The Astrophysics Podcast

• Dr. Maxim Lyutikov -- How do you make a Fast Radio Burst?

  Some things happen out in the universe that are too powerful to make in a lab. Other phenomena are so coherent and well-ordered, we can't figure out how they can be made without a lab! Fast radio bursts are an incomprehensible combination of both; they are extremely powerful, highly coherent, and very rapid bursts of radio emission. Dr. Maxim Lyutikov spends a lot of his time pondering how these bursts could possibly be made, and all the data seems to point to the most extreme physics imaginable: neutron stars at the highest densities we can imagine, with extremely strong gravity and with a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field.

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• Dr. Lindsey Kwok -- The Forensic Science of Supernovae

  How do we know so much about supernovae, when all we see is this little point of light getting brighter and then dimmer over time? Given this minimal data, we can often say what type of star exploded, and even some details about how the explosion took place. Supernova astronomers are a lot like forensic scientists dusting for fingerprints and getting DNA samples at the scene of a crime. But instead of a typical crime scene, they are investigating the death of an entire solar system. Dr. Lindsey Kwok is a CIERA fellow at Northwestern University and an expert at using JWST to perform state-of-the-art forensic supernova science.

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• Dr. Paul Duffell -- The Universe on a Computer (with host Dr. Abigail Polin)

  How big a computer do you need to simulate a supernova? Or a planet being formed? Or a black hole swallowing gas? Many astrophysicists spend their time developing computational models to simulate these systems and learn how they evolve. We discuss these computer simulations with Purdue Professor Dr. Paul Duffell. In this first episode of season 2, Dr. Abigail Polin takes over as host.

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• Dr. Brenna Mockler -- When Black Holes Get Hungry

  What do black holes like to eat? Sometimes a steady diet of interstellar gas just isn't enough and a black hole needs to snack on a whole star. No judgment, we all get that way sometimes. But it can lead to some extremely energetic outflows, visible from across the universe. Dr. Brenna Mockler tells us all about these events, called "Tidal Disruption Events", and what we can learn from observing them.

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• Dr. Dan Milisavljevic -- Into the Time Domain

  Our universe isn't just a static, unchanging backdrop. It is constantly changing in time and we now have the technology to image it over and over again to explore all those changes. This is called Time Domain Astronomy, and Danny Milisavljevic is an expert in this field. He spends a lot of his time on the forensic science of exploding stars, to gain clues about the underlying processes that caused the explosion in the first place.

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