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Astronomycast Episode 176 from Monday, February 8, 2010, mysteries of the Milky Way Part 1.

Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos to help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Cain, I'm the publisher of the universe today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gaia Professor at Southern Illinois University, Abramsville.

Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, it's a sunny day, I didn't know that we still had a local star anymore.

Sometimes the clouds are on fire, I'm not sure what that is.

Yeah, we don't get a lot of sun here.

So thanks to everybody who has been sending in their postcards.

We've been getting a bunch of virtual postcards, which I'm not sure we know what to do with those.

I guess we can cut them out and post them to the wall, but we love the paper. Kill more trees.

Yes, please. I'm aiming to have an entire wall covered so that I can take a glorious photo and list out where all of your postage stamps came from.

And we will include it on the podcast and the show notes, and we will all be amazed by it.

Yeah, that'll be awesome.

So if you haven't already, send a postcard from your hometown to...

PO Box 804, Edwardsville, Illinois 62025, and you can address it to either astronomy cast or astrosphere and media.

Perfect.

So we've wrapped up our solar system mysteries, and now we move on to the Milky Way mysteries and some of the general mysteries of galaxies from blue stragglers to Ada Karina.

What's going on?

So yeah, so this week we will expand our field of view and talk about some of the mysteries of our own Milky Way and then some of the common mysteries that go on in galaxies.

So let's start with blue stragglers. What's a blue straggler?

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