Stories by Phil Plait

Subatomic black holes from ancient cosmic history could, in principle, make you have a very bad day. But chances are you’ll never encounter one

All the sun’s planets are oddballs. But some are more so than others

NASA plans to launch a wildly ambitious nuclear-powered octocopter to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in 2028

A single subatomic particle from deep space had the same energy as a baseball pitch, and scientists still don’t know how it got here

Long ago, the cosmos might have been a black hole factory—and these primordial objects are even weirder than you think

Just how big can a star become? The answer depends on when in cosmic history you’re asking the question

Despite years of debate and follow-up studies, an odd streak of cosmic light still defies a final explanation. Is it a giant black hole screaming through intergalactic space?

Satellites are wonders of modern technology that have improved all of our lives. But having more than a million of them in orbit could destroy our view of the heavens and seriously damage our planet

Although astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets, the number of confirmed exomoons—and exorings—is still zero. But that may soon change

How big would a telescope need to be to see Earth’s dinosaurs from 66 million light-years away? Think big—and then think bigger

The collision of supermassive black holes shakes the entire cosmos, hard

You might think galaxies can’t ever find each other in our runaway cosmos, but it turns out gravity can sometimes overcome even the stretching of space itself

The venerable Hubble observatory is going strong despite its decades in space and the advent of next-generation successors

From planet-scorching stellar outbursts to cataclysms so powerful they shiver the very fabric of spacetime, these are some of the biggest blasts our cosmos has to offer

Stars emit lots of green light, but our eyes don’t let us see them that way

Total eclipses, lunar occultations, planetary conjunctions and meteor showers await stargazers this year

The “Seven Sisters” of the Pleiades are part of a much larger complex that can help reveal our galaxy’s deep history

Record-breaking objects can tell us about the most powerful events in the cosmos—sometimes

Depending on how you look at it, this catchphrase from a 1980s pop song is decently accurate: you can actually melt the planet if you stop its turning

Precisely calibrating clocks on Mars is harder than you’d think, because of some extremely esoteric physics

In our topsy-turvy universe, sometimes the farther away an object is, the bigger it seems to be

A technique called interferometry can greatly magnify tiny objects on the sky, and is powerful enough to reveal the surfaces of nearby stars

Comets don’t just orbit our sun. “Exocomets” are common around other stars in the galaxy, too

Centuries before other galaxies were known to exist, astronomers called them “spiral nebulas.” Today the defunct term still sparks confusion