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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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.
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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?
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10 years ago, LIGO first began directly detecting gravitational waves. Now better than ever, it’s revealing previously unreachable features.
Questions about our origins, biologically, chemically, and cosmically, are the most profound ones we can ask. Here are today’s best answers.
The red planet, Mars, may once have been teeming with life, just as Earth is today. Finding “organics” on Mars, however, doesn’t mean life.
Dust is ubiquitous in the modern Universe, appearing in nearly all galaxies. But our cosmos was born dust-free. So where does it originate?
It’s the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it’s still not the very beginning of everything.
The most common type of exoplanet is neither Earth-sized nor Neptune-sized, but in between. Could these haze-rich worlds house alien life?
The Holy Grail of physics is a Theory of Everything: where a single equation describes the whole Universe. But maybe there simply isn’t one?
JWST isn’t the first telescope to peer into this factory of star-birth some 5500 light-years away, but its views are the most educational.
Going back to 1990, we hadn’t even found one planet outside of our Solar System. As we close in on 6000, we now see many of them directly.
Since even before Einstein, physicists have sought a theory of everything to explain the Universe. Can positive geometry lead us there?
Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies and saw a gamma-ray surprise.
The Juno spacecraft, orbiting and imaging Jupiter since 2016, is still succeeding. Without a further extension, the mission now faces death.
With several seemingly incompatible observations, cosmology faces many puzzles. Could early, supermassive stars be the unified solution?
As we look to larger cosmic scales, we get a broader view of the expansive cosmic forest, eventually revealing the grandest views of all.
The Universe isn’t just expanding; the expansion is accelerating. If different methods yield incompatible results, is dark energy evolving?
When you don’t have enough clues to bring your detective story to a close, you should expect that your educated guesses will all be wrong.
10 years ago, LIGO saw its first gravitational wave. After 218 detections, our view of black holes has changed forever. Can this era endure?
Designed to map galaxies, the SPHEREx mission’s first science result is instead about interstellar interloper 3I/ATLAS. No, it’s not aliens.
In our own Milky Way, a recently deceased star creates a ghostly, hand-like shape in X-rays some 150 light-years wide. Here’s how it’s made.
Throughout history, “free energy” has been a scammer’s game, such as perpetual motion. But with zero-point energy, is it actually possible?