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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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It’s 100 years since astronomy’s famous ‘great debate.’ We still haven’t learned the most compelling lesson of all. So, you’ve arrived at a crossroads: you think the world works in a […]
In both visible light and infrared, we get a preview of the spectacular advances that await the James Webb Space Telescope. What astronomers see isn’t just determined by the telescope […]
It should be just as sticky (or non-sticky) as normal matter. Here’s how we know. Not only here on Earth, but everywhere in the Universe that we look, we find structures […]
Visiting even one friend can undo all the good work that social distancing has accomplished. Over the past few months, people all over the world have come to realize just […]
Over the past 30 years, we’ve revolutionized what we know about the Universe. But we couldn’t have done it without these lessons. On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope rocketed […]
The dream of an ‘Earth-like’ planet showcases our astrobiological ignorance. Over the past decade, our understanding of what planets exist around stars other than our own has exploded. The number […]
It’s one way to interpret recent X-ray data, but it conflicts with much, much better data we already have. Earlier this month, a new study came out claiming something shocking: perhaps […]
Its record-holding galaxy is 32 billion light-years away, in a Universe that’s only 13.8 billion years old. On April 24, 2020, humanity celebrates the 30th anniversary of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. […]
Even if you remove everything you can from the Universe, some energy will still remain. Here’s what that means. Imagine, if you can, what it would mean to have a Universe […]
We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]
They say that atoms are mostly 99.99999% empty space. But quantum physics says otherwise. If you were to look at what your body is made of, at smaller and more […]
In reality, it has no color at all. Here’s why. Every time you see an illustration of the COVID-19 coronavirus, it’s shown with a red color to it. Sometimes it’s red […]
How does one supernova get so bright, so energetic, and so massive? It’s a spectacular mystery to solve. On February 22, 2016, one of humanity’s automated sky-scanning telescopes — the Pan-STARRS Survey for […]
The original Hubble Deep Field truly showed us what the Universe looks like. Later this month, the Hubble Space Telescope will celebrate its 30th anniversary. This photo of the Hubble Space […]
And what role, if any, does gravity play? While most of us have never had the opportunity to go into space, we all have the chance to dream about it and […]
Small sample size? No underlying theory? Conflicts with all other results? It checks all the boxes. There’s nothing that’s special, on a cosmic scale, about our place in the Universe. Not […]
There are three factors all competing to determine the fate of the Earth, and the one that’s winning now won’t win in the end. If you could measure the average distance […]
When you look at the Universe in an entirely new way, you sometimes find what you could never have anticipated. Almost exactly one year ago today, the Event Horizon Telescope […]
And how it might ensure that future generations won’t have to face anything like this ever again. As of April 6, 2020, more than 1.3 million people worldwide have tested positive […]
It’s not the only one of its kind, but it’s definitely makes no sense without dark matter. Throughout the Universe, galaxies and star clusters come in all different sizes and masses. […]