Starts With A Bang podcast
Episodes
Starts With A Bang #127 - Satellites and space pollution
07 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When most of us were children, and we went to a rural area with clear skies overhead at night, we were all greeted by the same familiar sight: a dark ...
Starts With A Bang #126 - The origin of dust
07 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Out there in the Universe, we're most aware of what we see: of all the forms of light that arrive in our eyes, instruments, telescopes, and detect...
Starts With A Bang #125 - Large-scale structure
11 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most exciting developments in modern astrophysics isn't merely our standard "concordance cosmology" model, but rather the cra...
Starts With A Bang #124 - Astrochemistry
13 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 superno...
Starts With A Bang #123 - Alien physics
08 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Starts With A Bang #122 - Galaxy evolution and JWST
11 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Starts With A Bang #121 - Direct exoplanet imaging
06 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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. Fas...
Starts With A Bang #120 - Exoplanet biosignatures
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ou...
Starts With a Bang #119 - The CMB
05 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #118 - Snowball Earth
07 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Starts With A Bang #117 - Gravitational waves and the Universe
10 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #116 - Disintegrating exoplanets
05 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Out there in the Universe, each star represents an opportunity: a chance for a stellar system to develop that just might possess something remarkable....
Starts With A Bang #115 - Dwarf galaxies in isolation
15 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Univ...
Starts With A Bang #114 - Pluto and Charon
15 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Out there in the Universe, there are tremendous, uncountable numbers of planetary systems just waiting to be discovered. But stellar systems won't...
Starts With A Bang podcast #113 - Weird stars
11 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 fusio...
Starts With A Bang #112 - Galactic Archaeology
07 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #111 - Black Hole Jets
09 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 co...
Starts With A Bang #110 - Optical Interferometry
06 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Starts With A Bang #109 - Launching a galactic cone
07 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
Starts With A Bang #108 - A Future Particle Collider
03 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Starts With A Bang #107 - Binary Stars And Modified Gravity
06 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 conse...
Starts With A Bang #106 - The Troublesome Hunt for Planet Nine
08 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most swiftly forgotten revolutions in all of science is our understanding of the Solar System out beyond Neptune. Although Pluto was disc...
Starts With A Bang #105 - Dark Matter And Galaxies
11 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every January, I head to the American Astronomical Society's big annual meeting with an ulterior motive in mind. Beyond merely uncovering new scie...
Starts With A Bang #104 - The Magnetized Galactic Center
05 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Starts With A Bang #103 - Active galaxies and the universe
09 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
All throughout the Universe, galaxies exist in a great variety of shapes, ages, and states. Today's galaxies come in spirals, ellipticals, irregul...
Starts With a Bang #102 - The missing exoplanets
03 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 in...
Starts With A Bang #101 - Quantum Computing
06 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Happy new year, everyone, and with a new year comes a spectacular new podcast! We normally cover an intricate and underappreciated aspect of astrophys...
Starts With A Bang podcast #100 - Galaxies in the JWST era
09 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 rel...
Starts With a Bang #99 - Varying and evolving stars
11 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 v...
Starts With A Bang #98 - The Line Between Star And Planet
14 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ob...
Starts With A Bang #97 - Tiny Galaxies and Us
02 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With a Bang #96 - Detecting the Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background
12 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 befor...
Starts With A Bang #95 - Supermassive Black Holes and more
15 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 f...
Starts With A Bang #94 - Dark Energy And Cosmic Growth
17 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 in...
Starts With A Bang #93 - Mars From The Ground
06 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 an...
Starts With A Bang #92 - Type Ia Supernovae
08 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 a...
Starts With A Bang podcast #91 — Hypermassive neutron stars
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Starts With A Bang #90 - How Galaxies Grow Up
11 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 Uni...
Starts With A Bang #89 - The active threat of the Sun
14 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 cer...
Starts With A Bang #88 - From dust till cosmic dawn
10 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 unders...
Starts With A Bang #87 - AGNs From The South Pole
12 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is a tremendously interesting area of research, advancing rapidly over the past few years. Whi...
Starts With A Bang #86 - Stars In The Universe
08 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ligh...
Starts With A Bang #85 - Planetary Formation
10 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #84 - Cosmological Mysteries
20 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang up through and including the present day, one cosmic picture is sufficient to describe practically everyt...
Starts With A Bang #83 - The Longest Gravitational Waves
03 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since the advanced LIGO detectors first began operating in 2015, we've not only directly detected our first gravitational wave signals from merging ob...
