astro[sound]bites

• Episode 112.5: Extremely Looming Trouble?

  In today’s mini-episode, Cormac highlights how a proposed industrial megaproject threatens the pristine observing conditions at Paranal Observatory - home of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, as well as the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope and Cherenkov Telescope Array South facilities. We will also be taking our summer break a little later than usual - see you in a few weeks! Roel’s interview: https://astrobites.org/2025/08/29/the-looming-drama-for-the-paranal-observatory/ Apply to join us as a co-host!  https://astrosoundbites.com/recruiting-2025

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• Episode 112: It’s not fun to be in a YMC, eh?

  Episode 112: It’s not fun to be in a YMC, eh? Apply to join us as a co-host! https://astrosoundbites.com/recruiting-2025 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. Astrobites: https://astrobites.org/2025/07/23/ymc_formation/ https://astrobites.org/2025/07/09/gmc-dispersal/

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• 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.  Astrobites: https://astrobites.org/2025/06/27/pisngap_gws_flexible_models/ https://astrobites.org/2025/07/17/lss-bbhgw-expansionrate/   Space Sound: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/multimedia/sonifications/

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• Episode 110: Bayesian Biosignatures

  Apply to join us as a co-host! https://astrosoundbites.com/recruiting-2025   This week, Shashank, Cole and Cormac discuss a concept that has come up on many an ASB episode past: Bayesian statistics. They start by trying to wrap our heads around what a probability really means. Cole introduces us to a recent and attention-grabbing paper on a potential biosignature in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, with lots of statistics along the way. Then, Cormac brings up some counterpoints to this detection. They debate what it would take—statistically and scientifically—for a detection of biosignatures to cross the line from intriguing to compelling.   New Constraints on DMS and DMDS in the Atmosphere of K2-18 b from JWST MIRI https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8   Are there Spectral Features in the MIRI/LRS Transmission Spectrum of K2-18b? https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15916   Insufficient evidence for DMS and DMDS in the atmosphere of K2-18 b. From a joint analysis of JWST NIRISS, NIRSpec, and MIRI observations https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13407   Space Sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGdk49LRB14

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• Episode 109: Big, Small and In-Between

  Apply to join us as a co-host! https://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.  From Globs to Gravitational Waves: A Simulated Cosmic Choreography https://astrobites.org/2025/06/19/from-globs-to-gravitational-waves-a-simulated-cosmic-choreography/ Uncovering Precession for GW190521: How the Last Cycle Cracked the Case https://astrobites.org/2025/06/21/precession_gw190521/ Space Sound: https://soundcloud.com/esa/sound-of-a-juice-boom-deploying The clock ticking sound is by “opticalnoise” on freedsound.org (https://freesound.org/people/opticalnoise/sounds/201194/). The alarm sound is by “hypocore” on freesound.org (https://freesound.org/people/hypocore/sounds/164090/).

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