2025 Year-End Special

What were our joyfully cool cosmic things of 2025? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome three members of The LIUniverse production team: Jon Barnes, our Editor and self-proclaimed “#1 LIUniverse Fan,” Stacey Severn, our Social Media Manager/Community Director, and physics student Eleanor Adams, the show’s first intern.

Unlike nearly every episode so far, this time, rather than limit ourselves to one joyfully cool cosmic thing, the team is going to each share their individual joyfully cool cosmic things of 2025. Chuck’s saving his for later, so instead, we’re just going to jump right into everyone’s favorite “cosmic thing of the year”, starting with our co-host, Allen Liu.

Allen picks the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Allen and Chuck, who is also on the Rubin’s Science Advisory Committee and has been involved in the development of the Observatory for over a quarter century, discuss how truly amazing the images are in terms of detail and resolution.

Allen shares that he’s most excited to see images of transients like asteroids and gravitational lensing, since the Rubin will be taking images of the same areas twice with a gap of one week. Chuck talks about the citizen science aspect of the Rubin and encourages each of you in our audience to try and discover something on your own.

We hear about some of Allen’s published papers, including one on using VR for scientific research. The group talks about VR (including Beat Saber) and Jon shares his experience using VR technology to record his senior project at the Harold Ramis Film School at Second City, and the difficulty he had with the audio.

For Eleanor, this year’s cool cosmic thing was highly personal: her studies in modern physics this year, learning more than ever about what we don’t know, like the gap between classical and quantum physics! As she puts it, “the matter-antimatter asymmetry…broke my mind.” She also shares a little inspiration from Cal Sagan’s Cosmos.

Stacey’s cosmically cool thing of the year is relatively current: Comet C/2025 K1 ATLAS, which recently broke into 3 parts. The team compares this with the breakup of all breakups: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which broke up in 1994 on its way to a collision with Jupiter.

Jon’s joyfully cool cosmic year end thingamabob is about the new science fiction show Pluribus created by Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul), and he’s got a question for Chuck. How long would it take a signal like the one in Pluribus to travel from a star 600 light years away, like Betelgeuse or Antares? Without dropping any spoilers, the team ponders why an alien race would have reached out to Earth based on what they might have seen around the time of Charlemagne, and whether being subsumed in a hive mind would be good or bad.

This is a bittersweet episode, though, because we officially bid farewell to the show’s long time editor, Jon Barnes, who is moving on to a gig as a full-time content creator for a meal prep company that will involve lots of Jon cooking and filming himself while he does.

Finally, it’s time to wrap up the episode with Chuck’s Picture of the Year, which is related to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, but not in a way you might expect. It’s a photo of Vera Rubin when she was 10 years old. As Chuck puts it, “Who would have known that 25 years later, she would change our understanding of the cosmos itself?”

Happy New Year from The LIUniverse crew!

If you’d like to know more about what Jon’s up to post-LIUniverse, you can check out his TikTok @iheartjonbarnes.

We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon.

Credits for Images and Music Used in this Episode:

• Galaxies imaged by the Vera Rubin Observatory. – Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
• Artist illustration of gravitational lensing. – Credit: Public Domain
• Comet C/2025 K1 ATLAS. – Credit: Creative Commons / Dimitrios Katevainis
• Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. – Credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Weaver and E. Smith (STScI)
• Impacts on Jupiter from the broken-up comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. – Credit: Hubble Space Telescope Comet Team and NASA
• Image collage of Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. – Credit: ESO, P.Kervella, Digitized Sky Survey 2 and A. Fujii
• Image of astronomer Vera Rubin, age 10. – Credit: Vera Rubin family, used with permission
• Music Used In This Episode: Goin' Home, derived from Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, performed by the United States Air Force Band. – Credit: Public Domain.

#LIUniverse #AstronomyPodcast #CometC2025K1ATLAS #CometShoemakerLevy9 #VeraRubin