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Starts With A Bang #64 - Galaxies Without Dark Matter
Over the past 2 years, an exciting development has finally arisen: scientists have measured a large number of small, diffuse galaxies exquisitely well, and have finally found their first candidate ga…
Published on 5 years ago
Starts With A Bang #63 - Exoplanets, TESS, And Beyond
Over the past 30 years, we've gone from zero exoplanets to thousands. With each new generation of telescopes, observatories, and scientists, we build upon our previous finds to make enormous advances…
Published on 5 years ago
Starts With A Bang #62 - Black Holes And ALMA
It was only back in the early 2000s that scientists were struggling to identify and weigh the small number of supermassive black holes that we'd been able to identify in the known Universe, but the p…
Published on 5 years, 2 months ago
Starts With A Bang #61 - Astronomical Instruments And Injustices
When most of us think of astronomy, we think about two types of scientists: the observers who point their telescopes at the sky and collect data, and the theorists who put together the physical rules…
Published on 5 years, 2 months ago
Starts With A Bang #60 - The End Of The Dark Ages
When we look out at the Universe today, we see that it's full of stars and galaxies. And yet, we can only see those stars and galaxies because the space between those galaxies and ourselves doesn't b…
Published on 5 years, 3 months ago
Starts With A Bang #59 - Active Galaxies
When we look out at the galaxies in the Universe, almost all of them have supermassive black holes at their centers: millions or even many billions of times more massive than our Sun is. Most of the …
Published on 5 years, 4 months ago
Starts With A Bang #58 - Gravitational Waves From Space
When it comes to gravitational waves, our terrestrial laser interferometers have provided us with unparalleled success in terms of direct detection. But they have some strong fundamental limits: thei…
Published on 5 years, 5 months ago
Starts With A Bang #57 - The Universe's Newborn Stars
Even today, the Universe is forming enormous numbers of new stars: from various nebulae throughout our galaxy to mighty starburst galaxies where the entire galaxy is an enormous star-forming region. …
Published on 5 years, 6 months ago
Starts With A Bang #56 - Dark Matter Substructure
Dark matter is often thought of as the glue that holds the Universe together. With five times as much gravity due to this unseen form of matter as compared to normal, atom-based matter, it affects ho…
Published on 5 years, 7 months ago
Starts With A Bang #55 - The Cataclysmic Deaths Of Stars
When you look up at the sky, most of the points of light we see appear to be fixed. On night-to-night timescales, the distant stars and galaxies, with the exception of a few notable variables, appear…
Published on 5 years, 8 months ago