Search
Our mission is to answer the biggest questions of all, scientifically.
What is the Universe made of? How did it become the way it is today? Where did everything come from? What is the ultimate fate of the cosmos?
For most of human history, these questions had no clear answers. Today, they do. Starts With a Bang, written by Dr. Ethan Siegel, explores what we know about the universe and how we came to know it, bringing the latest discoveries in cosmology and astrophysics directly to you.
Read Less
with
Full Profile
Ethan Siegel is an award-winning PhD astrophysicist and the author of four books, including The Grand Cosmic Story, published by National Geographic.
Ask Ethan: What’s the biggest misconception in astronomy?
Many facts are well-known to professionals, but are unappreciated or even rejected outright by the public. "How stars work" takes the cake.
Travel half the distance to your destination, and there's always another half to go. So how do you eventually arrive? That's Zeno's Paradox.
Even the youngest galaxies are often dust-rich, even with very low levels of heavy elements. Nearby dwarf galaxy Sextans A explains why.
Astronomers have found starless gas clouds before, but Cloud 9 might be the most pristine one of all, with big lessons for cosmic history.
In a galaxy less than 300 million years after the Big Bang, oxygen's presence abounds. That's expected; its absence would truly be profound.
In general relativity, matter and energy curve spacetime, which we experience as gravity. Why can't there be an "antigravity" force?
The very word "quantum" makes people's imaginations run wild. But chances are you've fallen for at least one of these myths.
There will always be "wolf-criers" whose claims wither under scrutiny. But aliens are certainly out there, if science dares to find them.
Particles are everywhere, including particles from space that stream through the human body. Here's how they prove Einstein's relativity.
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.
Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Universe is simply that it, and everything in it, exists. But what's the reason why?
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
While ice itself is slick, slippery, and difficult to navigate across under most circumstances, skaters easily glide across the ice.
The highest-energy particles could be a sign of new, unexpected physics. But the simplest, most mundane explanation is particularly iron-ic.
While humanity has been skywatching since ancient times, much of our cosmic understanding has come about only recently. Very recently.
Our Universe doesn't just expand and cool, but the expansion itself is accelerating. Can stars form under such structure-erasing conditions?
Earth orbits the Sun while spinning on its tilted axis, with two annual occasions marking that maximal tilt. That's where solstices arise.
The Department of Energy's newest mission seeks to make a unified AI platform across all national labs. Will it help US science, or kill it?
Our Standard Model of the Universe, for both particle physics and cosmology, remains intact for now. When will its foundations crack?
With the observation of SN 2025wny, a lensed superluminous supernova, astronomy's future comes into sharp, exciting focus.
It takes a wide variety of processes in the Universe to make all the elements that populate space today. We're still discovering new ones!