Starts With A Bang Podcast

Out there in the Universe, we're most aware of what we see: of all the forms of light that arrive in our eyes, instruments, telescopes, and detectors. Much more difficult to see, as well as understand and make sense of, is the wide array of "stuff" that's present, but that isn't readily apparent to the apparatuses we normally use to reveal the Universe. From the dark bands of the Milky Way to the light-blocking materials in nebulae and clouds, all the way to lining the arms of spiral galaxies and the heavy, long-chained molecules found in protoplanetary disks, cosmic dust is perhaps our most enduring mystery.Sure, it gives absorption signatures that we can leverage, and at long enough infrared wavelengths, dust that gets heated has its own emission signatures, but we can generally only observe it in detail up close: within our own galaxy or in the nearest galaxies of all. That poses a huge challenge, because the origin of dust, including from a cosmic perspective, remains only very poorl