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Starts With A Bang #54 - The Origin Of Stars
One of the great challenges for astronomy is to determine, in gory detail, how stars are formed from a mere cloud of molecular gas and dust. Although the general picture is simple, where gravitationa…
Published on 5 years, 9 months ago
Starts With A Bang #53 - Exoplanets From Kepler To TESS And Beyond
How many planets are out there in the Universe? How many stars have planets, and what kinds of planets do stars of various types have? How close are we to doing direct imaging, finding whether some o…
Published on 5 years, 10 months ago
Starts With A Bang #52 - The Thirty Meter Telescope
The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons. As we improve our optics, our instruments, and our observing techniques, we can reveal progressively more of the Universe than we've ever s…
Published on 5 years, 11 months ago
Starts With A Bang #51 - Cosmology At The Edge Of Time
Have you ever wondered what the first moments of our Universe were like? Not just going back towards the hot Big Bang, but at the very first fractions of a second that come after, during, and even be…
Published on 6 years ago
Starts With A Bang #50: The Hunt For Planet Nine And Beyond
What lies out there, in the outer Solar System, beyond the orbit of the last known planet? Up until 1992, you would have said Pluto and its moon (maybe "moons" if you were willing to speculate), but …
Published on 6 years, 1 month ago
Starts With A Bang #49 - The LHC And The Future Of Physics
The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN, is the most powerful particle accelerator and collider in human history, and the detectors that observe the collisional debris are the most sensitive and c…
Published on 6 years, 2 months ago
Starts With A Bang #48 - The Event Horizon Telescope
Earlier this year, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration revealed the first image that directly showed the existence of an event horizon around a black hole. This image, constructed from ma…
Published on 6 years, 3 months ago
Starts With A Bang #47 - Ice Giants At The Solar System's Edge
What do we really know, and what mysteries are left to solve, about the outer worlds of our Solar System, and about the gas giant and ice giant worlds found throughout the Universe? Remarkably, if yo…
Published on 6 years, 4 months ago
Starts With A Bang #46 - Experimental Particle Searches
We know that there's more to the Universe than we presently know. As successful as the Standard Model may be, it cannot describe everything we observe to be true about the Universe. Neutrinos oscilla…
Published on 6 years, 4 months ago
Starts With A Bang #45 - Beyond Earth 2.0
With all the planets out there in the galaxy and Universe, it's only a matter of time and data until we find another one with life on it. (Probably.) But while most of the searches have focused on fi…
Published on 6 years, 6 months ago