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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: Does uneven cosmic expansion change our fate?
Recent evidence could indicate the Universe doesn't expand evenly. Does that change our expected fate: Big Rip, Big Crunch, or Heat Death?
1859's Carrington event gave us a preview of how catastrophic the Sun could be for humanity. But it could get even worse than we imagined.
Time isn't the same for everyone, even on Earth. Flying around the world gave Einstein the ultimate test. No one is immune from relativity.
We assume there's no preferred frame of reference in the Universe, and that light behaves the same in all directions. What if we're wrong?
We've now found many "conjoined" objects in the asteroid and Kuiper belts, including the first contact trinary, Nysa. What does it all mean?
On Earth's surface, we accelerate at 1g: 9.8m/s². In orbit, the acceleration is only slightly less. So why, then, are astronauts weightless?
Newton thought that gravitation would happen instantly, propagating at infinite speeds. Einstein showed otherwise; gravity isn't instant.
At a fundamental level, nobody knows whether gravity is truly quantum in nature. A novel experiment strongly hints that it is.
Today, the world's largest operating optical telescope is 10.4 meters in diameter. These 3 facilities will lead astronomy's next generation.
With the National Solar Observatory's incredible DKIST, we see the Sun in the highest resolution ever. Its latest images blew us all away.
Few wavelengths of light reach Earth's surface; the others require going to space. What can the ultraviolet ASPERA space telescope do?
Between war, disease, environmental destruction, and resource overconsumption, our civilization's future is uncertain. Can science save us?
As far as we can tell, there's no limit to how far it goes on; only a limit to how far we can see. Could the Universe truly be infinite?
The Earth is a massive planet, but doesn't form a truly perfect sphere. Here's how to understand our strongest and weakest gravity points.
Neither Vannevar Bush's "Science: the Endless Frontier" nor OSTP's "Science: A New Golden Age" got it fully right. Here's what they missed.
Obviously, the gas giants all top this list. But the fall-off is rapid after that, and the final two spots in the top 10 are truly shocking.
Human beings only see the Universe now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. What would the earliest life, anywhere, have seen instead?
When people choose the greatest scientist of all, Newton and Einstein always come up. Here's why they should pick Johannes Kepler instead.
Scientists are livid over the OSTP director's official report to the President. Will it lead to a new golden age for US science, or end it?
200 years ago, we hardly knew anything about our Universe on cosmic scales. Today, there's so much that we know. Here's how we arrived.
Early on, the entire Universe was ionized. Without the forbidden two-photon transition, it would have remained that way for far too long.