esiegel

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Ethan Siegel

Ethan was born in New York City as the son of a Jewish postal worker. He did his undergrad at Northwestern, taught public school in Houston, Texas and Los Angeles, California, before moving to Florida, where he got his PhD in theoretical astrophysics at the University of Florida. After that, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he taught at the University of Wisconsin, ate too much cheese, and also met his life partner, Jamie. After working in astrophysics research at the University of Arizona and starting the world-renowned science blog, Starts With A Bang, he moved from the hellish desert to rain-soaked Portland in 2008. Since then, he's been a professor at the University of Portland and Lewis & Clark College, grown a nationally renowned beard and mustache, got invited to join a circus and probably drank more beer than a healthy person should. He currently works as the head curator at Trapit, and can't wait to tell you a little bit more about the Universe.

Posts by this author

Total Eclipse of the Heart Moon!
As Bonnie Tyler sang, and later The Dan Band (with more cursing), Once upon a time there was light in my life But now there's only love in the dark Nothing I can say A total eclipse of the heart Well, it isn't the heart, but this Wednesday night, beginning at 10 PM Eastern Standard time (8 PM my…
Dangerman Audition!
Alright, folks, so last week I got this letter from a very good magician and television producer Anthony Owen from Objective Productions, the company partnered with Discovery Channel to make Dangerman in London: Thank you for your recent email application for Dangerman. If you are still…
Weekend Diversion: The smartest fish ever?
So I am preparing an audition video to be Dangerman this weekend, which will go up on youtube and get posted here next week. In the meantime, as promised for the weekend, I have a new weekend diversion for you: the archer fish, a.k.a. toxotes jaculatrix (hee hee). But what makes it so cool? Oh, I…
Great things await you onlineâ¦
Three awesome things are going on today for you, and I invite you to check them all out: The latest Carnival of Space is live, where you have your choice of 23 different astronomical topics to choose from. Of course, my post this week on galaxies and how they're made is on there, too! Pamela L.…
That Bloody Moon!
The closest you're going to get from me on Valentine's Day is something red, dear readers. As the Moon is now a waxing gibbous and will be for the next week, it will brighten the sky for the majority of the night. But before sunrise, it will dip below the horizon and set. The funny thing is, if you…
What if I were made of Dark Matter?
I've been talking about dark matter a lot, and yet there's still so much to explain about it. For example, dark matter and normal matter (protons, neutrons, and electrons) have a few things in common: They both have mass. They both feel the effects of gravity. They both cause their own gravity.…
Galaxies are made exactly how, now?
Last week, Jamie (my significant other) came home from work and told me about a conversation she had with her coworker, Chris. This week she asked another one, Miguel, whether he had any questions about Astronomy, Physics, space, etc. This week's question comes from Miguel: What is a galaxy, anyway…
How to Build a Home in Space
Ever get sick of your life here on Earth? What about really getting away from it all; what if you wanted to live in space, orbiting the Earth, away from everyone. (At least for awhile, like a summer home.) What would you need to do it, and what would it consist of? I propose an idea which I'll…
Weekend Diversion: An Optical Illusion
Starts With A Bang! is off to a great start; each the past three days we have topped the 100 visitor mark, bringing our total number of unique visitors up to 1,413! I'm going to attempt to start a new tradition here of making a weekend post on a topic that I just find neat, and share it with you.…
Faster-Than-Light II: Information?
To follow up on the faster than light post here, let's ask another question: If you can make a way of transferring information that doesn't involve matter, is that information limited by the speed of light? First off, let's go over what information is, and then we'll talk about how transferring…
The Cosmic Microwave Background? Not always…
The Universe isn't a static place. Although the laws of nature (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) don't appear to change over time, everything in the Universe appears to evolve, and changes over time. One of the simplest ways that this happens is through Hubble expansion. General relativity tells…
How to make a Black Hole
You and I have lived on planet Earth long enough to know that if you want to launch something into space, it needs to travel fast enough to escape the pull of Earth's gravity. Launch it with too slow of a speed, and it crashes back into Earth. Launch it with a little more speed, and you can send it…
Faster-than-light travel: is it possible?
Apparently, this is becoming a good place for people to get their questions answered! My friend Brian, recently wanted to know what the possibilities were for faster-than-light travel. Specifically, he was interested in it because he wants humans to do it. Brian: but otherwise how will we ever have…
Dark Matter: Is it right in front of us?
Last year, I had just finished my Ph.D. studies, and had moved to Madison, WI to teach introductory physics at the University of Wisconsin. I was working on this paper, and when I submitted it, I got a phone call from New Scientist magazine's space division. Fast-forward two weeks, and I find this…
Centripetal vs. Centrifugal force, & the Solar System
One of the worst teaching tools physicists use (and they almost all do it) is to tell students, There's no such thing as centrifugal force. What can you do when the top physics education website says, "It is important to note that the centrifugal force does not actually exist. We feel it, because…
Brain-damaged arguments and Boltzmann Brains
Okay, so I got a question from my friend Tamara, who's a high school teacher in my hometown of New York City. It concerns a recent article she read on the front page of the New York Times about something funny that us scientists are calling Boltzmann Brains. I've read this article three times…
Question: The Milky Way to an outsider…?
I got a great question earlier today from my buddy Zrinka, and decided to figure out the answer for her, and also for myself. She asks: Ethan, is it possible to know, or better to say to imagine somehow how our galaxy looks from outside? What a simple-sounding question! After all, we know what the…
An amazing video on Evolution and Intelligent Design
Evolution, creationism, and intelligent design are words that many people have extremely strong opinions about. Regardless of how you feel about why the laws of nature are what they are, which have evidently allowed us to exist, the evidence for the validity of the theory of evolution with one…
An amazing discovery: a double Einstein Ring!
One of the perks of being a postdoc at a place like the University of Arizona, one of the top places in the US for astronomy, is that we get a number of really interesting visitors. Today we got paid a visit by Tommaso Treu, an astronomer at UC Santa Barbara. He spoke to us today about one of his…
MOND vs. Dark Matter
The first serious advocate of modifying Newton's laws instead of postulating unseen (or dark) matter was Moti Milgrom, from whom today a new article appears on the astrophysics preprint archives. In particular, Milgrom asserts the following: MOND predictions imply that baryons alone accurately…
First question!
Dave, one of my online chessplaying buddies, asked me this question (edited for appropriateness): Now this speeding up of the expansion of the universe: Do I understand correctly that one of the theories to explain why relates to "dark matter"? In real simple terms, what in the dark blue blazes…
What is that Background?
Taking a look at the background picture, and wondering what it is?  It's the Bullet Cluster, also known to astronomers as 1E 0657-56. What's so special about it? Well, these are actually two galaxy clusters that are in the process of merging, and are colliding with one another! Although…
Setting up for the Blogosphere
In preparation for the launch of startswithabang.com, I am attempting to embed a video I had found on youtube, of the slow-motion ignition of a lighter. How does this work?  The video demonstrates that to make something very simple happen (to get a sustained, controlled flame out of a…