Rebecca Boyle

Award winning science journalist and author Rebecca Boyle explores how the moon has shaped everything on Earth, including human evolution. Drawing from her bestselling book, Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are, Boyle takes audiences through the moon’s role in timekeeping, religious development, scientific progress, and more, emphasizing the need for a thoughtful dialogue on our relationship with this celestial body as we plan for future space exploration.

Three quarters of a century after the solar wind was discovered, we do not really know the Sun. We have the basics—it is a yellow dwarf star of middle age, fairly quiescent compared to other stars with planets, pretty common in the galaxy—but surprisingly major questions remain. Scientists don’t know why its atmosphere, called the corona, is blistering hot while the surface is millions of degrees cooler. They don’t really understand the physical structure of the Sun’s magnetic field, including why it changes every 11 years between a tranquil state and a roiling, active phase like we’re seeing in 2024 and 2025. A pair of new sungrazing spacecraft are finally on the verge of getting answers. As we seek to study other stars and the planets around them, can we finally produce a more complete picture of the star next door?

In the beginning, the story goes, there was nothing. Suddenly, a tremendous clap started it all, and 13.8 billion years later, here we are. But the story of the universe’s origins is more complex and surprising than you learned in school. It is changing every day, thanks to astonishing new finds from the James Webb Space Telescope and the newly inaugurated Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Scientists are learning how dark energy and dark matter shaped the early history of the universe, and how they will dictate its end — or whether they exist at all. Astrophysicists are coming up with new theories to explain how everything turned on everywhere all at once, and how that could be. Come along to JWST’s mirror factory, to the mountaintops of Chile’s Atacama Desert, and into the first blinks of the earliest stars, for a trip through the dazzling and rapidly changing field of astrophysics.