PBS Space Time — Channel Summaries — Page 5
AI-powered summaries of 427 videos about PBS Space Time.
427 summaries
How Stars Destroy Each Other
Binary star systems can turn ordinary stellar evolution into a chain of violent, observable catastrophes—white dwarfs ignite novae, neutron stars and...
Can A Starfox Barrel Roll Work In Space?
“Star Fox” gets one space maneuver right: a barrel roll can be physically plausible in vacuum if the ship uses stored angular momentum rather than...
How Do We Know What Stars Are Made Of?
Stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium—and scientists figured that out by reading the “missing” colors in starlight, not the light itself. When...
The Future of Gravitational Waves
LIGO’s second gravitational-wave detection is being treated as both a confirmation of the phenomenon and a stress test of the analysis...
9 NASA Technologies Shaping YOUR Future
NASA-developed technologies have quietly migrated into everyday life—especially for Americans born after the mid-1990s—through a steady stream of...
The Great American Eclipse
A total solar eclipse across the continental United States on August 21 arrives after a long drought—America’s first total solar eclipse in 40...
Do Black Holes Have to Be Black?
Black holes may not have to be “black” in the everyday sense—some could carry the strong force’s “colour charge,” potentially leaving detectable...
How Astrophysics Can (LITERALLY) Save the World
Astrophysics turns a blurry moving dot into a quantified Earth-impact probability by combining orbital mechanics, careful uncertainty modeling, and...
Could You Fart Your Way to the Moon?
Fart-powered space travel fails for a simple reason: there isn’t enough expelled mass to generate meaningful momentum in the long run. Rockets work...
How Supernovas Act as Universe’s Largest Particle Accelerators
Cosmic rays—high-energy particles raining onto Earth—are largely powered by shockwaves from exploding stars, with supernova remnants acting as...
The Race to a Habitable Exoplanet - Time Warp Challenge | Space Time
FTL travel doesn’t merely let a ship arrive sooner—it forces the geometry of spacetime to behave like a time machine. In any faster-than-light (FTL)...
Suicide Space Robots
Robotic spacecraft have repeatedly been sacrificed on purpose—or destroyed as part of experiments—to extract measurements from places humans can’t...
How To Become an Astrophysicist + Challenge Question!
A career in astrophysics hinges less on raw talent than on surviving a long, numbers-heavy pipeline—especially the PhD-to-permanent-job...
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT + Flat Spacetime Geometry Comments | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
The episode’s biggest news is a major change behind “PBS Space Time”: Gabe is stepping down as writer and host to start full-time work at the US...
Using Stars to See Gravitational Waves
Gravitational-wave astronomy is entering a “golden age,” but the biggest story right now isn’t just more detections—it’s how those signals are...
Will You Travel to Space?
Virgin Galactic’s air-launched spaceplane program is reframing what “private spaceflight” can mean—shifting attention from reusable rocket landings...
Solving Quantum Cryptography
Quantum computers don’t yet threaten everyday encryption—but they’re on track to. The core risk comes from Shor’s algorithm, which can factor large...
Pulsar Starquakes Make Fast Radio Bursts? + Challenge Winners! | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are no longer pinned to one-off cosmic catastrophes. After astronomers found a repeating FRB—detected multiple times in 2012...
Cosmic Microwave Background Challenge | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons offer a direct snapshot of the early universe—released about 380,000 years after the Big Bang when the...
Should Space be Privatized? | Space Time
Space travel is shifting from government-run programs to a mixed system where private companies increasingly handle launch and, eventually, crewed...
The Nature of Space and Time AMA
Space and time remain fundamentally mysterious, but the most concrete thread running through the discussion is that modern physics treats them as a...
The Trebuchet Challenge | Space Time
Energy’s conservation turns a messy trebuchet mechanics problem into a clean calculation: once the counterweight and projectile start and end at...
The Most Important Satellite You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of
A pair of NASA satellites is quietly delivering some of the most actionable measurements on Earth—tracking atmospheric CO₂ at neighborhood-level...
Citizen Science + Zero-Point Challenge Answer | Space Time
Citizen science remains a practical engine for astronomy and physics because it scales human pattern recognition and monitoring time—tasks that are...
2021 End of Year AMA!
The AMA’s biggest through-line is a push to treat quantum and astrophysics questions as solvable puzzles—then admit where the answers are still...
The Calendar, Australia & White Christmas | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
Earth’s seasons don’t stay fixed to the calendar because Earth’s tilt and orbit slowly shift relative to each other. The southern hemisphere’s summer...
2022 Year End AMA
The core throughline of PBS Space Time’s 2022 year-end AMA is that “time” and “reality” look different depending on how information is...