Categories: Podcasts

Podcast: Accretion Discs

When too much material tries to come together, everything starts to spin and flatten out. You get an accretion disc. Astronomers find them around newly forming stars, supermassive black holes and many other places in the Universe. Today we’ll talk about what it takes to get an accretion disc, and how they help us understand the objects inside.

Click here to download the episode.

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

“Accretion Discs” on the Astronomy Cast website, with shownotes and transcript.

And the podcast is also available as a video, as Fraser and Pamela now record Astronomy Cast as part of a Google+ Hangout (usually recorded every Monday at 3 pm Eastern Time):

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

Recent Posts

Measuring Exoplanetary Magnetospheres with the Square Kilometer Array

Life on Earth would not be possible without food, water, light, a breathable atmosphere and…

15 mins ago

Psyche is Still Sending Data Home at Broadband Speeds

When I heard about this I felt an amused twinge of envy. Over the last…

14 hours ago

Uh oh. Hubble's Having Gyro Problems Again

The Hubble Space Telescope has gone through its share of gyroscopes in its 34-year history…

19 hours ago

Astronomers Will Get Gravitational Wave Alerts Within 30 Seconds

Any event in the cosmos generates gravitational waves, the bigger the event, the more disturbance.…

3 days ago

Next Generation Ion Engines Will Be Extremely Powerful

During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated…

3 days ago

Neutron Stars Could be Capturing Primordial Black Holes

The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to…

3 days ago