URN

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

It's a beautiful poem, but have you ever wondered about how Father Christmas could possibly deliver all those presents in one night?

How much would Santa's sleigh actually weigh?

And how much over-the-limit would Santa be once he's drunk all those brandies?

Find out on the Science Show, tomorrow, from 6-7pm.

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Alcohol

Also, on the experimental side of things, Grace and I (Emma) decide to risk the wrath of our housemates and set things on fire. Well, more specifically, Christmas puddings.

Yellow Flame - Vitamin B

Why did we do this? To see why different flames burn different colours, of course.

Not just to burn things.

Nope.

(It was fun though!)

Purple Flame - Potassium Chloride

This was the left-overs after we'd conducted our 'experiment'... Our poor housemates. At least we washed up.

In this one-off cookery 'Come Dine With Me' special, we chat to Professor Chris Conselice about what ingredients make a galaxy, especially the different types of stars you can find within them.

Please note: We may or may not have Dave Lamb (him off of Channel 4) in the studio with us during the show. But listen in to find out!

So what ingredients make a galaxy?

Firstly there are main sequence stars (see left) like our Sun.

Main Sequence Stars

Planetary Nebula

But what happens when a star ends its life? Well, that depends on how big the star is, and we will speak more about this during the show. A star could end its life become a 'Planetary Nebula' (see right) or it might even become a 'White Dwarf' or a 'Neutron Star'. The biggest stars are thought to become stellar black holes!

Also, NEW for this show, we will be doing some science that you can do in your kitchen. We got our intrepid reporters, Carl and Dan, to try and generate electricity from things that you might find lying around a student home.

Lemons!

The Life of a Star

In the last of our 'guest lecturer' series, we chat to Professor Ed Copeland about the origins of the Universe, the Big Bang, inflation, quarks, 'dark' matter, 'normal' matter, 'anti-'matter and 'does it even' matter?

Dark Matter

To the left is an image of the simulated dark matter distribution in our Universe. We can't see dark matter because it doesn't interact with visible light. It does interact with gravity however, so we can see its effects.

Standard Model

To the right is the Standard Model of particle physics, and it represents what we believe makes up matter in our Universe. Listen in on Monday to hear all about how we know this and whether there are any other particles in the Universe we don't know about.

If you have any questions you'd like to ask during the show (6-7pm on Monday 28th November), please text us for free on the webtext or tweet us @urn1350.

If you can't listen to the show LIVE, the podcast will be up and ready to listen to on Monday night, either on our podcast channel here on the URN website and also on iTunes. We'd love to hear what you've thought about the Science Show so far this year, so please contact us on our Twitter account @urnscienceshow.

On the 21st November, we spoke to Dr Omar Almaini from the astronomy department about Supermassive Black Holes.

No. This does not mean an analysis of the underlying rhythm and structure of the Muse song.

We discussed:
- How do black holes form?
- What happens as you get closer to a black hole?
- What are quasars and active galaxies?
- Why don't black holes keep 'sucking stuff in'?

This is an artist's impression of a black hole:

Supermassive Black Hole

And here are some black holes (or Active Galactic Nuclei - AGN) for real:

AGN

To see a movie of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy (made with photos of real astronomical observations), please follow the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOW-NYPEp84&feature=relmfu

We talked about spaghettification earlier, here's a artists impression to make you smile!
Spaghettification

So how big is a black hole in comparison to an everyday place?

Black hole size comparison

Today we shall be talking to our resident scientific expert, Boris Haeussler, about Galaxy Zoo.

Zoo

No! Not that kind of zoo.

Anyway, below are a couple of examples of galaxies that might make an appearance on Galaxy Zoo, the website where non-scientists are encouraged to take part in real astronomy research and classify galaxies.
Galaxies

On the left is M87, an elliptical galaxy which is part of the Virgo Cluster. On the right is an example of a beautiful spiral galaxy. Computers are rubbish at telling the difference between different shapes and morphologies of galaxies, which is why citizen science is a much better concept.

As well as classifying galaxies, you might find some other interesting looking objects. The Galaxy Zoo project managed to find galaxies that looked like every letter in the alphabet. Take a look at the picture below...

The Alphabet in Galaxies

Here are some links that you also might enjoy if you want to make a contribution to science:

Galaxy Zoo -
www.galaxyzoo.org/

Medical Research -