Another week, another roundup of your questions. This week listeners asked: will reaching light speed destroy the Universe? When is Andromeda going to look really, really cool with the unaided eye? Why didn't dark matter all turn into black holes? And there's even more. If you've got a...

The Milky Way is our home. An island of stars in a universe of other galaxies. But you might be surprised to learn that astronomers have only known the Milky Way's true nature for just a century. Let's learn the history of discoveries about the Milky Way, and what today's science tells us....

Last week we talked about galaxies in general, and hinted at the most violent and energetic ones out there: active galaxies. Quasars have been a mystery for half a century; what kind of object could throw out more radiation than an entire galaxy? A black hole, it turns out, with the mass of hundreds of...

This week we're going to look at some of the biggest objects in the Universe: galaxies. It was the discovery of galaxies in the early 20th century that helped astronomers realize just how big the Universe is, and how far away everything is. Let's learn how galaxies formed and how they evolve and...

We're going to return back to a long series of episodes we like to call: Radiation that Will Turn You Into a Superhero. This time we're going to look at cosmic rays, which everyone knows made the Fantastic Four. These high-energy particles are streaming from the Sun and even intergalactic space,...

This week we're going to study some of the most ancient objects in the entire Universe; globular clusters. These relics of the early Universe contain hundreds of thousands of stars, held together by their mutual gravity. Since they formed together, they give astronomers a unique way to test various...

Astronomers are always trying to get their hands on bigger and more powerful telescopes. But the most powerful telescopes in the Universe are completely natural, and the size of a galaxy cluster. When you use the gravity of a galaxy as a lens, you can peer right back to the edges of the observable Universe....

This week we continue the story of galaxy formation, learning how groups of galaxies come together to form the biggest structures around – galaxy superclusters. And when you look at the Universe at this scale, environment is everything.   Episode 26: The Largest Structures in the Universe (15...

Our Milky Way is a complex and majestic barred spiral galaxy. But 13.7 billion years ago it began, like all galaxies, from the elementary particles formed in the Big Bang. How did our galaxy grow from nothing to the hundreds of billions of stars we see today?   Episode 25: The Story of Galaxy...

We're finally ready to deal with the topic you've all been waiting for: Schwarzschild swirlers, Chandrasekhar crushers, ol' matter manglers, sucking singularities… you might know them as black holes. Join as as we examine how black holes form, what they consume, and just how massive...