Star Trails: A Weekly Astronomy Podcast · Single Malt Sky

Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos (and a Supermoon Too)

·23 min

Drew opens the episode for the week of October 5th through 11th. The harvest supermoon gets top billing. Saturn keeps its place in the evening sky. Autumn constellations are coming into view. He also points to a faint interstellar object whose nucleus is thought to be no larger than about five kilometers. Its peak brightness is expected around magnitude 11 to 12, which keeps it out of easy naked-eye reach, but still makes it scientifically thrilling. Drew then pauses to apologize for the long stretch without shows in September. He links that gap to work, a birthday, and the rough arrival of age 50. From there he folds the personal note into a reflection on quantum uncertainty and improbable survival, casting 50 as proof of endurance against entropy, chance, and noise. The mood then shifts back to the sky. October gives him room to lean into a darker tone. He introduces the rest of the hour as a cosmic case file: five mysteries of the cosmos. The first is the dark sector. He explains dark matter by pointing to galaxies whose outer stars move far faster than visible mass should allow. He also revisits dark energy, the unseen force inferred from the 1998 discovery that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. From there, the episode widens to other open problems. Drew names symmetry violations as one of the universe’s unfinished questions. Black holes follow as cosmic vaults where information may vanish. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays arrive as impossible bullets from nowhere. The Hubble tension shows up as a crack in the standard picture of cosmic expansion. Each mystery is treated as a locked door rather than a solved puzzle. Drew closes by returning to the idea that new telescopes, detectors buried in ice, and instruments launched into orbit may eventually change the story.

As heard by us

A moonlit sky report that turns astronomy's biggest unknowns into an easy, eerie listen.

Star Trails begins with the week of October 5th to the 11th, tying the harvest supermoon, Saturn in the evening sky, and autumn constellations to five unsolved mysteries of the cosmos.

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Why you'd press play

For a harvest supermoon week, Saturn at dusk, and a tour of astronomy's coldest open questions.

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