Cosmic Vertigo - Abc Rn

In Season one, Amanda and Alan took an inventory of what we've left on the Moon: golf balls, a couple of flags, 96 bags of human waste ... But Ashton, a listener, wonders whether any robots (or humans) are up there.

Zooming right in from the decommissioned dwarf planet Pluto to the humble yet powerful atom helium, Amanda and Alan measure up the smallest things in the Universe — with the aid of a strand of your hair.

The biggest things in the Universe don't necessarily last the longest. Massive swollen stars, hundreds of times bigger than our own sun, burn through their fuel and either explode into a supernova or become a black hole.

Cosmic Vertigo is back — and when they're not discussing the extremes of the Universe, Alan and Amanda are answering the big questions. Your questions. This week, it's the little issue of water on Mars.

Cosmic Vertigo season 2 is COMING SOON! And we need your help. Want to share your own personal experience of Cosmic Vertigo? Or do you have a spacey question you're burning to ask Alan and Amanda? Grab a smartphone, and use the inbuilt audio recorder to record your message. Then email that file to cosmicvertigo@abc.net.au

Cosmic Vertigo producer Joel Werner has a new podcast! Sum of All Parts tells extraordinary stories from the world of numbers. The episode featured here is.. 'Phoenix + Electron'.. Melbourne, 1989. Two teenagers hack Australia's recently established internet connection, and infiltrate some of the world’s most secure computer networks. Listen online or wherever you get your podcasts.. iTunes (AU) iTunes (US) Pocket Casts RSS

Amanda and Alan are back (for a hot minute) to celebrate the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017!

Missing Cosmic Vertigo? Well, check out this story about a telescope so powerful it listens to time..

Surprise! Bonus episode! Take a trip behind the scenes in the making of Cosmic Vertigo - LIVE! from the 2017 World Science Festival in Brisbane, Australia.

It’s amazing what you find when you try to see the dawn of time. This season of Cosmic Vertigo ends at the very beginning: the Big Bang.

In the unimaginably vast gaps between galaxies, something is accelerating the universe towards a lonely future. Alan and Amanda shake their heads at Dark Energy.

Dark Matter flies through solid walls like a ghost. Humans have buried super-sensitive crystals to try and detect it - and our Universe doesn’t make any sense without it.

Science fiction movies make it pretty clear that black holes are terrifying, all-consuming monsters. For astronomers there’s no cooler place to try and see.

It's a patchy, pale river in the sky - and a twirling spiral of 400 billion stars. It’s also headed for a dazzling intergalactic train wreck. Welcome to our Milky Way.

Alan and Amanda debate the number of civilisations that might be out there, get the maths wrong, and argue about whether our biggest barriers to coexistence would be linguistic or… dietary.

The science of exoplanets is stupendously fast-moving. The more we look for alien worlds, the more of them we find. Thousands and thousands of them, all with terrible names.

What makes a star a star? When will Betelgeuse explode? Amanda explores what "any day now" means in astronomy and Alan starts measuring mass in millions of marsupials.

Our Solar System started out as a chaotic Primordial Pancake. Now it hosts the eight planets we know and love, plus poor old Pluto, plus some other stuff. Like asteroids with their own moons.

It’s drifting away from Earth at the same rate that your fingernails grow, but the Moon is still our closest neighbour - so close, that we’ve left quite a lot of litter on its surface…

Meet your hosts, astronomers Dr Amanda Bauer and Dr Alan Duffy.