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.
Earth, the only rocky planet with a large, massive satellite, is greatly affected by the Moon. Destroying it would cause 7 major changes.
Straddling the bounds of science and religion, Newton wondered who set the planets in motion. Astrophysics reveals the answer.
How do normal matter and dark matter separate by so much when galaxy clusters collide? Astronomers find the surprising, unexpected answer.
Even in the very early Universe, there were heavy, supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. How did they get so big so fast?
Often viewed as a purely theoretical, calculational tool only, direct observation of the Lamb Shift proved their very real existence.
In July of 2022, the first science images from JWST were unveiled. Two years later, it’s changed our view of the Universe.
A longstanding mismatch between theory and experiment motivated an exquisite muon measurement. At last, a theoretical solution has arrived.
The all-time record is Usain Bolt’s 9.58 seconds, set in 2009. What is the fastest time, ultimately, for an ideal human body?
The passage of time is something we all experience, as it takes us from one moment to the next. But could it all just be an illusion?
From inside our Solar System, zodiacal light prevents us from seeing true darkness. From billions of miles away, New Horizons finally can.
Adams was infamously scooped when Neptune was discovered in 1846. His failure wasn’t the end, but a prelude to a world-changing discovery.
It’s knowledgeable, confident, and behaves human-like in many ways. But it’s not magic that powers AI though; it’s just math and data.
For its 2-year science anniversary, JWST has revealed unprecedented details in “the Penguin and the Egg.” Here are the surprises inside.
As the Sun ages, it loses mass, causing Earth to spiral outward in its orbit. Will that cool the Earth down, or will other effects win out?
Just 13.8 billion years after the hot Big Bang, we can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away. No, this doesn’t violate relativity.
We know of stellar mass and supermassive black holes, but intermediate mass ones have long proved elusive. Until now.
The Bullet Cluster has, for nearly 20 years, been hailed as an empirical “proof” of dark matter. Can their detractors explain it away?
On a cosmic scale, our existence seems insignificant and inconsequential. But from another perspective, humans are completely remarkable.
The standard picture of our Universe is that it’s dominated by dark matter and dark energy. But this alternative is also worth considering.
On the largest of cosmic scales, the Universe is expanding. But it isn’t all-or-nothing everywhere, as “collapse” is also part of the story.
From the explosions themselves to their unique and vibrant colors, the fireworks displays we adore require quantum physics.
The structure of our Solar System has been known for centuries. When we finally started finding exoplanets, they surprised everyone.
There are many things that separate science from ideology, politics, philosophy, or religion. Follow these 10 commandments to get it right.
The last infant stars are finishing their formation inside these pillars of gas. The evaporation of those columns is almost complete.
Sure, there’s less daylight during winter than summer, as your hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun. But darkness goes deeper than that.
Our thermodynamic arrow of time explains why the entropy of any isolated system always increases. But it can’t explain what we perceive.
The near and far sides of the Moon are so different from each other, and no one is sure why. New lunar samples could confirm a wild theory.
All telescopes are fundamentally limited in what they can see. JWST reveals more distant galaxies than Hubble, but still can’t see them all.
There was a time where no starlight was visible throughout the entire cosmos. That time was short-lived: shorter than astronomers imagined.
Gravitational waves carry enormous amounts of energy, but spread out quickly once they leave the source. Could they ever create black holes?