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Big, Really Big

Presenter: Seth Shostak, SETI Institute
When: April 18, 2011 1PM PDT

The universe is big – really big.* Galaxies, for instance, are often large enough to hold a trillion stars. But how did these heavenly heavyweights come to be? Hear how still-mysterious dark matter is implicated in the birth of galaxies.

Also, gamma ray bursts – explosions more energetic than anything since the Big Bang – take place somewhere in the visible universe every day. What are they, and could they obliterate life on Earth?

And, the biggest cosmic mystery de jour: dark energy. Why new, super-size telescopes may finally reveal just what it is.

We’re living large on “Big, Really Big.”

*appreciative nod to Douglas Adams
Guests:

George Djorgovski – Astronomer, California Institute of Technology Sandra Faber – Astronomer and Chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California at Santa Cruz; leads the CANDELS survey that uses the Hubble Space Telescope to image more than 250,000 distant galaxies Daniel Perley – Astronomer, University of California at Berkeley Ed Stone – Former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and physicist at the California Institute of Technology Richard Panek – Author of The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

Descripción en español

This episode was tagged with: galaxies gamma-ray bursts telescopes great attractor astronomy cosmology physics astrobiology

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