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This week, Shashank, Cole, and Cormac dive into the many disks of the universe, from planet-forming disks to AGN and galactic structures. Cole explores a misbehaving protoplanetary disk that hints at chaotic early planet formation. Cormac follows by showing how external radiation can erode disks and hinder the birth of giant planets. We then zoom out to compare these turbulent young systems to the massive disks around galaxies and supermassive black holes, tying together why disks form across so many cosmic environments and the methods we use to explore them.
Tag: black holes
Episode 113: Black Holes? Here? It’s more likely than you think.
In today’s episode, Cole, Cormac, and Shashank celebrate our glorious return from hiatus by tackling an astronomical favorite: black holes. These guys are important to astronomers for a wide range of reasons, but what happens when you find a black hole somewhere weird? Like in another black hole’s accretion disk? Or in your model of dark energy? Or in a Hot dog? Shashank covers a lot of similar-sounding acronyms for when we find black holes living inside (the accretion disks) of other black holes, while Cormac does his second ever astrobite with a type of sausage in the title, establishing a worrying precedent.
Episode 112: It’s not fun to be in a YMC, eh?
In today’s episode, Cormac, Shashank and Lucia come together to crack open the craziness inside Young Massive (Stellar) Clusters - some of the most exciting neighbourhoods in our Universe. They’re a very hot topic at the moment, and not just because of their intense radiation - they host the majority of massive stars, and ancient YMCs might be the ancestors of the globular clusters that orbit our own Milky Way today. Shashank shares a recipe for cooking up YMCs through a computational collision, and Lucia takes a peek at YMCs emerging from their dust-embedded embryonic environs. We round off with a casual discussion of whether simulationists are taking Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a bit too literally and chat about our favourite star clusters.
Episode 111: Mergers for Nothing and Your Chirps for Free
The only thing better than studying the largest compact objects in the universe is smashing them together. In this episode, Lucia, Shashank, and Cole cover binary black hole mergers and what these violent events can tell us about our universe! Lucia talks us through some mergers' specific spins and Cole forces Shashank to talk about cosmology again.
Episode 109: Big, Small and In-Between
Apply to join us as a co-host! astrosoundbites.com/recruiting-2025 This week, Lucia, Cole and Cormac discuss cosmic sandwich kids: intermediate mass black holes. Where are they hiding? How do they form? And can they grow up to become supermassive black holes? To answer questions like these, we take a look at globular cluster simulations and a famous gravitational wave event: GW190521. The discussion takes us to alien civilisations in the far, far future.
Episode 107: Things That Go Blip in the Night
The more things change, the more they, uh, change. This episode Cole, Shashank, and Cormac cover the exciting events that change what we see on the night sky. Ancient astronomers tracked the motions of the planets and the arrival of “guest stars” (supernovae), and nowadays we’re lucky enough to see some really wild and energetic events. Cormac gives us a view into what happens when a star punches through a black hole’s accretion disc, Shashank shows us a particularly persnickety pulsar, and Cole gets his twenty minute monologue on modern classical music cut for time.
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