Above and Beyond...

Early tonight, lay in the grass, feet towards the South and look directly up to find a group of stars that trace out a “backward question mark.” 

This is the head of Leo the Lion where the bottom brightest star has the mighty name Regulus. 

Regulus brings us face-to-face with a fact that challenges what most of us think a star should be… needs to be — a sphere….  But that’s not correct.  Stars can have different shapes.

Like planets, stars can spin on their axis.  Our sun completes about one turn every month.  Regulus, a much bigger star, spins once every 16 hours.  

Like a centrifuge, the material is pushed outward in the direction of the spin, causing Regulus to bulge at the equator.

Think of it as shaped like an M&M, a blue one of course. 

One study shows that if Regulus spun just 10% faster, the inward pull of gravity, which holds the star together, would be overpowered by the outward force of the spin, tearing the star to shreds. 

You’ll never think of an M&M the same way again.

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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
Space Art | Bryan Gros

#065 | The Blue M&M in the Sky | Aired 4-10-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

Tonight, you can see the constellation of Leo the Lion if you look almost directly overhead early in the evening.  

Look for the telltale “backward question mark” that shows the head of the lion.  Just to the left, under Leo’s body, use your telescope to make out the three close smudges.  

Those are the galaxies of the Leo Triplet.

Although tiny to our eye, these galaxies are each enormous in their own right, hundreds of billions of stars strong.  We’re peering in on a cosmic dance floor.

As billions of years pass, the galaxies elegantly swing around each other—a patient dance guided by gravity and set to the tempo of time.  

And because they’re so close together, these three galaxies are distorting the shapes of one another; pulling, bending, warping.  A reminder of their mutual gravitational influences.  

Eventually though, after only a few more do-si-dos they are destined to combine their stars to become one massive galaxy, a central hub, which in turn will pull in other galaxies.  

And so it goes, galaxies combining, a surprisingly common scene in the ever-changing theater of space.

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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

#066 | Dancing Galaxies | Aired 4-16-21 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

In April 2020 astronomers discovered the closest black hole to Earth ever found.  
It’s 1,000 light years away in the appropriately named constellation… Telescopium.  

Now look, one thousand light years is far, but in a galaxy one hundred thousand light years across, it’s… relatively… close to home.  

And, this black hole isn’t alone.  There’re two bright stars with it.  A three-bodied system.  
The black hole itself is of course, dark.  
And it would be undetectable, except for how it pulls on those other stars.  

It’s like Hulk Hogan in an invisibility cloak wrestling my two kids.  

Now, most black holes emit vast amounts of energy, and can be seen across the universe.

But with this invisible Hulk Hogan black hole, we can only detect its gravitational influence—a difficult task, as it turns out.

Truth is, this kind of observation can only be applied nearby.  Astronomers need to be able to observe those slight tugs.   

With time, I wonder what else we’ll find… close to home.
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Recorded at Eddie Whisler's House
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Editor
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer
David Smith | Logo Design

#067 | A Black Hole Close To Home  | Aired 4-30-21 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

Humans go to great lengths to keep even our cosmic social distancing effective.
Don’t contaminate other worlds!
We call it - “Planetary Protection"
See, when spacecraft are built: 
They’re constructed in a clean room, 
everyone wears full body gear, 
each part is painstakingly disinfected with alcohol wipes, 
then they’re heated to almost 250 degrees for 30 hours!
Yes… the handwashing, face covering equivalent… for space probes.  
And when a spacecraft nears the end of its mission?  
Why… we’ll fly it to its fiery death, incinerating as it enters the atmosphere of a distant world rather than recklessly contaminate a potentially habitable place.  
Truth is, chances are minute that a world contamination event could occur.
But if you had to bet on a lifeform capable of surviving such a trip Above and Beyond…, you’d choose tiny extremely hardy ones so stupendous in number that even far off chances of contamination would be increased.
We’ve got plenty of those. Planetary Protection is probably a good idea.
Gesundheit Earth!

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Recorded at Eddie Whisler's House
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Editor
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer & Editor
David Smith | Logo Design

#068 | Planetary Protection | Aired 5-7-21 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

I think Goldilocks would’ve liked astronomy.  She would’ve embraced the fact that being “not to close, and not too far” from the sun, is the “juuuust right” distance to be.  
Astronomers call it the “habitable zone.”   

Well, it turns out that there’s also a galactic habitable zone — an area in galaxies that’s also “just right.”  
… And you guessed it, our solar system is in it. 

