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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.
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The Universe is an enormous place, but we can’t see all the way back to the beginning. Here’s the latest record-breaker. No matter how far back we look in the […]
In General Relativity, even space and time themselves aren’t what they seem. Gravity might have been the first fundamental force ever discovered, but in many ways, it remains the least-well understood. […]
Space may be enormous, but collisions are inevitable. Here’s what happens when they occur. The Universe as we know it has been around for nearly 14 billion years: plenty of time […]
The ices and rock aren’t green, and neither are the tails. So where does a comet’s green color come from? Every so often, with extreme regularity, comets will plunge from beyond […]
In the earliest stages of the Universe, before there were protons or neutrons, we had a quark-gluon plasma. The story of our cosmic history is one of an expanding and […]
If the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, promoted by Stephen Hawking, works exactly as planned, it could lead to disaster. Imagine yourself on a world not so different from Earth, orbiting a […]
If we want to reach for the stars, we have to start in our own backyard. By looking at the sky alone, we can see the apparent, angular sizes of […]
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft taught us more than we ever imagined about Saturn. Could we do something similar for Uranus and Neptune? From where we are in the Solar System, looking out […]
The story of John Couch Adams, “the man who failed to discover Neptune,” and his cosmic redemption. Perhaps its human nature to want to only think positive thoughts about our […]
Three great things all align this August, making the Perseids a can’t-miss show. Here’s how to take advantage. When it comes to meteor showers, we have these dazzling pictures in […]
One moment, every particle in the Universe was massless. Then, they weren’t anymore. Here’s how it happened. In the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, the Universe was filled […]
The hallmark of a good scientist is changing your mind when new evidence arises. Here’s what that looks like. Science, like many things in life, is always a work-in-progress. While a […]
Mars will never look as big as the full Moon. But it isn’t even the biggest planet. From humanity’s perspective, the Sun and Moon always dominate Earth’s skies. The Moon and […]
Perhaps energy isn’t conserved at all in an expanding Universe. If you have a Universe full of stuff — whether that’s atoms, dark matter, radiation, neutrinos, or anything else — it’s virtually impossible to […]
It’s one of the biggest assumptions we’ve ever made about the Universe. Here’s why it’s wrong. Almost everyone has heard the story of the Big Bang. But if you ask anyone, […]
Dark matter feels fake. MOND sounds plausible. What should you conclude? Imagine I told you that everything you ever saw, touched, or experienced — in this world and in the Universe beyond — was […]
Gazing upon the red, blood Moon during totality is only part of the wonders awaiting you. On July 27, 2018, the longest total lunar eclipse of the century took place. Totality […]
Fill up your gas tank, no matter how hot it is, with confidence and safety from anywhere on Earth. For most of the northern hemisphere, summer is in full swing. Along […]
It wasn’t just the Milky Way and Andromeda two billion years ago. Here in the Local Group, our two largest galaxies dominate: Andromeda and the Milky Way. Our Local Group of […]
It’s one of the most common tropes in science fiction. But which movies actually get the science right? The way we travel through time, at a speed of one second per […]