Starts With A Bang podcast

Whenever you look at the Universe in a more powerful way than you ever have before, either in a new set of wavelengths, at higher sensitivity, on wider-field scales, or with novel capabilities, you open yourself up to a remarkable possibility. In addition to the "obvious" science gains that you'll achieve from finding more examples and revealing greater details about the type...

In order for stars to form, you need the right ingredients to make it happen: gravity, mass, time, and of course the right type of matter in the form of baryons. Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe had plenty of them, but they were all very simple: protons, deuterons, helium-3 and helium-4 nuclei, and a tiny bit of lithium-7. These nuclei, made out of protons and neutron...

One of the most foundational questions we know how to ask in astronomy is simply this: given a cloud of gas of a given mass, what types of stars will form? How many stars of a given mass will you wind up with, and what factors does that depend on? The answer to this question, if we can give an answer, is known as the "initial mass function," and is generally very difficult to...

We often think about the Solar System as being our own cosmic backyard, and in many ways, it is: these are the closest objects to us in all the Universe, and our only opportunity to study lunar and planetary systems in situ. However, when it comes to the objects beyond Saturn, including the Uranian and Neptunian systems, as well as everything that lies in the Kuiper belt and ...

Whenever a new star forms, several processes appear to be nearly universal. A cloud of cold molecular gas contracts, fragments, and rapidly collapses in certain places. The densest, coldest clumps of gas contract first, drawing in larger and larger amounts of matter onto them. A large, massive enough clump will heat up and have a random shape: collapsing along the shortest ax...