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The Star Spot


The Star Spot, with Justin Trottier, is a space themed podcast and radio show focusing on all aspects of astronomy and space exploration. Episodes feature timely news along with fascinating interviews with guests of wide-ranging background: scientists, engineers, artists, politicians, and entrepreneurs. Topics are broad, from the latest space mission to how the universe began to why humans explore.

Feb 24, 2014

Feature Guest: David Hanna

 

Supernovae and hypernove, blazars and quasars: our universe is one exotic place. To help us to make sense of it, today we're joined at The Star Spot by Professor David Hanna.

 

Current in Space

 

What do satellites and whales have in common? Anuj explains. Then, Benjamin on how a fight over the reliability of atmospheric extrasolar planet discoveries is a triumph for a science without dogmas.

 

About Our Guests

 

David Hanna is an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal. He works in experimental high energy physics, everything from particle accelerators probing the physics of the very small to gamma ray astronomy studying the incredibly large.

 

Hanna was a founding member of the US/Canada collaboration known as STACEE, the Solar Tower Atmospheric Cherenkov Effect Experiment. Yup, that’s why they call it STACEE. STACEE was an experiment dedicated to the study of high energy gamma rays emitted by astrophysical sources and was active observations until 2007.

 

He is currently a member of a new gamma ray collaboration called VERITAS which revels in its even longer name: the Very energetic radiation imaging telescope array system.

 

Through his work in high energy physics, Hanna studies black holes at the centre of active galaxies, pulsars, gamma ray bursts, supernova remnants, dark matter, quasars, hypernova, supernova, unidentified sources. today he joins me to discuss this zoo of the exotica