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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.
To Fred Hoyle, the Big Bang was nothing more than a creationist myth. 75 years later, it's cemented as the beginning of our Universe.
JWST has puzzled astronomers by revealing large, bright, massive early galaxies. But the littlest ones pack the greatest cosmic punch.
When cosmic inflation came to an end, the hot Big Bang ensued as a result. If our cosmic vacuum state decays, could it all happen again?
In 1957, humanity launched our first satellite; today's number is nearly 10,000, with 500,000+ more planned. Space is no longer pristine.
Leap day only comes once every four years, including in 2024. But the reason we have it, including when we do and don't, may surprise you.
There are many problems with relying on SAT and ACT scores for college admissions. But removing them entirely creates less opportunity.
For now, our Solar System's eight planets are all safe, and relatively stable. Billions of years from now, everything will be different.
There are plenty of life-friendly stellar systems in the Universe today. But at some point in the far future, life's final extinction will occur.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases. But that doesn't mean it was zero at the start of the Big Bang.
Everything acts like a wave while it propagates, but behaves like a particle whenever it interacts. The origins of this duality go way back.
So far, gravitational waves have revealed stellar mass black holes and neutron stars, plus a cosmic background. So much more is coming.
Almost every large structure in the Universe displays a 5:1 dark matter-to-normal matter ratio. Here's how some galaxies defy that rule.
Almost everything we can observe and measure follows what's known as a normal distribution, or a Bell curve. There's a profound reason why.
In the early stages of our Solar System, there were three life-friendly planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Only Earth thrived. Here's why.
For thousands of years, humanity had no idea how far away the stars were. In the 1600s, Newton, Huygens, and Hooke all claimed to get there.
Although many of Einstein's papers revolutionized physics, there's one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.
Beyond the planets, stars, and Milky Way lie ultra-distant objects: galaxies and quasars. Here's how far back we've seen throughout history.
Although early Earth was a molten hellscape, once it cooled, life arose almost immediately. That original chain of life remains unbroken.
The Earth that exists today wasn't formed simultaneously with the Sun and the other planets. In some ways, we're quite a latecomer.
The Universe didn't begin with a bang, but with an inflationary "whoosh" that came before. Here are the biggest questions that still remain.