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.
For every planet that orbits a star like our own, there are likely thousands of ‘orphan planets’ wandering the galaxy alone. Here in the Solar System, we can watch our star’s […]
It’s time to bust one of the biggest myths about where the night sky’s most spectacular, seasonal shows come from. Meteor showers are one of the night sky’s most spectacular sights […]
They seem almost indistinguishable in some regards, but only one of them represents our physical Universe. When it comes to describing the physical world, we can do it anecdotally, as […]
The past is gone, the future not yet here, only the present is now. But why does it always flow the way it does for us? Every moment that passes finds […]
One of the three basic circuit elements just got a lot smaller for the very first time, in what promises to be a trillion-dollar breakthrough. In the race for ever-improving […]
Most stars obey very similar rules, making them almost entirely predictable. But then, there are the weirdos. Catch this live-blog event to learn more. When we look out at the Universe […]
There have been a lot of public advocates from the “no dark matter” camp, getting lots of popular attention. But the Universe still needs dark matter. Here’s why. If you took […]
For most of us, it’s something we just accept every year. But there’s arguably no good that comes from it. Every year on the second Sunday in March, most places in […]
We always assume that dark matter is particle-based, and we just need to find which particle it is. But what if it isn’t so? Everything we’ve ever detected in the Universe, […]
And super-Earth, mini-Neptunes, and super-Jupiters aren’t among them. You’ll be surprised to learn why. Just 30 years ago, if you had asked an astronomer if there were planets around other stars […]
The possibilities were almost limitless, so why does everything line up? Our Solar System is an orderly place, with the four inner planets, the asteroid belt, and the gas giant worlds […]
The indirectly find was completely unexpected, and, if it holds up, could give the James Webb Space Telescope its first tantalizing target. In the quest to understand our Universe, and […]
One of astronomy’s most iconic sights in an artifact of faulty optics. Here’s how a new, great design will overcome it. When you look out at the greatest images of the […]
In the quantum world of the unstable, even identical particles don’t have identical masses. In the microscopic world of the quantum particle, there are certain rules that are wholly unfamiliar […]
After a 16 year wait, the star SO-2 will speed past our galaxy’s supermassive black hole at 2.5% the speed of light. It will be the first-of-its-kind test of Einstein’s […]
If the multiverse is real, why hasn’t our Universe, in a sea of infinite possibilities, run into another one at least once? The Universe we inhabit is vast, full of matter […]
Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist. There are a few fundamental facts about the Universe — its origin, […]
LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, will not only be the space-based successor to LIGO, but will predict black hole mergers up to years in advance. Across the Universe, innumerable masses […]
They say there’s a singularity, but must that be true? When you fall inside the event horizon of a black hole, there’s no escaping, no matter what you do or how […]
Images taken 20 years apart show the rate of evaporation, and they’ll take much more than mere thousands of years to destroy. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope snapped one of […]
There are no punches to pull here. If America believes in science, research, or basic truths about the Universe, we cannot cancel this mission. Last week, the White House released their […]
A single, complete view of half the world was enough to teach us how these distant, frozen bodies work. On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons flew by Pluto. Pluto’s atmosphere, […]
The medal-winning Norwegian team had a most unusual explanation for why their speed skaters wore blue. Is there any science to back it up? Every four years, the Olympics come around, […]
Okay, this is an incredible and rare opportunity, but I’m so pleased to announce that next January, from the 18th-24th, 2019, I’ll be leading an exclusive AstroTour of Iceland! We’ll […]
Asteroid strikes and supervolcano eruptions may yet have patterns to them, but the extinctions we’ve experienced appear to have occurred at random. Throughout the history of life on Earth, there have […]
There are many arguments over what makes a theory beautiful, elegant, or compelling. But in the face of data, predictive power is everything. When you look at any phenomenon in […]
Unless you can make a force that travels faster than the speed of light, a singularity is inevitable. The more mass you place into a small volume of space, the […]
There’s no way to frame this as anything other than a disaster for humanity. This article was originally written one week ago, on the day the FY2019 budget was released […]
The season finale gets the one thing Star Trek is famous for — ethics — completely wrong. Life is full of dilemmas whose solutions seem paradoxical. To obtain peace, you must prepare for war. […]
The Universe may defy our intuition, but that’s what science is for! If you take a look out at the Universe, and in every direction you look, you see objects rushing […]