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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.

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The Moon’s origin story gets a sharper fingerprint

The article revisits one of planetary science’s most famous creation stories: the Moon likely formed after a Mars-size body, usually called Theia, slammed into the young Earth. That giant impact melted large parts of Earth, destroyed Theia and threw enough debris into orbit for the Moon to assemble from the wreckage.

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A new shape in the radio sky

Phil Plait’s article is about an astronomical surprise that became possible only because astronomers looked at the sky in a different way. Visible-light surveys have mapped many familiar classes of objects, but the universe changes character across the electromagnetic spectrum. A structure that is invisible to ordinary telescopes may glow clearly in radio waves, x-rays or infrared light. That is why new instruments can still reveal genuinely new categories of cosmic phenomena.

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A clue from runaway stars

Phil Plait’s article is about a black hole that may be hiding in plain sight, not in some remote galaxy but in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbors. The case is indirect, which makes it especially interesting. Astronomers are not seeing a bright accretion disk or a spectacular jet. They are reading the motions of stars that have been flung through space at extreme speeds.

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A planet caught in a destructive loop

The article describes a star-planet relationship that is far more active than the usual picture of a star punishing a nearby planet with heat, radiation and gravity. HIP 67522 b, a young Jupiter-size world about 408 light-years away, appears to be doing something back to its star. As it races around HIP 67522, the planet seems to trigger enormous stellar flares. Those flares then blast the planet’s atmosphere, slowly stripping away the very world that sets them off.