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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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No civilization, no matter how successful, can last forever. What does the non-detection of intelligent aliens mean for our own longevity?
The discovery of CDG-2, a galaxy that's more than 99.9% dark matter, could reveal a new population of ultra-faint galaxies. But is it real?
No human has ever left the Solar System, and only six already-launched spacecraft will ever exit it. Will Voyager 1 remain the most distant?
Quantum entanglement links information between particles across space and time. So what happens when one of them falls into a black hole?
Forget about the terawatt lasers we're making on Earth. The Universe makes natural ones thousands of times more powerful than the Sun.
Even space and time are relative in Einstein's universe. That means our old notions of "where" and "when" no longer apply on cosmic scales.
There are plenty of engineering obstacles, and those can be overcome. But you cannot change the laws of physics, and those matter too.
The fundamental building blocks of reality are indivisible: quanta that cannot be split or divided. Our understanding remains incomplete.
Long after the last star burns out, the Universe will experience its end state: a heat death. Will everything prior then be meaningless?
Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we finally found them.
A big open question in 21st-century science is how life began here on Earth. The metabolism-first scenario just might be the best one.
One big goal of science is to find an inhabited, Earth-like planet. But if we find an Earth-like world, will we even recognize it?
Many reactions emit energy, often in large amounts, but cosmic efficiency is another metric altogether. Here's how to maximize your output.
The Universe is expanding, the expansion is accelerating, and some galaxies even recede faster-than-light. Can we see a change in real time?
Even the most brilliant mind in history couldn't have achieved all he did without significant help from the minds of others.
Before Sun-like stars die, they transition from AGB red giants into preplanetary nebulae. Here's how Hubble sees the famous Egg Nebula.
Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit taught us how to separate good science from the work of charlatans. In 2026, that matters more than ever.
No claim has even made it halfway up the Confidence of Life Detection (CoLD) scale, but 21st century science is just beginning to unfold.
Here in our modern Universe, it's cosmic dust that forms planets, complex molecules, and enables life. But how did the Universe create it?
13.8 billion years have passed since the Big Bang, but many stars will survive for longer than that. What's the longest-lived a star can be?