Starts With A Bang podcast

Feb 15 2025 114 ep. 67 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.

  Science
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Starts With A Bang #114 - Pluto and Charon

Feb 15 2025 98 mins  
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 th

Starts With A Bang podcast #113 - Weird stars

Jan 11 2025 97 mins  
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

Starts With A Bang #112 - Galactic Archaeology

Dec 07 2024 88 mins  
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,

Starts With A Bang #111 - Black Hole Jets

Nov 09 2024 96 mins  
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

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-