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Podcast by Ethan Siegel
Whenever a new star forms, several processes appear to be nearly universal. A cloud of cold molecular gas contracts, fragments, and rapidly...
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...
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...
One of the most exciting developments in modern astrophysics isn't merely our standard "concordance cosmology" model, but rather the cracks...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
It might seem hard to fathom, but it hasn't even been ten full years since advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave observatories that brought...
Out there in the Universe, each star represents an opportunity: a chance for a stellar system to develop that just might possess something r...
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...
Out there in the Universe, there are tremendous, uncountable numbers of planetary systems just waiting to be discovered. But stellar systems...
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 nuc...
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 ye...
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 go...
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 blac...
When you think of an active galaxy, what picture comes to mind? Do you think about a monstrous supermassive black hole feasting on tremendou...
Right now, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator/collider ever built. Accelerating protons up to 299,792...
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:...
One of the most swiftly forgotten revolutions in all of science is our understanding of the Solar System out beyond Neptune. Although Pluto...
Every January, I head to the American Astronomical Society's big annual meeting with an ulterior motive in mind. Beyond merely uncovering ne...
Have you ever wondered what the full story with the galactic center is? Sure, we have stars, gas, and an all-important supermassive black ho...
All throughout the Universe, galaxies exist in a great variety of shapes, ages, and states. Today's galaxies come in spirals, ellipticals, i...
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, w...
Happy new year, everyone, and with a new year comes a spectacular new podcast! We normally cover an intricate and underappreciated aspect of...
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 imag...
You might not think about it very often, but when it comes to the question of "how old is a star that we're observing," there are some very...
Out there in the Universe, there's a whole lot more than simply what we find in our own Solar System. Here at home, the largest, most massiv...
When we look at our nearby Universe, it's easy to recognize our own galaxy and the other large, massive ones that are nearby: Andromeda, the...
We all knew, if Einstein's General Theory of Relativity were in fact the correct theory of gravity, that it would only be a matter of time b...
Sometimes, it's hard to believe we've come as far as we have, scientifically, in such a short period of time. We only began accumulating the...
We have a pretty good idea of both what's in our Universe and how it grew up. But it's only because we have several different, completely in...
One of the most exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth doesn't require us going very far. While Mercury and the Moon have no atmospher...
Back in the 1990s, observations of type Ia supernovae were the key data set that led astronomers to conclude that the Universe's expansion w...
When stars are born, they can come with a wide variety of masses. But there are only a few ways that stars can die, and only a few types of...
One of the great advances of 20th and 21st century science has been, for the first time to show us two things: how the Universe began and wh...
For life on Earth, there's no more important source of energy than the Sun; without it, it's doubtful that life would have arisen on Earth,...
For a cosmologist like me, "cosmic dust" is a thing that's in the way, confounding our data about the pristine Universe, and it's a thing to...
The supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is a tremendously interesting area of research, advancing rapidly over the past few...
All throughout the Universe, we see stars and galaxies everywhere we look. But as we look to greater and greater distances, we're only seein...
Although it seems like a long time ago, it was as recent as the early 1990s that we had no idea whether planets in the Universe were univers...
From the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang up through and including the present day, one cosmic picture is sufficient to describe practica...
Since the advanced LIGO detectors first began operating in 2015, we've not only directly detected our first gravitational wave signals from...
It's now been nearly a full six months since the JWST was launched, and we're on the cusp of getting our first science data and images back...
When we look out at the Universe, what we see is typically what we think of: the points of light. Depending on the scales we're looking at,...
Have you ever wondered how it is that we know all we do about galaxies? How they formed, what they're made of, how we can be certain they co...
Every time we've figured out a different way to look at the Universe, going beyond the capabilities of our own meagre senses, we've opened u...