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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: The Farthest Messier Spiral, M109
"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell It took Charles Messier and his assistant, Pierre Méchain, a lifetime to scan and survey the sky for all the permanent deep-sky objects visible in their…
Weekend Diversion: The Edge of the World
"Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends." -Shel Silverstein No, there's…
Ask Ethan #4: Weird Astronomy Maps
"I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it." -Steven Wright So just because the Ask Ethan series is becoming way more popular than I can handle -- I've got more than 200 questions that I'm sitting on by now -- doesn't mean you should stop sending your questions! There are…
Are Parallel Universes Real?
Farnsworth: "There is it. The edge of the Universe!" Fry: "Far out. So there's an infinite number of parallel Universes?" Farnsworth: "No, just the two." Fry: "Oh, well, I'm sure that's enough." Bender: "I'm sick of parallel Bender lording his cowboy hat over me!" -Futurama Our existence here in…
Messier Monday: The Most Concentrated Messier Globular, M75
"I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words." -Joseph Pulitzer When it comes to the Messier objects, though, it isn't…
Weekend Diversion: An Underwater Waterfall?
Note: This post has been updated and improved as of 2014 here, at the new Starts With A Bang blog. What follows, below, is the original version that was first published here. "I love the sounds and the power of pounding water, whether it is the waves or a waterfall." -Mike May The world's oceans…
Ask Ethan #3: A Wild New Idea I Read About
"Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker." -Stephen Hawking Today's Ask Ethan comes to us via our question/suggestion box from reader MIUFish, who asks: I read something recently about some people who were…
The Little Bit of Dark Matter We Know
"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 It was in the 1930s, looking at…
Messier Monday: The Last 'Original' Object, M103
"Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." -Winston Churchill To kick off every week for nearly a year now, we've begun it with Messier Monday, where we take an in-depth look at the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the…
Weekend Diversion: Three Fantastic Fake Film Trailers
"Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?" -Samuel Goldwyn There are few experiences that we can share together -- no matter the great distances in space or time -- like a good movie. Encapsulating a great variety of…
Ask Ethan #2: Meet the Oort Cloud
"The great oak of Astronomy has been felled, and we are lost without its shadow." -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, on the passing of Jan Oort In our new semi-regular series, readers from all over the world (and in low-Earth orbit, too, because why not!) are invited to send in their questions and…
Where do Rogue Planets come from?
"Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't." -Edward Burtynsky It's really a romantic notion when you think about it: the heavens,…
Messier Monday: The Wild Duck Cluster, M11
"Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg." -Hans Christian Anderson Welcome back for another Messier Monday! There are 110 deep-sky objects in the Messier catalogue, some of the most prominent night-sky fixtures, as seen from Earth, running the gamut of…
Weekend Diversion: The Bear Necessities
“Some days you go bear hunting and you get eaten. Some days you come home with a nice rug to roll around on, and bear steaks. What they don't tell you as a kid is that sometimes you get the rug and steaks, but you also get some nice scars to go with them. ...once you realize what can go wrong, it's…
Ask Ethan #1: Back-to-school advice
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught." -Oscar Wilde As many of you know, last weekend I launched a suggestion box here on the site, and I've been overwhelmed by the response: about fifty of you have sent…
What does the Universe look like as seen from its most distant galaxy?
"One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range." -Victor Hugo A couple of weeks ago we took a look at the most distant galaxy (so far) in the known Universe, a galaxy so far away that it takes exclusively infrared observations from our most power space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer)…
Messier Monday: Andromeda, the Object that Opened Up the Universe, M31
"We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known universe." -Edwin Powell Hubble With 110…
Weekend Diversion: We Have A Suggestion Box!
"I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act." -Orson Welles It's like that for…
How would you figure out whether Global Warming is real? Part 3.
"Being told about the effects of climate change is an appeal to our reason and to our desire to bring about change. But to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over…
How would you figure out whether Global Warming is real? Part 2.
"We make the world we live in and shape our own environment." -Orison Swett Marden If you had never heard of global warming before, how would you figure out whether it's real or not? And if it is real, how would you figure out what humanity's role in it is? To answer this, I've decided to do a…
How would you figure out whether Global Warming is real? Part 1.
"There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it." -David Attenborough It's been a long time since I've written anything on this blog about global warming, climate change, or most Earth-based environmental topics in general. After…
Messier Monday: The Top-Heavy Gumball Globular, M12
"A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle." -Khalil Gibran It’s time again for another Messier Monday! The Messier Catalogue was the original comprehensive and accurate catalogue of fixed, deep-sky objects visible to any dedicated (northern…
Weekend Diversion: Punch-Out!!! in real life
"I'm happy to report that everybody whose face I've wanted to punch on Earth has already been punched." -Greg Kinnear Well, it's finally happened. After the javascript music player I'd been using to share music with you was discontinued, I finally found a new one here. There's no better way to…
The Most Distant Galaxy in the Universe
“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” -Oscar Wilde…
How do we see through our own galaxy?
"I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them." -Johann Lambert When we look out at the Universe, our view is pretty consistently dominated…
Why does Particle Physics matter?
"[S]cience is not a consumption good to be expanded in good times and restricted in bad times. The doing of science as well as the supporting of science is an expression of faith in the future. It would have been possible to have told Newton and Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg…
Messier Monday: A double-ringed mystery galaxy, M94
"We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." -Robert Frost It's time again for another Messier Monday! To kick off each week, we've been taking a look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue. Compiled in the 18th Century to help…
Weekend Diversion: Reason Enough
"[F]or those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our…
What does the Universe really look like?
"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise." -Paul Ricoeur Ask anyone who's looked up at a dark sky on a clear, moonless night, and you'll immediately hear tales about how incomprehensibly vast…
The Physicist's Dream Machine
"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge." -Enrico Fermi As you probably know, the Large Hadron Collider -- site of discovery of the last fundamental particle in the Standard Model, the Higgs Boson -- is the most energetic particle…