Starts With A Bang podcast

Here in our Universe, there are all sorts of places where stars are actively forming right now. Our galaxy is going through a relatively quiet phase at present as far as star-formation is concerned, but that rate was much higher in the past: perhaps 30 (or more) times higher than what it is today. If we want to understand what our galaxy was like earlier on, we have two ways ...

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 ...