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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: How do space telescopes stay focused?
With targets from all across the Universe, focusing a space telescope — with so many moving parts — is challenging, but doable. Here's how.
By probing the Universe on atomic scales and smaller, we can reveal the entirety of the Standard Model, and with it, the quantum Universe.
Despite their rarity, boron and beryllium can both be detected within white dwarf atmospheres. What does their presence and abundance imply?
When JWST opened its eyes, it spied a huge number of Little Red Dots. What we saw inside was a puzzle, but what's missing could solve it.
After a period of cosmic inflation came to an end, the hot Big Bang commenced. 13.8 billion years later, we arrived. Here's how we got here.
Once you cross over to the inside of an event horizon, you can never come out again. But then, how do black holes emit all sorts of things?
Oort cloud object Bernardinelli–Bernstein has the largest known cometary nucleus: 119 km wide. An impact with Earth would be catastrophic.
The Universe took a great many steps to create not just life, but intelligent life, here at home. What can we say about life beyond Earth?
The anthropic principle has fascinating scientific uses, where the simple fact of our existence holds deep physical lessons. Don't abuse it!
Vast arrays of planets, stars, black holes, galaxies, and more populate our Universe. Within each category, differences can be astounding.
Contracting gas clouds don't just make a single star, but a spectrum, with all different masses. Early on, that spectrum differed. But why?
Protons and neutrons are composite structures: made of quarks and gluons. But knowing they had substructure goes back long before that.
Yes, "the laws of physics break down" at singularities. But relativity itself would have to be wrong for black holes to not possess them.
It's the Universe's ultimate chicken-and-egg question: what came first, the galaxy or the black hole? One Little Red Dot proves the answer.
In 2016, humanity announced our first successful gravitational wave detection. 10 years and 389 events later, here's how far we've come.
The Astro2020 decadal report set the USA's agenda for space and ground-based astronomy. Here in 2026, we're clearly on the wrong course.
Two discrete symmetries, charge conjugation and parity, must be violated together for our Universe to exist. We haven't found enough of it.
Many people, now with LLM assistance, regularly claim to discover game-changing revolutions. Scientists don't buy it. You shouldn't either.
Despite all that we've discovered, Earth remains the only planet definitively known to possess life. Here's how to find a second example.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider superseded Fermilab's TeVatron in 2008, but now nears the end of its run. The ambitious FCC project comes next.
At and beyond the current frontiers of knowledge, many physicists have strongly held opinions. Can surveys point the way to breakthroughs?