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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 9 months, 4 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 11 months 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 1 year ago
Starts With A Bang #111 - Black Hole Jets
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 eve…
Published on 1 year, 1 month ago
Starts With A Bang #110 - Optical Interferometry
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 lo…
Published on 1 year, 2 months ago
Starts With A Bang #109 - Launching a galactic cone
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 a…
Published on 1 year, 3 months ago
Starts With A Bang #108 - A Future Particle Collider
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 …
Published on 1 year, 4 months ago
Starts With A Bang #107 - Binary Stars And Modified Gravity
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 Univers…
Published on 1 year, 5 months ago
Starts With A Bang #106 - The Troublesome Hunt for Planet Nine
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 until…
Published on 1 year, 6 months ago
Starts With A Bang #105 - Dark Matter And Galaxies
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 potential …
Published on 1 year, 7 months ago