Cosmic Coffee Time with Andrew Prestage
Cosmic Coffee Time with Andrew Prestage
Latest Episodes
#90 An Australian backyard astronomer helped NASA find 100 planets! Astronomy award winner Chris Stockdale used his home observatory in Churchill, Victoria to track distant stars and find the planets in their orbit. What a chat.
Chris Stockdale is an award winning astronomer in the Gippsland area of Australia. His contribution to NASA's exoplanet research earned him the Berenice and Arthur Page Medal from the Astronomical Society of Australia. And he's an amateur. ...
#89 Rogue planets! It's possible that most planets in our galaxy don't orbit a star, like we do with our sun. Rogue planets float through interstellar space in the cold darkness. How do they form? And how do we find a planet at interstellar distances with
We instinctively think of planets as rocky or gaseous bodies orbiting a star like our sun, with sunrise, sunset, heating and maybe even seasons. But what if a planet didn't orbit a light source? What if it just floated through space vaguely orb...
#88 Is the Universe Infinite? It’s almost an instinctive question, but maybe it’s unknowable.
Most people have looked to the skies and wondered if the universe has a boundary, or maybe it goes on for ever. The universe might be finite, with and end somewhere. Or, it might be infinite, with an infinite amount of space and matter. Both of...
#87 The next crewed Moon mission is ready for launch. Let’s preview the historic Artemis II flight, sending humans to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years.
The launch window for Artemis II opens on 6 February 2026. Humans will fly a test mission, swinging around the far side of the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. There won’t be a landing, but just like Apollo 8 tested systems in t...
#86 We all love the Moon, but it hasn’t always been there. Where did it come from, and when did that happen?
The Moon has a history longer than any of the features on Earth, but it isn’t as old as Earth. The Giant Impact hypothesis says that a Mars sized protoplanet collided with earth Billions of years ago and threw out enough of earth’s mantle to ma...