The brightest star in the night sky is getting ready to leave it for a while. Sirius, the Dog Star, is low in the southwest as night falls. Over the next few weeks, it’ll sink deeper into the twilight, then disappear from view. Sirius is almost nine light-years away. And it actually consists of […]

Stars are huge — anywhere from about 10 times the diameter of Earth to a hundred thousand times or more. Such a scale is just hard to fathom. One way to envision it is to consider how long it would take you to make one turn around such a giant body. An extreme example is Antares, the bright […]

Over the millennia, stars acquire a lot of names. Some make sense, some don’t. And some of them might have gotten mixed up along the way. An example is the fourth-brightest star of Leo, the lion, which is about 58 light-years away. It represents the lion’s hip. A few centuries ago, it was […]

Immanuel Kant is best known for his ideas about philosophy, from ethics to the nature of knowledge. But he also played a role in the development of an idea about how planets are born. And while many of the details were off, his basic idea was sound. Kant was born 300 years ago this week, in the […]

Few constellations have as many backstories as Virgo, the virgin. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was linked with several goddesses, each with her own story. In one story, she was Dike, the goddess of justice. She lived when the gods known as the Titans ruled the land. Everything was peaceful, it […]