Ethan Siegel

Starts With A Bang podcast

Science EN ↓ 131 episodes

The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. There’s a cosmic story uniting us. We’re determined to bring it to everyone.

Author

Ethan Siegel

Episodes

Starts With A Bang #6: The most distant galaxy in the Universe 03.04.2016 18:07

The Hubble Space Telescope has just shattered the record for most distant galaxy in the Universe. How did we break this record, and what do we expect to find even farther back?

Starts With A Bang #5: Gravitational Waves and LIGO 27.02.2016 23:13

In February of 2016, less than six months after first becoming operational, LIGO (the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory) announced the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves. What are they? What does it mean? What did we learn? And what can we do with them now that we know they exist? All this and more on this month's Starts With A Bang podcast!

Starts With A Bang #4: The story of Pluto and Charon 02.02.2016 19:20

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh serendipitously discovered Pluto: the first object in our Solar System out past Neptune. For 48 years, it was the only object known out there, until Charon -- its giant moon -- was discovered. But the 1990s brought with it a slew of Kuiper Belt objects, and in 2006, Pluto was officially demoted to a "dwarf planet." But also in 2006, NASA's New Horizons mission was launched:...

Starts With A Bang #3: Why is there more matter than antimatter? 30.12.2015 26:10

Everywhere we look in the Universe, we find that planets, stars, galaxies, and even the gas between them are all made of matter and not antimatter. Yet as far as we know, the laws of nature are symmetric between matter and antimatter: you can't create or destroy one without the other. So how did our Universe get to be the way it is? Come right up to the frontiers of our scientific knowledge and ha...

Starts With A Bang #2 - Size Of The Universe 30.11.2015 19:03

Although it's been only 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, we can see objects as distant as 46.1 billion light years away. How is this possible? Ethan Siegel explains in the second Starts With A Bang podcast. Plus, how to see Comet Catalina in the December skies, and why it's on its way out of the Solar System forever. This podcast is free to download and distribute in perpetuity thanks to the...

Starts With A Bang #1 -- Water (and life?) on Mars 30.10.2015 28:03

In the first inaugural Starts With A Bang podcast, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel discusses the latest evidence for water on Mars, what it means for Earth and potential life on the surface, as well as other topics. Guest (and Patreon supporter) Maciek makes an appearance, and we discuss the future of physics and speculate on what the next great advance might be. This podcast is free to download and d...