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.
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 […]
It’s been over 100 years since Einstein, and over 300 since Newton. We’ve still got a long way to go. From measuring how objects fall on Earth to observing the motion […]
If dark matter doesn’t interact with normal matter or light, how can it be heated up? One of the great cosmic mysteries of our time is the presence and existence of […]
From billions of miles away, a faint, single pixel shows us how precious and alone Earth truly is. There are people alive today who can remember a time where no human-made […]
The heaviest elements in the periodic table have their own unique story. No, they don’t come from a supernova. When it comes to the elements of the Universe, every one […]
It was so well-motivated and compelling. But the particles never appeared. Every so often, an idea comes along in theoretical physics that’s undeniably profound. When a single idea can solve […]
The first planet beyond ‘naked eye’ astronomy will pass within just 1° of Mars. Although there are eight major planets in the Solar System, most of us never see Uranus or […]
You’d be amazed at what you can learn from even one single pixel. Over the past decade, owing largely to NASA’s Kepler mission, our knowledge of planets around star systems beyond […]
The Universe is filled with something, as opposed to nothing, and scientists don’t understand it. When we look around at the Universe: at the planets and stars, at the galaxies […]
Scientific discovery often happens when you least expect it. But no one could’ve expected this. Imagine that you’re a scientist, going out on a limb to design and build an experiment […]
We know that life is possible on an Earth-like world around a Sun-like star. But can it find a way on a Super-Earth? When it comes to the origin of […]
Theoretical work tells you where to look, but only experiments can reveal what you’ll find. There are fundamental mysteries out there about the nature of the Universe itself, and it’s our […]