Starts With A Bang #82 - JWST And Infrared Astronomy
12 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It's now been nearly a full six months since the JWST was launched, and we're on the cusp of getting our first science data and images back from some ...
Starts With A Bang podcast #81 - The Local Bubble
08 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When we look out at the Universe, what we see is typically what we think of: the points of light. Depending on the scales we're looking at, this can c...
Starts With A Bang #80 - The Cosmos, James Webb, and Beyond
09 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever wondered how it is that we know all we do about galaxies? How they formed, what they're made of, how we can be certain they contain dark...
Starts With A Bang #79 - The Far Infrared Universe
19 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Every time we've figured out a different way to look at the Universe, going beyond the capabilities of our own meagre senses, we've opened up an oppor...
Starts With A Bang #78 - From Failed Stars To SETI
06 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When you start looking at the Universe, you realize that there are more signals out there than are simply generated by stars. On the one hand, you hav...
Starts With A Bang #77 - Stellar Destruction
09 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Some stars, as they go through their life cycles, will die of natural causes. They'll burn through their fuel until they can fuse elements no longer, ...
Starts With A Bang #76 - Supermassive Black Holes
18 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to the black holes that populate the Universe, they range from the very tiny, of only ~3 solar masses or so and with event horizons that...
Starts With A Bang #75 - Instruments And Mega - Cameras
06 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You know how it works, right? Point your telescopes at the sky, collect the data, and then send it off to the scientists for analysis and to compare w...
Starts With A Bang #74 - Galaxy Clusters And Their Environments
09 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the science of astronomy, it's important to see both the forest and the trees. Galaxy clusters, in many ways, serve as both. They're rich environme...
Starts With A Bang #73 - Ocean Worlds And So Much More
20 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If you want to understand the origin of life in the Universe, you have three basic ways to do it. One is to search for intelligent aliens directly: th...
Starts With A Bang #72 - The Central Cores Of Galaxies
06 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Practically every galaxy in the Universe has a supermassive black hole at their core. Ranging from millions to many billions of solar masses, these co...
Starts With A Bang #71 - Rare Stars And Stargazers
10 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Like everything in the Universe, stars are born, they live a little while, and then they die. But despite their similarities in terms of where they co...
Starts With A Bang #70 - The Accelerating Milky Way
05 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about the Universe as a whole, the accelerations that objects experience from our perspective are overwhelmingly due to the expansion of...
Starts With A Bang #69 - Machine Learning In Astronomy
10 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When you think about how astronomy works, you probably think about observers pointing telescopes at objects, collecting data about their properties, a...
Starts With A Bang #68 - Pulsars, Polarization And More
10 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Swarming through our own galaxy, we've detected quite a few bizarre objects: pulsars. These rapidly spinning neutron stars are only a few kilometers a...
Starts With A Bang #67 - Astroparticles And Dark Matter
06 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If you look out at the Universe and measure all the matter out there, including stars, gas, dust, plasma, black holes, etc., it simply doesn't add up....
Starts With A Bang #66 - XENON And Astroparticle Physics
14 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever wondered what it's like to work as a small (but vital) part of a large collaboration, where hundreds or even thousands of experimental s...
Starts With A Bang #65 - Ultracool Dwarfs
11 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You might have thought that if we were going to find life anywhere in the Universe, our best bet would be to look at stars like our Sun, on account of...
Starts With A Bang #64 - Galaxies Without Dark Matter
13 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past 2 years, an exciting development has finally arisen: scientists have measured a large number of small, diffuse galaxies exquisitely well...
Starts With A Bang #63 - Exoplanets, TESS, And Beyond
22 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past 30 years, we've gone from zero exoplanets to thousands. With each new generation of telescopes, observatories, and scientists, we build ...
Starts With A Bang #62 - Black Holes And ALMA
12 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Starts With A Bang #61 - Astronomical Instruments And Injustices
25 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Starts With A Bang #60 - The End Of The Dark Ages
30 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 spa...
Starts With A Bang #59 - Active Galaxies
14 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #58 - Gravitational Waves From Space
17 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to gravitational waves, our terrestrial laser interferometers have provided us with unparalleled success in terms of direct detection. B...
Starts With A Bang #57 - The Universe's Newborn Stars
12 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Even today, the Universe is forming enormous numbers of new stars: from various nebulae throughout our galaxy to mighty starburst galaxies where the e...
