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.

An image of a yellow and purple wave with an unclear origin.
Everything acts like a wave while it propagates, but behaves like a particle whenever it interacts. The origins of this duality go way back.
nasa merge black hole
So far, gravitational waves have revealed stellar mass black holes and neutron stars, plus a cosmic background. So much more is coming.
An image of a spiral galaxy taken by the JWST in space.
Almost every large structure in the Universe displays a 5:1 dark matter-to-normal matter ratio. Here's how some galaxies defy that rule.
A choropleth map of the united states displaying median age by county with a color gradient from light to dark blue indicating increasing age ranges following a natural bell curve distribution.
Almost everything we can observe and measure follows what's known as a normal distribution, or a Bell curve. There's a profound reason why.
Comparison of early Mars with abundant water and a thicker atmosphere versus the dry and arid Mars of today, much like Venus, which also died in terms of its potential to support life.
In the early stages of our Solar System, there were three life-friendly planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Only Earth thrived. Here's why.
gaia ESA milky way
For thousands of years, humanity had no idea how far away the stars were. In the 1600s, Newton, Huygens, and Hooke all claimed to get there.
Einstein field equations
Although many of Einstein's papers revolutionized physics, there's one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.