Did Gravity Wipe Out The Dinosaurs?
The Supermassive Podcast
Izzie Clarke
4.6 • 556 Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do we calculate a black hole's event horizon? Does Mercury's tail impact Earth? Can we name a planet Rupert? And did gravity wipe out the dinosaurs? Izzie Clarke & Dr Becky Smethurst dive into the rather whimsical Supermassive Mailbox to answer your questions.
Want to name an Exoworld? Here's the IAU website to start a campaign: https://nameexoworlds.iau.org/
Send your questions, whimsical messages and your night sky photos to podcast@ras.ac.uk or find us on Instagram @SupermassivePod. Or why not support the show by joining The Supermassive Club? You'll get ad-free listening and access to The Supermassive forum.
The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. |
| 0:08.2 | With me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst and the Society's deputy |
| 0:13.8 | director Dr. Robert Massey. We've not gone through our supermassive mailbox in a while. |
| 0:20.3 | Yeah, we get a lot of questions, but sometimes, |
| 0:22.4 | you know, we just get nice or funny messages, you know? For example, Brian Ross posted in the Supermassive |
| 0:28.3 | club to say, my wife gave our son and I a cat for Christmas. Best Christmas present ever. Love |
| 0:34.1 | that. Brian says his is a hyper sweet, cute black cat named Tribble, and his sons is another |
| 0:40.3 | hyper-sweet, cute, solid grey cat named Quaver, |
| 0:43.2 | which is very cute. Brian says, I think it would be fun to do an |
| 0:46.3 | episode that is cat-centric. I agree, Brian. |
| 0:49.7 | How physicists use cats in their examples, besides |
| 0:52.8 | Schrodinger, but obviously include Schrodinger, |
| 0:54.9 | whatever. And he's seen a couple here and there, but wondered how often cats are used to explain |
| 0:59.6 | aspects of physics, which I think is a great idea for an episode is. Why haven't we done a cat physics? |
| 1:05.5 | I don't know, but it's like the other half of my personalities. |
| 1:10.2 | Where is Pip? We need her now to come in a meal. Let's consult her. Let's half of my personalities. I do. Where is Pip? |
| 1:11.1 | We need her now to come in a meal. Let's consult her. Let's see what she says. I'll ask Cosmo and Suki and see what they want to add to this as well. I mean, there's a really famous thing about sort of like how physicists worked out that how cats rotate. So they always are on their feet when they're dropped and things like this. But one of the things that also pops to mind, which is my favorite thing ever, |
| 1:29.5 | F.D.C. Willard, aka Tresta, the cat of the physicist Hetherington, who, after he wrote a paper |
| 1:36.8 | using like we all the way through, like we've done this and we found this, he realized, well, |
| 1:42.4 | actually, I'm the only author on this paper, and the, |
| 1:45.3 | and the journal will reject my article just based on, like, grammatical style being wrong, |
| 1:50.9 | because I'm a solo person, it should be I did this and I did that. |
... |
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