HeyJaredStar Trails: A Weekly Astronomy Podcast
Star Trails is a weekly astronomy podcast that begins in your backyard and expands outward to the edge of the universe.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 6, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest episodes
Rivers Through the Dark (opens the original)
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Galaxies carry the evidence of their past. When the Milky Way captures a dwarf galaxy or tears apart a globular cluster, it leaves behind long, ghostly ribbons of stars called stellar streams. These streams preserve the history of ancient collisions, and their shapes may trace the invisible dark matter surrounding a galaxy. This week, we follow the stellar wreckage left behind by galactic cannibalism, from the enormous Sagittarius stream wrapped around the Milky Way to Oyashio, the first suspect
Little Red Dots at Cosmic Dawn (opens the original)
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The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered hundreds of tiny red points in the early universe. They are extraordinarily compact, unexpectedly bright and strangely quiet in the X-ray and radio wavelengths where an active black hole should reveal itself. Astronomers call them “little red dots,” but that modest nickname conceals one of the most intriguing mysteries of the Webb era. In this episode, we follow the clues hidden in their light. Some may contain young black holes buried inside enormous
Did the Milky Way Flip? (opens the original)
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The Milky Way looks permanent from our place inside it, a great band of stars stretching across the night sky. But new research suggests our galaxy may once have been oriented in a completely different direction, perhaps reorienting by more than 90 degrees during its violent youth. This episode explores the evidence for the Milky Way's possible ancient flip and, even more remarkably, how astronomers could possibly reconstruct something that happened around ten billion years ago. Using stellar mo
When Black Holes Twist Spacetime (opens the original)
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What happens when a black hole spins? According to general relativity, it doesn't simply rotate in space, it actually drags spacetime around with it. This episode explores the strange phenomenon known as frame dragging, from its first predictions more than a century ago to new observations that may let astronomers watch it at work around supermassive black holes. We'll visit a distant black hole where the remains of a shredded star appear to be wobbling through twisted spacetime, then return to
Listening to the Heartbeat of the Milky Way (opens the original)
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Most amateur astronomers spend their nights collecting light. But what if you could study our galaxy without looking through a telescope at all? In this episode, we sit down with amateur astronomer and radio enthusiast Hap Griffin to explore the fascinating world of backyard radio astronomy. Using a homemade radio telescope consisting of a recycled microwave dish, and less than $100 worth of electronics, Hap is recreating one of the classic experiments that revealed the Milky Way's spiral struct
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