Starts With A Bang Podcast

Out there in the Universe, each star represents an opportunity: a chance for a stellar system to develop that just might possess something remarkable. While we normally think about life, and intelligent life at that, as the grand prize the Universe has to offer, there are a wide variety of fascinating phenomena that are out there to consider. Whereas Mercury, for example, is the closest world to our Sun in our own Solar System, it still takes 88 days to make a complete revolution. In other systems, however, exoplanets can be so hot that they orbit their parent star in less than a single Earth day.In fact, we've discovered a few systems that are so extreme, the planets that orbit them are in the process of disintegrating: where the heat, winds, and radiation from the parent star actually blows part of the planet itself away. This doesn't just include a planet's atmosphere, which is what we see for giant worlds, but even the surfaces and interiors of rocky planets in the most extreme cases. At tempe