Starts With A Bang

A dense starfield, with various colored stars shimmering through a dark cloud-like formation, lies against a deep black background in the mysterious zone of avoidance.
The Universe is out there, waiting to be discovered

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.

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Ethan Siegel is an award-winning PhD astrophysicist and the author of four books, including The Grand Cosmic Story, published by National Geographic.

Full Profile
A bald man with a long beard and handlebar mustache gestures with his hands against a backdrop of an upside-down cityscape wearing a purple shirt.
Groupthink in science isn’t a problem; it’s a myth
Scientists are notoriously resistant to new ideas. Are they falling prey to groupthink? Or are our current theories just that successful?

Ethan Siegel

solar system model
Two visualizations map the cosmos, displaying color-coded cosmic microwave background radiation. Blue and orange patches indicate temperature variations across a spherical and an oval projection.
It's difficult to project a sphere onto a flat, two-dimensional surface. All maps of the Earth have flaws; the same is true for the cosmos.
Two colorful spiral galaxies interacting in space, with bright centers and swirling arms of red, blue, and white hues, set against a backdrop of stars.
The Kalam cosmological argument asserts that everything that exists must have a cause, and the "first" cause must be God. Is that valid?
We understand many things about our Universe, and our home within it, extremely well. The number of stars in the Milky Way isn't among them.
branching parallel universes
The Multiverse isn't just a staple of science fiction; there's real-life science behind it, too. Here are 10 facts to expand your mind.
A colorful, spinning galaxy with a bright orange core, existing for 12 billion years, is surrounded by smaller galaxies and star clusters against a black space background.
Large, massive, rotating galaxies like the Milky Way are common today. So how could one form a mere ~2 billion years after the Big Bang?
Over a century after we first unlocked the secrets of the quantum universe, people find it more puzzling than ever. Can we make sense of it?
globular cluster terzan 5
For centuries, even after we knew the Sun was a star like any other, we still didn't know what it was made of. Cecilia Payne changed that.