With the global pandemic of COVID 19 still encompassing the word, we are generally not big fans of viruses right now. But we sure are thinking about them a lot. That’s right, even astrophysicists are pondering these bizarre little critters. In fact, astrovirology, although very new, is actually an emerging subfield of astrobiology. And that’s because it turns out viruses don’t just influence organisms – they’re incredibly important on a planetary scale. Perhaps an interplanetary scale. Virology Links: Dr. Vincent Racaniello’s Columbia University virology course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list… PBS Eons Where do Viruses Come From? https://youtu.be/X31g5TB-MRo Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the…

It’s been 120 years since Henry Cavendish measured the gravitational constant with a pair of lead balls suspended by a wire. The fundamental nature of gravity still eludes our best minds – but those secrets may be revealed by turning back to the Cavendish experiment. That steampunk contraption may even reveal the existence of extra dimensions of space. Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://pbsspacetime.com/ Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements! https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/space… Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the…

This is a map of the multiverse. Or in physics-ese, it’s the maximally extended Penrose diagram of a Kerr spacetime. And in English: when you solve Einstein’s equations of general relativity for a rotating black hole, the universe does not come to an abrupt halt at the bottom of the gravitational pit. Instead, a path can be traced out again but you do not end up in the universe that you started in. As I said, it’s a map of the multiverse. Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the website. To be a Guest Author please visit our "Post Your Article"…

The universe is precisely 13.8 billion year old – or so our best scientific methods tell us. But how do you learn the age of the universe when there’s no trace left of its beginnings? Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the website. To be a Guest Author please visit our "Post Your Article" page.More Posts - Website

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space-Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Check out the Space-Time Merch Store https://pbsspacetime.com/ Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements! https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/space… From Stargate to Interstellar, wormholes are our favorite method for travelling across fictional universes. But they are also a very serious field of study for some of our greatest minds over the last century. So what’s the holdup? When do we get to wormhole ourselves out of here? Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the website. To be a Guest Author please visit our "Post Your Article"…

Check out Antarctic Extremes on PBS Terra: https://www.youtube.com/pbsterra Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space-Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements!https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/space… Check out the Space-Time Merch Store: https://pbsspacetime.com/ The Milky Way galaxy is relatively calm by the destructive standards of the rest of the Universe and compared to its own very violent past. But just recently we discovered that its violent past was much more recent than we thought – and could even happen again. Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the website. To be a Guest Author…

In astronomy, we talk about billions of years like it’s no big deal. But how can we be sure about timescales so far beyond the capacity for human intuition? Our discovery of what we now call deep time is very recent – as recent as our discovery of the true spatial vastness of our universe. And it came as scientists tried to measure the age of the Earth. What they found was as shocking and humbling as anything seen through the telescope. Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements! https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/space……

Normal maps are useless inside black holes. At the event horizon – the ultimate point of no return as you approach a black hole – time and space themselves change their character. We need new coordinate systems to trace paths into the black hole interior. But the maps we draw using those coordinates reveal something unexpected – they don’t simply end inside the black hole, but continue beyond. In these maps, black holes become wormholes, and new universes lie on the other side. Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements!…

If there’s one thing cooler than a black hole it’s a rotating black hole. Why? Because we can use them as futuristic power generators, galactic-scale bombs, and portals to other universes. Black holes are self-sustaining holes in the fabric of spacetime. Space at the event horizon cascades downwards, dragging more space behind it, sort of like how water drags itself near the edge of a waterfall. In a Kerr black hole, space above the event horizon is dragged around in a circle – so less waterfall and more whirlpool. Water spiralling down a drain in a flat sink doesn’t know about the hole – it only knows about the motion…

This episode of space time is brought to you by the information flowing through an impossibly complex network of quantum entanglement, that just happens to mutually agree that you and I exist inside it. Oh, and Schrodinger’s cat is in here too. In quantum world things are routinely in multiple states at once – what we call a “superposition” of states. But in the classical world of large scales, things are either this or that. The famous thought experiment is Schrodinger’s cat – in which a cat is in an opaque box with a vial of deadly poison that’s released on the radioactive decay of an atom. Quantum mechanics tells…