Little Astronomy

“Recent comets” can mean two different things: comets newly discovered by astronomers, and comets that are actually worth looking for in the sky right now. Most people searching this term want the second one. The tricky part is that comets are moody little snowballs. They can brighten fast, fade just as fast, or show up in one hemisphere and stay invisible from the other. A c...

Europa is one of the most tempting places in the Solar System to look for life, and NASA has spent decades circling back to it. Not because the moon is easy to study. It isn’t. Europa sits deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt, wrapped in a shell of ice, and probably hides a salty ocean beneath it. That combination is exactly why scientists keep going there. For a broader catalog ...

Black holes are not all the same size, and they don’t all form the same way. The types of black holes astronomers talk about most often are stellar black holes, supermassive black holes, intermediate-mass black holes, and primordial black holes. Two of those are firmly confirmed. Two are still the stuff of active research and, in one case, some very patient cosmic detective w...

Massachusetts has a surprisingly solid astronomy scene for a small state packed with traffic, colleges, and weather that enjoys ruining plans. The trick is knowing which observatories are actually open to the public, which ones run scheduled skywatching nights, and which ones are basically research facilities with a nice dome. Here’s the useful version: a guide to observatori...

North Carolina has a better planetarium scene than most people expect. You’ve got big-city science centers, university-backed domes, and a few places that are really more “science museum with a planetarium theater” than a standalone star temple. That distinction matters. If you want the full night-sky experience, you need to know which spot is actually worth the drive. This g...