Starts With A Bang podcast

Dr. Kielan Hoch, a postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute, dives into the fascinating realm of exoplanets and their formation. He discusses groundbreaking imaging techniques, particularly those from the James Webb Space Telescope, that could one day help us see Earth-like worlds. Hoch also highlights the challenges faced by early-career scientists in securing funding and navigating a competitive landscape, stressing the need for systemic reform. This engaging conversation blends optimism and urgency as we ponder the future of exoplanet exploration.

Out there in the Universe, somewhere, a second example of an inhabit world or planet likely awaits us. It could be some other planet or moon within our own Solar System; it could be a spacefaring, interstellar civilization, or it could be an exoplanet around a different parent star. Although the search for life beyond Earth generally focuses on worlds that have similar conditions to Earth, like rocky planets with thin atmospheres and liquid water on their surfaces, that's not necessarily the only possibility. The truth is that we don't know what else is going to be out there, not until we look for ourselves and determine the answers.And yet, if you've been paying attention to the news, you might think that super-Earth or mini-Neptune type worlds, such as the now-famous exoplanet K2-18b, might be excellent candidate planets for life. Some have even gone as far as to claim that this planet has surefire biosignatures on it, and that the evidence overwhelmingly favors the presence of life within this planet's atmosphere. But the science backing up that claim has been challenged by many, including our two podcast guests for this episode: Dr. Luis Welbanks and Dr. Matthew Nixon.Beyond the breathless and sensational claims, what does the actual science concerning K2-18b in particular, and of biosignatures on exoplanets in general, actually teach us? What does the evidence indicate, and if we are going to find inhabited exoplanets, what will it take for us to actually announce a positive detection with confidence and less ambiguity? That's what this episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast is all about; I hope you enjoy it!(When an exoplanet passes in front of its parent star, a portion of that starlight will filter through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, allowing us to break up that light into its constituent wavelengths and to characterize the atomic and molecular composition of the atmosphere. If the planet is inhabited, we may reveal unique biosignatures, but if the planet has either a thick, gas-rich envelope of volatile material around it, or alternatively no atmosphere at all, the prospects for habitability will be very low. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech)

Perhaps the strongest evidence we've ever acquired in support of the Big Bang has been the discovery of the leftover radiation from its early, hot, dense state: today's cosmic microwave background, or CMB. While there were many competing ideas for our cosmic origins, only the Big Bang predicted a uniform, omnidirectional bath of blackbody radiation: exactly what the CMB is.But it turns out the CMB encodes much more information than just our cosmic origins; it allows us to map the very early Universe from when it was just 380,000 years old, and gives us vital information about what has happened to light from that time over its 13.8 billion year journey to our eyes. It encodes information about our cosmic expansion history, about dark matter and dark energy, about intervening galaxy clusters, and about the material here in our own galaxy, along with much more. It is, arguably, the richest source of information from any one single observable in our entire Universe.Here to guide us through what CMB scientists are working on here in 2025, including what we've learned and what we're still trying to find out, I'm so pleased to welcome Dr. Patricio Gallardo to the show. We've got more than an hour and a half of quality science to go through, and by the end, I bet you'll be more excited about the upcoming Simons Observatory, designed to measure the CMB to higher precision than ever before, than you knew you should be. Enjoy!(This image shows the Large Aperture Telescope's colossal, 6-meter primary and secondary mirrors at the Simons Observatory in February of 2025. The telescope has already seen first light, and will soon begin delivering new CMB science as never before. Credit: M. Devlin/Simons Observatory)

When we search for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look for planets that are similar to Earth. To most of us, those signatures would look the same as the ones we'd see if we viewed our planet today: blue oceans, green-and-brown continents, polar icecaps, wispy white clouds, an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen and oxygen, and even the modern signs of human activity, such as increasing greenhouse gas emissions, planet modification, and electromagnetic signatures that belie our presence.But for most of our planet's history, Earth was just as "inhabited" as it is today, even though it looked very different. One fascinating period in Earth's history that lasted approximately 300 million years resulted in a planet that looked extremely different from modern Earth: a Snowball Earth period, where the entire surface, from the poles to the equator, was completely covered in snow and ice. This isn't just speculation, but is backed up by a remarkable, large suite of observational and geological evidence.So what was Earth like during this period? How did it fall into this phase, how did it remain trapped in that state for so long, and how did it finally thaw again? To help explore this topic, I'm so pleased to welcome PhD candidate Alia Wofford to the program, who conducts intricate climate models of early Earth to try to reproduce those early conditions. From that work, we're learning about what we should be looking for when it comes to potentially inhabited exoplanets, because Earth has been inhabited for around 4 billion years, and wow, has its appearance changed over all that time. Have a listen and see for yourself!(This illustration shows a frozen-over planet, but one that still possesses a significant liquid ocean beneath the surface ice. Many worlds in our Solar System may be described by this scenario at various points in cosmic history, including even planet Earth more than two billion years ago. Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi/Wikimedia Commons)

