Brains Matter

Today’s episode is part 1 of a 3 part series called “Where is my flying car?” organised and hosted by the University of Melbourne’s Physics Students Society. Hosted by Dr Roger Rassool, panel members included: Dr Andi Horvath, Museum Victoria, Dr Erica Sloan, Monash Institute on Pharmaceutical Science, Tim Thwaites, Science writer, and myself. The [...]

There can be few questions more fundamental for a scientist’s research to address than “Is our home here on Earth unique? Or ubiquitous?” Astronomers involved in the search for – and the study of – extra-solar planets are fortunate enough to have this sort of question driving their daily activities. This episode is sponsored by [...]

In 1998, two teams traced back the expansion of the universe over billions of years and discovered that it was accelerating, a startling discovery that suggests that more than 70% of the cosmos is contained in a previously unknown form of matter, called Dark Energy. The 2011 Nobel Laureate for Physics, Brian Schmidt, leader of [...]

In today’s episode, I talk to Dr Duncan Galloway, ARC Future Fellow at Monash University. His interest is in Neutron Star Binaries and I talked to him about this: – Duncan’s background – What is a neutron star? – How big is a neutron star? – How does a neutron star stay together? – The [...]

The Ordinary Guy has contributed to another 365 Days of Astronomy podcast Aryabhata

Professor Brian Schmidt won the Nobel Prize for physics for 2011, for his work in helping discover that the universe was accelerating in it’s expansion, which came as a huge surprise to the whole astronomical community. I spoke to Brian about his work for the 24/5/2009 episode of Brains Matter – for those of you [...]

In today’s episode, I speak to Dr Rosemary Mardling from Monash University on the 3-body problem and the n-body problem. – What is the 3-body problem? How does it relate to astronomy? – How was it worked out in the early days? – What was Newton’s approach to the problem? – How does the 3-body [...]

The Ordinary Guy has contributed to another 365 Days of Astronomy podcast The making of Makemake

In this episode I speak again to Dr Rosemary Mardling from Monash University with an update on extra solar planets – What kind of planets are being discovered? – The HARPS spectrograph and its capability – The radial velocity method – How many extra solar planets have been discovered to date? – The transiting method [...]

In this episode, I talk to Dr Michael Brown, the ARC Future Fellow from Monash University, who has been doing work on the planned surveys with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. He talked to the podcast about the Square Kilometre Array. Topics we discussed included: – What are the different types of telescopes? – [...]