In astronomy, there’s a topic that has nothing to do with things, and more to do with emptiness—vast stretches of space, hundreds of millions of light years across.  They’re aptly named Supervoids.  

See, galaxies are made of stars.  As a result they have gravitational influence pulling other galaxies toward them.  More galaxies beget more gravity and more pulling, creating stupendous galaxy clusters (of course), but also leaving enormous voids in their wake.

Find the Bootes constellation in tonight’s sky and know that far beyond the connect-the-dot-stars lies one of these great nothings, the Bootes Supervoid.  

This supervoid is so big, it should have two thousand or so galaxies.  Instead, astronomers have found a mere 60.  
Stranded galaxies.

An abyss so desolate that if humans had evolved in the center of this void, we wouldn’t have had the telescopes to discover another galaxy until the nineteen sixties.  

Imagine researchers back then making sense of that one.
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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Brett Jacobs | Program Title: Above and Beyond

#096 | Stranded In A Supervoid | Aired  on WJCT Jacksonville and WUFT Gainesville

Early tonight, go outside and face northeast.  Find the brightest star in the constellation Cepheus named Alderamin.  

Then locate the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus.  It’s name is Deneb.  

Alderamin and Deneb are next-door neighbors separated by about two fists held at arm’s length.  Those are going to be our guide stars.  
Got it?  Great!  

Now midway between those two is a faint star.  You really should know its name.  It’s called HR 8106. 
 
So what’s going on with H R eight one zero six ?  Well, this is what Martians would call their “North Star.”  

On Earth, the North Star is the bright-ish star Polaris.  Shoot a line straight out of Earth’s North Pole and it points there.  Do the same on Mars and you get HR 8106.  

So every planet has a patch of sky its north axis points to, and if there is a bright enough star there, voila – north star!

Something to remember, you know, the next time you’re on a different planet.

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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Brett Jacobs | Program Title: Above and Beyond

#097 | Mars's North Star | Aired on WJCT Jacksonville and WUFT Gainesville

#098 | Arrokoth The Snowman | Aired on WJCT Jacksonville and WUFT Gainesville

#099 | M13

#100 | Mizar And Alcor

Just after the sun sets, face southeast and make out the brightest star you can see.  This is Spica of the constellation Virgo.

Spica though is actually a binary system; two stars orbiting each other around a shared center of gravity, which is surprisingly common.

So, what makes Spica unique – the size of each star.  Typically, at least one star in a binary system is a pipsqueak, Spica!  Both stars are larger, many times hotter, and thousands of times brighter than our own sun.  

They’re also incredibly close to one another; much closer to each other than Earth is to the sun.

So close in fact, they orbit each other once every four days.  At that proximity there’s other effects; the gravity of each star pulls on the stuff of the other star so much so that each star is – the shape of an egg.

Let’s recap.  Spica is a seemingly ordinary single point of light hiding an incredible drama of two beastly blue stars, rapidly swinging around each other, deforming one another with the immense power of their mutual gravitational fields.

I mean what else do you want?

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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design

Spica in tonight's night sky

It's true - every star dies.  But not every star goes out the same way.  Sometimes what's left behind is a remnant called a white dwarf.  It's the crushed core of a star that once was, but is now compact, dense, and searing hot.

In a survey of over 7000 white dwarves, one stood out as mysterious.  It was bafflingly rich in certain chemical elements, including sulfur – which is unheard of in stars!

So… where did the sulfur come from?

Well, astronomers found a large, gaseous planet orbiting that white dwarf.  And it looks like the gaseous molecules are being stripped by the blistering ultraviolet light.  

The white dwarf is shredding the planet!

And those gasses accrete into a disk, swirling around (and ultimately into) the white dwarf, yielding the chemical result that was so baffling.  
I guess white dwarves have to eat too.

What an amazing thing to exist!  But in a universe so vast and wondrous, I think it would be even more surprising if such a thing didn’t.

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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design

#054 | A White Dwarf that Shreds | Aired 1-24-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

In 1969, NASA’s massive think tank considered multitudes of scenarios of what might be encountered during the Apollo missions.  