Take the galactic center for example, so densely packed are the stars that they frequently pass close to one another.  They can’t help it -  They’re packed in.

If our solar system somehow found itself within eight thousand light years of the center of the Milky Way, well we’d probably suffer some devastating fate.

See, the gravitational consequences that come from such close encounters with other stars would tragically alter Earth’s orbit, throwing us towards our sun or ripping us away from it completely, leaving us to wander space… forever.  

Certainly Goldilocks never envisioned such cosmic carnage, but she would’ve rested well with our just right spot in our galactic home.
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Recorded at Eddie Whisler's House
Eddie Whisler | Story & Voice
Greg Minton | Editor
Tony Steve | Music
Andy Ouellette | Producer
David Smith | Logo Design

#069 | Galactic Goldilocks | Aired 2-19-21 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

Much of what is studied in space plays out over aeons.  Maybe that’s why “fast radio bursts” (or FRBs) are so intriguing to astronomers.  

They last just milliseconds.

On July 24th, 2001, an FRB was recorded by an observatory in Australia, but we didn’t even know it until after combing through the data six years later. This was the first FRB discovery.

Since then, we’ve observed several dozen others, and learned a little more.  They’re bright bursts of radio light.  Extremely powerful!  

Think of the total energy output of the sun over, say… 10 years, released in milliseconds.  But they’re so distant that when they arrive at our detectors they’re a thousand times less powerful than a cell phone signal… if it were on the moon.  

Let’s listen to one right now…  

So what generates these?  There’re many hypotheses but right now… We don’t know.

Scientists guzzle mystery for fuel so they’re OK with owning up to those three words.  What about you?
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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 art
Thanks to Harvard Dataverse for the audio of the FRB:
Law, Casey, 2016, "The Sound of Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QSWJE6, Harvard Dataverse,

#072| Fast Radio Bursts | Aired 7-24-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

On Jul 24, 1969, Neil, Buzz, and Michael arrived back on Earth from the Apollo 11 Moon mission.

What exactly were they doing after splashdown in the Pacific?

Were they touring the world, confetti falling from city buildings as they wave at the throngs of people who had come out to see these courageous men with their own two eyes?

Were they on diplomatic tours talking to leaders around the world?

Nope! They were in quarantine.  But not for COVID-19.

See, Upon arrival everything from the trip was treated as hazardous contaminant, as if covered with alien microbes.

They swapped out their astronaut gear for biological isolation garments and were transported to the mobile quarantine facility for 21 days.

After all, we had no idea if they had come into contact with exotic microbes which would contaminate our entire globe with some horrible pandemic—diseases from space undiscovered and not understood.

The celebration would have to be put on hold until they were out of quarantine. This is the price we pay for taking one small step on an alien world.
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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 art

#073 | Quarantine For Moon Microbes | Aired 7-31-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

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 tonight look east.  Search higher in the sky, away from the horizon to find three bright stars that create the points of a really great looking triangle.  And it’s called – get this- The Summer Triangle.  

Now this is NOT a constellation.  It’s known as an asterism.  
But that’s for another episode.

The Summer Triangle is made up of the brightest stars from three different constellations.
Almost directly overhead is Vega from the constellation Lyra.  Look for its blueish-white color burning from only 25 light years away.

The triangle point on the right is Altair in the constellation “Aquila the Eagle.”   At a mere 17 light years away, it’s the nearest star.

And the third star?  That’s Deneb, a super bright enormous star, dwarfing the size of either of the other two.
And it’s far! - 2,600 light years out.

Keep an eye on all three of these stars well into December as they march across the sky.  
Yep - even in the winter you'll be able to spy a Summer Triangle.
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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 Art

#075 | The Summer Triangle | Aired 7-9-21 on WJCT Jacksonville and WUFT Gainesville

The life of a planet involves impacts – some small, and others massive and powerful.  See - lots of debris is out there in space, hurdling through our solar system.  


And when debris smacks a world, it blasts surface rock out into space – which in turn, can travel, and impact another world!

Think of it as planets sneezing.  Rock-spittle everywhere.  
Planets have been swapping spit for eons!

And the closer two worlds are, the more likely they are to have meteorites from one other.  

For example, we know of at least 70 meteorites on Earth that came from Mars.  Their chemical makeup is like a signature, a fingerprint that can be traced back to the Red Planet.  

