggest blunder". Except, a hundred years later, astronomers found that the universe isn't just expanding ... it's speeding up! The simplest way to account for this in theory is to drag Einstein's blunder out of the bin, dust it off, and give it a new name: Dark Energy. Not a big deal — it only accounts for, what, 70% of the known universe ...

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!