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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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When objects are gravitationally bound, they cannot escape from one another's influence. How does that work within the expanding Universe?
Travel half the distance to your destination, and there's always another half to go. So how do you eventually arrive? That's Zeno's Paradox.
Even the youngest galaxies are often dust-rich, even with very low levels of heavy elements. Nearby dwarf galaxy Sextans A explains why.
Astronomers have found starless gas clouds before, but Cloud 9 might be the most pristine one of all, with big lessons for cosmic history.
In a galaxy less than 300 million years after the Big Bang, oxygen's presence abounds. That's expected; its absence would truly be profound.
In general relativity, matter and energy curve spacetime, which we experience as gravity. Why can't there be an "antigravity" force?
The very word "quantum" makes people's imaginations run wild. But chances are you've fallen for at least one of these myths.
There will always be "wolf-criers" whose claims wither under scrutiny. But aliens are certainly out there, if science dares to find them.
Particles are everywhere, including particles from space that stream through the human body. Here's how they prove Einstein's relativity.
If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it's a JWST image or any other observatory.
Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Universe is simply that it, and everything in it, exists. But what's the reason why?
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
While ice itself is slick, slippery, and difficult to navigate across under most circumstances, skaters easily glide across the ice.
The highest-energy particles could be a sign of new, unexpected physics. But the simplest, most mundane explanation is particularly iron-ic.
While humanity has been skywatching since ancient times, much of our cosmic understanding has come about only recently. Very recently.
Our Universe doesn't just expand and cool, but the expansion itself is accelerating. Can stars form under such structure-erasing conditions?
Well before plants and animals, there were fungi.
Earth orbits the Sun while spinning on its tilted axis, with two annual occasions marking that maximal tilt. That's where solstices arise.
The Department of Energy's newest mission seeks to make a unified AI platform across all national labs. Will it help US science, or kill it?
Our Standard Model of the Universe, for both particle physics and cosmology, remains intact for now. When will its foundations crack?