The Open Universe

For 14 billion years, our Universe has been expanding.  For 5 billion years, its expansion has been accelerating.  But now.... is our Universe slowing down again?

Our exploration continues into the world of CEERS, one of the major flagship surveys of the early JWST data. Now, astronomers are confronted by yet more first generation galaxies that seem to defy scientific consensus -- a group of objects so luminous that their formation should not have been possible based on standard theories of galaxy formation. So, is the Universe truly broken? Or is it simply playing a cruel trick on our ability to locate how far these galaxies actually are....?

It’s July 2022, and JWST is now in full swing – its early images already captivating people the world over. In all this excitement, however, a team of astronomers is struck by one thing in particular... two beacons of light, shining out from the very depths of time: extraordinarily bright galaxies in existence so early as to defy all expectations. But how could galaxies so big exist so soon after the birth of the cosmos? Have we misunderstood galaxy formation all along?

Christmas Day, 2021 offered a once-in-a-lifetime present to the astronomical community: JWST, a revolutionary new space telescope with the potential to transform our understanding of the cosmos. But with every new innovation, there is always room for plenty of surprises….  In our new miniseries on the Open Universe Podcast, we delve into the world of JWST and the incredible observations it’s made in just the first year of its operations – some, perhaps, with the potential to break our understanding of the universe.

The Open Universe goes on tour to Castel Gandolfo, Italy, home of the Vatican Observatory, where we chat with resident astronomer Richard D'Souza on astronomy, faith, and early efforts to map the Milky Way.

Volcanic explosions and surface flows on a frozen world?! Join us on board the New Horizons spacecraft on its journey towards the edge of the Solar System as it uncovers a distant world full of geological surprises.

Photons traveling through spacetime are cosmic messengers carrying with them rich stories of the past history of our cosmos. Find out how an otherwise innocuous observation of distant quasars in 1965 transformed our understanding of the composition of intergalactic space, and the phases of evolution our Universe underwent billions of years ago.

For years, astronomers have been puzzled by the mysterious bursts of cosmic radio emission, until recently, two teams identified the origin of these events as extremely magnetic stars -- strong enough to disrupt credit cards on the moon!

Relive the story of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who, as a 19-year old, came to a remarkable realization on board a ship journeying to start his physics scholarship in England. This discovery would lead to a bitter spat with one of the most eminent luminaries in the world of astronomy, and eventually reveal an astonishing feature of time and space – the existence of black holes.

The vastness of space was unfathomable until a pioneer of "Big Data" found a regularity in the way some stars change brightness, a discovery which has ever since allowed us to precisely measure distances to stars throughout the Milky Way and beyond.

Our universe appears to be an ever-expanding, or an open universe. Join us on a journey into the future to discover what this means for all the planets, stars, and galaxies.

Discovering small planets like the Earth orbiting other stars like the Sun is hard, but blobs of gas surfacing from stellar interiors can help.

We hit our mid-life crises early and started a podcast about astronomy.