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.
There’s a lot to get rid of if we want to get only our Universe out of String Theory. A lot of people, when they learn about String Theory for the […]
And after years of mystery, we finally know where they come from. Here on Earth, thunderstorms and accompanying lightning strikes represent tremendous releases of energy. It was way back in 2011 […]
Time always moves in the same direction, but what if the Universe were contracting? As we step forward in time, a number of things always seem to happen together. Objects […]
It’s not a gambit. It’s not fraud. It’s not an opinion. And it’s not biased like you think it is. Most of us, when we think about what science is, default […]
What we’ve seen isn’t necessarily what we get, but the most common world doesn’t look like ours. There’s a very common myth out there in astronomy: the idea that the Sun […]
The night sky is already noticeably different, and bigger changes are ahead. For all of human history until the launch of Sputnik, the only objects in the night sky were naturally […]
A new survey, the DESI Legacy Imaging Survey, has found more lenses than all others put together. One of Einstein’s most revolutionary predictions is that mass bends light. During a […]
We have two ways of measuring the expansion rate. Here’s the harder one. If you want to understand where our Universe came from and where it’s going, you need to measure […]
The successor to Hubble is almost ready for launch. It’s really coming this year, too! NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, originally proposed in the 1990s, is finally slated to launch later […]
The newest record-setting quasar houses an enormous black hole. No one knows how. In every scientific field, we’re always on the lookout for whatever new discovery might reveal what’s currently beyond […]
Binary pulsars are doing what no other measurement has done: measure our galactic acceleration directly. Even though the majority of the matter that makes up our Universe may be completely […]
If you thought it was just one rich region in space, look deeper and wider. Shining brilliantly in January’s skies is the Great Orion Nebula. By 10 PM every night in […]
And can we devise an experiment to tell, even when we aren’t looking? One of the most bizarre aspects of quantum physics is that the fundamental entities that make up the […]
In 2020, we experienced the shortest ‘day’ in 50 years. Here’s the reason why. On the timescales that humans experience, there are lots of things that we consider to be extremely […]
There are many things on large scales that also appear on small scales. But is the Universe truly a fractal? If you take a look at the structures that form in […]
The expansion rate is dropping, but distant galaxies are accelerating. Here’s how. If you take a look at any galaxy in the Universe that isn’t gravitationally bound to our own, we’ve […]
For the cosmos, it’s all too easy being green. Stars come in a wide variety of colors, but never green. Stars form in a wide variety of sizes, colors and masses, […]
The smallest and faintest stars of all, even the failed stars that didn’t make it, are hiding some fascinating secrets. You might have thought that if we were going to […]
It’s 92 billion light-years wide after just 13.8 billion years. And that’s just fine. If there’s one rule that people know about how fast things can move, it’s that there’s a […]
It’s that the Universe can be understood at all. Don’t deafen yourself to its lessons. In a nutshell, 2020 has been a unique year in human history. For the first time […]
A single lifetime is more than enough to take you to the limits of the Universe. Right now, there are only three things limiting how far our spacecrafts can take […]
If you think ‘particles are matter’ and ‘antiparticles are antimatter,’ think again. In this Universe, there are certain rules that have never been observed to be broken. Some of these […]
No matter how your year went, Hubble’s views of the Universe never disappoint. Year after year, Hubble’s telescopic views are unparalleled. Saturn, its rings, and 5 of its moons are […]
It might have been Einstein’s greatest blunder, but it’s our leading theory today. One of the most mysterious components in the entire Universe is dark energy, which — if we’re being honest with […]
Two stellar mass black holes, if they merge in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, could have their gravitational wave signal affected by the strongly curved space around them. […]
The first COVID-19 vaccines are here. So are the anti-vaxxers. Over the past year, most of us have learned more about coronaviruses than we ever thought we’d need to know. […]
It might not feel that way, but a 95% dark Universe really is the best game in town. No matter how much we might try and hide it, there’s an enormous […]
After a wait of 397 years in orbit, we’re finally getting a truly ‘Great’ Conjunction. Recently, December 21, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn finally met. Looking towards the southwest skies from […]
It doesn’t propagate at infinite speeds, and that’s a problem for Newton. When you look at the Sun, the light you’re seeing isn’t the light that’s being emitted right now. Instead, […]
With just a few more neutron star mergers, we’ll have the best constraints of all-time. How fast is the Universe expanding? Ever since the expanding Universe was first discovered nearly […]