Starts With A Bang #133 - The Milky Way's center
Here in our Universe, there are all sorts of places where stars are actively forming right now. Our galaxy is going through a relatively qui...
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Starts With A Bang podcast
Podcast by Ethan Siegel
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20 of 133 episodes
Starts With A Bang #132 - Space in the ultraviolet
Whenever you look at the Universe in a more powerful way than you ever have before, either in a new set of wavelengths, at higher sensitivit...
Starts With A Bang #131 - The Baryon Life Cycle
In order for stars to form, you need the right ingredients to make it happen: gravity, mass, time, and of course the right type of matter in...
Starts With A Bang #130 - the initial mass function of stars
One of the most foundational questions we know how to ask in astronomy is simply this: given a cloud of gas of a given mass, what types of s...
Starts With A Bang #129 - Triton and the outer solar system
We often think about the Solar System as being our own cosmic backyard, and in many ways, it is: these are the closest objects to us in all...
Starts With A Bang #128 - Planet formation and proto-protoplanets
Whenever a new star forms, several processes appear to be nearly universal. A cloud of cold molecular gas contracts, fragments, and rapidly...
Starts With A Bang #127 - Satellites and space pollution
When most of us were children, and we went to a rural area with clear skies overhead at night, we were all greeted by the same familiar sigh...
Starts With A Bang #126 - The origin of dust
Out there in the Universe, we're most aware of what we see: of all the forms of light that arrive in our eyes, instruments, telescopes, and...
Starts With A Bang #125 - Large-scale structure
One of the most exciting developments in modern astrophysics isn't merely our standard "concordance cosmology" model, but rather the cracks...
Starts With A Bang #124 - Astrochemistry
All across the Universe, stars are dying through a variety of means. They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collap...
Starts With A Bang #123 - Alien physics
One of the great discoveries to be made out there in the grand scheme of things is alien life: the first detection of life that originated,...
Starts With A Bang #122 - Galaxy evolution and JWST
It's no secret that the Universe and the objects present within it, as we see them all today, have changed over time as the Universe has gro...
Starts With A Bang #121 - Direct exoplanet imaging
It's hard to believe, but it was only back in the early 1990s that we discovered the very first planet orbiting a star other than our own Su...
Starts With A Bang #120 - Exoplanet biosignatures
Out there in the Universe, somewhere, a second example of an inhabit world or planet likely awaits us. It could be some other planet or moon...
Starts With a Bang #119 - The CMB
Perhaps the strongest evidence we've ever acquired in support of the Big Bang has been the discovery of the leftover radiation from its earl...
Starts With A Bang #118 - Snowball Earth
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...
Starts With A Bang #117 - Gravitational waves and the Universe
It might seem hard to fathom, but it hasn't even been ten full years since advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave observatories that brought...
Starts With A Bang #116 - Disintegrating exoplanets
Out there in the Universe, each star represents an opportunity: a chance for a stellar system to develop that just might possess something r...
Starts With A Bang #115 - Dwarf galaxies in isolation
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 th...
Starts With A Bang #114 - Pluto and Charon
Out there in the Universe, there are tremendous, uncountable numbers of planetary systems just waiting to be discovered. But stellar systems...