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A moon that grows only in the mind

Phil Plait opens with a familiar astronomical surprise: a full moon climbing over the horizon can look enormous, almost near enough to touch. The effect is powerful even for someone who knows the moon has not swollen in the sky. That is the point of the column. The moon illusion is not a subtle measurement error or a trick caused by a rare viewing condition. It is a durable mismatch between what the eye receives and what the brain decides it means.

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Gravity’s roundness test

Phil Plait starts with a question that sounds like a bar bet for astronomers: what is the roundest object anyone has found in the universe? The trick is to define roundness carefully. The article is not looking for the smoothest surface. It is looking for the object closest to a sphere, with every point on its surface nearly the same distance from its center.

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Darkness that makes stars

Phil Plait’s column begins by turning away from the spectacular images that usually define modern astronomy. The universe is full of exploding stars, colliding galaxies and glowing nebulae, but some of its most important objects are visible because they are dark. The article focuses on Bok globules: small, dense clouds of gas and dust that can look like holes punched into a starry background.

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A forecast for the sun’s temper

Solar flares are not just spectacular eruptions on a distant star. When they are aimed the wrong way, they can disturb the technological systems that modern life keeps in orbit and on the ground. A flare releases intense radiation from the sun’s surface, and it can be followed by a coronal mass ejection, a giant bubble of magnetized plasma. If that material reaches Earth, it can trigger geomagnetic storms that threaten satellites, communications, navigation systems, power grids and astronauts.

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A newborn star’s violent surroundings

The article uses a striking James Webb Space Telescope image to explain a brief, turbulent phase in star formation. The object at the center of the story is HH 49/50, a Herbig-Haro object in the Chamaeleon I Cloud complex about 625 light-years from Earth. Its nickname, the “cosmic tornado,” comes from the way hot gas and dust appear twisted into a long, curling structure.

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Names are astronomy’s living archive

Phil Plait’s column uses a deceptively simple question - why do stars have such strange names? - to show how astronomy carries its history inside its vocabulary. A star name is rarely just a label. It can preserve a chain of translations, a cultural nickname, an old cataloging scheme, a technical measurement or a practical need created by a telescope.

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Why asteroid scares usually change

Phil Plait uses a familiar kind of alarming headline as the starting point: astronomers spot a newly discovered space rock, early calculations show a nonzero chance of impact, and the public briefly hears that an asteroid might hit Earth. The article’s point is not that such warnings are meaningless. It is that they are provisional by design.

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Looking back at Earth

Phil Plait’s article turns a familiar question inside out. Instead of asking how humans might detect extraterrestrial civilizations, it asks whether another civilization could detect Earth, assuming its technology were roughly comparable to ours.

The setup is timely because exoplanet science has changed the scale of the problem. Astronomers have found nearly 6,000 planets around other stars, and extrapolations suggest the Milky Way may contain hundreds of billions of planets. Even if only a small fraction resemble Earth, the number of potentially habitable worlds could still be large. That makes life elsewhere a serious scientific possibility. But detectability is a separate question. A living or technological planet can exist without being obvious across interstellar distances.

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A crowded system comes into focus

Saturn used to look like a planet with a few dozen known moons and one spectacular ring system. The rings still dominate the view, but the moon count has changed dramatically. In this Scientific American Q&A, senior news reporter Meghan Bartels talks with astronomer Edward Ashton, whose work helped push Saturn’s official satellite tally to 274. Ashton and his collaborators have identified 192 of those moons, most of them small, faint objects only a few kilometers across.

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A rocky planet that should have lost its air

The article centers on TOI-561 b, a rocky exoplanet that appears to violate a basic expectation about atmospheres. Small, hot worlds should have trouble holding on to gas. Heat gives atmospheric molecules more energy, a planet’s low gravity makes escape easier, and intense radiation from a nearby star can strip air away over time. TOI-561 b seems to face all of those problems at once.