Should we ever make a discovery of life on Mars, we would find ourselves in a bit of a pickle.  Did that life arise on its own or did it catch a case of life from Earth?  Or possibly even the other way around!  

One thing’s for sure, it would be a great problem to sort out.  

Gesundheit Mars!
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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 Art

#076 | Planets Swapping Spit | As aired on WJCT Jacksonville and WUFT Gainesville

You can always rely on stars creating patterns in the night.  In fact, there are simple, eye catching star patterns that you can’t help but connect—squares, curves, jagged lines, backward question marks, triangles, and so on.  You’d probably call them “constellations.”  
But almost never are the easily drawn shapes one of the official eighty-eight constellations.

Sometimes they’re a pattern within a single larger constellation.  Other times they’re made up of individual stars from multiple different constellations.  

These patterns of stars that are NOT one of the constellations are called “asterisms.”  Say it out loud.  Asterism.

For example, the summer triangle is an asterism.  And the Big Dipper too, which I bet you thought was a constellation.  It’s actually the rear end of a large bear, the constellation Ursa Major.  

Great!  Now that we’re all on the same page, prepare to never put your new knowledge to good use because people want their constellations.

Asterism?  Keep that to yourself, buddy.
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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 Art

#077 | Asterisms and Constellations | Aired 9-4-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

On September 15, 2017, the Cassini spacecraft, one of the greatest spacecraft to ever study space, ended its thirteen year mission of Saturn after sending back enormous amounts of data.   

Only designed for a five year mission, Cassini was running out of fuel.  So the decision was made to plunge it into Saturn—to burn up in the atmosphere, instead of contaminating nearby moons.  

The days leading up to its final moments were called the mission’s ‘Grand Finale’ where on its final day it took one last picture of where it would plummet, before turning off its bandwidth-hungry cameras completely.  

It would need all its powers to sample the Saturnian atmosphere and transmit that data to Earth.  One last time.

In its final moments its instruments tasted the gasses at 76,000 miles per hour.  

At 6:21 AM it fired ten percent thruster capacity to stay on course.  Heat increasing.  One minute later thrusters were at a hundred percent, fighting from tumbling.  

Then… silence.
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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 Art

#078 | Cassini's Grand Finale | Aired 9-11-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

On October 5th, 1923, an observation changed our view of the universe in a BIG way.  

See, Edwin Hubble was photographing what we now know is the Andromeda Galaxy.  At the time though, it was thought this object might be within our own Milky Way.  It was possible that our galaxy was the entire universe.

Hubble collected an image on a light sensitive glass plate.  He labeled three bright stars with the letter “N” for nova.  

He compared it to earlier plates and found that one of the novas pulsated light as a variable star.  

So he scratched out the “N” and wrote V A R in ALL CAPS.  See it for yourself online.  

Now, these variable stars are special in that you can use the brightness to determine the distance from Earth.  So he did.  And man was Andromeda out there!  WAY beyond our Milky Way.
Our universe just got a whole lot bigger.

And since then, his namesake, the Hubble telescope has detected about 265,000 other galaxies.

Way to go Hubble.
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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 Art

#079 | VAR! | Aired 10-2-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

Since 2016, astronomers have known that an Earth-sized planet, named Proxima b, orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. 

And in early 2020 a team detected what seems to be a 2nd planet orbiting Proxima Centuri – now remember this number – every 1,900 days.

This prompted another astronomer to look for that planet in his decades old Hubble data. 

See when he originally studied that data, he would have missed it since they only looked for possible planets with an orbit of no more than one thousand days.  BINGO – there it was.  Orbiting every 1,900 days, as expected.

And then, another group took extremely fuzzy images of what could be the planet located where it was predicted it should be.  

Amazing!  None of the data sets on their own would be convincing enough.  

But thanks to different approaches, from different people, yielding different types of data, from different times – well now we’re sure. 
Welcome to the family, Proxima c.

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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 Art

#080 | The Discoveries Of Proxima C | Aired 10-9-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

Cassiopeia is a constellation that immortalizes the vain Queen of Ethiopia, mother of the beautiful Princess Andromeda and wife of King Cepheus.  

Although the entire family is enshrined in constellations in Northerly skies, Cassiopeia is the most easily identifiable. 

At nine tonight Look to the Northeast and find 5 brightish stars that draw out a number “3” about the size of two fists tall, held at arm’s length.  
She hangs there midway between the horizon and the zenith.  
Yes,  You found her.

