Emily's back from New Zealand, Chris is ... still just around, really. And Syzygy returns from hiatus with Episode 100, looking back on a huuuuuge year for the Just Wonderful Space Telescope. Emily takes us through the five "first-light" images released from JWST several months ago — plus one little bonus image that they found behind the couch. (Oh, and sorry for the audio quality on this one — for boring technical reasons we had to share one microphone ... Back to our usual high-quality...

Not wanting to overshadow this week's exciting supermassive black hole image release or anything, but Emily has news of her own. A short episode, in which Chris delves into the new Sag A* image a bit, before dropping the news bomb you've all *really* been waiting for ...

You've heard of supernovae, the just stupidly big explosions that mark the end of some stars' lives. Maybe you know there are different kinds of supernovae — type 1a, type II ... Did you know that, smaller than a super nova, there's just a plain, vanilla *nova*? Or that, even bigger than super, there's *hyper*novae? Well, hold onto your hats, because there's a new nova in town, and it's ... really quite small. On the nova scale, anyway. Emily gives all the goss on cute little micronovae....

Astronomers have spotted the biggest comet ever! And it's heading for Earth! Except (a) it's not heading towards Earth — it's closest approach to us will be beyond Saturn's orbit — and (b) it's not technically the biggest. But it's still cool! Emily's here with loads of info about comets, big comets, things that are sort of comets, how many tails they have (hint: it's more than one), and heaps more besides.

A very different story this week: using high-energy particles, originating from violent supernovae and supermassive black holes, to scan the insides of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Physicists are teaming up with Egyptologists to check some tantalising results from 2017 thaty suggest there just might be a previously unknown cavity — an open space — inside the Great Pyramid. Could it be a new, hidden room? A vault filled with ancient treasure? Or just somewhere they kept all the heating ducts...

For the latest — and last? — baby-themed episode, we talk baby planets and how they're made. And sure, we've talked about this before in previous episodes, but this time Emily comes with brand new research that shows an actual protoplanet forming from the stellar disk. And even better, the possibility that we can even spot a proto*moon* forming around a protoplanet. Plus, for any astronomers looking for ideas, she's got her Top 5 list of unsolved planet questions.

We’ve done the baby universe, and baby galaxies, and the very first baby stars ... and *those* were a bit nasty, a bit grumpy. So this week, we're talking baby stars again, but in the modern era — stars being born now, as we speak. Mind you, just because they've got more than H and He to buiold with, doesn't mean they're any less temperamental. Emily takes use from the interstellar medium, through interstellar clouds and collapsing proto-stars, to the birth of a cute little pre-main-sequence...

This week, it's baby galaxies — the very, very ancient, and the surprisingly brand new. Emily looks back at the earliest things-we-might-consider-galaxies, and the competing models for how they formed. Then we take a peek into the beautiful M81 galaxy, which is, as we speak, sloughing off some of its stars and galaxy stuff, thanks to an ongoing fight with M82 next door. The fun part is, the extra stuff seems to be forming into a new galaxy — albeit one with a difficult future ahead ...

Continuing our theme of baby-related astronomy, Emily picks up the story from last episode — we'd just finished making the universe and watching its insane growth spurt, and then ... the first stars turned on! And wow, were those first stars weird. Even weirder, there might still be some of them about, 13 billon years later!

We're back! Emily has some exciting news, and in regonition of this, we're starting a series of episodes on a theme — starting with the birth and infancy of the Universe! From the earliest physically-sensible moments, through the explosive growth spurt of Inflation, to the creation of forces, particles, nuclei and — eventuallly — atoms, we track the adorable and exciting early development of the cosmos.

While the James Webb Space Telescope waits patiently for its new scheduled liftoff on Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe has been doing amazing things, whizzing through the outer edges of the Sun's corona for the very first time. Emily explains what we do — and staggeringly don't — know about our nearest star, and how Parker is going to help plug some of the more embarrassing gaps in our knowledge.

Every year, thousands of decent-sized chunks of rock hurtle past — and often into — the Earth. Of the ones that do hit, most burn up leaving a pretty trail. Occasionally, a bigger one explodes with a boom that shatters windows. More rarely, a big one wipes leaves a large smoking crater and widespread local destruction. Then there was that huge one that devestated the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs. Wouldn't want one of those again/ Fortunately, loads of astronomers are watching the skies to...

When a galaxy eats another galaxy it's called "Galactic Cannibalism". But what if a galaxy eats a galaxy that ate another galaxy, which maybe ate another ... we're getting into Russian nesting dolls here. Emily gives all the latest on new evidence of galactic cannibalism in our local neighbourhood, galaxy-wise, in the form of strangely ancient globular clusters.

