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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 1 day, 7 hours 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 weeks, 1 day 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 2 months 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 3 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 3 months, 4 weeks 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 5 months 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 5 months, 3 weeks ago
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 won't just consist of planets orbiting a parent star; ther…
Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago
Starts With A Bang podcast #113 - Weird stars
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, a…
Published on 7 months, 3 weeks ago
Starts With A Bang #112 - Galactic Archaeology
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…
Published on 9 months ago