Rings around the planets and especially Uranus this week on planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

Imka de Potter is a renowned UC Berkeley astronomer and planetary scientist.

She studies those complex yet comely collections of cosmic crumbs that surround the gas giants in our solar

system. We'll chat with her about some of the most interesting things we've

recently learned about planetary rings, including those surrounding crazily tilted urinous.

Later Bruce Betts will resolve our space trivia question about planetary magnetic fields.

We hope you won't find the answer, repellent. And Emily is just a minute

or so away from this week's Q&A segment. Let's check the headlines from around this best

of all possible universes. did you hear about the new

supernova? It is by far the biggest ever detected and can't be a welcome site

to anyone with the misfortune to live nearby.

Fortunately for us, SN 2006 GY is 240 million light years away in another galaxy.

On the other hand,

Eta Caronae is just 7,500 light years from our neighborhood,

and scientists think it may blow soon.

That's soon in the cosmic sense, by the way. Is there no end to wonders in the

Cosmos? No, Virginia, there isn't. How about the Jupiter-sized planet circling a

star just 60 light years away? Astronomers have used the Spitzer infrared

space telescope to determine that winds on that globe whirl at 4,500 miles

per hour or about 2 kilometers per second.

Compare that to a measly 340 miles per hour

...