PBS_SpaceTime

The Kepler telescope recently noticed a strange partial eclipse that some have speculated could be a Dyson Sphere. Are Dyson Sphere's possible? Are they practical? What other alternatives to futuristic energy capture do we have to choose from?

Black holes are the result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon- not matter, not light, not even information.

How does dark energy affect the universe's expansion? Measuring past expansion history should tell us the future expansion without ever having to count any galaxies. To measure this we need to measure the redshift-distance relationship, which we will talk about in detail in this episode.

With millions of Earth-like planets around sun-like stars in our galaxy alone, why don't we see intelligent alien life? Or any other life for that matter? It gets especially weird when you factor in new scientific revelations that life on Earth occurred crazy fast! So if you want to help us theorize on the real reasons we haven't found alien life, you should check this video of Space Time! Why don’t we see alien civilization? The resolution for it has to be that there is some sort of great filter that either makes intelligent life extremely rare in the first place or that wipes out, essentially, all advanced civilization before they get to the galactic empire stage, whether by a nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, accidentally making a <a href="https://rumble.com/v4b1yl-a-star-meets-a-black-hole.html" target="_blank">black hole</a> that swallows the planet, et etcetera. But some people believe in that and some people just don’t buy that theory. The other logical explanation is that we know of exactly one instance intelligent life happening, the case of the earth. Multicellular life evolved independently dozen of times. It just took a really long time for those single cells to become complex enough to form large collaborative structure capable of collective reproduction, I.e plants, animals, species capable of making the Kerbal Space Program. So what is the great filter? Maybe it’s just time. If life is common then of the billions of Earth-like planets in the <a href="https://rumble.com/v4bfkl-hubble-space-telescope-zoom-into-the-center-of-our-galaxy-nasa-esa-video.html" target="_blank">galaxy</a>, only a tiny fraction needed to have a small head start on us in order to have produced the Federation of Planets and Stargates and stuff by now. Well, that explains a lot!

How did life on Earth get started? Did life on Earth originate on another planet? Either Mars, or in a distant solar system? Could Earth life have spread to have seeded life elsewhere? Let’s see what modern science has to say about the plausibility of panspermia.

Paul Dirac’s insights into the nature of Quantum Mechanics laid the foundation for Quantum Field Theory and predicted the existence of anti-matter. Part 1 in our series on Quantum Field Theory.

Australia will perpetually encounter the season opposite to the one we in the northern hemisphere will encounter, so does this means that Australia will never get a white Christmas?

Fomalhaut is a massive young star surrounded by a ring of dust debris that can tell us a great deal about the formation of our own solar system.

If we, or any conscious being is around to witness the very distant future our galaxy, what will they see? How long will life persist as the stars begin to die?

Causality is meant to move in one direction: forward. But the Quantum Eraser experiment seems to reverse causality. How and why can this happen and what are the implications of this experiment on how we understand Quantum Mechanics and our greater universe?

If you study a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, you may notice a large, deep blue splotch on the lower right. This area, creatively named the Cold Spot. Is this feature a statistical fluke, the signature of vast supervoids, or even the imprint of another universe?

We’re living in a brief window of time where our planet isn’t frozen underneath a giant layer of glaciers. How much longer will the moderate climate that we’ve come to know as “normal” continue? This episode looks at how the changes in our planet’s orbit and rotation impacts our climate.

Black holes! From Stephen Hawking to Interstellar, black holes are mammoths in the world of science AND sci-fi. But what exactly IS a black hole? Do events happen inside black holes? Are black holes really a hole? Are black holes really black?!

Our laws of physics are equations of motion, along with some associated constants. We’ve talked about the symmetries of these equations, and how they lead us to conserved quantities. But this is just the tip of the theoretical iceberg - sometimes investigating the symmetries of these equations predicts entirely new physics. The standard model of particle physics is a remarkable example.

Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most unintuitive theory ever devised. And yet it’s also the most successful, in terms of sheer predictive power. Simply by following the math of quantum mechanics, incredible discoveries have been made. Its wild success tells us that the mathematical description provided by quantum mechanics reflects deep truths about reality.

Every once in a while we add a second onto our days. Similar to the Leap Year, this is known as the Leap Second. But, if the Leap Year already helps us account for the offset from a calendar in days, what exactly does the Leap Second do? Check out this video for the answer!

The second law of thermodynamics – the law that entropy must, on average, increase – has been interpreted as the inevitability of the decay of structure. This is … misleading. Structure can develop in one region even as the entropy of the universe rises. Ultimately, entropy is a measure of the availability of free energy – of energy that isn’t hopelessly mixed in thermal equilibrium.

Quasars, X-ray Binaries and Supermassive voids at the center of our galaxies … black holes take many forms. In this episode Matt tells us what these different types of black holes are and how scientists are using VLBI, Very Long Baseline Interferometry, to map the different black holes throughout the known universe.

Is our universe a definitive single reality or is it merely one within an infinitely branching multiverse?

Mars One. The Mars Rover. Bruno Mars. Mars Bars. It's pretty clear we're OBSESSED with the idea of Mars, especially in regard to it being a potential colony for earthlings. But is that really the best option? Is there a better place for us to colonize in our solar system? Well, how about Venus?

We’ve come a long way in our understanding of dark energy. In previous episodes we’ve looked at how our universe is paradoxically flat and how dark energy is exponentially accelerating the expansion of the universe. Now, let's dive into the true nature of dark energy and how its antigravity effect and its other properties are having such bizarre effects on our universe.

Listen, we know you've thought about it, and we're here to give you THE DEFINITIVE ANSWER to one of the greatest science questions of all time. How long would it take to get to the MOON by farting? Join Gabe on PBS Space Time as we walk through some of the surprising and WEIRD science behind farts, rockets, and everything in between as we seek an answer to this propulsion problem.

We’ve broken down our preconceived notions about mass and time, now let’s redefine what they really are. Since we know that time is not a universal constant, what is? Matt defines causal order and explains how even though time may look different to multiple observers, it is the one concrete reality that we can all agree on.

The universe is HUGE. But, there is only so much of the universe we can ACTUALLY see, and if we wanted to measure that FINITE space, how would we do it? A gigantic ruler? One really long car ride? Or maybe it's something even more spectacular, something that involves not only the observable universe as it is NOW, but how it was when it was first BORN?

Humans have been talking about space colonization for quite some time, but our neighboring planets are not exactly the most hospitable places. If we are ever going to be successful, we should probably figure out where we could reasonably expect to survive.