When Pluto was discovered, astronomers expected to find a planet similar to Earth in size. But as they made more observations, they realized that Pluto is actually much smaller than what they initially thought.

Today’s article is a bit special since it was written by @and0uille! She will explain in detail how to install your own castopod instance to host podcasts. If you want to see the end result before jumping in, you can visit the podcast SpaceSheep.

This morning we are with Sylvia Ekström who is an astrophysicist at the Observatory of Geneva. She studies the way massive stars evolve over time. She is also very involved in outreach at the Observatory of Geneva and in the entire region. She will tell us about stars and her atypical career.

Food in space is complicated. It has to be good enough for astronauts to actually eat it, it has to be healthy so that astronauts don’t end up sick, it has to keep for months at a time, it has to be compact,… To make things worse, in micro-gravity, your taste buds don’t work quite the same. For instance, Peggy Whitson discovered that in micro-gravity, she likes some foods that she didn’t like on Earth, but doesn’t like other foods that she usually loves. So feeding…

Between Mars and Jupiter, somewhere in the asteroid belt, you can find the dwarf planet Ceres. But this celestial object wasn’t always considered to be a dwarf planet.

In 1963, the USSR sent Valentina Tereshkova – the first female cosmonaut – into orbit around the Earth. It was another 20 years before the United States overcame the systemic sexism that was keeping them from sending women into space.

In elementary school, I learned that Christopher Columbus was the only man in his time to believe that the Earth was round. This is why he wanted to sail westwards to India, to prove everyone wrong. People would tell him “You’re crazy! You’re going to reach the edge of the flat Earth!", and he would answer “Of course not, the Earth is round!". So in a way, he is painted to be this visionary genius who made it possible for Europeans to arrive on a new continent.

As I was writing a booklet for an astronomy class I was teaching, I looked for illustrations to explain various elements of celestial mechanics. But I wanted the style of all the illustrations to be coherent. So just fetching images from Wikipedia wasn’t enough.

There is a kind of small, compact galaxy in which many stars are forming. They are one tenth of the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy, and one hundred times more compact. They are called green pea galaxies.

In 1957, Sputnik was launched, marking the begining of the era of space exploration. It was the first time humans put an object in orbit around the Earth. Since that date, we have sent many satellites, probes, capsules, and space stations into space. And we also sent a few objects that are more… unexpected.