Looking Up

Five minutes at the end of each week explores the big and the small questions in astronomy, cosmology, and space science. Hosted by Kechil Kirkham, no subject is too big or too small, and experts are regularly brought on board to illuminate and excite. Cape Town is the place to be for astronomy, with some of the largest telescopes in the world housed or being built not too far away. Looking Up takes advantage of the shoals of scientists and engineers working on the planet’s most advanced astronomy projects, who live and work right here in the Mother City. Kechil has recently acquired an MPhil in Space Studies at the University of Cape Town, and works in South Africa’s space industry on the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope.
Weekly English South Africa Places & Travel
438 Episodes
280 – 300

Looking up - 04 October 2019

Flaring black holes - black holes gobbling up stars - all happening silently in space, far far away. Dr Itumeleng Monageng describes his latest research, revealing a greedy black hole with an accretion disc that regularly brightens every 9 hours and we don't know why. But we are thankful that…
4 Oct 2019 4 min

Looking up - 27 September 2019

Not your every day job: Professor Roger Deane of the University of Pretoria studies far away objects in the universe using an extraordinary technique in astronomy called gravitational lensing. This is where a massive object such as a black hole distorts light coming from objects far, far behind it, acting…
27 Sep 2019 4 min

Looking up - 20 September 2019

Astronomers face many technical challenges observing, but you may not have thought volcanoes were one of them. If you build your observatory on top of a volcano however, you can expect some problems. Here Dr Grazia Umana from the Catania Observatory in Sicily talks to Kechil about how they manage…
20 Sep 2019 4 min

Looking up - 13 September 2019

What all about space telescopes: Kechil runs through some facts about the Hubble Space Telescope and its 2021 successor, the James Webb, which has recently passed a major engineering milestone. It's a big complicated project so it can be forgiven for being 12 years late, so if your projects are…
13 Sep 2019 5 min

Looking up - 06 September 2019

The latest from the Chang'e mission to the Moon where they've found unexplained gel-like substances on the surface. Plus name a planet! The South African Astronomical Observatory is running a competition. Go to www.saao.ac.za for more details.
10 Sep 2019 4 min

Looking up - 23 August 2019

These are a few of my favourite things: the Voyager 2 mission, and that Tesla roadster in orbit around the Sun. Kechil describes why she likes the Voyager mission and what is so special about it. (Warning: Nudity).
23 Aug 2019 5 min

Looking up - 16 August 2019

Sutherland is where the South African Astronomical Observatory has its telescopes, and many international ones besides. Dr David Buckley talks to Kechil about what's happening and about the latest telescopes coming online. You can pay a visit! See www.saao.ac.za for tour details.
16 Aug 2019 5 min

Looking up - 09 August 2019

As it's Women's Day today Kechil is talking to Carla Sharpe, African Programme Manager at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, about women in space. Carla and Kechil are both space enthusiasts and have met a number of astronauts. Here they talk about the qualities needed and about the changing…
10 Aug 2019 4 min

Looking up - 02 August 2019

Dr Lee Townsend, an astronomer at UCT, tells us about the merry dance going on in the universe revealing the strange and extreme physics of binary systems, where one dense neutron star sucks the living daylights out of its companion. Sometimes these binaries end up as black holes, and other…
2 Aug 2019 5 min

Looking up - 26 July 2019

What is observational cosmology? Dr Kurt van der Heyden of the University of Cape Town's Astronomy Department tells Kechil about his interests. He asks big questions …
27 Jul 2019 4 min

Looking up - 19 July 2019

More on that fabulous lunar eclipse, and a clip of what it was like at the Observatory last Tuesday. If you'd like to enjoy the Moon some more, go along to the Cape Town Science Centre and gasp in awe at the Soyuz capsule there. Visit www.ctssc.org.za for details of…
19 Jul 2019 5 min

Looking up - 12 July 2019

The Moon! We landed on it almost 50 years ago and on Tuesday 16 July there will be a partial eclipse of the Moon. The Observatory is having a special public viewing starting at 8pm at the Observatory with a talk, proceeding with telescope observing.
12 Jul 2019 5 min

Looking up - 05 July 2019

Last week there was a total eclipse of the Sun! Sadly not for us but for those lucky souls in South America. If you write esoteric pub quizzes you can't beat a question about saros cycles. These are sequences of time used to predict eclipses. Eclipses are a form of…
5 Jul 2019 4 min

Looking up - 21 June 2019

There are many interesting parts to NASA's Artemis program to send humans back to the Moon. One of them is checking out the possibilities for habitation, and to do this they want robots to scuttle about the surface investigating sinkholes. These may protect people from radiation, though I can't think…
21 Jun 2019 4 min

Looking up - 14 June 2019

This is to clarify Trump's recent confusing tweet: For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the…
14 Jun 2019 4 min

Looking up - 07 June 2019

Did exploding stars result in humans walking upright? Latest research from astronomers suggests that a supernovae explosion increased lightening strikes, burning forests to the ground to be replaced by long grasses and shrubs. It was advantageous to walk upright in the savannah, hence bipedalism.
7 Jun 2019 5 min

Looking up - 31 May 2019

More exoplanets. Astronomers are detectives, using tiny amounts of data to infer what's going on up there. The South African Astronomical Observatory has helped to detect yet another rather exotic planet.
31 May 2019 4 min

Looking up - 24 May 2019

Astronomy Professor Paul Groote talks to Kechil about exploding stars and why there will be more and more of them as time goes on
24 May 2019 5 min

Looking up - 17 May 2019

We're all DOOMED! But how doomed? What if a large asteroid lands on Earth smashing it to bits? Can life be carried off in rocks, to land back down on Earth aeons later and re-seed the planet? The computers say Yes.
17 May 2019 4 min
280 – 300