It might seem hard to fathom, but it hasn't even been ten full years since advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave observatories that brought us our very first successful direct detection, turned on for the very first time. In the time since, it's been joined by the Virgo and KAGRA detectors, and humanity is currently closing in on 300 confirmed gravitational wave detection events. What was an unconfirmed prediction of Einstein's General Relativity for a full century has now become one of the fastest-growing fields in all of astronomy and astrophysics.Here in 2025, we're now looking forward to the LISA era: where we're going to build our first gravitational wave detectors in space. They'll have far longer baselines (i.e., separations between the various spacecrafts/stations) than any terrestrial gravitational wave detector, enabling us to detect fundamentally different classes (and masses) of objects that emit gravitational waves. At the same time, the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning is enabling us to detect and characterize ever greater numbers of gravitational wave events, an incredibly exciting development.For this episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast, I'm so pleased to welcome Shaniya Jarrett to the program. She's here to guide us up to the frontiers and help us peer over the horizon, and is currently an astronomy PhD student at the University of Maryland after earning her Masters degree from the Fisk-Vanderbilt bridge program. Have a listen and learn all of the exciting science that's not only within our reach today, but that we all have to look forward to in the very near future!(The image above shows an illustration of the three future LISA, or Laser Interferometer Space Antennae, spacecrafts, in a trailing orbit behind the Earth. LISA will be our first space-based gravitational wave detector, sensitive to objects thousands of times as massive than the ones LIGO can detect. Credit: University of Florida/NASA)

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 temperatures of around 2000 degrees and upwards, these exoplanets can lose their crusts, mantles, and even their cores over long enough timescales.Believe it or not, we've actually caught a few exoplanets doing exactly this, and we've got the JWST spectra in hand for one of them now, teaching us, for the first time, what a planetary interior is made of outside of our own Solar System. I'm so pleased to have the first author from that 2025 study, soon-to-be Dr. Nick Tusay, as our guest on this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast, as we take a look at the most extreme exoplanetary systems ever discovered!(This image shows an illustration of an evaporating, rocky exoplanet, with an enormous dust tail arising from the material blown off of the planet from its interaction with the nearby star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Sure, it's easy to look out at the Universe and take stock of what we find. Although spiral and elliptical galaxies house the majority of the Universe's stars, represented locally by galaxies like Andromeda and our own Milky Way, the overwhelming majority of galaxies are much smaller and lower in mass than we and our cousins are. These low-mass galaxies, the dwarf galaxies in the Universe, represent upwards of 97% of all the galaxies that exist.However, while most of the dwarf galaxies we know of are found as satellites around larger, more massive galaxies, they aren't good laboratories for helping us understand the Universe as it was long ago. Back during the first few billion years of cosmic history, it wasn't just dwarf galaxies that formed the majority of starlight in the cosmos, but isolated dwarf galaxies: dwarf galaxies that hadn't yet interacted with larger neighbors.We can best understand those early-stage galaxies by studying their late-time analogues: isolated dwarf galaxies in the Universe today. On this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast, I sit down with Dr. Catherine (Cat) Fielder, and we talk about some of the nearest, most isolated galaxies of all: including some that have been imaged with flagship-quality telescopes. What have we learned about them so far, and what else are we hoping to discover? Find out here, today!(This three panel image shows a ground-based, wide field view of the entirety of galaxy NGC 300: one of the closest spiral galaxies outside of our Local Group. Though this galaxy is relatively isolated, there are dwarf galaxies nearby it that are even more isolated than this galaxy itself, making them excellent objects to teach us how tiny galaxies grow up in isolation from large, major galaxies. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA)

Out there in the Universe, there are tremendous, uncountable numbers of planetary systems just waiting to be discovered. But stellar systems won't just consist of planets orbiting a parent star; there will be moons, asteroids, Kuiper belt-like objects, and many of them will be bound together into their own rich sets of systems, with both irregular and round bodies comprising these planetary systems.Here in our own Solar System, we have at least three notable large, terrestrial-sized bodies with impressive lunar systems of their own: the Earth-Moon system, the Mars-Phobos-Deimos system, and the Plutonian planetary system. Pluto, interestingly, is orbited by Charon, which is very large and massive compared to Pluto, an unusual and possibly unique, or most extreme, configuration of all known such bodies. But how did it get to be that way? That's the topic of this podcast, and the research focus of this month's guest: Dr. Adeene Denton.It's kind of amazing what variety can emerge in terms of surviving systems from ancient planetary collisions, but by running simulations and understanding the geology of these worlds, we can learn more about what's possible, likely, and unlikely in our Universe. Dive into this fascinating conversation and learn some cutting-edge science along the way!(This composite image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was based on photographs taken by the New Horizons mission as it flew by the Plutonian planetary system back in 2015. Charon's appearance is vastly different from Pluto's, but both bodies are shown with the correct relative size and albedo. Credit: NASA, APL, SwRI)

Catherine Slaughter, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, joins to unravel the mysteries of pulsating stars. She explains how Cepheid variables experience dramatic brightness changes due to helium ionization, creating a rhythm of expansion and contraction. The discussion reveals the vital role these stars play in measuring cosmic distances and enhancing our understanding of the universe. Slaughter also highlights advancements in astronomical data collection and the promise of machine learning in stellar research.

Elaina Hyde, an astrophysicist and observatory director at the Allen Carswell Observatory, dives into the fascinating world of galactic archaeology. She explains how astronomers investigate the Milky Way's 13.8 billion-year history using diverse data across light wavelengths. The discussion highlights the significance of sub-dwarf B stars and the role of both large and small telescopes in uncovering cosmic secrets. Elaina also shares insights on the Milky Way's merger history and the impact of modern technology on our understanding of the universe.