Episode 88: Two’s Company: From Binary Stars to Binary Supermassive Black Holes, with Pawel Artymowicz

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Feature Guest: Pawel Artymowicz

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Star Wars fans will be familiar with the planet Tatooine and its two suns. But as it turns out the majority of stars in the Milky Way galaxy live with a companion. And that’s led scientists to study how multiple star systems form and develop, and whether they can host habitable planets.

To help us understand the behaviour of binary star systems and the even more fascinating domain of supermassive binary black holes, the results of merging galaxies, today we’re joined at The Star Spot by Pawel Artymowicz

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Current in Space

Anuj shares new evidence that has pushed back the origin of life by hundreds of millions of years. Tony explains what measures scientists are using to predict the likelihood that newly discovered exoplanets are in fact habitable. Dave updates us on NASA’s big water on Mars discovery with new analysis which is leading us to believe the red planet was much warmer and wetter than we had thought. And The Star Spot goes to the movies… off to Mars to be exact as Denise reviews The Martian.

About Our Guest

Pawel Artymowicz is Professor of Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He received his Undergraduate degree in Astronomy from the University of Warsaw and his PhD from the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Toronto he was Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Stockholm in Sweden. He was the most cited astronomer in Stockholm from 1994 through to 2004. He has also worked as a Research Assistant at the Space Science Telescope Institute and the Lick Observatory in Santa Cruz, California.

Links

Pawel Artymowicz has kindly provided us links to his research in progress:

Accretion  of   gas  from  circumbinary  disks  onto  forming   binary  systems
Check out the resulting image

Pawel Artymowitch University Website

Binary black hole – Video Learning – WizScience.com

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