Cosmic Queries: The Random Edition

About This Episode

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 when seen from Saturn, whether there’s a north pole to our universe, and why astronomers got the Milky 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.”

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: Cosmic Queries: The Random Edition.