Radio Skies & Strange Signals
The Supermassive Podcast
Izzie Clarke
4.6 • 556 Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2020
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Plus, Robert Massey shares his top tips for stargazing at home and choosing the right telescope for you. Send you pictures and questions to podcast@ras.ac.uk or tweet @RoyalAstroSoc.
Space Book Club Recommendations:
- When Galaxies Collide - Lisa Harvey-Smith
- Space: 10 Things You Should Know - Becky Smethurst
- Moon: Art, Science, Culture - Robert Massey & Alex Loske
- No Shadow of a Doubt - Daniel Kennefick
- How To Be An Astronaut and Other Space Jobs - Sheila Kanani
- The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) - Katie Mack
The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media Production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I think I want to become a radio astronomer now. |
| 0:03.9 | You know when people ask you, is it worth going out for a meteor shower? |
| 0:06.5 | I'm like, yes. |
| 0:07.4 | Does anything actually get in the way of these signals? |
| 0:10.8 | I'm literally just detecting particles of light again that just happen to be radio waves. |
| 0:18.2 | Hello, welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, |
| 0:24.3 | science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smithurst. |
| 0:28.5 | Yeah, this month we're exploring space with radio astronomy. |
| 0:32.0 | I think it's about time we gave optical telescopes a little bit of a break. |
| 0:35.4 | Yeah, definitely. |
| 0:36.5 | So personally, I think radio astronomy |
| 0:38.8 | is one of those topics that it does take a moment to wrap your head around it. Yeah, definitely. |
| 0:45.1 | I agree that. I think it's because we're so used to using radio waves in like everyday life |
| 0:50.5 | to transfer information, right, that we eventually hear as sound, right? So we use radio waves |
| 0:55.7 | either AM amplitude modulation or FM frequency modulation to transfer information, right, |
| 1:03.1 | back and forth on, you know, your car radio or your kitchen radio, whatever it is. And yet here |
| 1:08.1 | with radio astronomy, we're talking about just detecting light |
| 1:11.9 | in the same way that you would with optical telescopes or x-ray telescopes or whatever it might |
| 1:17.1 | be. And it sort of takes a minute to just sort of flip your brain from going, no, no, I'm not, |
| 1:21.9 | I'm not receiving information that I'm going to hear. I'm literally just detecting particles of |
| 1:26.4 | light again that just happen to be |
| 1:28.4 | radio waves. Yeah, exactly. Well, over this episode, we'll hopefully understand what exactly is going on. |
... |
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