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.
A climate catastrophe 2 billion years ago almost ended life on Earth. Here’s the biggest lesson of all. Although it was more than 4½ billion years ago that planet Earth formed, […]
If you’re careful enough, you can learn more about the Solar System than you ever imagined. This year, on March 20th, the full Moon will illuminate the night sky. With […]
So, you want to know about black holes, including how we’re seeing them, what happens when you fall into them, what our future plans for direct and indirect detection are, […]
Even if we don’t destroy ourselves, we always have the Universe to contend with. Wiping out all life on Earth is hard, but causing mass extinctions is easy. The 1991 eruption […]
Both effects could be responsible for a redshift. But only one makes sense for our Universe. In physics, like in life, there are often multiple solutions to a problem that […]
If you accept cosmic inflation and quantum physics, there’s no way out. The Multiverse is real. Look out at the Universe all you want, with arbitrarily powerful technology, and you’ll never […]
The only other large galaxy in the local group is larger in size and has more stars. But mass? Perhaps we’re the biggest, after all. The Milky Way is home to […]
The planet has had life on it, in some form or another, for nearly as long as Earth has existed. If you came to our Solar System right after it formed, […]
If your goal was to destroy the science of astronomy and astrophysics, this is exactly how you’d do it. One of the perks of being President of the United States of […]
If you understand gravity well enough, you might not even need a telescope to revolutionize astronomy. In science, advances arise at the intersection of theory and real-world observation. One of […]
Our future fate is likely already determined. If we end in a Big Crunch, what does that mean? The ultimate fate of the Universe is one of the biggest existential questions […]
Yes, life exists in our Universe. No, that statement doesn’t equal science. Imagine you’ve encountered a natural phenomenon you want to understand better, but don’t have the tools to do so. […]
While the web of dark matter (purple) might seem to determine cosmic structure formation on its own, the feedback from normal matter (red) can severely impact galactic scales. Both dark […]
The ‘giant impact’ that led to Earth might not have been so giant, after all. A little over 4.5 billion years ago, our Solar System began to form. Somewhere in the […]
As more time passes since the Big Bang, more of the Universe comes into view. But how much? Even though it’s been billions of years since the Big Bang, there’s a […]
50 years ago, Apollo 9 launched. Without it, we never would’ve landed on the Moon. The Apollo program is most famous for its greatest achievement: taking humanity to the Moon. It […]
Gravity gets weaker as the distance squared. But gravitational waves only get weaker as the distance. Why? One of the things we often just accept about the world is that […]
Faraday’s law of induction was set forth in 1834, and was the experiment that led Einstein to discover relativity. When we think about Einstein and the theory of relativity, all […]
Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we found them. The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the […]
What happened 4.56 billion years ago is the most important part of the cosmic story ever to happen to us. If you were to look at our Universe at the time […]
If you think it expanded faster than light-speed, you need to read this. If the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the speed of light is truly our cosmic speed […]
Galactic mergers should push gas and dust into the centers of galaxies. So why are these two so quiet? Scientists have studied the closest, largest, brightest galaxies to Earth for centuries. […]
Gravity and time are so different from what you’d expect. Here’s how it all would end. If you could only know the answer to one question about the Universe, what would […]
But we shouldn’t give up on direct detection. Here’s why. Dark matter is not only the most abundant form of matter in the Universe, it’s also the most mysterious. Whereas all […]
In 2017, we saw gravitational waves a neutron star merger for the first and only time. And it keeps getting more interesting. On August 17, 2017, a cosmic signal arrived […]
For billions of years, dark energy couldn’t have been detected. Now, it’s everywhere we look. When we look out at the ultra-distant Universe, billion of light-years away, we’re seeing it as […]
The Universe is expanding, but we, our planet, solar system and galaxy all aren’t. Here’s why. Take a look out at almost any galaxy in the Universe, and you’ll find it’s […]
We can see light from the atoms in the Universe before the first stars form. And no, I don’t mean from the CMB! After the Big Bang, it took only a […]
Happy birthday to Pluto, discovered on this day in 1930. Pluto, first discovered in 1930, was no more than a distant dot in our most powerful telescopes. Clyde Tombaugh’s original images […]
It’s a rare occasion for orbits to align so perfectly. Enjoy the sights this Tuesday. On Tuesday, February 19th, the Moon will reach perigee, its closest point of approach to planet […]