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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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Who should sit atop the iron throne? Let your DNA decide. Here on Earth, we hold one important truth to be self-evident above all others: that all humans are created equal. […]
Our Sun will someday run out of fuel. Here’s what it will look like when that happens. The fate of our Sun is unambiguous, determined solely by its mass. If all […]
The whole should equal the sum of its parts, but doesn’t. Here’s why. The whole is equal to the sum of its constituent parts. That’s how everything works, from galaxies to […]
It might be the biggest conundrum facing cosmology today. But perhaps it’s not a controversy; it might be a clue. https://soundcloud.com/ethan-siegel-172073460/starts-with-a-bang-44-the-expanding-universe/ One of the biggest conundrums in the Universe surrounds the […]
General Relativity had to be right. Here’s how we knew. What happens to light when it passes near a large mass? Does it simply continue in a straight line, undeflected from […]
And why Einstein’s quest for unification was doomed from the start. If you wanted to answer the question of what’s truly fundamental in this Universe, you’d need to investigate matter and […]
Xenon-124 isn’t stable, and the direct detection of its decay could lead us to an even greater prize. Our Universe is old: 13.8 billion years old, to be precise. Many of […]
Our outer Solar System, from Jupiter to Neptune, isn’t unique after all. In the early 1990s, scientists began detecting the first planets orbiting stars other than the Sun: exoplanets. The easiest […]
Our planet is rare, precious, and fragile. It’s up to all of us to be its steward. With the advent of rocketry and spaceflight, our cosmic perspective changed forever. The very […]
If a star spins and then collapses, what happens to its angular momentum? The most common way to form a black hole in the Universe is to have a massive […]
There was a first molecule, and we found one just like it. But there’s a big difference. The Universe’s first molecule is found at last! That’s what the headlines have […]
Red, green, and blue? What we call ‘color charge’ is far more interesting than that. At a fundamental level, reality is determined by only two properties of our Universe: the quanta […]
A single thought experiment reveals a paradox. Could quantum gravity be the solution? Sometimes, if you want to understand how nature truly works, you need to break things down to […]
Well-lit cities and towns are essential to public safety. That doesn’t have to ruin the night sky. For most of us here on planet Earth, navigating the world at night is […]
Now that we’ve seen our first one, we want more, and we want them better. Here’s how to get there. To resolve any astronomical object, you must achieve resolutions superior to […]
It’s the technique, from the Event Horizon Telescope, that brought us a black hole’s image. Here’s how it works. The Event Horizon Telescope has accomplished what no other telescope or telescope […]
We’ve put so much together about the Universe. Could it all come tumbling down? We’re always on the lookout for the next big thing, and even our best guesswork is often […]
And what do we still have left to learn? The original idea of a black hole goes all the way back to 1783, when Cambridge scientist John Michell recognized that a […]
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 […]