Up in Orion's shoulder sits Betelgeuse, a supergiant star near the end of its life. The surface of Betelgeuse has been roiling and pulsing for centuries, as long as humans have recorded its modulated luminosity. Dr. Jared Goldberg is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Dr. Golberg has been developing computer models for Betelgeuse to help understand and interpret its oscillations over time.

What happens when a black hole eats up a star? Apparently a lot of things happen, and if you wait around awhile and look in the radio, even more things happen! Dr. Yvette Cendes tells us what it's like to be a radio astronomer and about her latest research into tidal disruption events (TDE's), when a black hole shreds up a star and eats it, producing a dramatic light show across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Some things happen out in the universe that are too powerful to make in a lab. Other phenomena are so coherent and well-ordered, we can't figure out how they can be made without a lab! Fast radio bursts are an incomprehensible combination of both; they are extremely powerful, highly coherent, and very rapid bursts of radio emission. Dr. Maxim Lyutikov spends a lot of his time pondering how these bursts could possibly be made, and all the data seems to point to the most extreme physics imaginable: neutron stars at the highest densities we can imagine, with extremely strong gravity and with a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field.