Stories by Phil Plait

This week—and any time there’s a new crescent moon—the lunar night is a little less dark, thanks to the bright reflected light of Earth

Get to know the stellar trio behind one of the most iconic sights in summer’s night sky

When looking for life in space, we should broaden our horizons

Our planet’s not-quite-circular orbit means that on July 6 we’ll be about 2.5 million kilometers farther from the sun than average—but we won’t feel any colder

The wildfire smoke that smothered the U.S. Northeast last week has surprising connections to astrophysics—and to the historic search for our place in the cosmos

Our planetary neighbor Venus becomes a brilliant beacon in the sky each time it reaches its greatest orbital distance from the sun

Cell-phone towers leak radio waves into space, but they’ll be tough for aliens to detect

Saturn’s surprisingly young rings and record-breaking bounty of moons make the planet a ripe target for springtime sky watchers

Launching a fleet of space telescopes is not the solution to the Starlink problem

We only have a few clues about where the sun was born. Some new ones point to a crowded origin story for our nearest star

Red dwarfs are dim bulbs but host more Earth-like planets than any other kind of star

How I learned to stop worrying and love the next Earth-threatening asteroid

The Lucy spacecraft and its target asteroids show that the way that we name discoveries matters

The Chelyabinsk asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmosphere 10 years ago, the largest impact in more than a century

Citizen scientists and researchers found that we are losing our view of the sky at an astonishing rate of almost 10 percent each year

Clues to the origin of this enormous cloud of gas have been maddeningly vague

A mass of moving material on Mars called a mantle plume may be causing marsquakes and volcanism

The IceCube observatory has detected neutrinos from an active galaxy for the first time, revealing clues about how supermassive black holes gobble matter

Much of North America can witness a delightful astronomical event on the evening of December 7 as the moon blocks out Mars

A new JWST image of a star surrounded by strange, rippling spirals reveals a hidden chapter in the story of how dust spreads across the cosmos

The death of a massive star far across the universe affected lightning on our planet and could teach us about the Milky Way