Like - when should the astronauts actually land on the moon?  

Certainly, some element makes one arrival time better than all the others.  

For landing on the Moon, that element is lurking in the shadows.  

Actually, it’s the shadows themselves.

That’s right – shadows governed the arrival times for all of the Apollo landings.

See, once each month there’s this 16-hour window of time where the lunar shadows are optimal for a pilot to accurately judge boulders, hills, valleys, and slopes.  

So, all landings were timed so that the sun’s light would strike at between 5 and 14 degrees to the surface.  

And it’s a good thing too, since the Apollo 11 lunar lander overshot its landing site by 4 miles and Neil Armstrong had to manually fly it through a field of boulders while running out of fuel.

While celebrating that one small step on another world, know that July 20th was selected for the perfect lengths of lunar shadows.

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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Bryan Gros | Moon art

#071 | I'll Take Moon Shadows for the Landing | Aired 7-16-21 on WJCT Jax and WUFT Gainesville

Early in the evening tonight, look south to find Antares a bright-ish, orange, flickering star.

That twinkling orange light, it was once said, is the beating heart of Scorpius, the monstrously large scorpion.  

Like some other bright orange and red stars peppered throughout our skies, Antares is set to burst as a supernova in a million years – give or take.  

In 2017, in the mountains of Chile, the European Southern Observatory utilized multiple telescopes, acting as one very large telescope to take a picture that, at the time was the most detailed image of a star’s surface ever captured besides the sun.  

The astronomers revealed unprecedented detail in the movement of gasses racing within the atmosphere of Antares.  

They found turbulent, low density gas much farther from the star than predicted, as well as mysterious large bright spots.  See some of the images online for yourself.  

And so it goes... new technologies bring new advances, and in this case, new understandings to this beating heart of Scorpius.
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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Bryan Gros | Space Image

#074 | The Beating Heart Of Scorpius | Aired 8-7-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

Early in the night sky find Rigel just under the belt of Orion.  

It’s a monster. A blue supergiant a hundred thousand times brighter, 18 times more massive, and 67,000 times larger.  It puts out an enormous amount of energy compared to our sun.

Rigel is kind of rock ‘n’ roll type of star that burns bright, lives fast, and dies hard, demanding attention at every step along the way. 

Because of that fierce energy output, if this blue beast was our sun, Earth would have to be safely placed hundreds of times as far away.  

Otherwise Earth would be a burnt cinder, unable to support life, especially the kind of life capable of creating, say… insightful radio shows about space. 

Burning hot and fast, blue giants only have fuel for measly millions of years.  On the other hand, our relatively cooler star, the Sun, still has billions of years before it becomes a red giant and cooks Earth. 

So, look up and wonder at the brilliant megastars like Rigel, and consider yourself lucky to orbit the hum-drum sun when you next look above and beyond.
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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design

#091 | Rock And Roll Supergiant | Aired 3-05-21 on WJCT FM 89.9 Jacksonville Florida

You know what I love to stare at, lost in wonder?...  Uranus.  Go outside early this evening and look West to find everybody’s favoritely named planet.

Oh, wait… that’s right.  Nevermind.  We can’t see Uranus without a telescope. 
 
So, you know what that means right?  There was an actual first person to discover the 7th planet.  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are visible with the naked eye.  Nobody discovered them.  They were visible to even the earliest humans.

But Uranus is different.  On March 13th, 1781, William Herschel spotted it while surveying dim objects in the night sky.  He initially thought it was a comet or a star. 

It wasn’t until further observation 2 years later, that it was confirmed as a planet.  Looking back through the record, astronomers found that it had even been observed as far back as 1690, dim and misidentified.