Starts With A Bang #56 - Dark Matter Substructure
09 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 com...
Starts With A Bang #55 - The Cataclysmic Deaths Of Stars
10 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #54 - The Origin Of Stars
04 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Starts With A Bang #53 - Exoplanets From Kepler To TESS And Beyond
07 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
Starts With A Bang #52 - The Thirty Meter Telescope
09 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons. As we improve our optics, our instruments, and our observing techniques, we can reveal pro...
Starts With A Bang #51 - Cosmology At The Edge Of Time
14 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #50: The Hunt For Planet Nine And Beyond
14 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 (mayb...
Starts With A Bang #49 - The LHC And The Future Of Physics
12 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN, is the most powerful particle accelerator and collider in human history, and the detectors that observe th...
Starts With A Bang #48 - The Event Horizon Telescope
12 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Earlier this year, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration revealed the first image that directly showed the existence of an event horizon aro...
Starts With A Bang #47 - Ice Giants At The Solar System's Edge
07 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #46 - Experimental Particle Searches
19 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Starts With A Bang #45 - Beyond Earth 2.0
14 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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.) ...
Starts With A Bang #44 - The Expanding Universe
03 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
One of the biggest conundrums in the Universe surrounds the question of how quickly the Universe is expanding. Questions like what is the Universe mad...
Starts With A Bang #43 - Gravitational Microlensing
08 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about finding planets in the Universe, we typically look for ways to detect them as they orbit their parents stars, either affecting the...
Starts With A Bang #42 - Black Holes And Gravitation
25 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
So, you want to know about black holes, including how we're seeing them, what happens when you fall into them, what our future plans for direct and in...
Starts With A Bang #41 - Before The First Stars
25 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
After the Big Bang, it took only a few hundred thousand years for the Universe to form neutral atoms. But it took tens or even hundreds of millions of...
Starts With A Bang #40 - Pristine Matter and Future Space Telescopes
12 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
One of the great goals in our study of the Universe is to see past the currently-known frontiers. That means going farther, to greater and greater dis...
Starts With A Bang #39 - The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence
20 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Is there intelligent life out there in the Universe beyond planet Earth? If so, are they technologically advances, can they hear us, and are they broa...
Starts With A Bang #38 - Interstellar Interloper `Oumuamua
21 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 2017, the incredible happened: for the first time in history, we were able to identify an object passing through our Solar System that originated f...
Starts With A Bang #37: The Outer Solar System
23 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Our Solar System formed some 4.6 billion years ago from a molecular cloud that collapsed. Our proto-Sun formed along with a protoplanetary disk that e...
Starts With A Bang #36: The Future Of Gravitational Wave Astronomy
28 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I'm so pleased to welcome Dr. Erin MacDonald to the Starts With A Bang podcast, as we discuss the future of Gravitational Wave astronomy. From pulsars...
Starts With A Bang #35 - Do We Live In A Multiverse
31 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There's been a lot of speculative ideas put forth about the Multiverse, and I dare say that a great many of them are nothing more than wishful thinkin...
Starts With A Bang #34 - There Is No Big Bang Singularity
27 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Universe, today, is expanding and cooling, as the volume of the Universe increases while the number of particles within it remains constant. If yo...
Starts With A Bang #33 - The Limits Of Space
29 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever wondered what's out there in the Universe, on the largest scales, beyond what we can even observe? Or what lies down below the tiniest d...
Starts With A Bang #32 - Humanity's 3 Hopes For Alien Life
30 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There are three very different ways humanity is searching for alien life beyond Earth. We can directly search the various planets and moons in our Sol...
Starts With A Bang #31 - The Most Important Equation In The Universe
30 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There are some incredibly big questions that humanity has been asking about the Universe since we first began looking upwards: what is the Universe li...
Starts With A Bang #30: Hawking's Greatest Discovery
29 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In memory of Stephen Hawking's life, I've decided to share the physics behind his greatest discovery: Hawking radiation. For a long time, in the conte...
Starts With A Bang #29 - What's At The Center Of A Black Hole
28 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When you fall inside the event horizon of a black hole, there's no escaping, no matter what you do or how you accelerate. Even if you travel at the Un...
Starts With A Bang #028 - In God's Image
31 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A simple, innocent question that I received had me thinking for days about how to answer it. The question? "If humans were made in God's image, whose...