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Hello! Welcome to the StarXiv, hosted by Dr Michelle Collins and Dr Payel Das. This is a biweekly podcast that delves into the latest astronomy papers & results from the arXiv. Michelle and Payel are astronomers at the University of Surrey. They love research, but struggle to find time to read a lot of papers. They’re hoping this podcast fixes that. The beautiful logo is designed by Izzy Gray, a PhD student currently studying at the University of Surrey.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ arXiv astronomy paper discussions • Milky Way formation, mergers, stellar populations • dwarf/ultra-diffuse galaxies, metallicities • black holes, supernovae, transients • dark matter, cosmology, gravitational lensing • exoplanets, disks, Solar System • machine learning, technosignaturesThis podcast is a biweekly discussion of recent astronomy and astrophysics research papers posted to arXiv, hosted by working astronomers. Across episodes, it surveys a wide range of current topics spanning the nearby Universe, the high-redshift cosmos, and the Solar System, with an emphasis on what new datasets, simulations, and analysis techniques are revealing.
A recurring thread is galaxy formation and “galactic archaeology”: how the Milky Way and its satellites assembled through mergers, accretion, and internal evolution, and how this history is reconstructed using stellar chemistry, ages, and kinematics. The show frequently returns to dwarf galaxies and ultra-faint systems—how to find them, whether some are “failed” or “dark” galaxies, how their metallicities are set, and what their star clusters and stellar populations imply about early star formation. Related discussions touch on structure in disks and halos (bars, rotation curves, satellite planes, streams), the intracluster medium in galaxy clusters, and how lenses, arcs, and rings can be used as both discovery tools and probes of mass distributions.
Another major theme is compact objects and transients: black holes across mass scales (intermediate-mass to supermassive), how they form and grow, and how they are detected via accretion signatures, gravitational waves, or interactions with stars. Stellar evolution topics include supernovae (including their use in cosmology), variable and unusual stars, and activity such as flares and starspots. Cosmology also appears through discussions of large surveys, standard sirens, the expansion history of the Universe, and constraints on dark matter models from observations like lensing signals, halo structure, and the Lyman-alpha forest.
The podcast also covers exoplanets and planetary environments—formation at wide separations, ultra-short-period planets, atmospheric biosignature claims, and the possibility of planets originating outside the Milky Way—alongside Solar System and heliophysics topics such as planetary magnetospheres, moons, cratering histories, and solar flare forecasting.
Throughout, the episodes highlight how modern astronomy is driven by major facilities and surveys (including space telescopes and spectroscopic programs) and increasingly by computational methods, from machine learning for discovery and forecasting to simulations that connect physical assumptions with observable signatures.
