Starts With A Bang Podcast

When it comes to gravitational waves, our terrestrial laser interferometers have provided us with unparalleled success in terms of direct detection. But they have some strong fundamental limits: their laser arms are short; their sensitivity is limited to low-mass, small-radius objects; the signals they detect last for mere seconds, at most. Most importantly, seismic noise, and even the fact that we live on a planet with tectonic plates, place restrictions on how sensitive we'll ever be able to get. But in space, all of these stories change dramatically, and the upcoming European Space Agency mission LISA is aiming to open up our eyes to a realm of gravitational wave astronomy like we've never experienced before. On this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast, we're joined by Dr. Ira Thorpe of NASA as we explore the future of gravitational wave astronomy in an entirely new realm: in space! (Image credit: EADS ASTRIUM)

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

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: NA

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 fascinati

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 beyon

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)

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 found throughout the Universe? Remarkably, if you had asked this same question 30 years ago, we would have had a quaint story about how planets form and why our Solar System has the planets it does, and we assumed that these rules would be extended to all solar systems in the galaxy and Universe. But with the deluge of exoplanet data, accompanied by better observations and simulations of our Solar System, that old story isn't even the half of it. I'm so lucky to get to interview Heidi Hammel for this edition of the podcast, who, as a bonus, was the lead investigator on the Hubble Space telescope when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter back in 1994! Come listen to one of my favorite interviews ever today! (Image credit: NASA/Voyager 2)

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 to be true about the Universe. Neutrinos oscillate from one flavor into another, and must have a non-zero mass, but we don't understand why or how. Dark matter has an overwhelming suite of astrophysical evidence that points towards its existence, but we have no direct evidence for the type of particle it might be. What do we do about these puzzles? We perform the best experiments we can to try and probe, identify, and constrain the novel physics that might be responsible for these unexplained phenomena. This month, I'm so pleased to chat with Doctor Laura Manenti, postdoctoral research associate at NYU Abu Dhabi and a researcher on the XENON1T and the Proto-DUNE experiments. Take a dive into the world of experimental particle physics on the latest Starts With A Bang podcast! (Image credit: Enrico Sacchetti.)

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.) But while most of the searches have focused on finding the next Earth, sometimes called Earth 2.0, that's very likely an overly restrictive way to look for life. Biosignatures, or more conservatively, bio-hints, might not only be plentiful on worlds very different from our own, but around Solar Systems other than our own. Earth-like worlds, in fact, might not even be the most ubiquitous places for life to arise in the Universe. I'm happy to welcome scientist Adrian Lenardic onto the Starts With A Bang podcast, and explore what just might be out there if we look for life beyond our idea of Earth 2.0! (Image credit: JPL-Caltech/NASA.)

One of the biggest conundrums in the Universe surrounds the question of how quickly the Universe is expanding. Questions like what is the Universe made of, how old is it, what is it's ultimate fate, etc., absolutely depend on this. For generations, we argued over the details of this, seeming to have finally reached a consensus in 2001 with the Hubble Key Project's results: 72 km/s/Mpc, with an uncertainty of about 10%. But the modern results, as of 2019, seem to depend on how you measure it. Some teams are consistently getting 67 km/s/Mpc, while others get 73-74 km/s/Mpc, with uncertainties that don't overlap. This may not be a controversy, but rather a clue, and Nobel Prizewinner and co-discoverer of dark energy Adam Riess joins me on this special edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast. Don't miss it! (Image credit: NASA / GSFC)

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 their star's position or velocity, or blocking or reflecting a certain portion of their light. But what about the planets that are too small to be detected that way? What about the planets whose effects are imperceptible? And what about the rogue planets: the ones that no longer (or perhaps never did) orbit a star of their own? Well, they're not doomed to be invisible! In fact, we can measure and characterize them extremely well, through the power of gravitational microlensing. This isn't some pipe dream of science fiction that may someday come to fruition; it's real, current science that expects a tremendous explosion of planetary discoveries with WFIRST's launch in the mid-2020s. Come find out what the future of this fascinating scientific field holds as we launch into a tremendous conversation with researcher Savannah Jacklin, as we explore the microlensing Un

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 indirect detection are, and how scientists are answering some of the biggest questions about them today? It's a fascinating story about some of the most mind-blowing objects in the Universe. Please welcome Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Mississippi, Dr. Leo C. Stein, to the show, and enjoy a 1 hour+ conversation where we explore some of the deepest concepts in cutting-edge physics and gravitational wave astronomy! (Image credit: Northwestern Visualization/Carl Rodriguez)

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 years for the first stars to turn on, and a whopping 550 million years for those neutral atoms to all become reionized by that starlight once again. Believe it or not, we can measure not only the starlight coming from the stars that do form through the now-infrared light they emit, but also the neutral atoms themselves through the power of 21-cm astronomy. I'm joined this week by Dr. Elizabeth Fernandez, research astronomer, science communicator and podcaster extraordinaire on her show, SparkDialog. (Check it out, here: http://sparkdialog.com/) How did the Universe grow up to be the way it is today? Take another spectacular step on the latest edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast.

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 distances. It means going fainter, to smaller and less-easy-to-see objects. It means going to earlier times and less-evolved conditions. And it means detecting more of the Universe than we've ever seen before. Our goal is the most ambitious one you can imagine: understanding what the Universe was like when it was born, how it grew to be the way it is today, and where it's headed in the future. One huge step that we only took this decade was to detect the first pristine matter left over from the Big Bang, before any stars or galaxies formed from it. A second, that we're taking today, is to try and create a better space-based observatory than Hubble or even James Webb. On this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast, we talk about both of these issues with astronomer and chief scientist at the Keck Observatory: John O'Meara. Enjoy!

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 broadcasting in ways that we could possibly detect them? In the absence of their arrival on Earth, you might think that there's no surefire way to know. But the scientists working hard on SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, sure are trying their best. By listening to the Universe at large (and our galaxy in particular), they're hoping to uncover the answer to perhaps the ultimate question: whether there's a civilization out there that humanity might hope to make contact with, and that could perhaps be our ally in uncovering the great mysteries of the Universe. I'm so pleased to welcome astronomer and senior scientist at the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak, onto this edition of the Starts With A Bang Podcast!