Topic · 7 episodes
Astronomy
Every Onpode episode on Astronomy.
Episodes
Why a planet's distance from its star determines if liquid water can exist
Why galaxies rotate too fast — the dark matter problem without a solution
Radio, infrared, optical, X-ray — why astronomers need telescopes across the spectrum
How the Doppler shift of light proves the universe is expanding
The parallax method and the cosmic distance ladder that maps the universe
Hubble may have spotted a planet orbiting a white dwarf — a rare stellar discoveryA University of Warwick team reanalyzed 25-year-old Hubble and FUSE archival spectroscopy and found a 4.4-day orbital signal around white dwarf HS 0209+0832 — flagged as a provisional candidate, not a confirmed planet. The paper itself offers two incompatible formation scenarios, and the team has requested scarce Chandra X-ray time to distinguish between them.
Astronomers just discovered the first green star ever observed — a cosmic oddityWD J1330+6435, a white dwarf accreting planetary debris, is the first star credibly identified as appearing green to the naked eye. University of Warwick researchers reached this conclusion by modeling human cone sensitivity against the star's spectrum — a methodological shift from tracking spectral peak temperature that prior stellar color studies had never applied.