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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-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, …
Published on 20 hours ago
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, survives, and continues to live beyond our own home planet …
Published on 1 month ago
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 grown up over the past 13.8 billion years. Galaxies are larger…
Published on 2 months ago
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 Sun. Fast forward to the present day, here in 2025, and we're…
Published on 3 months, 1 week ago
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 within our own Solar System; it could be a spacefaring, in…
Published on 4 months ago
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 early, hot, dense state: today's cosmic microwave background, o…
Published on 5 months, 1 week ago
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 look the same as the ones we'd see if we viewed our planet…
Published on 6 months ago
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 us our very first successful direct detection, turned on fo…
Published on 7 months ago
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 remarkable. While we normally think about life, and intellig…
Published on 8 months, 1 week ago
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 the Universe's stars, represented locally by galaxies like An…
Published on 8 months, 4 weeks ago