Starts With A Bang podcast

All across the Universe, stars are dying through a variety of means. They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed...

One of the great discoveries to be made out there in the grand scheme of things is alien life: the first detection of life that originated, survives, and continues to live beyond our own home planet of Earth. An even...

It's no secret that the Universe and the objects present within it, as we see them all today, have changed over time as the Universe has grown up over the past 13.8 billion years. Galaxies are larger, more massive, more...

It's hard to believe, but it was only back in the early 1990s that we discovered the very first planet orbiting a star other than our own Sun. Fast forward to the present day, here in 2025, and we're closing in on 6000...

Out there in the Universe, somewhere, a second example of an inhabit world or planet likely awaits us. It could be some other planet or moon within our own Solar System; it could be a spacefaring, interstellar...

Perhaps the strongest evidence we've ever acquired in support of the Big Bang has been the discovery of the leftover radiation from its early, hot, dense state: today's cosmic microwave background, or CMB. While there...

When we search for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look for planets that are similar to Earth. To most of us, those signatures would look the same as the ones we'd see if we viewed our planet today: blue oceans...

It might seem hard to fathom, but it hasn't even been ten full years since advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave observatories that brought us our very first successful direct detection, turned on for the very first...

Out there in the Universe, each star represents an opportunity: a chance for a stellar system to develop that just might possess something remarkable. While we normally think about life, and intelligent life at that, as...

Sure, it's easy to look out at the Universe and take stock of what we find. Although spiral and elliptical galaxies house the majority of the Universe's stars, represented locally by galaxies like Andromeda and our own...

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; there will be moons...

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, and that outward...

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 in time determined...

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 ever discovered, with...

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 long baseline...

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 an enormous disk of...

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 together at energies...

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 Universe consistent with...

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 the early 1990s that...

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 stories, and...

Have you ever wondered what the full story with the galactic center is? Sure, we have stars, gas, and an all-important supermassive black hole, but for hundreds of light-years around the center, there's a remarkable...

All throughout the Universe, galaxies exist in a great variety of shapes, ages, and states. Today's galaxies come in spirals, ellipticals, irregulars, and rings, all ranging in size from behemoths hundreds or even...

Up until the early 1990s, we didn't know what sorts of planets lived around stars other than our Sun. Were they like our own Solar System, with inner, rocky planets close to our star and large, giant worlds farther...

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 bring on a true...

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 gotten a...