SCIENCE

The idea that matter is mostly empty space is mostly wrong

Practically all of the matter we see and interact with is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. Then…

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Starts With A Bang podcast #104 — The magnetized galactic center

The center of the galaxy doesn’t just host stars and a black hole, but an enormous set of rich gassy…

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What was it like when humans first arose on planet Earth?

Despite billions of years of life on Earth, humans first arose only ~300,000 years ago. It took all that time…

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What was it like when oxygen killed almost all life on Earth? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Apr, 2024

Although our planet is thought to have had about a 2:1 ratio of oceans to continents throughout its history, there…

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Ask Ethan: How do symmetries lead to conservation laws?

First derived by Emmy Noether, for every symmetry a theory possesses, there’s an associated conserved quantity. Here’s the profound link.…

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How to measure a lunar month during the solar eclipse | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Apr, 2024

This partial solar eclipse, captured over Arlington, VA in 2021, shows the Moon’s disk partially blotting out the Sun. The…

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Ask Ethan: Has a new study disproven dark matter and dark energy? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Mar, 2024

The full-field image of MACSJ0717.5+3745 shows many thousands of galaxies in four separate sub-clusters within the large cluster. The blue…

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Flagship NASA space telescope faces a penny-pinching death | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Mar, 2024

The Bullet Cluster, the aftermath of a galaxy cluster collision that occurred 3.8 billion years ago in a region of…

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Ask Ethan: How did matter come to exist in our Universe? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Mar, 2024

In the very early Universe, there were tremendous numbers of quarks, leptons, anti-quarks, and anti-leptons of all species. After only…

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When will the Earth meet its demise? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Mar, 2024

If the Earth had the misfortune to either encounter a black hole or simply have one get too close to…

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