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.
Billions of years ago, the ever-increasing entropy must’ve been much lower: the past hypothesis. Here’s how cosmic inflation solves it.
The largest hazardous asteroid found in the last 8 years showcases a little-known class of planet-killers. And we’re woefully unprepared.
In 1974, Stephen Hawking showed that even black holes don’t live forever, but emit radiation and eventually evaporate. Here’s how.
In 1995, Hubble peered at the Pillars of Creation, forever changing our view. Now in 2022, JWST completes the star-forming puzzle.
If you want to share the truths about our Universe with others, don’t fall into the trap of arguing with a misinformer. Do this instead.
Most exoplanets have been found around single stars via the transit method. But binary star systems might contain even more of them.
Early relics and late-time objects give incompatible results for the expanding Universe. This independent anomaly intensifies the problem.
Practically all of the matter we see and interact with is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. Then why is reality so… solid?
Are you unhappy with how various events in your life turned out? Perhaps, in a parallel Universe, things worked out very differently.
The Universe gravitates so that normal matter and General Relativity alone can’t explain it. Here’s why dark matter beats modified gravity.
It’s literally the one and only trick that separates top-notch physicists from crackpots, dropouts, and those who can’t cut the mustard.
1.9 billion years ago, a star’s explosive death created a black hole. Its light just arrived at Earth. But did it set a cosmic record?
Holograms preserve all of an object’s 3D information, but on a 2D surface. Could the holographic Universe idea lead us to higher dimensions?
Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we finally found them.
NASA is creating a planet habitability index, and Earth may not be at the top. With our current data, ranking habitability is guesswork.
With its first view of a protoplanetary disk around a newly forming star, the JWST reveals how alone individual stellar systems truly are.
The Universe begins with negligible amounts of angular momentum, which is always conserved. So why do planets, stars, and galaxies all spin?
Before we discovered gravitational waves, multi-messenger astronomy got its start with light and particles arriving from the same event.
They say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. But thanks to these three pioneers in quantum entanglement, perhaps we do.
From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic ones, solving any of these puzzles could unlock our understanding of the Universe.
It’s the very closest stars to us that hold the key to unlocking the possibilities for life in star systems all throughout the Universe.
In the 20th century, many options abounded as to our cosmic origins. Today, only the Big Bang survives, thanks to this critical evidence.
The far side of the Moon is incredibly different from the Earth-facing side. 63 years later, we know why the Moon’s faces are not alike.
We have two descriptions of the Universe that work perfectly well: General Relativity and quantum physics. Too bad they don’t work together.
Sooner or later, Earth is going to be hit by a large enough space object to cause significant damage to humanity. Stopping them isn’t easy.
No matter what physical system we consider, nature always obeys the same fundamental laws. Must it be this way, and if so, why?
The James Webb Space Telescope viewed Neptune, our Solar System’s final planet, for the first time. Here’s what we saw, and what it means.
When people pick the greatest scientist of all-time, Newton and Einstein always come up. Perhaps they should name Johannes Kepler, instead.
Yes, NASA’s Perseverance rover found organics on Mars. So did Curiosity. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean anything in the search for life.
No matter how good our measurement devices get, certain quantum properties always possess an inherent uncertainty. Can we figure out why?