Live from York's Festival of Ideas*, in front of an audience of ... what, had to be a few hundred thousand people, right? ... Emily and Chris discuss some awesome astronomy that you can go outside and see with your own eyes. In particular, they go deep on the incredible May 2024 aurora, and show what the 2024 total eclipse across the USA looked like, with a preview of amazing eclipses to look forward to in the coming years. Chris finishes with a song, as he does. Watch on YouTube!

(* Apologies for the audio quality, it was a big echo-ey space and it didn’t record as well as I’d hoped)

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced byChris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web:syzygy.fm | Instagram & Threads: @syzygypod

Some of the things we talk about in this episode:

• Watch this live show on YouTube

• York Festival of Ideas

• The May 2024 Aurora

• Solar Cycle 25

• The Solar Dynamics Observatory

• timeanddate.com

• The 2024 total solar eclipse

• Upcoming eclipses

A huge team of astronomers — and their even-huger team of tiny, fibre-obtic-wielding robots — are zeroing in on one of the great questions of cosmology: just what the heck is going on with Dark Energy? We know the Universe is expanding. Apparently, it's expanding faster. But maybe it is expanding faster, slower? Tiny robots measuring breathtakingly-huge cosmic bubbles may give us an answer.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced byChris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web:syzygy.fm | Instagram & Threads: @syzygypod

Some of the things we talk about in this episode:

• Announcement of the DESI results

• A good video about the results

• The DESI home page

• Dark Energy

• Heat Death or Big Rip

• The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics

• BAO bubbles

This week, a new Black Hole Record (kinda), and with it a nice conundrum. the GAIA mission has found the biggest black hole ... of the stellar-mass variety ... in our galaxy. A lot of caveats there, but the fun thing is, it's just next door, which makes us wonder if that's coincidence or a harbinger of more big black holes to come in GAIA's data dumps! Plus, a riddle: why do we keep spotting black holes that are too big to make? Did we break physics? Emily has a few explanations.

Help us make Syzygy even better! Tell your friends and give us a review, or show your support on Patreon: patreon.com/syzygypod

Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

On the web: syzygy.fm | Instagram & Threads: @syzygypod

Some of the things we talk about in this episode:

• The Biggest (small) Black Hole (in our galaxy)

• The rapid-release paper

• The GAIA mission

• GAIA’s data release schedule

• Types of Black Hole

• LIGO gravitational wave telescope

• Quasi-stars

• Syzygy Episode 116: Black Hole Sun