Come back five hours later.  She’s now higher in the sky, directly in the North, and has toppled over so that the “3” is now an “M.”
Yes, she’s moved!

Now come back at six in the morning and see that she’s in the Northwest.  Cassiopeia’s shifted again! Looking like an “E” or the Greek letter Sigma.  

She’s a tumbling queen to Earthbound observers, set into motion through the night by the spin of the Earth.  Her vanity, apparently punished by dizziness.  
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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 Art

#081 | The Tumbling Queen | Aired 10-16-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

For some time now, we humans have been witnessing a revolution in astronomy, and lately we’ve been observing a golden age within that revolution.  

For example it’s been kind of a gold rush for exoplanets - planets orbiting other stars.  We’ve confirmed over four thousand of ‘em.

Amazing considering the very first was only discovered in nineteen ninety-two.  

Like a card collection increasing over time, this glut of new planets requires organization.  

Enter the Earth Similarity Index.  This measures how much like Earth a planet is: from zero point zero (not at all like Earth) to one, zero, an exact Earth analogue).  

Take a planet's radius, density, escape velocity, and surface temperature, assign likeness values, and voila.  Now we know how similar that planet is to Earth, the most coveted card.

It’s kind of like a matching game, but this index doesn’t characterize Earth’s most prized trait —habitability.  

Presumably, you’d need a water card in that index.  
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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 Art

#082 | Earth Similarity Index | Aired 12-4-20 on WJCT 89.9 FM Jacksonville

December 21st will treat us to “The Great Conjunction of 2020.”  The year 2020 isn’t usually associated with the word “great,” but this time we mean it.  

See, in astronomy, a conjunction is when astronomical bodies look super close to one another in our skies. Sometimes they even seem to merge.  

Jupiter and Saturn are the marks.  Follow them in the night sky these next few nights until they essentially look like one bright spark low in the western sky.  

Now, you can see it with your naked eyes, but this is a perfect opportunity to pull out a telescope.  A good telescope.  

Why?  Because on Monday you’ll be able to clearly see Jupiter adorned by colorful belts and it’s four sparkling moons AND Saturn with its rings.  ALL IN ONE SINGLE FIELD OF VIEW THROUGH THE TELESCOPE!  

So get out there and look through a lens.  And collectively we can all look up and say “GREAT!?”

Well, maybe, because you know it’ll be a cloudy night.  I mean, what do you expect?  It’s 2020.
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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

#083 | The Great Conjunction of 2020 | Aired 12-18-20 on WJCT FM 89.9 Jacksonville

What if I told you that astronomers will place over one hundred thousand Christmas trees in the Australia Outback? 
You might ask why? 

Well, to build one of the most important instruments humans have ever built, of course.  

The “trees” are actually antennas that will be part largest radio telescope IN THE WORLD - The Square Kilometer Array.

It’s split between remote regions in Western Australia and Southern Africa.  See, the array will detect radio signals from space so we can’t have our own radio emissions interfering.  

Remote locations are key.  

Also key is the shape of the antenna, and there’s just no way around it, the low frequency-specific antennas look like 6 foot metal Christmas trees.  

The whole project seeks to push Einsteinian relativity to the limit, study the early universe further back than ever before, and do it with detail fifty times sharper than Hubble.   

By the time the project is completely finished, engineers expect around one million of these Christmas trees.  

So… Merry Christmas Science!
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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

#084 | Christmas Trees For Science | Aired 12-25-20 on WJCT FM 89.9 Jacksonville

As astronomers look far into the night sky with ever-increasing capabilities, the universe reveals some very bizarre places.  

Take the case of planet HD189733B.  Oh, the naming art of astronomers!    

It’s been extensively studied by a slew of different instruments and what we’ve learned is simply awesome.  

This planet is an extra-hot gas giant orbiting so close to its tempestuous parent star that flare-ups from the star are like mega blast furnaces torching the daytime side of the planet, which generate blistering winds of over five thousand miles per hour. 
That’s seven times the speed of sound.

So much atmosphere is incinerated that a long, comet-like tail has been detected stretching far away into space.  

Planets like this one, orbiting so close to their host star, moving so swiftly, and burning so hot have a special name for their orbits.  Are you ready?    “Torch orbits.”  That’s right, Torch orbits.  Now that’s a name we love.

Good job astronomers.  
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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

#085 | Torch Orbits | Aired 1-8-21 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