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.
It was Stephen Hawking’s obsession for the last 30 years of his life. Here’s why it matters. When it comes to the sciences, sometimes making two observations or measurements that appear […]
Finding the particle we assume is responsible for dark matter has always been a guessing game. We guessed wrong. You can’t get mad at a team for trying the improbable, hoping […]
Planets can ‘discover’ nuclear power on their own, naturally, without any intelligence. Earth did it 1.7 billion years before humans. If you were hunting for alien intelligence, looking for a surefire […]
As the Event Horizon Telescope prepares to release its first results, we can expect not just one, but two black hole images. What does a black hole actually look like? For […]
This year’s prize represents not just a single example of brilliant work, but generations of advancements that led to it. Every year, the most prestigious prize in the most fundamental of […]
NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory has shown us the Universe like nothing else ever before. When it comes to the Universe, it mainly generates X-rays through high-temperature heating. X-rays from Chandra reveal […]
Instead of eternal expansion, could we just be part of a universal cosmic cycle? There are few questions that can keep us up at night the way pondering the eventual fate […]
Some of the meteorites that strike our planet originate from our red neighbor, Mars. Here’s how we know. As the planets orbit the Sun, well-separated from one another, we tend to […]
On September 27, 1972, scientists performed the first test of Bell’s inequality. God does play dice with the Universe, after all. One of the most puzzling and counterintuitive aspects of quantum […]
The Big Bang happened everywhere at once, but stars are a different story. The Universe, back at its inception, was almost perfectly identical everywhere. It was the same high temperature […]
White dwarfs, neutron stars, and brown dwarfs aren’t actually stars at all. Here’s why. When it comes to stars, there’s a huge variety of different types out there. Our Sun is […]
Billions of years from now, dark energy will push the rest of the Universe out of reach forever. These galaxies will be the last to go. A look at the night […]
If the Sun is 93 million miles away, why does sunlight filtering through the clouds or the trees spread out? Rays of sunshine are one of those natural sights that leave […]
A new Starts With A Bang podcast brings on an expert for an unforgettable conversation. Once a month, as part of our Patreon, we put together a podcast on a […]
The world’s greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world, and everything went haywire. The reason why will shock you. For millennia, humanity’s one-and-only reliable way to keep time was […]
We can’t help but wonder if it’s habitable, or even inhabited, but the evidence isn’t there for it. Every star that fills the night sky carries along with it one of […]
For 100 million years, there was only creation in the Universe. Meet our first moments of destruction. The cosmic story that gave rise to us is a story rife with […]
If all you see is low-energy light in a myriad of directions, you can’t be sure. But this light comes from the Big Bang. There are a lot of things that […]
These three reasons are why there’s no getting around the fact that astronomy needs the James Webb Space Telescope. Even the most powerful telescope in history, the Hubble Space Telescope, […]
LIGO’s enormous arms contract and expand as gravitational waves pass through them. But, puzzlingly, so does the light within them. For the past three years, humanity has known a new kind […]
A very clever idea says there’s a ninth Solar System planet, larger than Earth, far beyond Neptune. Here’s why most scientists think it’s not real. It’s been nearly three years since […]
The nightmare scenario of no new particles or interactions at the LHC is coming true. And it might be our own fault. Over at the Large Hadron Collider, protons simultaneously circle […]
Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe became completely dark. The first stars, when they ignited, changed everything. For perhaps 100 million years, the Universe was devoid of stars. The […]
An Oxford physicist tries to cast doubt on dark energy, but the data says otherwise. It was a mere 20 years ago that our picture of the Universe got a […]
The other great spiral galaxy in the local group demonstrates why we’re #2, even in our own backyard. The Milky Way is our cosmic home, containing hundreds of billions of […]
Of all the experiments performed and measurements made involving fundamental particles, none has ever violated the Standard Model. Until now. If there’s one thing you can count on physicists for, it’s […]
Our biases, preferences, and ideas of simplicity and elegance can get in the way. Here’s a scientific way to cut through them all. What are the rules governing reality? If you […]
Every physical theory has constants in it. The gravitational constant is remarkably uncertain. When we first began formulating physical laws, we did so empirically: through experiments. Drop a ball off […]
For perhaps 100 million years, there were no stars in the Universe. What was it like then? The earliest stages of the Universe were extraordinarily eventful in bringing us about. Cosmic […]
Not everyone is satisfied with the Big Bang. But every alternative is a disastrous failure. It’s treated as though it’s an unassailable scientific truth: 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe […]