Starts With A Bang podcast

When we search for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look for planets that are similar to Earth. To most of us, those signatures would look the same as the ones we'd see if we viewed our planet today: blue oceans, green-and-brown continents, polar icecaps, wispy white clouds, an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen and oxygen, and even the modern signs of human activity, such as increasing greenhouse gas emissions, planet mod...

It might seem hard to fathom, but it hasn't even been ten full years since advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave observatories that brought us our very first successful direct detection, turned on for the very first time. In the time since, it's been joined by the Virgo and KAGRA detectors, and humanity is currently closing in on 300 confirmed gravitational wave detection events. What was an unconfirmed prediction of Einste...

Out there in the Universe, each star represents an opportunity: a chance for a stellar system to develop that just might possess something remarkable. While we normally think about life, and intelligent life at that, as the grand prize the Universe has to offer, there are a wide variety of fascinating phenomena that are out there to consider. Whereas Mercury, for example, is the closest world to our Sun in our own Solar System, it ...

Sure, it's easy to look out at the Universe and take stock of what we find. Although spiral and elliptical galaxies house the majority of the Universe's stars, represented locally by galaxies like Andromeda and our own Milky Way, the overwhelming majority of galaxies are much smaller and lower in mass than we and our cousins are. These low-mass galaxies, the dwarf galaxies in the Universe, represent upwards of 97% of all th...

Out there in the Universe, there are tremendous, uncountable numbers of planetary systems just waiting to be discovered. But stellar systems won't just consist of planets orbiting a parent star; there will be moons, asteroids, Kuiper belt-like objects, and many of them will be bound together into their own rich sets of systems, with both irregular and round bodies comprising these planetary systems.

Here in our own Solar System,...

When it comes to stars, most of them, for most of their lives, behave in a very similar fashion to the Sun. In their cores, they undergo nuclear fusion, which provides energy and creates radiation, and that outward radiation pressure holds the star up, internally, against gravitational collapse. For most stars, this balance between the pressure from outward radiation and the inward force from gravitation is nearly perfect all throu...

When we look out at our home galaxy, the Milky Way, we have to recognize that even though it's been growing and evolving for 13.8 billion years, we're only observing it as it is right now: a snapshot in time determined by the light that's arriving in our instruments right now. However, just like we're living "right now" in human history but can, through the science of archaeology, learn about historical events that happened many th...

In this Universe, there are a few objects that are just larger, and a few events that are just more powerful, than others. As far as size goes, the cosmic web creates some of the largest features ever discovered, with the largest galaxy filaments and the largest regions devoid of galaxies spanning as much as ~2 billion light-years. No robust, verified structure has ever been found that's larger. Meanwhile, as far as energy and powe...

It's hard to imagine, but it was only five years ago, in 2019, that humanity feasted our collective eyes on the first direct image of a black hole's event horizon. Thanks to the technique of very long baseline interferometry and the power of arrays of radio telescopes stitched together from all across the Earth, we were able to resolve the event horizon of the black hole M87*, despite the fact that it's an impressive 55 million li...

When you think of an active galaxy, what picture comes to mind? Do you think about a monstrous supermassive black hole feasting on tremendous stores of gas and other forms of matter? Do you picture an enormous disk of accreted matter, being accelerated, heated, and eventually shot out along two jets, each perpendicular to the disk itself? This common picture of active galaxies describes many of the most prominent ones, but isn'...

Right now, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator/collider ever built. Accelerating protons up to 299,792,455 m/s, just 3 m/s shy of the speed of light, they smash together at energies of 14 TeV, creating all sorts of new particles (and antiparticles) from raw energy, leveraging Einstein's famous E = mc² in an innovative way. By building detectors around the collision points, we can uncover al...

On the largest of cosmic scales, the best description we have of our Universe is known as the ΛCDM model with an inflationary hot Big Bang: our consensus cosmology. It tells us that we have a Universe consistent with being made of about 5% normal matter, a little bit of radiation in the form of photons, around 0.1% neutrinos, and the rest made of the mysterious dark matter (~27%) and dark energy (~68%). Governed by General Relativi...

One of the most swiftly forgotten revolutions in all of science is our understanding of the Solar System out beyond Neptune. Although Pluto was discovered nearly a full century ago, it wasn't until the early 1990s that we even discovered the next object beyond Neptune that wasn't also part of the Plutonian system. And yet, in the 30 short years that have passed since then, we've learned so much more about the structur...

Every January, I head to the American Astronomical Society's big annual meeting with an ulterior motive in mind. Beyond merely uncovering new scientific findings, gathering information for potential stories, and connecting with friends and colleagues, I also look to meet emerging junior researchers who are swiftly becoming not only experts, but leaders, in their particular sub-field of astronomy.

One of the most popular researc...

Have you ever wondered what the full story with the galactic center is? Sure, we have stars, gas, and an all-important supermassive black hole, but for hundreds of light-years around the center, there's a remarkable story going on that's traced out in a variety of elements at a whole slew of different temperatures. Imprinted in that material is a remarkable set of features that reveals the magnetic fields generated in our...

All throughout the Universe, galaxies exist in a great variety of shapes, ages, and states. Today's galaxies come in spirals, ellipticals, irregulars, and rings, all ranging in size from behemoths hundreds or even thousands of times larger than the Milky Way to dwarf galaxies with fewer than 0.1% of the stars present here in our cosmic home. But at the centers of practically all galaxies, particularly the large ones, lie superm...

Up until the early 1990s, we didn't know what sorts of planets lived around stars other than our Sun. Were they like our own Solar System, with inner, rocky planets close to our star and large, giant worlds farther away? It turned out that exoplanetary systems come in a great variety of configurations: with planets of all sizes, masses, and distances from their parent stars. But some configurations are more common than others.

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Happy new year, everyone, and with a new year comes a spectacular new podcast! We normally cover an intricate and underappreciated aspect of astrophysics on the podcast, but I had the opportunity to bring on a true expert in the field of quantum computing and just couldn't pass it up.

You've likely heard a lot of noise about quantum computers and the benefits that they're poised to bring, with buzzwords like "P=NP,...

It's hard to believe, but it was only back just a year and a half ago, in mid-2022, that we had yet to encounter the very first science images released by JWST. In the time that's passed since, we've gotten a revolutionary glimpse of our Universe, replete with tremendous new discoveries: the farthest black hole, the most distant galaxy, the farthest red supergiant star, and many other cosmic record-breakers.

What is it ...