October is Nobel Prize month, and this year the Physics Nobel was shared by three amazing physicists: one who took Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and wrapped some bonkers Escherian mathematics around it to show that these black hole things are real solutions of the equations; and two who then said, OK, let's go find one in the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. Here's to Reinhard Genzel, Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose, the newest Physics Nobel Laureates!

OMG life on Venus!!! Well, now, hold on there Tex. Yes, astronomers announced this month that they'd found phosphine in the atmosphere of our planetary neighbour. And yes, phosphine is a pretty decent biosignature, a chemical that is pretty strongly associated with life here on Earth. Emily digs deep to explain the big gap between "Hey, look — phosphine! Huh." and "We found aliens!"

OK, maybe not *spectacular* as such — but a laid-back summery edition anyway. Emily and Chris share their fave summertime astro-related reads, films, TV shows and podcasts, as well as their go-to sites and apps for fun and retail therapy. Plus, Emily discloses her weird YouTube habits, and shows off her quilting skills. Come for the fun, stay for the puns!

Fusion reactions in stars, including our Sun, produce huge amounts of neutrinos. These tiny elementary particles are almost impossibly hard to spot: ludicrous numbers of neutrinos are passing through you right now, without noticing your atoms at all. But they're one of the only ways we have to understand the inner workings of the Sun's core — and deep underground beneath an Italian mountain, astronomers have *finally* spotted neutrinos originating from the final piece of the stellar fusion puzzle, the CNO cycle.

The planets we see around us in the galaxy haven't just been hanging around forever, you know. We're pretty sure they must have formed at some point in the past, and more are forming right now, presumably. But it's a rare treat to actually see a planet's birth in progress, which is what astronomers have managed to do recently — in staggering detail!

Live! from the York Festival of Ideas online program, a zoomtastic chat about dark matter — the strange, unknown stuff that comprises only, what, 80% or more of the matter in the universe. What is it? Why is it? How is it? Emily gives the lowdown on one of astronomy's more embarrassing problems, before we welcome guests Mikhail Bashkanov and Dan Watts, physicists at the University of York who have found something veeeery interesting. It's an exotic particle — a hexaquark, to be exact — that just might solve this cosmic mystery.

Neutron stars are weird. Pulsars are weird. All pulsars are neutron stars. Are all neutron stars pulsars? Hmmm. How are they born? Do they die? Are they all the same? How big are they? Do pulsars all spin at the same rate? Or do they speed up, or slow down? So many questions — and we can thank Fabulous Listener Dave Weingartner for getting in touch to ask!

In 1957, a paper was published in Reviews of Modern Physics that changed astrophysics at its core. Well, we say "paper" — it was more of a tome: a hundred pages of research and review that laid out in detail how the elements of the periodic table are made in nuclear processes in stars and supernovae. The authors — Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle — are all legendary figures in astrophysics. The last of the authors, Margaret Burbidge, died on 5 April 2020 at the age of 100. We look back on the lives and contributions to astronomy of this great quartet of scientists, focussing on their pivotal B-squared-F-H paper.

Everyone's heard of the famous comets: Halley, McNaught, Hale-Bopp, the Great Comet of 1844. Ok, maybe not that last one. Earlier this year astronomers got very excited about a new comet, called Atlas, winging its way through the Solar System. The Great Comet of 2020? Atlas promised to be quite a show ... until it didn't.

Weirdest episode title ever! From her lockdown bunker in Preston, Emily joins Chris for a special social-distanced episode, talking about a weird binary system found in the TESS data recently. One of the stars is pulsating, but only on one side — which doesn’t happen very often. In fact, this is a first for astronomy, which is always exciting. The star may be close to overloading its Roche lobe, which doesn’t sound good at all. And of course, we’re almost through our run of Super Moons for 2020, with a Pink Moon in April and a Flower Moon in May, so naturally Emily has been on the radio again …