Starts With A Bang podcast

Oct 06 2024 110 ep. 66 mins 1.4k

Starts With A Bang podcast artwork

The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. There’s a cosmic story uniting us. We’re determined to bring it to everyone.

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Starts With A Bang #110 - Optical Interferometry

Oct 06 2024 100 mins

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*, des

Starts With A Bang #109 - Launching a galactic cone

Sep 07 2024 89 mins

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 desc

Starts With A Bang #108 - A Future Particle Collider

Aug 03 2024 98 mins

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 dete

Starts With A Bang #107 - Binary Stars And Modified Gravity

Jul 06 2024 112 mins

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%)

Starts With A Bang #106 - The Troublesome Hunt for Planet Nine

Jun 08 2024 93 mins

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

Starts With A Bang #105 - Dark Matter And Galaxies

May 11 2024 98 mins

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-

Starts With A Bang #104 - The Magnetized Galactic Center

Apr 05 2024 102 mins

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 feature

Starts With A Bang #103 - Active galaxies and the universe

Mar 09 2024 90 mins

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 al

Starts With a Bang #102 - The missing exoplanets

Feb 03 2024 106 mins

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. Bu

Starts With A Bang #101 - Quantum Computing

Jan 06 2024 98 mins

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'