Your friendly neighbourhood astrophysicist. I’m Dr Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me!
I have also written a few books. My latest, “A Brief History of Black Holes”, is available in hardback, e-book and audio (which I narrated myself!)
My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
From Dr. Becky. Above and below our galaxy the Milky Way are two gigantic bubbles blasting out gamma rays, the most energetic light in the Universe. For 15 years, we’ve been trying to figure out what created them. We thought we had the answer. And now new research has just complicated everything. These are the…
From Dr. Becky. AD | Go to https://surfshark.com/drbecky and use code DRBECKY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN | Above and below our galaxy the Milky Way are two gigantic bubbles blasting out gamma rays, the most energetic light in the Universe. For 15 years, we’ve been trying to figure out…
From Dr. Becky. These are the big events coming up in 2026 in astrophysics. April will hopefully see the launch of Artemis II, NASA’s mission crewed by astronauts that will loop around the Moon – all in prep for landing humans on the Moon again in a few years time with the Artemis IV mission.…
From Dr. Becky. Lucky for dark matter, the Universe is also expanding. When we look out at distant galaxies they all appear to be moving away from us, because the space itself in between them is getting bigger, spreading out the energy. So in the same way that photons, particles of light travelling through the…
From Dr. Becky. Why doesn’t dark matter collapse? Think about it, gravity pulls on it. There’s a huge amount of it; outweighing all the normal matter in the Universe. So why doesn’t it form dark stars? Dark black holes? Or entire dark galaxies? Instead, it just sits there… in enormous, fuzzy clouds around galaxies. And…
From Dr. Becky. AD | Download UPDF 2.0 with an exclusive offer: https://updf.com/updf-sales-promotion/?utm_source=youtube-DrBecky-2603-claire&utm_medium=en&utm_campaign=claire202603&packageKey=overseapromotion ✔ One license works on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and web ✔ Useful for research, documentation, and long-form reports Learn more about UPDF: https://updf.com/?utm_source=youtube-DrBecky2603-claire&utm_medium=DrBecky&utm_campaign=claire202603&packageKey=overseapromotion Try UPDF AI (chat with PDFs & summarize documents): https://ai.updf.com/chat-pdf/?utm_source=youtube-DrBecky-2603-claire&utm_medium=DrBecky&utm_campaign=claire202603&packageKey=overseapromotion Why doesn’t dark matter collapse? Think about it,…
From Dr. Becky. Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) will swing past its closest approach to the Earth on the 19th April on its orbit the Sun, which takes it 160,000 years to get all the way from the Oort cloud on the edge of the Solar System. Because we haven’t seen this before, we don’t have…
From Dr. Becky. Each year NASA puts out a call to the astro community to say “please send us your proposals for what you’d like to use JWST for” and you have to write a very detailed document justifying the science case and how you’d use it, they all get ranked by a panel and…
From Dr. Becky. How much of the science in Project Hail Mary is actually possible? Because this story is packed with real science! I got to sit down with Ryan Gosling to chat about how the science in Project Hail Mary (one of the most scientifically ambitious sci-fi stories ever written) was translated from the…
From Dr. Becky. How much of the science in Project Hail Mary is actually possible? Because this story is packed with real science! I got to sit down with Ryan Gosling and author Andy Weir to chat about how the science in Project Hail Mary (one of the most scientifically ambitious sci-fi stories ever written)…
From Dr. Becky. How much of the science in Project Hail Mary is actually possible? Because this story is packed with real science! I got to sit down with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to chat about how the science in Project Hail Mary (one of the most scientifically ambitious sci-fi stories ever written)…
From Dr. Becky. AD – Download Opera for free and try it today: https://opr.as/Opera-browser-drbecky | Hello and welcome to this episode of Night Sky News for March 2026 with me astrophysicist, Dr Becky Smethurst. This is the show where we chat about what you should look out for in the night sky in the next…
From Dr. Becky. How much of the science in Project Hail Mary is actually possible? Because this story is packed with real science! I got to sit down with Ryan Gosling to chat about how the science in Project Hail Mary (one of the most scientifically ambitious sci-fi stories ever written) was translated from the…
From Dr. Becky. One of the central ideas in Project Hail Mary is that life can spread between star systems, a real scientific idea idea known as Panspermia that suggests that microbial life can travel between planets and stars on asteroids or even tiny dust grains to eventually spawn life on other planets, giving all…
From Dr. Becky. We did it we made it through the dark, cold winter and equinox is right around the corner. The day with equal daytime and nighttime, except that’s not quite true. Equal day and night is known as equilux, not equinox, and usually we don’t quite have equal day and night on the…
From Dr. Becky. How much of the science in Project Hail Mary is actually possible? Because this story is packed with real science! I got to sit down with Ryan Gosling and author Andy Weir to chat about how the science in Project Hail Mary (one of the most scientifically ambitious sci-fi stories ever written)…
From Dr. Becky. An astrophysicist breaks down the science of Project Hail Mary FEATURING RYAN GOSLING! Now out on my channel: https://youtu.be/lYHCTEnYOr4?si=jXWXMQ8utn2OYVmy @SonyPicsUK@AmazonMGMStudios #projecthailmary #shorts 👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about black holes, cosmology, dark matter, the early universe, the James Webb…
From Dr. Becky. Our predictions of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis come from modelling how the strong and weak force behave in a rapidly expanding and cooling universe. So we know that when it’s still very hot get a lot of weak force interactions with neutrons merging with neutrinos to make protons and electrons, and also protons…
From Dr. Becky. The Big Bang Theory is nearly perfect, except for one glaring problem – where is all the Lithium? According to the theory predictions there should be over three times as much Lithium in the Universe than we’ve found with our observations. So is this a case of we’ve been looking in the…
From Dr. Becky. AD – To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for 30 days visit https://brilliant.org/DrBecky and you’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription which gives you unlimited daily access to Brilliant. | The Big Bang Theory is nearly perfect, except for one glaring problem – where is all the…