Your friendly neighbourhood astrophysicist, Dr Becky Smethurst, is an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. She makes videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm and focuses on how we know things, not just what we know, and especially, the things we still don’t know.
From Dr. Becky. There’s been a big claim of a marker of life, known as a biosignature, found using JWST in the atmosphere of an exoplanet known as K2-18b. The data also confirmed this planet was a “Hycean” world, a planet with a liquid water ocean surrounded by a hydrogen dominated atmosphere. The biosignature that’s…
From Dr. Becky. If you’re struggling, consider therapy with BetterHelp #ad. Click https://betterhelp.com/drbecky for a 10% discount on your first month of therapy with a credentialed professional specific to your needs. In this month’s Night Sky News we’re chatting about the Chandrayaan-3 mission to the South Pole of the Moon, evidence of wet-dry cycle of…
From Dr. Becky. Go to https://brilliant.org/drbecky to get a 30-day free trial and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription! This summer, I published two research papers with my collaborators about the growth of supermassive black holes. One of those research papers was about what processes cause SMBHs to spin at…
From Dr. Becky. A new research study was published this month claiming to have found smoking-gun evidence for an alternate theory of gravity, called MOND, that doesn’t need dark matter to explain our observations of the Universe. They did the same test that three other research studies have done in the last couple of years,…
From Dr. Becky. There’s a blue supermoon coming up on 31st August, but what is a blue moon? And what is a super moon? The next one isn’t until 2032 so spot it while you can! 👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about…
From Dr. Becky. Go to https://ground.news/drbecky for the latest science news. Sign up or subscribe through my link before Sept 1, 2023 for 30% off unlimited access to get reliable information all in one place. A research paper was published this month that claims to have found evidence for the existence of supermassive dark stars…
From Dr. Becky. In this month’s Night Sky News episode we’re chatting about the future of Voyager 2 after NASA briefly lost communications with it this month, plus how JWST has found evidence for water vapour very close in around a star still forming rocky planets, which has huge implications for how we think Earth…
From Dr. Becky. Why do you travel? To see amazing sights? To experience new cultures? Or to eat ALL the good food? I travel for all those reasons too but for me as an astrophysicist, my main reason is something known as “astrotourism”. Travelling to see the sights of the night sky that I can’t…
From Dr. Becky. Go to https://brilliant.org/drbecky to get a 30-day free trial and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription! Everything we know about the Universe suggests that supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies should merge together, BUT the maths tells us that supermassive black holes will never merge…
From Dr. Becky. It was Oppenheimer & Snyder that first mathematically predicted the existence of black holes. Not Einstein. And not Schwarzschild. Sure Schwarzschild took Einstein’s newly published theory of General Relativity and solved it for a sphere of mass which was not rotating, and those solutions would *later* be applied to describe black holes.…
From Dr. Becky. In the 1930s, Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist interested in neutrons which led him to be the first to mathematically predict the existence of black holes. So how did an expert in *theory* end up leading the *experimental* development of the atomic bomb during WWII? Chadwick (1932; discovery of neutron report) –…
From Dr. Becky. The European Space Agency has released the first test science images from the Euclid Space Telescope 🥳 revealing thousands of galaxies both near and far in exquisite detail. The plan for Euclid is to survey the sky, recording the positions and distances of galaxies which we can use to produce a 3D…
From Dr. Becky. Go to https://brilliant.org/drbecky to get a 30-day free trial and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription. A new research study has come out claiming that to explain the massive galaxies found at huge distances in James Webb Space Telescope images, the Universe is older than we think,…
From Dr. Becky. Get a 7-day free trial and 25% off Blinkist Annual Premium by clicking here: https://www.blinkist.com/drbecky In this month’s Night Sky News we’re celebrating 1 year of JWST science with the latest images released, and the news of the discovery of the most distant growing supermassive black hole. Plus I explain the new…
From Dr. Becky. A new research study has been published claiming that the Universe is 26.7 billion years old, and not the typically accepted value of 13.8 billion years old. This all stems from the distant galaxies JWST has found that seem to have formed too many stars in too short of time in the…
From Dr. Becky. Last week I flew to Granada, Spain for the Galactic Bars 2023 conference to present the research I have been doing with my recently graduated PhD student about the impact of bars on their galaxies. This is what a week in my life looked like, giving a talk, attending discussion sessions, wine…
From Dr. Becky. It’s been 1 entire year since we saw the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, surpassing all our expectations! In that year we’ve seen JWST break records on the most distant galaxy known, characterise many an exoplanet’s atmosphere and find evidence for photochemistry occurring in the atmosphere of one,…
From Dr. Becky. The BIG news in physics is that a new type of gravitational wave has been detected using pulsar timing arrays. In this video we’re chatting about what a pulsar timing array actually is, what’s been found, and why the gravitational waves *might* be from pairs of supermassive black holes orbiting each other,…
From Dr. Becky. The full moon on the 3rd July is a supermoon! That just means the moon is slightly closer to us on its oval shaped orbit than normal, making the moon slightly bigger and brighter on the sky. Sadly your eye won’t really be able to tell the difference to a normal full…
From Dr. Becky. My favourite fact about the whole big new gravitational wave news is that we could only do this NOW because we now know the precise position of the planet JUPITER! With a pulsar timing array you need to time the precise time that pulses arrive here on Earth, and if they change…
From Dr. Becky. Go to https://brilliant.org/drbecky to get a 30-day free trial and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription. We got long awaited JWST data this month, with measurements of the atmosphere of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1c. It’s not quite the twin of Venus we expected but the results have interesting…
From Dr. Becky. THE BIG NEWS IS HERE! Astrophysicists in the NanoGrav collaboration have found evidence for HUGE gravitational waves that could be due to merging supermassive black holes. This was all possible due to pulsar timing arrays which triangulate the positions of pulsars across our galaxy to work out of the distances between them…
From Dr. Becky. @hankschannel you’re right, us astrophysicists do know something 😉 and until tomorrow we’re all 🤐 BUT we can do some speculating. If your guess is right about this being a detection of light years long gravitational waves using the timing of light pulses from pulsars (😏) then what could cause these gravitational…
From Dr. Becky. How do we define a second? It used to be as a fraction of the length of a day, i.e. how long it takes Earth to turn once on its axis. But that wasn’t precise enough for scientists, especially since the length of Earth’s day changes! So instead, since the 1950s the…
From Dr. Becky. Betelgruse and Jupiter look very different on the sky. So even though they’re both TOO BRIGHT for JWST, you can do something very clever to take an image with JWST… 👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an…
From Dr. Becky. Start speaking a new language in 3 weeks with Babbel 🎉. Get up to 60% OFF your subscription ➡ Here: https://bit.ly/DrBecky60 Watch the launch live on 1st July 2023 at 15:12 UTC on #ESAWebTV – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OJ6lCFS29Y The Euclid Space Telescope is set to launch no earlier than the 1st July 2023 on…
From Dr. Becky. Phosphorus is one of the key ingredients of life here on Earth – and is a building block of the DNA molecule. Finding phosphorus containing molecules in the water plumes from the south pole of Enceladus (Saturn’s moon) is therefore a BIG DEAL! 👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the…
From Dr. Becky. Everyone was hopeful that the exoplanets in the TRAPPIST-1 system might be like those in the Solar System, especially since some of them lie in the “Goldilocks zone” around their star where it’s not too hot or cold for water. JWST was always set to reveal what their atmospheres were made of,…