Podcast Episodes

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, 6 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, 7 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, 8 months ago

Starts With A Bang podcast #91 — Hypermassive neutron stars

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 sta…

Published on 2 years, 9 months ago

Starts With A Bang #90 - How Galaxies Grow Up

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 al…

Published on 2 years, 10 months ago

Starts With A Bang #89 - The active threat of the Sun

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 …

Published on 2 years, 11 months ago

Starts With A Bang #88 - From dust till cosmic dawn

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. B…

Published on 3 years ago

Starts With A Bang #87 - AGNs From The South Pole

Episode 87

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 hig…

Published on 3 years, 1 month ago

Starts With A Bang #86 - Stars In The Universe

Episode 86

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 br…

Published on 3 years, 2 months ago

Starts With A Bang #85 - Planetary Formation

Episode 85

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 certa…

Published on 3 years, 3 months ago