Starts With A Bang — February 7, 2020

Starts With A Bang Podcast #53: Exoplanets from Kepler to TESS and beyond

A fascinating podcast on the topic with NASA scientist Dr. Jessie Christiansen.

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!

The Starts With A Bang podcast is made possible by and releases early for Patreon supporters.

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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