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Starts With A Bang #101 - Quantum Computing
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 …
Published on 1 year, 8 months ago
Starts With A Bang podcast #100 - Galaxies in the JWST era
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, we've…
Published on 1 year, 8 months ago
Starts With a Bang #99 - Varying and evolving stars
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 its mass, radiu…
Published on 1 year, 9 months ago
Starts With A Bang #98 - The Line Between Star And Planet
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, while …
Published on 1 year, 10 months ago
Starts With A Bang #97 - Tiny Galaxies and Us
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, the gr…
Published on 2 years ago
Starts With a Bang #96 - Detecting the Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background
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: th…
Published on 2 years ago
Starts With A Bang #95 - Supermassive Black Holes and more
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 holes du…
Published on 2 years, 1 month ago
Starts With A Bang #94 - Dark Energy And Cosmic Growth
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 consen…
Published on 2 years, 2 months ago
Starts With A Bang #93 - Mars From The Ground
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 a …
Published on 2 years, 4 months ago
Starts With A Bang #92 - Type Ia Supernovae
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 known a…
Published on 2 years, 5 months ago