StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – The Random Edition, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Teacher or professor: StarTalk
Subject: Astronomy
Content of the Lesson: Thanks to Wix for sponsoring this video! Create your website now: http://www.wix.com/go/startalk. It’s time for another episode of Cosmic Queries, where your own personal astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson answers, sight unseen, fan submitted questions chosen by his co-host. This week, Chuck Nice asks Neil questions on a wide variety of topics that we couldn’t answer in other episodes, from alien plant life, to colonizing Mars, to whether velocity could be considered a dimension. You’ll find out if the constellations would look different from Saturn, whether there’s a north pole to our universe, and why astronomers got the Mily Way’s north pole wrong in the first place. Discover why a stable black hole can’t exist inside a star, and how the expansion of our Sun will affect the Earth. You’ll learn how scientists knew to leave gaps in the periodic table of the elements, and why the moon is spiraling away from the Earth at 5 inches a year. Neil speculates on what the bright spot on the dwarf planet Ceres might be, whether we’ll explore Jupiter’s moon Europa in our lifetimes, and if we’ll find life in its subsurface ocean. You’ll also hear how NASA inventions led to grooved highway pavement and safer, cheaper LASIK surgery. On the lighter side, Neil and Chuck talk about Neil’s famous vests, the Ship of the Imagination from COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey, YouTube’s famous “Double Rainbow Guy,” and the wrestling move Neil always wanted to invent which he calls the “Double Tidal Lock.” This episode originally aired on August 26, 2016.


Click here to view video on YouTube.