I guess now would be the time to make a joke about Uranus being in a dark patch of sky where the sun don’t shine, but we won’t.
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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Bryan Gros | Space Imagery
Brett Jacobs | Program Title: Above and Beyond

#092 | Uranus Discovered | Aired 3-12-21 on WJCT FM 89.9 Jacksonville Florida

In our world, discovery and ingenuity ignites the imagination of the next generation. And so, it is in science.  Galileo’s advances, for example, strongly impacted a younger astronomer, inventor, and mathematician—Christiaan Huygens.

Like Galileo, Huygens improved on telescopes significantly, and used his inventions to make colossal discoveries.

On March 25th, 1655, he discovered the moon Titan orbiting Saturn. 

Titan earns its name.  It’s huge as far as moons go.  Wrapping itself in thick cloudy atmosphere that rains liquid methane and ethane.

It’s a moon with climate!  It features seasons and a dynamic geology that steers hydrocarbon liquids into rivers that empty into lakes and seas. 

Until the day he died, Huygens famously dreamed of what the surfaces of other worlds would be like.  It’s only fitting then, that a mission to Saturn landed a probe named Huygens on the surface to see it for the first time. 

The namesake of a titan in science, visiting the Titan he discovered.
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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Bryan Gros | Space Imagery
Brett Jacobs | Program Title: Above and Beyond

#093 | A Titan Discovers Titan | Aired 3-19-21 on WJCT FM 89.9 Jacksonville Florida

On March 31st, 2005, at the Palomar Observatory, a team led by Michael Brown discovered yet another Pluto-like world, way out in the solar system named Makemake (that’s right, Ma-kay_ma-kay). 

It was the second of now many distant objects that are comparable to the size of the once-ninth planet, Pluto.  

Makemake is a remarkable frozen world, where ancient surface material has been bombarded from solar UV radiation and cosmic rays for aeons, slowly changing simple compounds into complex mixtures of organic molecules called tholins.

Some of these tholins are likely what give Makemake’s surface its red color, just like Pluto.

Now, Makemake’s discoverer, Michael Brown, is known as “Killer of Pluto” precisely because he’s discovered so many of the worlds like this. We now call them dwarf planets.  

It was this veritable rise of Dwarf planets that forced us to look again at Pluto and a new definition of planet.

Happy discovery day Makemake!
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Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Bryan Gros | Space Imagery
Brett Jacobs | Program Title: Above and Beyond

#094 | Makemake & the Rise of the Dwarf Planets | Aired 3-26-21 on WJCT FM 89.9 Jacksonville Florida

Look up early tonight, directly overhead. Between the twin stars of Gemini and the sickle shaped head of Leo, you’ll find a dim collection of stars. 

Great, you’ve found that Crabby constellation we call Cancer! 

Now within this constellation, just below the front left claw, hovers one of the most well-studied open clusters of stars—M67.

M67 is full of really old stars, adorning telescope images of it with higher- than- normal amounts of red and orange colored stars.  

These old orangy stars are between 3 and 5 billion years old.  That’s the same age range of our sun!  

And check this out - in spring, 2016, a survey of 20 sun-like stars in M67 showed that those stars have the same rotational period as the Sun. 

Similar ages and similar spins. Awesome!  

That means we can be that much more confident that what we learn by studying our sun (the easiest star to examine) can be applied writ-large throughout the cosmos.  

Good to know.
___________________________
Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Bryan Gros | Space Imagery
Brett Jacobs | Program Title: Above and Beyond

#095 | Cancer Connections | Aired 4-02-21 on WJCT FM 89.9 Jacksonville Florida

Above and Beyond... brings the universe to you, 90 seconds at a time.

Eddie Whisler, Director of the Bryan Gooding Planetarium at Jacksonville's Museum of Science & History brings you above and beyond Jacksonville's night sky to share the wonders of the universe.

Produced by Jacksonville University's The Science Of... in collaboration with the Museum of Science and History and WJCT Public Media. 

Aired on WJCT FM 89.9 during Science Friday and Radiolab.

Recorded at Jacksonville University
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Audio Engineer
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design
Bryan Gros | Space Images
Brett Jacobs | Named "Above and Beyond"
Janel Palomo | General Assistant 2019/2020

Jacksonville University's The Science Of...

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