Latest Free talks Podcast Episodes
Europa Clipper: Exploring Jupiter's Ocean World
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - May 25, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsPresenter is the Project Scientist, Dr. Robert Pappalardo (JPL) May 22, 2024 Jupiter's moon Europa may be a habitable world, containing the “ingredients” necessary for life within its ocean. Data from NASA’s earlier Galileo mission suggest that a global, salty ocean exists beneath the icy surfa...
The Allure of the Multiverse (with Dr. Paul Halpern)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - April 24, 2024 00:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsApr. 17, 2024 In this talk, physicist and popular author Paul Halpern (St. Joseph's College) examines the history of the concept of a multiverse in science, and discusses the ideas by Einstein and other noted physicists that have led scientist today to take the notion of multiple universes serio...
The Black Hole Wars: My Battle with Stephen Hawking
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - April 15, 2024 21:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsWith Dr. Leonard Susskind (Stanford University) Black holes, the collapsed remnants of the largest stars, provide a remarkable laboratory where the frontier concepts of our understanding of nature are tested at their extreme limits. For more than two decades, Professor Susskind and a Dutch colle...
Black Holes and the Technology to Find Them
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - April 10, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsA Non-technical Talk by Dr. Jessica Lu (University of California, Berkeley) on March 13, 2024 The population of black holes, objects left over from dead stars, is almost entirely unexplored. Only about two dozen black holes are confidently known in our Galaxy. As a result, some of the most bas...
Exploring the Gravitational Wave Universe
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - February 21, 2024 03:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsSpeaker: Dr. Brian Lantz (Stanford University) Feb. 7, 2024 Measuring gravitational waves is a revolutionary new way to do astronomy. They were predicted by Einstein, but it was not until 2015, that LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) first detected one of these waves...
Water Above, Water Below: The Many Roles of Water in Making Planets Habitable
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - December 05, 2023 06:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsDr. Laura Schaefer (Stanford University): Water is everywhere. Its atoms, hydrogen and oxygen, are the first and fifth most abundant elements in the universe. Water is found in abundance in many environments; it finds its way into planets of all shapes and sizes, where it modifies the properties...
The Peril and Profit of Near-Earth Objects
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - October 29, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsA Talk by Dr. Robert Jedicke (U of Hawaii) Oct. 11, 2023 Near-Earth objects present both an existential threat to human civilization and an extraordinary opportunity to help our exploration and expansion across the solar system. Dr. Jedicke explains that the risk of a sudden, civilization-alter...
SPECIAL: An Interview with Frank Drake (conducted by Andrew Fraknoi)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - July 17, 2023 17:00 - 44 minutes ★★★★ - 5 ratingsJune 2012 Frank Drake (1930-2022) was known as the "father of SETI science" -- he was the scientist who conducted the first radio survey for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, and came up with the formula for estimating the likelihood of such civilizations, now called the Drake Equatio...
SPECIAL: An Interview with Frank Drake: The Founder of SETI Science (conducted by Andrew Fraknoi)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - July 17, 2023 17:00 - 44 minutes ★★★★ - 5 ratingsJune 2012 Frank Drake (1930-2022) was known as the "father of SETI science" -- he was the scientist who conducted the first radio survey for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, and came up with the formula for estimating the likelihood of such civilizations, now called the Drake Equatio...
Ashes to Ashes, Earth to Earth, Dust to Dust: The Birth and Death of Worlds
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - July 14, 2023 06:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingswith Dr. Eugene Chiang (University of California, Berkeley) June 21, 2023 We now know that our solar system is but one of countless others. Where did all these planets come from? What are their fates, and ours? Dr. Chiang describes the life cycle of planets, how they are born and die, and how th...
An Eclipse Double-Header: Two North American Eclipses of the Sun in 2023 & 2024 (with Andrew Fraknoi)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - May 18, 2023 05:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsNorth America will be treated to two eclipses of the Sun in the 2023-24 school year: an annular eclipse on Oct. 14, 2023 and a total eclipse on Apr. 8, 2024. Some 500 million people will be in a position to see at least a partial eclipse on each date. Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi (Fromm Institute,...
The First Results from the James Webb Space Telescope (with Dr. Alex Filippenko)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - March 13, 2023 05:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsDr. Alex Filippenko (University of California, Berkeley) Mar. 8, 2023 We have a new supersensitive eye in the cosmic sky. Parked nearly one million miles from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope. JWST observes at the red to the...
Our Boldest Effort to Answer our Oldest Question: Breakthrough-Listen Search for Intelligent Life
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - February 20, 2023 00:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsFor centuries, humans have gazed at the night sky and wondered if any intelligent life forms like us might be out there. In 2015, the Breakthrough Foundation gave a $100 million grant to the University of California at Berkeley to undertake the most comprehensive search for signals from an extr...
Spacetime Symphony: Gravitational Waves from Merging Black Holes
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - January 26, 2023 06:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsTalk by Dr. Lynn Cominsky (Sonoma State University) Gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. They travel at the speed of light, but are much harder to detect than light waves. On September 14, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (L...
100 Years of Einstein's Relativity (And How it Underlies Our Modern Understanding of the Universe)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - December 29, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsWith Dr. Jeffrey Bennett (University of Colorado) 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of Einstein's completion of his General Theory of Relativity, the comprehensive theory of space, time, and gravity. In everyday language, Dr. Bennett explains the basic ideas of Einstein's work (both his special...
