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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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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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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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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.
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This article returns to one of the most compelling places in the solar system: Enceladus, the small icy moon of Saturn that sprays material from a hidden ocean into space. The basic reason for its scientific appeal is straightforward. Scientists do not have to drill through the ice to sample the ocean below. Enceladus is already doing part of the work for them by venting plumes of water and ice grains from fractures near its south pole.
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This article turns a materials-science result into a broader question about what physicists think the limits of matter are. Copper has long been the default metal for moving heat away from hot components. Its usefulness is not glamorous, but it is central to modern technology: electronics, power equipment, data centers and industrial systems all depend on getting heat out before performance drops or hardware fails.
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This article centers on a difficult astronomical target: a disk of gas and dust around a planet-like object outside our solar system. Astronomers have long expected such disks to exist. Giant planets are thought to form inside broad disks around young stars, and moons may form later inside smaller disks around those planets. But seeing one of those smaller moon-building environments directly is hard because the signal is faint, close to a much brighter star and mixed with the glare of nearby material.
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The article describes a discovery that makes the universe feel less like a scatterplot of galaxies and more like a moving, connected machine. Astronomers found a long chain of galaxies embedded in a much larger cosmic filament about 400 million light-years from Earth. The striking part is not only its size. The whole structure appears to be rotating.
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The article examines a tempting but difficult idea: private companies want the next generation of low-Earth-orbit stations to feel less like laboratories and more like modern habitats, possibly even high-end hotels. The promise is easy to understand. A traveler might float past warm interior panels, look through large windows at Earth, sleep in a carefully designed pod and experience an orbital station as a destination rather than only as infrastructure.
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Phil Plait’s column begins with the sun as the most ordinary fact in human experience: it lights and warms Earth, and life has spent billions of years adapting to it. The twist is that the sun is not a permanent background condition. It is a star with a life cycle, and its slow internal changes will eventually make Earth uninhabitable even without any asteroid, nearby supernova or human-made disaster.
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