From ancient stones to first stars

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt for your chance to win a meteorite 💥 What connects a 5,000-year-old stone circle to the most ambitious radio telescope ever built? In this episode, we travel from Stonehenge to Jodrell Bank and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) to trace humanity’s obsession with the sky — from lifting megaliths to catching whispers of the Big Bang.

We start at Stonehenge, a Neolithic “star clock” aligned with the solstices, then fast-forward through millennia to stand beneath the 76 m Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, and finally into the control rooms of the SKA: hundreds of dishes and over 100,000 antennas designed to detect the first stars and galaxies. The tools change — stones, steel, superconducting detectors — but the question stays the same: what is our place in the universe?

Topics:

* How Neolithic builders engineered and aligned Stonehenge with the Sun?

* Why Jodrell Bank became a Cold War–era listening post and a pulsar powerhouse?

* How pulsars, neutron stars, and the Crab Nebula became cosmic calibration tools?

* What the SKA will actually “hear” from the cosmic Dark Ages and first stars?

* How the Simons Observatory and SKA together will rewrite our map of the cosmos

Timestamps:

00:00 Stonehenge introduction and the mystery of its construction

01:56 Transport and engineering of the Sarsen and bluestones

05:34 Stonehenge as a solar-aligned cosmic calendar

08:00 Transition from Stone Age to modern astronomy at Jodrell Bank

09:15 Lovell Telescope history and its role in tracking Sputnik

20:00 Overview of the SKA and its global scientific mission

44:23 From ancient stones to radio telescopes: the shared human quest to understand the cosmos

Thanks to the incredible staff of Jodrell Bank for their hospitality!

Featuring Lucio Piccirillo (U. Manchester) https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/lucio.piccirillo

Keith Grainge (SKA Headquarters; Jodrell Bank scientist) Website: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/keith.grainge.html

Simon Garrington (Director, e-MERLIN, Jodrell Bank) Website: https://www.jodrellbank.net/

Learn more about the Simons Observatory: https://simonsobservatory.org/about/so-uk/

SO-UK https://www.souk.ac.uk

Learn more about what SO:UK is delivering from Michael Brown talk: https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/28120/contributions/116594/attachments/74662/107684/SO_UK_Paris_Nov_2022.pdf

The UK-based data center, in Manchester, transitioned to full operations in Spring 2025.

The SO:UK project is funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and the UKRI Carbon Reduction Fund.

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