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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.
Protected: Ask Ethan: Could evolving dark energy lead to a Big Crunch?
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The most common visual depictions of the history of the Universe show the Big Bang as a growing tube with an "ignition" point. Why is that?
The fabric of spacetime is four-dimensional, with three for space and only one for time. But wow, time sure is different from space!
Could life be widespread throughout the cosmos, in the subsurface oceans of ice-covered worlds? NASA's Europa Clipper mission investigates.
An in-depth interview with astronomer Kelsey Johnson, whose new book, Into the Unknown, explores what remains unknown about the Universe.
There are a number of factors to consider when choosing where to build a telescope. These 3 locations, on their merits, surpass all others.
The Universe changes remarkably over time, with some entities surviving and others simply decaying away. Is this cosmic evolution at work?
Black holes encode information on their surfaces, but evaporate away into Hawking radiation. Is that information preserved, and if so, how?
Artificial intelligence is much more than image generation and smart-sounding chatbots; it's also a Nobel-worthy endeavor rooted in physics!
National Geographic's first James Webb Space Telescope book shows us the cosmos like never before.
The earliest Milky Way-like galaxy, REBELS-25, was spotted rotating about its axis. It's only 700 million years old: 5% of our present age.
Interferometry gave us a black hole's event horizon, but that was in the radio. What can we accomplish with a new optical interferometer?
Today, the deepest depths of intergalactic space aren't at absolute zero, but at a chill 2.73 K. How does that temperature change over time?
The Universe has been creating stars for nearly all 13.8 billion years of its history. But those photons can't match the Big Bang's light.
Comet A3, also known as Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, has sprung to life since 2024's last equinox. Here's how to catch the show for yourself.
In theory, dark matter is cold, collisionless, and only interacts via gravity. What we see in ultra-diffuse galaxies indicates otherwise.
The Parker Solar Probe is about to undergo its seventh encounter with Venus on its journey toward the Sun. Here's how fast it'll go.
In all directions, at great distances, the Universe looks younger, more uniform, and less evolved. Does that mean Earth must be the center?
Time is relative, not absolute, as gravity and motion both cause time to dilate. Your head and feet, therefore, don't age at the same rate.
Despite many ultra-distant galaxy candidates found with JWST, we still haven't seen anything from the Universe's first 250 million years.
LHC scientists just showed that spooky quantum entanglement applies to the highest-energy, shortest-lived particles of all: top quarks.