Starts With A Bang podcast

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. A decade ago, we were still trying to figure out how, when, and where stars formed throughout the Universe; today, we have that nailed down, but a whole suite of new questions and puzzles have arisen as a result of what we learned. On this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast, I'm pleased to welcome Indiana University astronomer Jennifer Sieben to the show, who specializes in the Universe's star-formation history and also works in astronomy outreach. She has a YouTube channel with astronomy vlogs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNgwz85_GjP_t2_HhUQ7BFj_S189sOPz1 Serves as her University's outreach coordinator for astronomy and is co-Editor-at-Large for a science blog: blogs.iu.edu/sciu/ And can be found here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARDISeeker Come enjoy the spectacular story of the Universe's newborn stars today! (Image credit: A Feild / STScI, 2002)

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 how galaxies and giant large-scale structures form in a tremendous, truly epic way. But depending on what the properties of dark matter actually are, we should get a very different Universe on smaller scales. Is dark matter cold? Warm? Hot? And does it interact with itself, or is it truly invisible? Thanks to a fascinating new technique, we're learning more about this than ever before. Take a listen as we invite Dr. Anna Nierenberg onto the podcast to talk about how gravitational lensing is revealing dark matter substructure as never before, and how it might reveal these elusive properties of dark matter at long last as a result. (Additional information: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/10/eight-new-quadruple-lenses-arent-just-gorgeous-they-reveal-dark-matters-temperature/ ) (Image credit: NASA, ESA, A. NIERENBERG (JPL), AND T. TREU AND D. GILMAN (UCLA))

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 to be relatively unchanged. But every once in a while, a spectacular event will occur, giving off a transient signal that outshines a typical star's brightness by factors of many billions. These events fall into many classes: supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and even more exotic events, and part of the fun is uncovering exactly what's going on as we discover these new classes of objects for the first time. Scientist Anna Ho, PhD candidate at Caltech, is right on the cutting edge of that frontier, and brings us an insider's look at this exciting and rapidly evolving field. Come get the latest on what we know and what we're still learning about the cataclysmic deaths of stars! (Image credit: Bill Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF))

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 gravitational collapse leads to protostars that ignite nuclear fusion in their cores, the actual environments where these stars are born have many competing factors at play. Gravitational collapse is only one of them, joined by thermal heating and radiative cooling, magnetic fields and hydrodynamics, as well as stellar winds, ultraviolet radiation, and feedback from a variety of sources. Here to help us disentangle what's important, where, and when is Ph.D. candidate Mike Chen, an astrophysicist specialized in the formation of stars at the University of Victoria. If you've ever wondered how we actually form stars in our Universe, this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast is for you! (Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration.)

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 of our Earth-like planets are potentially habitable or even inhabited? Are Super-Earths a real thing, or are all of the ones larger than our world more Neptune-like than we care to admit? We've answered a whole slew of questions about exoplanets that we didn't even know to ask a decade or two ago, and there's so much more happening right now as well as on the horizon. Come get the scoop on the latest Starts With A Bang podcast, featuring the incredible Dr. Jessie Christiansen of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute! (Image credit: NASA / TESS)

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 seen before. As the 2020s dawn on us, we're preparing to jump from 10 meter-class observatories, which are presently the largest in ground-based optical telescopes, to 30 meter-class ones, with approximately thrice the resolution and ten times the light-gathering power. There's a tremendous suite of cosmic stories to discover, but the only one of the 30 meter-class observatories to be built in the Northern Hemisphere is facing a tremendous controversy that's been decades in the making. What are the next steps towards building the Thirty Meter Telescope? The latest edition of the Starts With A Bang Podcast features the TMT's vice president for external relations, Dr. Gordon Squires, and you won't want to miss it! (Image credit: Thirty Meter Telescope Collaboration)

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 before the Big Bang occurs? It was my pleasure to get to speak to Dan Hooper, astrophysicist, professor, and author of the new book At The Edge Of Time, which is my favorite popular science book of 2019. (Pick up a copy here: https://amzn.to/2XReiGG) In this fascinating hour+ conversation, we cover topics like dark matter, inflation, and what not only 21st century physics but even 30th century physics might hold. Don't miss it! (Image credit: Princeton University Press / Dan Hooper.)

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 even the existence of the Kuiper belt was doubted by many. Of course, all of that changed with the discovery of many different objects, including the more-massive-than-Pluto world discovered in 2003: Eris. We quickly realized that Pluto was not unique, but one member of a distinct class of objects thoroughly different than the planets. In 2006, we created the "dwarf planet" classification for non-planetary objects that still were Pluto-like. But more recently, a compelling but controversial idea has emerged: the idea of a Planet Nine that is more massive than even Earth, but lies hundreds of times farther away that we are from the Sun. Both of these achievements, the theorizing of Planet Nine and the Pluto-killing discovery of Eris, come courtesy of the same planetary astronomer: Mike Brown. Dive into a fascinating conversation with him and me right here on the 50th edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast! (Image credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC))

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 comprehensive ever constructed. With this powerful new tools, physicists discovered the Higgs boson earlier this decade, and continue to probe the frontiers of the known Universe. Currently undergoing upgrades, the LHC has only collected, to date, 2% of the eventual data it will wind up collecting. Meanwhile, physicists are already planning for the future, looking to build a next-generation collider capable of probing the frontiers beyond the LHC's reach. Yet many detractors, dissatisfied with the motivations for pushing these boundaries forward, are working to obstruct this tremendous, civilization-scale endeavor. My guest this month on the Starts With A Bang podcast is Dr. James Beacham, a scientist who works as a member of CERN's ATLAS collaboration. In a far-ranging discussion, we talk about the LHC and beyond as we face an uncertain but potential-filled future for particle physics. This is one discussion you won't want to miss! (Image credit: CERN / Maximilien Brice and Julien Marius Ordan)

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 many petabytes of data from telescopes observing the same target, simultaneously, from all across the Earth, provided a breathtaking confirmation of Einstein's relativity in a realm where it had never been tested before. But that's just one image of one black hole at one particular moment in time, and there's so much more to come from the Event Horizon Telescope. This month, we're so fortunate to sit down with EHT scientist Sara Issaoun, who takes us through the past, present, and future hopes for the Event Horizon Telescope and how it hopes to answer humanity's biggest questions about black holes. (Image credit: APEX, IRAM, G. Narayanan, J. McMahon, JCMT/JAC, S. Hostler, D. Harvey, ESO/C. Malin)