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.
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. […]
In principle, the laws of physics are the same forwards and backwards. But in practice, time only runs in one direction. Most of the laws of physics are the same […]
All stars will eventually die. But we’ve never seen ones die like this before. When you look up at the sky, most of the points of light we see appear to […]
Astrophysics has probed a test of a fundamental law, ‘Lorentz invariance,’ well beyond the LHC’s limits. Einstein is still right. The greatest scientific legacy that Albert Einstein left us is this: […]
In 774/775, tree rings show a spike in carbon-14 unlike anything else. At last, scientists think they know why. Every once in a while, science gives us a mystery that comes […]
Your opinions about a large number of complex scientific issues are probably wrong. That’s why we have science. In 2016, an Italian virologist named Roberto Burioni was invited to appear on […]
We’re not made out of the densest elements, but we’re the densest planet nonetheless. Here’s why. Of all the planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids and more in the Solar System, only […]
On the morning of March 31, 2020, these three worlds will be at their mutual closest in 20 years. For the past few weeks, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter have all shone […]
The center of our Sun tops out at 15 million K, but nuclear bombs can get nearly 20 times hotter. Here’s how. In terms of raw energy output, nothing on our […]
NASA’s New Horizons is the most distant technologically advanced observatory ever. And that makes all the difference. When you look at an object that’s very distant from you, how well […]
Ending social distancing won’t only make us sicker, but will tank the health care industry in the process. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic continues to spread around the world. As of today, […]
The combination of charge conjugation, parity, and time-reversal symmetry is known as CPT. And it must never be broken. Ever. The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely […]
Hawking radiation should really be happening, but black holes are farther from decaying than ever before. Black holes are, in many ways, the most extreme objects that will ever exist in […]
It’s not just for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. Not even close. Shortly after Earth first formed first formed, life quickly took hold, thriving ever since. Both reflected sunlight on a […]
It isn’t just that mass and energy are equivalent and interchangeable. It tells us something fundamental about mass itself. Of all the equations that we use to describe the Universe, perhaps […]
A year ago, a puzzling gap existed between black holes and neutron stars. With nearly a year of new data, LIGO solves the puzzle. On Monday, March 16, 2020, astrophysicist Carl […]
We’ve never found eight stars bound together in the same stable system. But nature might make it so. The Universe that we have is often more wondrous and bizarre than even […]
Today, our observable Universe extends for 46 billion light-years in all directions. But early on, things were much smaller. There are few things we can conceive of that are as mind-bogglingly […]
And why social distancing, isolation, and sheltering-in-place are so effective, but only if we do them early enough. In any biological system, if you put a living organism into an environment […]
And if you have a friend at the same longitude, you can even measure its circumference. This year’s equinox, on March 19/20 of 2020 (longitude-dependent), is Earth’s earliest in 124 […]
You’d have to throw out a lot of known physics for this to even be a possibility. Here’s why. It’s an undeniable scientific fact that dark matter must exist in order […]
Dark matter is perhaps the most mysterious substance in the Universe. What exactly it is, however, still eludes us. Dark matter is one of the most mysterious and yet most ubiquitous […]
It’s an incredibly useful approximation. But the truth takes us far deeper. Anyone who’s ever taken a physics course has learned the same myth for centuries now: that any object thrown, […]
Now is not the time to panic. But it’s the perfect time to get informed. The typical human body is made out of some 10²⁸ atoms distributed across approximately 100 […]
Should we build a more powerful collider? A telescope that probes the Universe as never before? Absolutely. Here’s why. Every time someone proposes that we invest in fundamental science — to push the […]
The full Moon is always a sight worth looking at. This March, the full Worm Moon is a little more “super” than usual. The full Moon is always a spectacular sight: […]
The light we observe isn’t the same as the light that gets emitted. Here’s what causes it. The light you see, when you look out at the stars and galaxies that […]
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras. One of the first theorems anyone learns in mathematics is the Pythagorean Theorem: if you have a right triangle, then the square […]
No one has seen an equinox this early since the 19th century. And you’d better get used to it. This year, on March 19, 2020, the equinox will occur. For a […]