How old are the elements?

We’re delving into the CrowdScience archive to give you another chance to hear an award-winning show from 2025. CrowdScience listener Dorit has a problem. She wants the tiles in her new bathroom to be arranged randomly but, no matter what she does, it still looks like they form s ...  Show more

Space missions are searching for evidence of extra-terrestrial life. CrowdScience listener George in Kenya wants to know what could be up there, and if there’s a risk it could harm humanity. With rovers currently analysing samples on Mars, missions searching for the building bloc ...  Show more

The atoms in your heart once burned in the fires of a dead star. Does this constitute an almost-spiritual connection to the cosmos or is it mere chemistry? In this episode, Robert and Julie discuss the billion-year-old carbon inside us.

Like most things in the universe, stars begin as particles floating around in massive clouds of dust and gas. But what forces these particles to coalesce and form a star? Tune in and learn more about the birth of stars in this podcast.

Daniel and Jorge talk about how stars fuse lighter elements and what changes when they reach Iron.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life cycle of stars. In his poem Bright Star John Keats wrote, "Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art". For Keats the stars were symbols of eternity- they were beautiful and ordered and unchanging - but modern astronomy tells a very d ...  Show more