Up Next
Back to Show
PBS Space Time
Can Viruses Travel Between Planets?
Season 6
Episode 18
In the midst of a pandemic, we sure are thinking about viruses a lot. That’s right, even astrophysicists are pondering these bizarre little critters. In fact, astrovirology, although very new, is actually an emerging subfield of astrobiology. And that’s because it turns out viruses don’t just influence organisms - they’re incredibly important on a planetary scale. Perhaps an interplanetary scale.
Support Provided By
16:28
Could sending a quantum twin across the galaxy make you both old and young at the same time?
17:39
It's possible that an event horizon is forming right behind and you won't know until its too late.
20:48
Are there no alien signals to find... or do we need to update how we search for them?
14:27
Physicists hope Planck stars can save us from black hole singularities and paradoxes.
17:41
Galaxies older than the universe? Webb's findings keep defying our best explanations.
16:16
Earth's core: solid or liquid? Yes — we know more about distant galaxies than our own interior.
14:42
Gödel found a time-travel solution in General Relativity, revealing spacetime can loop on itself.
18:46
Tardigrades can survive almost anything—even most of Mars. But one Martian chemical stops even them.
18:18
The Higgs boson may open a portal to hidden particles that could explain dark matter.
19:02
The universe expands faster. “Dark energy” may not be constant after all.
16:26
There’s a new generation of experiments that may unlock the gravity particle.
18:33
The universe thrums with quantum fields, except something may be missing: the sterile neutrino.