Philip Plait's Blog

All Good Things…

Welp. This is my final article for SYFY Wire.

Astronomers find a torched super-Earth on a ONE DAY orbit around its star

Astronomers have discovered a rare exoplanetary beast, and it’s providing evidence that planetary formation and evolution over time take a lot of different pathways. It’s a super-Earth getting positively cooked by its host star, but the baffling part is its big sibling right next door [link to paper]. 

Mea culpa: Planet definitions and Earth clearing its orbit

Every now and again, I screw up. 

Oh, it’s extremely rare when I write an article (cough cough), but it happens. Sometimes it’s small enough that I’ll just issue a correction in the text and then forget about it, because hey, that happens. But other times it’s either big enough or an interesting enough mistake that it’s worth following up.

Mea culpa is Latin for “my fault.” So, mea culpa.

In this case it’s a point I’ve actually made a few times when talking about trying to define what a plane...

Tonight, NASA's DART will slam into an asteroid at 24,000 kph

Tonight, if all goes well, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test — or DART — mission will slam into a tiny asteroid moon at nearly 24,000 kilometers per hour, blasting out a cloud of debris, creating a flash of light visible across the solar system, and changing the velocity of the asteroid by less than a millimeter per second… which is tiny, but significant.

JWST’s Neptune: The best infrared view in 30 years

Neptune is the keeper of the deep: The last known major planet from the Sun, the god of the boundless sea beyond the inner solar system that marks the shore of the black depths of interstellar space.

Despite being four times the diameter of Earth, its distance of a soul-chilling 4.5 billion kilometers from us makes Neptune tiny and faint even through large telescopes — which is why it wasn’t discovered until 1846. 

Whoop whoop whoop! NASA InSight 'hears' an asteroid impact on Mars

On Sept. 5, 2021, NASA’s InSight lander “heard” the impact of an asteroid slamming into the surface of Mars — in fact the space rock broke into three pieces, each hitting the planet and creating a crater. Not only that, but it also detected the acoustic waves generated by the asteroid as it rammed through the thin air of Mars too!

Astronomers find the nearest black hole to Earth, and it has a Sun-like companion star

Astronomers have found the nearest known black hole candidate to Earth, a quiet beast nearly ten times as massive than the Sun just 1,570 light-years from us*. It was found through the antics of its Sun-like stellar companion, but how it came to be is a head-scratcher [link to paper].

Astronomers find the death cry of a star in a cluster long ago and not so very far away

A team of astronomers has found what may be the oldest known planetary nebula ever seen, and certainly one of the biggest. These structures are fleeting on a cosmic timescale, so finding one so old is extremely helpful in nailing down what happens as stars die.

Could the destruction of a large icy moon explain both Saturn’s tilt and its rings?

Saturn’s rings are arguably the most gorgeous and spectacular structures in the solar system. They’re so flat — proportionally thinner than a single sheet of paper — that when they’re edge-on we can’t see them at all; if it weren’t for the fact that Saturn is tilted so we see them at an angle they’d be nearly invisible.

Keck and JWST team up to watch as massive stars blast away gas in the Orion Nebula

One of the most truly spectacular objects in the entire sky is the celebrated Orion Nebula, a star-birth factory 1,300 light-years from Earth. It's so bright that it can be seen with the naked eye; it looks like a star, the middle of three that form Orion's "dagger" that hangs down from his Belt. With a telescope it reveals itself to be a brilliant and colorful display of hot gas a couple of dozen light-years across.