I'm so excited to announce Cosmos, an exciting new space book for which I'm so proud to have written the foreword for! ✨ Cosmos is a tour through space, starting with the Sun and inner Solar System then moving through the outer planets and into the Milky Way and finally the realm of distant galaxies. With up to the minute images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, it's the ultimate guide to all things in the Universe for any space enthusiast out there. This is the kind of book that inspired me to study astrophysics and set me on the path to where I am today. So I'm particularly thrilled to be a part of this project with DK, thinking about the next generation of scientists this will inspire 💖 This book is for all ages, aspiring and seasoned astronomers alike; if you love space and astronomy then you've got to make room for it on your bookshelf! It's out in the UK on the 3rd October 2024, Australia on the 7th October, and the USA & Canada on the 15th October. And you can pre-order a copy now from this link: geni.us/CosmosBook
YOU CAN SEE THE NORTHERN LIGHTS FROM AS FAR SOUTH AS OXFORD RIGHT NOW!! 🤯😱🥳😍🥰 ✨🤩 GET OUT THERE AND LOOK UP! A giant solar storm caused the northern lights to be visible much further south than normal. The aurora are due to high energy particles buried up by the Sun in the solar storm hitting molecules in our atmosphere and causing them to glow. The greens are from Oxygen and the pinks from Nitrogen. You could just about see the colours with your eyes alone but the camera picked it out even more. There’s even reports of them being seen from the Southern Hemisphere in Argentina! #aurora #northernlights #geomagneticstorm #oxford #uk #astronomy #nightsky #womeninstem #timelapse
Tonight’s video is sadly going to be delayed one day due to circumstances out of my control. It’s on the “axis of evil” in the cosmic microwave background - a topic I’m really excited about and hope you will love when it finally posts tomorrow 👍
I hope everyone who has travelled to see the eclipse today has the best of weather and enjoys the wonder of totality! ☀️🌑 In the meantime, there's some big astrophysics news. A research group using JWST data has claimed that the crisis in cosmology is SOLVED. They've got a new value for the current rate of expansion of the Universe that agrees (within error) with the value we get from our best model of the Universe. That's despite the fact that we've already heard from a different research group using JWST data in the same way who claimed that JWST made the crisis in cosmology WORSE. So what is going on?! You can bet this week's video is going to be on this...
Yesterday's video was the LAST video I filmed in my old filming space before I moved house! It's the last time you'll see that backdrop on this channel 😢 but it does mean that I just filmed next week's Night Sky News video for March 2024 in my NEW filming space in the NEW house! Anyone want a sneak peak of the new filming space? 👀
And for all those who've asked/requested, next week's Night Sky News *will* include info on how to watch the upcoming total solar eclipse across Mexico, USA & Canada on the 8th April. Plus we're chatting about the fast growing supermassive black hole ever found 😱
Some minor technical difficulties on the channel this evening! Seems like a crucial tick box to notify you all that my latest Night Sky news video actually went live was unfortunately unticked (seriously @YouTube , why is that even a feature?!). Many of you watched the original posting (thank you! 🙏) and I'm sure you will have been confused when you were then notified about the same video going live again, but re-uploading was the only way to notify everyone (you can't tick the box after a video has one public). If you interacted with the first version and left a comment about my house move/a science question, know that those are still visible to me on my analytics page and I'll get to them when I can. If I can ask a big favour of those who watched the first version already to engage again in some way (simply hitting like or commenting helps!) that would be a huge help. Thanks for all the support everyone ❤️
Watch my latest Night Sky News video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-Sye...
Oh boy! New paper on the crisis in cosmology just came out from one of the big JWST groups. You KNOW I'll be covering this in this month's Night Sky News. It's not necessarily anything new, just a confirmation of previous results from the same group. If you've been watching my videos for a while you know that one of the explanations for the Hubble tension has always been if the Cepheid variable stars are "biased bright" and we're attributing too much light to them and therefore getting their distance wrong, which screws up our measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe. We had some hints that this wasn't the case from the same research group last year, but this paper has now done the same thing with more data and just ruled this out with very strong statistical evidence to back it up! Very interesting...
link to paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2401.04773.pdf
My video this week won’t go up tonight at 8pm UK time as usual, it’s delayed slightly because I’ve only been back in the office for a few days! It’s the traditional space meme reaction video I always do in January to give us all a much needed giggle. Hopefully it’ll be worth the extra wait for you all!
End of an era 💔 what an absolute legend of YouTube (and one of the nicest people you will ever meet). Congrats @TomScottGo on 10 fantastic years on YouTube. I can’t wait to see what you do next, even if it’s just taking a very long nap.
Happy New Year to all 700,000 of you here who love space as much as I do 🥳
Your friendly neighbourhood astrophysicist. I'm Dr Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me!
I have also written a few books. My latest, "A Brief History of Black Holes", is available in hardback, e-book and audio (which I narrated myself!)
My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
Channel art by Megan Smethurst: www.instagram.com/megansmethurst_gdesign/