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.
We’re used to scientists telling us about the math and physics behind astronomical events. But what does studying space make us feel?
Based on data since 2000 alone, global warming is still occurring at a whopping 7-sigma significance. How hot will planet Earth get?
All across the Universe, planets come in a wide variety of sizes, masses, compositions, and temperatures. And most have rain and snow.
With a record-setting $1.9 billion jackpot, you’d think it’s a no-brainer to buy a Powerball ticket. But the math truly shows otherwise.
The ESA’s Gaia mission just broke the record for closest black hole by over 1,000 light-years. Is there an even closer one out there?
Science is for everyone, even those possessing strongly held beliefs that seem to conflict with the best available evidence.
IceCube just found an active galaxy in the nearby Universe, 47 million light-years away, through its neutrino emissions: a cosmic first.
Using physics, Ross Chastain floored it during the final turn, scraping the wall and passing 5 cars to advance to the NASCAR championship.
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.
Empty space itself, the quantum vacuum, could be in either a true, stable state or a false, unstable state. Our fate depends on the answer.
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.
When you don’t have enough clues to bring your detective story to a close, you should expect that your educated guesses will all be wrong.
From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic ones, solving any of these puzzles could unlock our understanding of the Universe.