#53 - November 2016

The Discussion: In a month when the European Space Agency
succeeded and failed in the first part of their Exomars saga, we
go through the glory and the debris of Mars exploration, hanging
out with astronauts Tim Peake and Tim Kopra, conducting exoplanet
research, provide some advice about studying astrophysics and
explain why the effects of dark matter aren’t witnessed in our
own solar system.


The News: Rounding up the space and astronomy news this month we
have:


Exomars, round one

Another look at the Viking mission data that may have
discovered Martian life

Hubble discovers that the universe contains 10 times more
galaxies than thought

A philosophical discussion about the chances of life existing
elsewhere

Venus was habitable when life began to flourish on Earth

Elon Musk’s plans for colonising the solar system

The ethics of colonising other planets

An update of NASA’s Juno mission at Jupiter

And the latest taikonauts and astronauts.



The Hat of Woo: Paul’s Hat of Woo is the repository for all
festering and rancid conspiracy theories that have no basis in
truth and yet persist in any dark and stinking corner of the
internet.


This month we pull one of the biggies out of the putrid hat: Evil
aliens and a reptilian rival for the title of overlord.


The Interview: This month we return to writer, broadcaster and
researcher Dr Chris North from Cardiff University to answer a
listener’s question on Chris’ interview in last month’s episode.


Dr North mentioned that we can see Gravitational Waves to
discover all sorts of information from these waves, such as size,
distance & velocity, which I can understand (through
Amplitude and frequency and rate of change of the signal), but
how is it also possible to infer things like the spin and spin
rate from the wave signal? (ignoring the question of how does a
black hole spin if it has mass but no matter as Dr North
mentions, and how do events happen inside a black hole since as
you get closer to the event horizon doesn't time appear to us to
slow down to us as an outside observer?) Mark de Vrij in Poland.