“When I was four or five years old, my mother took me out to the backyard… Halley’s Comet was coming around. She was taking an astronomy class at the time and she said, ‘Lee, there’s a comet there’. I don’t think I actually knew what I was looking at, but I still just remember very vividly how dark and interesting the sky was looking… and that just set me on this path.”

In this week’s episode of Pioneering Minds, we journey to the final frontier with Dr Lee Spitler from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where we discuss life among the stars, from supernovas to Star Wars, and address the age-old question: are there extraterrestrial lifeforms out there?