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.
The total solar eclipse of July 2, 2019, is the longest one we’ll have until 2027. And that’s not all. On July 2, 2019, the new Moon will pass between Earth […]
The quest for a quantum theory of gravity is the holy grail of physics. Here’s why it’s murkier than anyone expected. If you want to fully describe how the Universe […]
If you think nothing can move faster than light, check out this clever way to defeat that limit. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. When Einstein set forth […]
The remote volcano Raikoke just erupted after nearly 100 years of silence. Here’s why it matters. On June 22, 2019, a volcano that had been dormant and inactive for nearly a […]
The Planck length is a lot smaller than anything we’ve ever accessed. But is it a true limit? If you wanted to understand how our Universe operates, you’d have to examine […]
Here are four separate ways you can prove it, even 50 years after-the-fact. 50 years ago, on July 20, 1969, humanity took our first footsteps on the surface of another […]
Discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, it’s powered by a supermassive black hole. 2019 marks 20 years of NASA’s Chandra, humanity’s most powerful X-ray observatory. Artist illustration of the Chandra X-ray […]
The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, but doesn’t have the earliest sunrise or the latest sunset. Here’s why. The length of a day on planet Earth might […]
It’s where Earth’s axial tilt with respect to the Sun is most extreme. Here are the consequences. Today is June 21st, 2019: the day of the solstice. Although there are […]
Some galaxies might not have any dark matter. Here’s why you should care. There are two assumptions that everyone makes about the Universe for extremely good reasons, but they might not […]
A vacuum cleaner is the wrong picture. Time to bust that myth. There are no classes of object in our Universe more extreme than black holes. With so much mass present […]
If you thought that diamonds were the hardest things of all, this will have you thinking again. Carbon is one of the most fascinating elements in all of nature, with chemical […]
At the core of the largest star-forming region of the Local Group sits the biggest star we know of. Mass is the single most important astronomical property in determining the lives […]
Two independent techniques give precise but incompatible answers. Here’s how to resolve it. If you didn’t know anything about the Universe beyond our own galaxy, there are two different pathways you […]
If we restrict ourselves to looking for extraterrestrial life on Earth-like worlds, we might miss it entirely. When we think about life out there in the Universe, far beyond the […]
The world of particle physics sure does have surprises, even for the most educated of physicists out there. If you ever take a visit to the physical site of CERN, where […]
There really is a cosmic conundrum about how fast the Universe is expanding. Changing its age won’t help. One of the most surprising and interesting discoveries of the 21st century is […]
An entire Universe of possibilities await stars like our own, even after they run out of fuel. One of the most profound rules in all the Universe is that nothing lasts […]
It’s not impossible according to physics, but we truly don’t know how this object came to exist. Out in the extremities of the distant Universe, the earliest quasars can be found. […]
Has the mystery really been solved? Doubtful. The real science goes much deeper. For perhaps the last year or so, a small galaxy located not too far away has captivated the […]
If we only look for life on worlds like our own, we might miss the most commonly inhabited planets of all. With all the planets out there in the galaxy and […]
When we think about the birth of the Universe, was time already in place? When we look at the Universe today, we know with an extraordinary amount of scientific certainty that […]
Dark matter’s naysayers latched onto one tiny puzzle. This new find may have solved it completely. Imagine the largest cosmic smashup you can. Take the largest gravitationally bound structures we […]
There aren’t any holes in the Universe at all. What actually exists is far more interesting. Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you read, there’s a hole in the […]
If we don’t push the frontiers of physics, we’ll never learn what lies beyond our current understanding. At a fundamental level, what is our Universe made of? This question has […]
If we could see in three dimensions instead of two, we’d never have thought otherwise. Perhaps the most famous sight of a dying star is the Ring Nebula, discovered in […]
It’s the ultimate way to go… and yet, it still isn’t what you’d expect. There are many terrifying ways that the Universe can destroy something. In space, if you tried to […]
13.8 billion years isn’t close to enough time, but if we wait long enough, even our Sun will become one. The Big Bang happened approximately 13.8 billion years ago, and it […]
If you look everywhere between the numbers 1 and 2, you’ll never find 3. Let’s say you have an idea about how our physical reality might be different from how we […]
The solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, was the nail in the coffin of a Newtonian Universe. On May 29, 1919, the world changed forever. For hundreds of years, Isaac […]