In this rather delayed episode, we say farewell to an old friend: the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, tragically destroyed at the start of December 2020 after 57 years of solid service. Wiping a fond tear from her eye, Emily recalls the scientific highlights and cultural importance of this great telescope dish.

We'll always happily talk about black holes — and today we'll extend that to things that go around black holes: blanets (black hole planets), and squeezars (stars so close to a black hole, they're squeezed by gravity). It's a stupidly epic discussion of stupidly large solar systems, stupidly big planets, stupidly fast stars on stupidly close orbits around stupidly supermassive black holes.

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.