In this show we'll answer listener questions like: Why don't humans have a tail even though we have a tailbone? Why is bird poop white and mammal poop brown? Why can't we remember our early years? What happens when you die in space? And much, much more
A&S
Follow U of T News
Renowned scholar Juna Kollmeier named director of U of T’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics Juna Kollmeier, who will become the new director of CITA on July 1, is an observationally oriented astrophysicist whose research focuses on supermassive black holes, the Milky Way and the intergalactic medium (photo by Bret Harman/TED)
Renowned astrophysicist
Juna Kollmeier, on faculty at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, has been named the new director of the University of Toronto’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), a research centre focused on the origin and evolution of the universe and other phenomena discovered by modern astronomy.
Since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, scientists have identified more than 4,000 of these astronomical bodies. Exoplanets planets found outside our solar system have been shown to challenge traditional theories of planet formation, which were based on Earth’s own system.
A recent study has revealed that gas giants can form from a smaller core than previously thought possible. The study was led by Caroline Piaulet, a PhD student at the University of Montreal’s Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx), in collaboration with a team of astronomers including Eve Lee, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at McGill and the McGill Space Institute.
Astronomers have long thought of super-Earths as the rocky cores of mini-Neptunes whose gassy atmospheres had blown away, but a new study challenges that theory.
Mini-Neptunes and super-Earths up to four times the size of our own are the most common exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system.
In the new study in the
Astrophysical Journal, astronomers show that some of these exoplanets never had gaseous atmospheres to begin with, shedding new light on their mysterious origins.
From observations, we know about 30% to 50% of host stars have one or the other, and the two populations appear in about equal proportion. But where did they come from?