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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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The first image of an Event Horizon is here. Here’s what it means. Variety isn’t just the spice of life, but a natural consequence of living in our Universe. Gravitation, obeying […]
We’ve never seen an image of a black hole’s event horizon before. Here’s what we’re expecting, based on what we already know. For hundreds of years, physicists have hypothesized that the […]
Beyond the oceans boiling and the death of our Sun, Earth’s ultimate fate won’t be determined until far in the distant future. It took the Universe 13.8 billion years to create […]
Sometimes, the simplest questions of all are the most difficult to meaningfully answer. If you were to take any tiny piece of matter in our known Universe and break it […]
When the Universe gives us clues, we ignore them at our own peril. When you approach the world scientifically, you seek to gain knowledge about how it works by asking it […]
If parallel Universes or the multiverse are real, we might someday encounter a visitor who hails from another one. Here’s what to do. There are a lot of things that are […]
We assume that life is ubiquitous in the Universe. But what if it’s just us? When it comes to the question of extraterrestrial life, humans optimistically assume the Universe is prolific. […]
What should a black hole look like? Our theoretical predictions are about to meet our first observations. In science, there’s no moment more exciting than when you get to confront […]
If you think we’ve done a great job with planet-finding so far, just wait until you learn what’s possible with microlensing! When we think about finding planets in the Universe, […]
Imagine you had perfect technology and unlimited fuel. How far could you go? Human spaceflight has brought us beyond Earth, but we could potentially venture even farther. The very first launch […]
In all the Universe, there’s only one Earth. But can we find the other worlds that are like ours? Even though the ingredients for life have been confirmed to be practically […]
There is a fundamental difference between matter and antimatter. But not enough of one to explain our Universe. Our Universe is a vast and enormous place, and if there’s one […]
It’s rare but spectacular when the Moon passes in front of another planet. Here’s how to see it. From our perspective on Earth, the night sky appears virtually unchanged with the […]
Earth wasn’t the only potentially habitable planet in the early Solar System. What happened to Mars? If you could travel back in time to the early stages of the Solar System, […]
If dark energy is causing the Universe to disappear, how can we still find and see ultra-distant stars and galaxies? In the 1920s, scientists discovered that the Universe was expandingbased […]
The visible light portion of the spectrum is tiny compared to the whole thing. Here’s what we’re missing. When you look at the Milky Way in visible light, you might see […]
LIGO and Virgo have now detected a total of 11 binary merger events. But exactly 0 were in the Milky Way. Here’s why. One of the most spectacular recent advances in […]
In order to reap the greatest rewards, we have to think big and invest big. One of these four missions will deliver like never before. When it comes to exploring the […]
The transition across a quantum barrier is known as quantum tunneling, and the amount of time it takes for such a transition to occur had never been measured before. For […]
A climate catastrophe 2 billion years ago almost ended life on Earth. Here’s the biggest lesson of all. Although it was more than 4½ billion years ago that planet Earth formed, […]