Search
Ethan Siegel
Theoretical astrophysicist and science writer
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.
Read Less
And what role, if any, does gravity play? While most of us have never had the opportunity to go into space, we all have the chance to dream about it and […]
Small sample size? No underlying theory? Conflicts with all other results? It checks all the boxes. There’s nothing that’s special, on a cosmic scale, about our place in the Universe. Not […]
There are three factors all competing to determine the fate of the Earth, and the one that’s winning now won’t win in the end. If you could measure the average distance […]
When you look at the Universe in an entirely new way, you sometimes find what you could never have anticipated. Almost exactly one year ago today, the Event Horizon Telescope […]
And how it might ensure that future generations won’t have to face anything like this ever again. As of April 6, 2020, more than 1.3 million people worldwide have tested positive […]
It’s not the only one of its kind, but it’s definitely makes no sense without dark matter. Throughout the Universe, galaxies and star clusters come in all different sizes and masses. […]
In principle, the laws of physics are the same forwards and backwards. But in practice, time only runs in one direction. Most of the laws of physics are the same […]
All stars will eventually die. But we’ve never seen ones die like this before. When you look up at the sky, most of the points of light we see appear to […]
Astrophysics has probed a test of a fundamental law, ‘Lorentz invariance,’ well beyond the LHC’s limits. Einstein is still right. The greatest scientific legacy that Albert Einstein left us is this: […]
In 774/775, tree rings show a spike in carbon-14 unlike anything else. At last, scientists think they know why. Every once in a while, science gives us a mystery that comes […]
Your opinions about a large number of complex scientific issues are probably wrong. That’s why we have science. In 2016, an Italian virologist named Roberto Burioni was invited to appear on […]
We’re not made out of the densest elements, but we’re the densest planet nonetheless. Here’s why. Of all the planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids and more in the Solar System, only […]
On the morning of March 31, 2020, these three worlds will be at their mutual closest in 20 years. For the past few weeks, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter have all shone […]
The center of our Sun tops out at 15 million K, but nuclear bombs can get nearly 20 times hotter. Here’s how. In terms of raw energy output, nothing on our […]
NASA’s New Horizons is the most distant technologically advanced observatory ever. And that makes all the difference. When you look at an object that’s very distant from you, how well […]
Ending social distancing won’t only make us sicker, but will tank the health care industry in the process. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic continues to spread around the world. As of today, […]
The combination of charge conjugation, parity, and time-reversal symmetry is known as CPT. And it must never be broken. Ever. The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely […]
Hawking radiation should really be happening, but black holes are farther from decaying than ever before. Black holes are, in many ways, the most extreme objects that will ever exist in […]
It’s not just for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. Not even close. Shortly after Earth first formed first formed, life quickly took hold, thriving ever since. Both reflected sunlight on a […]
It isn’t just that mass and energy are equivalent and interchangeable. It tells us something fundamental about mass itself. Of all the equations that we use to describe the Universe, perhaps […]