Starts With A Bang podcast

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 stars will form? How many stars of a given mass will you wind...

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 the Universe, and our only opportunity to study lunar and pl...

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 sight: a dark night sky, glittering with many hundreds or even t...

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 detectors. Much more difficult to see, as well as unders...

One of the most exciting developments in modern astrophysics isn't merely our standard "concordance cosmology" model, but rather the cracks that seem to be emerging in it. Sure, we'v...

All across the Universe, stars are dying through a variety of means. They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, t...

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, survives, and continues to live beyond our own home planet o...

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 grown up over the past 13.8 billion years. Galaxies are lar...

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 Sun. Fast forward to the present day, here in 2025, and we...

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 within our own Solar System; it could be a spacefaring, int...

Perhaps the strongest evidence we've ever acquired in support of the Big Bang has been the discovery of the leftover radiation from its early, hot, dense state: today's cosmic microwave backgr...

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 pla...

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...

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 intellige...

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 ...

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; t...

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, an...

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 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...

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 lon...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 un...

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 potenti...

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, the...

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...

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, gi...

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 b...

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...

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 simple approximations that we make: measure it...

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 massive object is the Sun: a bright, hot, luminous star, whi...

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 major galaxies in nearby groups like Bode's Galaxy,...

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 before we detected one of its unmistakable predictions:...

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 first very strong evidence for supermassive black h...

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 independent lines of evidence that point to the same...

One of the most exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth doesn't require us going very far. While Mercury and the Moon have no atmosphere and Venus is an inferno-esque hellscape, Mars offers...

Back in the 1990s, observations of type Ia supernovae were the key data set that led astronomers to conclude that the Universe's expansion was accelerating, and some new form of energy, now know...

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 remnants that can be left behind: white dwarfs, neutron star...

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 what the Universe looks like today. The modern frontier is all...

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, and it certainly wouldn't have evolved to give rise to the w...

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 be understood so that it can be properly subtracted out. Bu...

The supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is a tremendously interesting area of research, advancing rapidly over the past few years. While most of these observations focus on either high...

All throughout the Universe, we see stars and galaxies everywhere we look. But as we look to greater and greater distances, we're only seeing the light that's the easiest to see: the ones from the bri...

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 universal, common, uncommon, or even exceedingly rare. While certai...

From the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang up through and including the present day, one cosmic picture is sufficient to describe practically everything we observe: the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM...

Since the advanced LIGO detectors first began operating in 2015, we've not only directly detected our first gravitational wave signals from merging objects in the Universe, we've observed close to 100...

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 from some 1.5 million kilometers away. There are all sorts o...

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, this can come in the form of stars, galaxies, or even cluste...

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 contain dark matter, and how they grew up in the context of th...