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.
Even if you remove everything you can from the Universe, some energy will still remain. Here’s what that means. Imagine, if you can, what it would mean to have a Universe […]
We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]
They say that atoms are mostly 99.99999% empty space. But quantum physics says otherwise. If you were to look at what your body is made of, at smaller and more […]
In reality, it has no color at all. Here’s why. Every time you see an illustration of the COVID-19 coronavirus, it’s shown with a red color to it. Sometimes it’s red […]
How does one supernova get so bright, so energetic, and so massive? It’s a spectacular mystery to solve. On February 22, 2016, one of humanity’s automated sky-scanning telescopes — the Pan-STARRS Survey for […]
The original Hubble Deep Field truly showed us what the Universe looks like. Later this month, the Hubble Space Telescope will celebrate its 30th anniversary. This photo of the Hubble Space […]
And what role, if any, does gravity play? While most of us have never had the opportunity to go into space, we all have the chance to dream about it and […]
Small sample size? No underlying theory? Conflicts with all other results? It checks all the boxes. There’s nothing that’s special, on a cosmic scale, about our place in the Universe. Not […]
There are three factors all competing to determine the fate of the Earth, and the one that’s winning now won’t win in the end. If you could measure the average distance […]
When you look at the Universe in an entirely new way, you sometimes find what you could never have anticipated. Almost exactly one year ago today, the Event Horizon Telescope […]
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 […]