#51 - September 2016

The Discussion: Jeni’s astronomy research yields its first
results in the hunt for exoplanet phase variation and we revisit
our Star Wars podcast extras with a listener’s book review.


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


An ‘Earthlike planet detected by ESO around our nearest
stellar neighbour

The upcoming launch of OSIRIS Rex to sample an asteroid

That bump in the data at CERN turns out to be a false hope

That alien megastructure story just won’t foxtrot oscar

The Cassini spacecraft spots methane filled canyons on
Saturn’s moon Titan

A meteorite lands in Yorkshire garden. Real or fake?



Woobusters: Continuing our quest to debunk the myths and
conspiracy theories that persist in every dark corner of the news
and the internet. This month’s topic, picked at random from
Paul’s festering Hat of Woo: Area 51 – the remote and secret
installation in the Nevada desert where sanity gets dissected and
reason is left to die.


Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter
take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always
plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month
we get a question that probes certainty in science and how high
certainty discoveries can still turn out to be wrong:


Why when the Bicep two team found the evidence for primordial
gravitational waves did they claim it was a five sigma result,
and later wasn't it shown the result was not accurate? I thought
a five sigma had a 1 in 350million chance of being wrong! There
has to be something I don't understand about the sigma scale or
the Bicep results? Rodney Cuthbertson.