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.
Cosmic rays aren’t just limited by the speed of light. Even among non-scientists, it’s well-understood that there’s an ultimate speed limit to the Universe: the speed of light. If you’re a […]
We give it the flight plan, and it takes care of the rest. It has to. Here’s why. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, there are certain limits that can […]
And which ones are probably examples where we’ve fooled ourselves? Every once in a while — multiple times per year — a new research finding fails to line up with our theoretical expectations. In […]
Ingenuity is remarkable. But these 5 exploration ideas are revolutionary. Telescopes are our initial tools for revealing and studying foreign worlds. Hubble images of Mars, particularly around the regions with […]
And, at some point, did the Milky Way lose ours? There are some 400 billion objects flying through the Milky Way galaxy with enough mass that — if they were all made of […]
Science can teach us so much about our planet, but something more must compel us to take care of it. If you want to understand our planet, the best way to […]
Complex organisms and living worlds couldn’t exist without these transitions. You couldn’t make the Universe we have today if everything were always the same. Although many philosophically favored the idea […]
If you’ve ever struggled with the strong force, this explanation is a life-saver. If you ask someone to think about some physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force […]
We can describe what we see happening, but we don’t understand why. Despite our vast cosmic knowledge, enormous unknowns remain. The quantum fluctuations inherent to space, stretched across the Universe […]
While Mars is known as a frozen, red planet today, it has all the evidence we could ask for of a watery past, lasting for approximately the first 1.5 billion […]
We’ve almost got the entire story. James Webb will put the last piece into place. In all of science, there are really only two ways that something can be “known” to […]
At just 3 solar masses, it eliminates the “mass gap.” Searching for black holes is one of the most difficult astronomical games a scientist can play. Emitting no light of their […]
The Big Theoretical Physics Problem At The Center Of The ‘Muon g-2’ Puzzle In early April, 2021, the experimental physics community announced an enormous victory: they had measured the muon’s magnetic […]
Mass determines a star’s fate… except when it doesn’t. Supernova events are common, visually spectacular astronomical cataclysms. In 1987, a supernova just ~168,000 light-years away was observed in the Large Magellanic […]
Dark matter must gravitate, so why couldn’t the graviton solve it? One of the most puzzling observations about the Universe is that there isn’t enough matter — at least, matter that we know […]
The mismatch between theory and experiment is anything but certain. The most exciting moments in a scientist’s life occur when you get a result that defies your expectations. Whether you’re a […]
And could Earth-based life provide the seeds for biology elsewhere? Today, on Earth, there’s an enormous variety and diversity of life on our planet. Every single surviving lifeform appears, in […]
Even 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, we can reconstruct the first 3 minutes. About 100 years ago, we began to truly understand the nature of the Universe for the […]
If you want to know what the Universe is like, you have to look at it in the right way. Only by observing it can we know what the Universe is […]
The densest objects that haven’t collapsed to black holes can tell us information about the Universe unlike anything else. Swarming through our own galaxy, we’ve detected quite a few bizarre objects: […]
Only 3% of physics graduates and 2% of astronomy graduates are Black. That’s got to change. In the late 1990s, about 5% of the approximately 4000 bachelor’s degrees in physics per […]
The ultimate lesson from Dr. Birx is one we should never, ever repeat. About a year ago, as the world experienced the deadly “first wave” associated with the coronavirus pandemic, many […]
Enough mass in one location will always create a black hole. But not all masses are possible. If you take enough mass and compress it into a small enough volume […]
We need more and better data to know, but that’s exactly what’s coming. Over the past few decades, a number of important advances have helped revolutionize our picture of the Universe. […]
Only 17 years after its discovery have we learned we’re safe from asteroid Apophis. Ever since its 2004 discovery, asteroid 99942 Apophis has threatened planet Earth. Asteroid Apophis has been measured […]
Physics demands that it couldn’t be any other way. Here’s why. Ask anyone — even someone with no background in science — to name something that Einstein did, and odds are they’ll come back with […]
When you measure not just light, but light’s polarization, you learn so much more. It’s been over 100 years since the first solution for a black hole was discovered in General […]
It’s one of Einstein’s most bizarre predictions. And it’s true. There’s no such thing as absolute time. No matter where you are, how fast you’re moving, or how strong the gravitational […]
Something isn’t adding up, but it isn’t a calibration error. It’s been nearly 100 years since we discovered that the Universe was expanding. Ever since, the scientists who study the […]
Both views are equally spectacular, but unequally informative. Every so often, a creative amateur project highlights our professional achievements. This mosaic shows the region between the constellations of Cygnus and […]