Ethan Siegel

Ethan Siegel

A theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, host of popular podcast “Starts with a Bang!”

Ethan Siegel 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.

Parker Solar Probe
It would get rid of our hazardous, radioactive, and pollutive waste for good, but physics tells us it's a losing strategy for elimination.
A dense cluster of young stars and bright blue-white spots set against a dark reddish-brown background, with scattered sparkles of light from numerous stars in the outer Milky Way, captured stunningly by JWST.
Almost all of the stars, planets, and interesting physics happens in the inner portions of galaxies. Is that conventional wisdom all wrong?
Rows of identical Earth-like planets stretch out into the vast copy multiverse, with a dark starry background visible between them.
Within our observable Universe, there's only one Earth and one "you." But in a vast multiverse, so much more becomes possible.
Satellite image showing a dense cloud mass over the southeastern United States and the Gulf of Mexico, with an inset graph from NOAA depicting hurricane frequency peaking around mid-August to late September, a trend exacerbated by global warming.
The laws of physics aren't changing. But the Earth's conditions are different than what they used to be, and so are hurricanes as a result.
atom illustration
Most fundamental constants could be a little larger or smaller, and our Universe would still be similar. But not the mass of the electron.
Two breathtaking pictures of a galaxy and a star taken by the Hubble telescope, highlighting the beauty and cosmic magnitude that fuels the Hubble tension.
In the expanding Universe, different ways of measuring its rate give incompatible answers. Nobel Laureate Adam Riess explains what it means.
The image shows a bright spot labeled "JADES-GS-z13-1-LA," seemingly an impossible light captured by the JWST, surrounded by measurement markers, including a scale bar for 1 kpc and 0.28 arcsec. Filters and colors are listed at the bottom.
The Lyman-α emission line has never been seen earlier than 550 million years after the Big Bang. So why does JADES-GS-z13-1-LA have one?