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.
If there are cracks in Einstein’s theory, this is how to find them. Is Einstein’s most powerful theory, General Relativity, always correct? Or will there come a point where it breaks […]
It’s fundamentally different from space. Here’s how. Here’s a question that most of us have been asked at some point in our lives, “what’s the shortest distance between two points?” By […]
When one group says “A” and another group says “B,” consider that everyone might be wrong. One of the biggest enemies of scientific truth is the setup of a false dichotomy. […]
The rings are raining down onto the planet, and disappearing surprisingly fast. 4.5 billion years ago, our Solar System first formed. Protoplanetary disks, which all solar systems are thought to […]
They’re one of the brightest windows into our Universe’s star-forming past. When we look out at the galaxies in the Universe, almost all of them have supermassive black holes at […]
As the Universe ages, will it eventually fade away entirely? The earliest signal we’ve ever directly detected from the Universe comes to us from shortly after the Big Bang: when […]
Don’t miss the summer’s greatest natural sights of all. Some of the natural highlights of our night sky are easy to overlook. Every year, you’ll hear about some of the brightest, […]
Everything is being driven apart. But there’s hope of reaching what’s currently so far away. For the first 7.8 billion years, the Universe unfolded exactly as scientists would have expected in […]
There could have been life on Mars in the past, but that’s only the beginning of the story. For as long as humanity has been watching the skies, we’ve been fascinated […]
It comes from a supernova seen just 33 years ago, and it doesn’t pulse. 33 years ago, a supernova occurred just 168,000 light-years from Earth. This new image of the supernova […]
Some of them may have formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang. When we look out at the Universe, we’re not seeing objects as they are today, but rather […]
Research is for the experts. Listen to them instead. “Research both sides and make up your own mind.” It’s simple, straightforward, common sense advice. And when it comes to issues like […]
There are exposed planetary cores orbiting stars, and we may have already found them. When we take a look at the planets in our Solar System, there’s a pretty clear difference […]
It doesn’t have to be a science-fiction dream. For as long as human beings have been watching the night sky, we’ve dreamed of visiting other worlds and truly seeing what’s […]
Catch Saturn at its biggest and brightest, and view its rings while you still can. Right now, in Earth’s skies, Saturn appears at its biggest and brightest. A view of tonight’s […]
How can we save humanity from ourselves? In this life and this Universe, there will always be questions beyond the capabilities of humanity to answer. There’s so much that we’ve […]
The history of the Universe is forever imprinted in our own bodies. We can learn a lot about the history of the Universe just by looking at each of our own […]
There’s a boundary to how far back we can observe everything that exists. Despite everything we’ve learned about our Universe, there are many existential questions that remain unanswered. We don’t know […]
How quickly is it expanding today, and how does that expansion rate change over time? What is the Universe made of? How quickly is it expanding today, and how does that […]
Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is only one of two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is merely one among the […]
It’s 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of just 1%. Here’s how. How old is the Universe? For generations, people argued over whether the Universe had always existed, whether it […]
For the first time in many years, there’s currently a comet visible to the naked eye in Earth’s night sky: comet NEOWISE. For the first time in many years, there’s currently […]
Without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides […]
According to the Standard Model, the leptons and antileptons should all be separate, independent particles from one another. But the three types of neutrino all mix together, indicating they must […]
For northern hemisphere skywatchers, it might just be the century’s best comet so far. Every once in a while, large, icy objects pass through the inner Solar System. C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) […]
5 years ago, LIGO detected our first gravitational waves here on Earth. Next decade, LISA will start seeing them from space. When it comes to gravitational waves, our terrestrial laser interferometers […]
At a very simple level, it’s nothing but physics. Here’s why you should care. It’s not very often that a physics problem becomes a politicized issue, but that’s exactly what’s happened […]
The biggest error from ‘A Brief History of Time’ continues to misinform generations of aspiring physicists. The greatest idea of Stephen Hawking’s scientific career truly revolutionized how we think about […]
We still don’t know how it came to be this way. Every once in a while, we find an object in the Universe that completely mystifies us. For generations, astronomers have […]
Almost certainly not. Here’s the science of why. The Universe, as we know it, simply doesn’t add up. On the one hand, we can look out on a cosmic scale and […]