Starts With A Bang #124 - Astrochemistry

Starts With A Bang #124 - Astrochemistry

From Starts With A Bang podcast by Ethan Siegel

December 13, 2025 · 1h 34m

About this episode

This episode explores the surprising findings in astrochemistry related to stellar death and the formation of elements in the universe.

All across the Universe, stars are dying through a variety of means. They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed by other, larger stars, or they can die gently, as our Sun will, by blowing off their outer layers in a planetary nebula while their cores contract down to form a degenerate white dwarf. All of the forms of stellar death help enrich the Universe, adding new atoms, isotopes, and even molecules to the interstellar medium: ingredients that will participate in subsequent generations of star-formation. For a long time, however, we'd made assumptions about where certain species of particles will and won't form, and what types of environments they could and couldn't exist in. Those assumptions were way ahead of where the observations were, however, and as our telescopic and technological capabilities catch up, sometimes what we find surprises us. Sometimes, we find elements in places that we didn't anticipate, leading us to question our theoretical models for how those elements can be made. Other times, we find molecules in environments that we think shouldn't be able to…

People in this episode

Host: Ethan Siegel

Guest: Kate Gold

Topics covered

  • astrochemistry
  • stellar death
  • star formation
  • interstellar medium
  • observational astronomy

Keywords

  • astrochemistry
  • stellar death
  • black holes
  • supernovae
  • interstellar medium
  • molecules
  • star formation

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