The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.
Our mission: to answer, scientifically, the biggest questions of all.
- What is our 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 countless generations, these were questions without resolutions. Now, for the first time in history, we have scientific answers. Starts With A Bang, written by Dr. Ethan Siegel, brings these stories — of what we know and how we know it — directly to you.
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Featured
Why power generated through nuclear fusion will be the future, but not the present, solution to humanity’s energy needs.
It’s a strange idea to consider: that a tiny building block of matter, the atomic nucleus, holds the greatest potential for energy release.
And yet, it’s true; while electron transitions in atoms or molecules typically release energy on the order of ~1 electron-Volt, nuclear transitions between different configurations release energies a million times as great, on the order of ~1 Mega-electron-Volt.
Popular
From before the Big Bang to the present day, the Universe goes through many eras. Dark energy heralds the final one.
A wild, compelling idea without a direct, practical test, the Multiverse is highly controversial. But its supporting pillars sure are stable.
The surface and atmosphere is colored by ferric oxides. Beneath a very thin layer, mere millimeters deep in places, it’s not red anymore.
The first supernova ever discovered through its X-rays has an enormously powerful engine at its core. It’s unlike anything ever seen.
Just 13.8 billion years after the hot Big Bang, we can see 46.1 billion light-years away in all directions. Doesn’t that violate…something?
All Stories
NASA’s SOFIA mission is upgraded and back in action, and the Cigar Galaxy makes a perfect target. In theory, cold, neutral gas is the key to stars and galaxies. A visualization […]
Being a small piece of a large experiment is vital to the enterprise of science. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work as a small (but vital) part of […]
Are dark matter and dark energy both two sides of the same coin? When it comes to the Universe, what you can easily see isn’t always reflective of all there is. […]
The inevitable long, slow decline is accelerating, and there’s nothing we can do. The Universe, as it is today, is less active, is forming fewer stars, and is creating fewer chances […]
Science was never the same after meeting ‘the particle who lived.’ Back in the early 1930s, there were only a few known fundamental particles that made up the Universe. If you […]
Thou shalt not conclude “aliens” from insufficient data. When it comes to what’s out there in this Universe, perhaps the only thing that’s greater than our cosmic ignorance is the […]
Just say no to artist’s illustrations. This is what the Universe actually looks like. The Universe we observe often surpasses our greatest imaginings. This 20-year time-lapse of stars near the center […]
The Big Bang is our accepted origin of the Universe. But is there another possibility? Since the mid-1960s and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang has […]
Avi Loeb says it’s aliens. Every other astronomer disagrees. Here’s why. In 2017, an astronomical event occurred that was unlike any other: for the first time, we observed an object that […]
Think there are habitable super-Earths out there? Think again. Here in our Solar System, we have two very distinct types of planets: small, terrestrial, rocky worlds, with thin (or no) atmospheres […]
There’s a lot to get rid of if we want to get only our Universe out of String Theory. A lot of people, when they learn about String Theory for the […]
And after years of mystery, we finally know where they come from. Here on Earth, thunderstorms and accompanying lightning strikes represent tremendous releases of energy. It was way back in 2011 […]
Time always moves in the same direction, but what if the Universe were contracting? As we step forward in time, a number of things always seem to happen together. Objects […]
It’s not a gambit. It’s not fraud. It’s not an opinion. And it’s not biased like you think it is. Most of us, when we think about what science is, default […]
What we’ve seen isn’t necessarily what we get, but the most common world doesn’t look like ours. There’s a very common myth out there in astronomy: the idea that the Sun […]
The night sky is already noticeably different, and bigger changes are ahead. For all of human history until the launch of Sputnik, the only objects in the night sky were naturally […]
A new survey, the DESI Legacy Imaging Survey, has found more lenses than all others put together. One of Einstein’s most revolutionary predictions is that mass bends light. During a […]
We have two ways of measuring the expansion rate. Here’s the harder one. If you want to understand where our Universe came from and where it’s going, you need to measure […]
The successor to Hubble is almost ready for launch. It’s really coming this year, too! NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, originally proposed in the 1990s, is finally slated to launch later […]
The newest record-setting quasar houses an enormous black hole. No one knows how. In every scientific field, we’re always on the lookout for whatever new discovery might reveal what’s currently beyond […]
Binary pulsars are doing what no other measurement has done: measure our galactic acceleration directly. Even though the majority of the matter that makes up our Universe may be completely […]
If you thought it was just one rich region in space, look deeper and wider. Shining brilliantly in January’s skies is the Great Orion Nebula. By 10 PM every night in […]
And can we devise an experiment to tell, even when we aren’t looking? One of the most bizarre aspects of quantum physics is that the fundamental entities that make up the […]
In 2020, we experienced the shortest ‘day’ in 50 years. Here’s the reason why. On the timescales that humans experience, there are lots of things that we consider to be extremely […]
There are many things on large scales that also appear on small scales. But is the Universe truly a fractal? If you take a look at the structures that form in […]
The expansion rate is dropping, but distant galaxies are accelerating. Here’s how. If you take a look at any galaxy in the Universe that isn’t gravitationally bound to our own, we’ve […]
For the cosmos, it’s all too easy being green. Stars come in a wide variety of colors, but never green. Stars form in a wide variety of sizes, colors and masses, […]
The smallest and faintest stars of all, even the failed stars that didn’t make it, are hiding some fascinating secrets. You might have thought that if we were going to […]
It’s 92 billion light-years wide after just 13.8 billion years. And that’s just fine. If there’s one rule that people know about how fast things can move, it’s that there’s a […]
It’s that the Universe can be understood at all. Don’t deafen yourself to its lessons. In a nutshell, 2020 has been a unique year in human history. For the first time […]