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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.
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.
Adams was infamously scooped when Neptune was discovered in 1846. His failure wasn't the end, but a prelude to a world-changing discovery.
It's knowledgeable, confident, and behaves human-like in many ways. But it's not magic that powers AI though; it's just math and data.
For its 2-year science anniversary, JWST has revealed unprecedented details in "the Penguin and the Egg." Here are the surprises inside.
As the Sun ages, it loses mass, causing Earth to spiral outward in its orbit. Will that cool the Earth down, or will other effects win out?
Just 13.8 billion years after the hot Big Bang, we can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away. No, this doesn't violate relativity.
We know of stellar mass and supermassive black holes, but intermediate mass ones have long proved elusive. Until now.
The Bullet Cluster has, for nearly 20 years, been hailed as an empirical "proof" of dark matter. Can their detractors explain it away?
On a cosmic scale, our existence seems insignificant and inconsequential. But from another perspective, humans are completely remarkable.
The standard picture of our Universe is that it's dominated by dark matter and dark energy. But this alternative is also worth considering.
On the largest of cosmic scales, the Universe is expanding. But it isn't all-or-nothing everywhere, as "collapse" is also part of the story.
From the explosions themselves to their unique and vibrant colors, the fireworks displays we adore require quantum physics.
The structure of our Solar System has been known for centuries. When we finally started finding exoplanets, they surprised everyone.
There are many things that separate science from ideology, politics, philosophy, or religion. Follow these 10 commandments to get it right.
The last infant stars are finishing their formation inside these pillars of gas. The evaporation of those columns is almost complete.
Sure, there's less daylight during winter than summer, as your hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun. But darkness goes deeper than that.
Our thermodynamic arrow of time explains why the entropy of any isolated system always increases. But it can't explain what we perceive.
The near and far sides of the Moon are so different from each other, and no one is sure why. New lunar samples could confirm a wild theory.
All telescopes are fundamentally limited in what they can see. JWST reveals more distant galaxies than Hubble, but still can't see them all.
There was a time where no starlight was visible throughout the entire cosmos. That time was short-lived: shorter than astronomers imagined.
Gravitational waves carry enormous amounts of energy, but spread out quickly once they leave the source. Could they ever create black holes?