Astronomy Cast
Astronomy Cast offers you a fact based journey through the cosmos. Each week Fraser Cain (Universe Today) and Dr. Pamela Gay (SIUE / Slacker Astronomy) take on topics ranging from the nearby planets to ubiquitous dark matter.
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Ep. 373: Becquerel Experiment (Radiation)
Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity completely by accident when he ...
Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity completely by accident when he exposed a chunk of uranium to a photographic plate. This opened up a whole new field of research to uncover the source of the mysterious energy.
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Ep. 372: The Millikan Oil Drop
In 1909 Robert Millikan devised an ingenious experiment to figure ...
In 1909 Robert Millikan devised an ingenious experiment to figure out the charge of an electron using a drop of oil. Let's talk about this Nobel Prize winning experiment.
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Ep. 371: Eddington Eclipse Experiment
At the turn of the 20th Century, Einstein’s theory of ...
At the turn of the 20th Century, Einstein’s theory of relativity stunned the physics world, but the experimental evidence needed to be found. And so, in 1919, another respected astronomer, Arthur Eddington, observed the deflection of stars by the gravity
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Ep. 370: The Kaufmann–Bucherer–Neumann Experiments
One of the most amazing implications of Einstein's relativity is ...
One of the most amazing implications of Einstein's relativity is the fact that the inertial mass of an object depends on its velocity. That sounds like a difficult thing to test, but that's exactly what happened through a series of experiments performed b
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Ep. 369: The Fizeau Experiment
Light is tricky stuff, and it took scientists hundreds of ...
Light is tricky stuff, and it took scientists hundreds of years to puzzle out what this stuff is. But they poked and prodded at it with many clever experiments to try to measure its speed, motion and interaction with the rest of the Universe. For example,
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Ep. 368: Searching for the Aether Wind: the Michelson–Morley Experiment
Waves move through a medium, like water or air. So ...
Waves move through a medium, like water or air. So it seemed logical to search for a medium that light waves move through. The Michelson-Morley Experiment attempted to search for this medium, known as the “luminiferous aether”. The experiment gave a negat
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Ep. 367: Spitzer does Exoplanets
We've spent the last few weeks talking about different ways ...
We've spent the last few weeks talking about different ways astronomers are searching for exoplanets. But now we reach the most exciting part of this story: actually imaging these planets directly. Today we're going to talk about the work NASA's Spitzer S
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Ep. 366: HARPS Spectrograph
Almost all the planet hunting has been done from space. ...
Almost all the planet hunting has been done from space. But there’s a new instrument installed on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher which has already turned up 130 planets. Is
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Ep. 365: Gaia
The European Gaia spacecraft launched about a year ago with ...
The European Gaia spacecraft launched about a year ago with the ambitious goal of mapping one billion years in the Milky Way. That’s 1% of all the stars in our entire galaxy, which it will monitor about 70 times over its 5-year mission. If all goes well,
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Ep. 364: The COROT Mission
Before NASA’s Kepler mission searched for exoplanets using the transit ...
Before NASA’s Kepler mission searched for exoplanets using the transit method, there was the European COROT mission, launched in 2006. It was sent to search for planets with short orbital periods and find solar oscillations in stars. It was an incredibly