Space Weather and the Question of Human Survivability (with Dr. Tom Berger)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - December 12, 2022 21:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsThe Sun can unleash violent “space weather” -- storms that can radiate X-rays and even gamma rays into space, send giant clouds of magnetic plasma slamming into the Earth and other planets, and spray firehoses of charged particles throughout interplanetary space. On Earth, we are mostly protecte...
Is Anyone out There: The Hundred-Million Dollar "Breakthrough: Listen" Project
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - December 05, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingswith Dr. Dan Werthimer of the University of California, Berkeley What is the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe and how might we detect signals from alien civilizations? Dr. Werthimer describes current and future projects searching for such signals, including the new $100-mi...
A Planet for Goldilocks: Kepler and the Search for Living Worlds
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - October 31, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsWith Dr. Natalie Batalha (NASA, Kepler Mission Project Scientist) NASA's Kepler Mission launched in 2009 with the objective of finding "Goldilocks planets" orbiting other stars like our Sun -- those that are not too hot, not too cold, but just right. The space telescope opened our eyes to the m...
The Fast Radio Sky: A New Window on the Violent Universe
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - October 25, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsIn this episode, Dr. Victoria Kaspi (McGill University) introduces us to a brand-new mystery in the skies -- superfast bursts of radio waves whose source is still unknown. These energetic bursts come from all over the sky (and all over the universe,) pack a huge amount of energy, and typically ...
Colliding Neutron Stars, Gravity Waves, and the Origin of the Heavy Elements
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - August 23, 2022 03:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingswith Prof. Eliot Quataert (University of California, Berkeley) In the previous decade, one third of the world's astronomers became involved in a single project -- observing a distant and violent event, when two "star corpses" called neutron stars collided and exploded. This represented the f...
When Mars Was Like Earth: Five Years of Exploration with the Curiosity Rover
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - August 02, 2022 06:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsSpeaker: Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory For five years, Curiosity explored Gale Crater, one of the most intriguing locations on Mars -- once the site of an ancient lake. In this talk, the mission's Project Scientist discussed what the rover was capable of and the man...
Rubble Piles in the Sky: The Science, Exploration, and Danger of Near-Earth Asteroids
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - July 15, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingswith Dr, Michael Busch (SETI Institute) Near-Earth asteroids are a population of small bodies whose orbits around the Sun cross or come near our planet’s orbit. They turn out to be unusual physical environments: essentially rubble piles. They represent a natural hazard we ignore at our peril, b...
Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto (with Alan Stern & David Grinspoon)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - June 24, 2022 16:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsIn July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, revealing its surface to our view for the first time. In this program, Drs. Alan Stern and David Grinspoon give us an insider's view of how this complex mission came to be and what it discovered at the edge of our solar system. Their rece...
Do Humans Have What it Takes to Thrive in this Universe?
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - June 01, 2022 21:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsDr. Sandra Faber (University of California, Santa Cruz) Do Humans Have What it Takes to Thrive in this Universe? In this thought-provoking talk, cosmologist (and National Medal of Science winner) Dr. Sandra Faber takes a look at our cosmic origins, the future of the Earth as a habitable planet,...
A Sharper Image: Seeing Colliding Galaxies with Adaptive Optics (with Dr. Claire Max)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - May 12, 2022 22:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsWhen light from space enters Earth’s atmosphere, it is distorted and displaced, something our eyes perceive as “twinkling.” Adaptive optics can remove a great deal of this distortion, essentially restoring much of the detail we’ve been robbed off in our view of the stars and galaxies. Dr. Max,...
Cosmobiology: Recent Progress in Cosmology, Exoplanets, and the Prerequisites for Life in the Universe
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - May 03, 2022 03:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsIn this talk, astrobiologist Charles Lineweaver discusses the history of life on Earth and what we can deduce from our understanding of the universe about the existence and history of life elsewhere. He recounts the ongoing discovery of large numbers of exoplanets -- planets orbiting other star...
Cosmology and Ambition: Losing the Nobel Prize (with Dr. Brian Keating)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - April 08, 2022 01:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsWhat would it have been like to be an eyewitness to the Big Bang? In 2014, astronomers using the powerful BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole thought they’d glimpsed evidence of the period of cosmic inflation at the beginning of time. Millions around the world tuned in to the announcement, and No...
Planets Under Our Feet: The Caves on Earth, Mars, and Beyond (with Dr. Penelope Boston)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - March 26, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsNew exploration indicates that caves may be more common on rocky and icy worlds in our Solar System than we have thought in the past. Caves below the Earth show us a very different planet than the familiar one we experience on the surface. Each dark cave system has its own micro-organisms and d...
Dark Star: The Invisible Universe of Brown Dwarfs (with Dr. Adam Burgasser)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - March 15, 2022 16:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsIn this illustrated talk, Dr. Burgasser explains what happens when a newly forming star doesn't have "what it takes" to produce energy in its core in an ongoing way. This results in "failed stars" or brown dwarfs -- objects that were predicted in theory, but only discovered in the 1990's. Tod...
Charon, Pluto’s Companion: What We’re Learning from New Horizons (with Dr. Ross Beyer)
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures - March 01, 2022 23:00 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 5 ratingsPluto’s large moon Charon turned out to be far more interesting than astronomers expected. Pluto was the star when the New Horizons probe flew by, but the features on Charon’s surface tell a fascinating tale of how icy worlds could form far from the gravitational influences of the giant planets...
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