Phil Plait

NASA plans to launch a wildly ambitious nuclear-powered octocopter to Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 2028

All the sun's planets are oddballs. But some are more so than others Even at a glance, the planets in our solar system are wildly diverse.

Subatomic black holes from ancient cosmic history could, in principle, make you have a very bad day. But chances are you’ll never encounter one

Subatomic black holes from ancient cosmic history could, in principle, make you have a very bad day. But chances are you'll never encounter one Phil Plait Fri, April 24, 2026 at 12:45 PM GMT+2 7 min read

The Kardashev scale is an interesting but flawed gauge of a civilization's growth

The problem with Pluto isn’t its planetary or nonplanetary status—it’s our insistence on declaring the world must be one or the other

There are parts of the universe, and of the electromagnetic spectrum, that we’re not covering with our telescopes—but not as many as you might think!

Our galaxy and its nearest large companion, Andromeda, may be headed for a collision on a cosmic scale. What happens then?

Deep surveys of the sky have turned up galaxies vastly larger than our own. Are there even bigger ones yet to be seen?

Here’s a hand-wavy attempt: a galaxy is a collection of stars, gas, dust and dark matter all held together by mutual gravity. At the lower end of the scale, some very small galaxies could be mistaken...