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
There are many arguments over what makes a theory beautiful, elegant, or compelling. But in the face of data, predictive power is everything. When you look at any phenomenon in […]
Unless you can make a force that travels faster than the speed of light, a singularity is inevitable. The more mass you place into a small volume of space, the […]
There’s no way to frame this as anything other than a disaster for humanity. This article was originally written one week ago, on the day the FY2019 budget was released […]
The season finale gets the one thing Star Trek is famous for — ethics — completely wrong. Life is full of dilemmas whose solutions seem paradoxical. To obtain peace, you must prepare for war. […]
The Universe may defy our intuition, but that’s what science is for! If you take a look out at the Universe, and in every direction you look, you see objects rushing […]
The science of volcanic lighting is almost as spectacular as the phenomenon itself. When hot, molten rock pushes its way up through the Earth’s crust and exits through to the […]
If you want to go where no one has gone before, you have to make the investment. Here’s what last week’s launch means. If you want to send humans to Mars, […]
Quantum interpretations are all the rage. Too bad you don’t even need one. In everyday life, there are certain rules we take for granted: cause-and-effect, for instance. Something occurs, and that […]
The hole in the ozone is shrinking, for sure, but to assess the whole layer, you need to look at the whole Earth. Throughout the history of life on Earth, there’s […]
The next-to-last episode of the first season is heavy on plot and character development, but packs a science and ethical punch, too. What do you do when, after a life-threatening journey […]
Did you hear the story about how a 100 petawatt laser will finally ‘break the quantum vacuum’? Get the facts. Empty space, as it turns out, isn’t so empty. The fluctuations […]
It isn’t just for merging neutron stars, anymore. Over the past three years, there’s arguably been no greater scientific discovery than the direct detection of gravitational waves. The two LIGO […]
But is this really a problem for the theory? Or is it physics to the rescue? Dark matter is one of the most powerful, yet one of the most controversial, ideas […]
If you want to know how we get something from nothing, you’d better understand what we mean! When we look around at our world and Universe today, we talk and think […]
Elegance, beauty, and mathematical precision makes for a compelling story and an exquisite model. But it doesn’t make it right. Scientific theories, at their best, are simple, straightforward, full of predictive […]
Plus, how the mycelium network’s destruction could, physically, actually end life in the Universe. Imagine taking a seemingly impossible journey: traveling to another Universe on a network of biological spores […]
There are lots of properties inherent to particles, and while everyone has an antiparticle, not everyone is matter or antimatter. For every particle of matter that’s known to exist in […]
If everything goes right, astronomy will take a magnificent leap into the future. But here’s what needs to happen first. Back in 2000, NASA held their decadal survey, choosing what would […]
Surprisingly, the evidence points towards the existence of the unobservable multiverse. But it isn’t the answer you’re looking for. “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that […]
If humans were made in God’s image, then whose image were aliens made in? A simple, innocent question that I received had me thinking for days about how to answer it. […]
The ‘big event’ was billed as a first in 150 years. But is what we’re seeing really that rare? This January 31st, something quite rare and special will happen. At 1:30 […]
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe. For hundreds of years, there was an immutable law of physics that was never challenged: […]
What it would take to make a ‘mirror Universe’ a reality. The idea of parallel Universes has been around for over 60 years now, giving a theoretically physical existence to all […]
If nothing can escape from beneath the event horizon, where do these phenomena come from? The most important feature of a black hole is that it has an event horizon: a […]
Would there be only blackness past the event horizon? Or something more? Black holes are some of the most perplexing objects in the entire Universe. Objects so dense, where gravitation […]
There’s nothing new, recent, or remarkable about it. It’s just a typical cosmic pebble in the galactic ocean. Last year, the interstellar interloper ʻOumuamua passed through the inner Solar System. Originally […]
The neutron star-neutron star merger was initially only seen in 1 detector out of 3. Here’s how scientists didn’t let it slip away. On August 17th, 2017, a gravitational wave event […]
Even if it can’t detect them directly, we’ll learn the answer. Here’s how. Perhaps the most revolutionary find of the past generation, when we think about the Universe beyond Earth, is […]
The deep dive into the mirror Universe, and the ethics of how we deal with purity and diversity, is just getting started. Life in the mirror Universe isn’t easy for anyone. […]
What do our future missions in physics, astronomy, astrophysics and more hold? If you went back in time just 30 years, the world as we it was a completely different place. […]