An esoteric particle called the muon wobbles weirdly in a magnetic field, and physicists around the world go a frothing frenzy of excitement ... because maybe these wobbles mean new physics! The experiments at Fermilab and Brookhaven labs disagree quite firmly with theoretical calculations, which is exciting. And because new physics can be tested with modern astronomy — sometimes it's the only way we can explore the boundaries of the theories of the universe — then Emily is keen to understand just what's going on. So maybe we've just seen signs of new forces, new particles, even supersymmetry ... but then again, maybe not.

Emily is up a mountain in New Zealand, observing stars and doing astronomer-y things. Or, she would be, if the weather was behaving better. In this episode, recorded on site at the University of Canterbury's Mount John Observatory in the heart of NZ's gorgeous South Island, we find out just what astronomers get up to when they're shut up with their telescopes, working by night and sleeping by day, trying to glean cosmic secrets through gaps in the clouds.

China's doing it. The United Arab Emirates are doing it. The USA as well, of course they're on it as well — seems everyone is going to Mars these days. Emily takes a good hard look at each of the current Mars missions, from an orbiting spacecraft examining the red planet's weather, to a couple of rovers, one dropped to the surface by sky crane. There's even a tiny helicopter! it's all happening on Mars in 2021.

The Sun, our star. So easy to take for granted. But it's had an interesting few billion years so far, with several billion more to go. Emily tells the story of the Sun from dust cloud rocked by a supernova shock wave, to violent childhood, to boring middle age, to giant red puffer fish phase, and finally to beautiful planetary nebula illuminated by a white-hot stellar core, slowly fading away.

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.