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

Messier Monday: A Rich Open Star Cluster, M37
"Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody." -Benjamin Franklin Welcome to Messier Monday, where each week we take a journey into one of the 110 objects in the Messier Catalogue of non-cometary deep…
Weekend Diversion: Science Book Reviews for the Holidays
"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." -Henry David Thoreau Every day that we have free or leisure time, there's this great conflict as to how we spend it: working to better…
There's Water on Mercury, and EVERY World Like it!
"You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there." -Edwin Louis Cole Our Solar System is -- at least from our perspective -- the most well-studied system of planets, moons, asteroids and comets in the entire Universe. Image credit: Olaf Frohn, from earlier in 2012. And in this…
Why you must NEVER hug the Moon!
"Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night." -Hal Borland Of course you know the danger that would befall us if the Earth ever got too close to the Sun, as the Perry Bible Fellowship shows, atop. But have you ever…
Messier Monday: A Straggling Globular Cluster, M30
"The man's a born straggler... another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would've been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger." -Carl Hiaasen Welcome to the latest Messier Monday, where each week we take a look at one of Charles Messier's original catalogue…
Weekend Diversion: Make Yourself Hallucinate (Safely)
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a Ride!'” -Hunter S. Thompson For those of you who've…
Giving thanks for our place in the Universe
“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is…
Messier Monday: Bode's Galaxy, M81
"When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system." -Kalpana Chawla Welcome to this week's Messier Monday, where I pick a new object out of the original catalogue of 110 "faint fuzzies" designed to help comet-…
Weekend Diversion: Blending the "real" with 3D prints
“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” -Niels Bohr One of the most amazing recent technological innovations is the advent of 3D Printing, where any shaped or textured object can be accurately reproduced with the right software and printing materials. The things…
So just what is out there beyond the Standard Model?
"Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me." -Craig Ferguson Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate -- albeit not incredibly precisely -- which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to…
Is there any particle physics beyond the standard model?
"...this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data." -Steven Weinberg One of the most fundamental questions we could ever ask about all of existence is "What makes up the Universe…
Messier Monday: An Ancient Globular Cluster, M15
"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old." -Mark Twain Welcome to yet another installment of Messier Monday, where each week, I'll pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet…
Weekend Diversion: The First Relativistic Video Game!
“There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that's still beyond logic of the observer.” -Toba Beta It might be hard to believe, but science tells us truths about the Universe that we might never have intuited or philosophized about if the Universe itself didn't…
Where do Type Ia Supernovae come from?
"You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it." -Henry Louis Gates When it comes to stars, their fates are very well known. Every single star that's massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core will someday run out of fuel and die. Image credit: NASA,…
Every Galaxy will have New Stars for Trillions of Years!
"It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight." - Neil Armstrong Indeed, all that glitters so brilliantly in the cosmos does so because of the stars that have formed throughout it. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team. Over the 14 billion-or-so years that our Universe has been around…
Messier Monday: The Lagoon Nebula, M8
"I hate that expression, 'fusion.' What it means to me is this movement where nothing ever really fused." -Wayne Kramer Welcome to another Messier Monday, where each week, I pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters -- to highlight and…
Weekend Diversion: The Greatest Pumpkin EVER!
"Only the knife knows what goes on in the heart of a pumpkin." -Simone Schwarz-Bart With Halloween just behind us, the only things that pumpkins may mean to you now are pie, soups, or -- as John Prine would sing you -- a condescending term of affection, as in, Daddy's Little Pumpkin. But I recently…
Our way is not the only way!
"The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at least once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at-least-once. And for life as we know it…
The Halloween Horror of the Dark Universe!
"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad Despite the wondrous, luminous…
Messier Monday: The Pleiades, M45
"Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,) Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter, Longer than sun or any revolving satellite, Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades." -Walt Whitman Last week, we kicked off…
Weekend Diversion: Happy Halloween 2012, with a Retrospective!
"Where there is no imagination there is no horror." -Arthur Conan Doyle Halloween, for those of you who've been here a while, is my favorite holiday. Every year for the past dozen years now, I've dressed up as whatever I've wanted for Halloween. And -- if you haven't seen the pattern yet -- it…
The Science of Predicting the Future
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." -Niels Bohr What's going to happen next? It's perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at…
What is the Sun made out of?
"The sun is a mass of incandescent gas A gigantic nuclear furnace Where hydrogen is built into helium At a temperature of millions of degrees" -They Might Be Giants It's so ingrained in us that the Sun is a nuclear furnace powered by hydrogen atoms fusing into heavier elements that it's difficult…
Messier Monday: The Crab Nebula, M1
"This nebula had such a resemblance to a comet in its form and brightness that I endeavored to find others, so that astronomers would not confuse these same nebulae with comets just beginning to shine." -Charles Messier Let's take a journey back in time to when our known Universe was a lot smaller…
Weekend Diversion: Something Amazing from Something Simple
"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." -Pablo Picasso People find artistic inspiration from a plethora of different sources, ranging from the very complex to the…
The Secret to Writing Your Dissertation
"I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o'clock the next morning I was up writing again." -Abraham Pais, physicist You've been in graduate school for many years…
Have we reached the end of Particle Physics?
"The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other." -James Smithson The entirety of the known Universe -- from the smallest constituents of the atoms to the largest superclusters of galaxies -- have more in common than you might think.…
What Happened Before The Big Bang?
“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” -Bertolt Brecht One of the most frequent questions I get about the Universe -- as a cosmologist -- isn't quite about the Big Bang in and of itself. The expansion of the Universe in reverse; image…
Weekend Diversion: Celebrate the Universe ― and Carl Sagan ― with me!
"History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again." -Carl Sagan From the streets and people of our hometown to the nations, planets, stars and galaxies (and beyond…
At the end of their lives, stars glow hotter than ever!
"A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth." -Ernst Mach Our Sun, like all Sun-like stars, will come to the end of its life someday. All the hydrogen fuel in its core…