Some stars go out with a whimper, but others go with a bang — and what a bang! Supernovae are ludicrously energetic explosions, so you wouldn't want to see one up close. Astronomers to do spot them, in surprisingly large numbers — though usually they only get to observe them after they've lit up. Recently, however, researchers managed to get loads of data about one supernova in a not-too-distant galaxy *before* it went boom, thanks to a lucky intervention by this podcasts favourite space...

We've spotted thousands of planets around other stars in our own Milky Way. But when we look at other galaxies, it's mostly impossible to see individual stars — let alone any planets orbiting them. Recently, astronomers spotted what looks suspiciously like a transit event in the signal from a bright x-ray binary system in the whirlpool galaxy. Could it be an exoplanet? Emily runs throuugh all the ways this might *not* be the case, and we're left with a tantalising "well ... maybe”.

We're going back to Jupiter again — or, near Jupiter anyway. Like the Lucy space probe we're zooming off to the 4th and 5th Lagrange points of Jupiter's orbit, where a whole pile of Trojan asteroids are camped. Emily explains Lucy's mission, how it got the name (it's complicated), and what we hope to learn about the solar system's origins from this Trojan multitude.

There are few things in the Solar System more iconic then Jupiter's Great Red Spot, that swirling vortex staring out from the giant planet like a huge eye. Ever since Cassini (or was it Hooke?) first spotted it back in the late 17th century, it's been an object of fascination for astronomers and amateur stargazers alike. New research shows the spot is not only shrinking, it's speeding up — but why? What's going on? What even is this thing anyway? Emily's got all the answers.

We've been waiting. And waiting. And ... waiting. Finally — *finally!* — the James Webb Space Telescope is ready for launch on 18 December this year. Which is Chris's birthday, so things better go smoothly or he'll be pretty upset. Emily explains why this is a momentous event for astronomy, and what we hope to get from this amazing bit of astronomical engineering.

Branson's done it. Bezos is going to do it. Elon's doing it for sure, if only to find out where he parked his car. All the rich kids are heading to space — but where is that, exactly? How high to you have to go to actually get into the astronaut club? Emily and Chris go over the first Virgin Galactic fully-populated flight, and discuss where space may or may not begin — and what it means when really rich people decide they want to be astronauts.

Live and online at the York Festival of Ideas 2021, Emily and Chris discuss infinities. Is the Universe infinite? What does that even mean? Does it go on forever in all directions? Does it bend back on itself? Is it a multidemonsional doughnut or saddle? And will it last forever? How big is infinity, anyway?

Hundreds of scientists have carried out the largest survey of dark matter in the universe, and released the first tranche of results. It's a staggering bit of research, involving observations 100 million galaxies with some of the finest astronomical imaging gear on the planet. And guess what? Einstein was wrong! Or, well, that's what some headlines screamed. The reality is a little more nuanced: there are some intriguing discrepancies between models and experiments, and lots more work to do.

Our farthest-flung object, little Voyager 1, is still hurtling through the cosmos, 21 light hours away in interstellar space. And decades into its mission it's still measuring stuff! Voyager 1 sent back measurements of the background hum of the interstellar medium, the incredibly diffuse plasma that fills the void between our solar system and the next.

An esoteric particle called the muon wobbles weirdly in a magnetic field, and physicists around the world go a frothing frenzy of excitement ... because maybe these wobbles mean new physics! The experiments at Fermilab and Brookhaven labs disagree quite firmly with theoretical calculations, which is exciting. And because new physics can be tested with modern astronomy — sometimes it's the only way we can explore the boundaries of the theories of the universe — then Emily is keen to understand...

Emily is up a mountain in New Zealand, observing stars and doing astronomer-y things. Or, she would be, if the weather was behaving better. In this episode, recorded on site at the University of Canterbury's Mount John Observatory in the heart of NZ's gorgeous South Island, we find out just what astronomers get up to when they're shut up with their telescopes, working by night and sleeping by day, trying to glean cosmic secrets through gaps in the clouds.

China's doing it. The United Arab Emirates are doing it. The USA as well, of course they're on it as well — seems everyone is going to Mars these days. Emily takes a good hard look at each of the current Mars missions, from an orbiting spacecraft examining the red planet's weather, to a couple of rovers, one dropped to the surface by sky crane. There's even a tiny helicopter! it's all happening on Mars in 2021.