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Ethan Siegel
A theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, host of popular podcast “Starts with a Bang!”
Ethan Siegel is a Ph.D. astrophysicist and author of "Starts with a Bang!" He is a science communicator, who professes physics and astronomy at various colleges. He has won numerous awards for science writing since 2008 for his blog, including the award for best science blog by the Institute of Physics. His two books "Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive" and "Beyond the Galaxy: How humanity looked beyond our Milky Way and discovered the entire Universe" are available for purchase at Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @startswithabang.
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Imagine how different our understanding of the Universe would be if we saw nothing beyond the Milky Way. Our corner of the Universe was gifted with a plethora of bright, nearby […]
Forget the speed of light or the electron’s charge. This is the physical constant that really matters. Why is our Universe the way it is, and not some other way? There […]
What took hundreds of millions of years to create is being wasted on… party balloons? There’s a natural resource found beneath Earth’s surface that’s been building up for hundreds of […]
And if they exist, are there alternate-reality versions of you out there, too? You’ve likely imagined it before: another Universe out there, just like this one, where all the random events […]
The past 300,000 years occurs in the blink of a cosmic eye, but it’s meant everything to humanity. The history of humanity was anything but inevitable. Although the Universe created […]
Even the best science imaginable has its limits. In terms of ambition, it’s hard to ask for more than to know absolutely everything there is to know about the Universe. That’s […]
A 1060-hour amateur exposure of a nearby galaxy does what even Hubble couldn’t do. The Universe is full of astronomical wonders, but it’s up to humanity to observe and analyze them. […]
Neither one reflects the other; they’re both blue for entirely different reasons. If you’ve ever been curious about the world you live in, you’ve probably wondered why the sky is […]
There are real problems that our society faces, and only through expert-level knowledge can we solve them. All across the country, you can see how the seeds of it develop from […]
The cosmic story of us wasn’t inevitable, but the culmination of many chance events. By the time our planet was four billion years old, the rise of large plants and animals […]
The two planets most suited for habitability had very different fates. At last, scientists know why. Imagine the early days of our Solar System, going back billions of years. The Sun […]
The thin ribbon is a rare and spectacular celestial phenomenon, but so much more than a mere aurora. It isn’t often that skywatchers discover a new naked-eye phenomenon in astronomy, but […]
Some claim that inflation isn’t science, but it sure has made some incredibly successful scientific predictions. So, you want to know how the Universe began? You’re not alone. Every other […]
Depending on how you measure it, there are two different answers that could be right. If you want to see what’s out there in the Universe, you first have to be […]
The world’s greatest observatory can go no further with its current instrument set. The Hubble Space Telescope has provided humanity with our deepest views of the Universe ever. It has […]
The history of life on Earth took many meandering turns before it gave rise to us. When Earth first formed, all the raw ingredients for life — atoms, molecules, a potentially habitable planet […]
Dark matter, dark energy, inflation and the Big Bang are real, and the alternatives all fail spectacularly. If you keep up with the latest science news, you’re probably familiar with […]
The small step that one man took would never have happened without this narrow escape. On July 20, 1969, history was made as humanity set foot on the Moon for the […]
It’s made up of scores of telescopes at many different sites across the world. But it acts like one giant telescope. Here’s how. If you want to observe the Universe more […]
How fast is the Universe expanding? The results might be pointing to something incredible. If you want to know how something in the Universe works, all you need to do […]