Skeptophilia

In my Critical Thinking classes, I did a unit on statistics and data, and how you tell if a measurement is worth paying attention to.  One o...

One of the main things that separates scientists from the rest of us is that they notice things we very likely just take for granted. Gregor...

It's sometimes hard to fathom that only a hundred years ago, there was still a spirited argument going on in the astronomical community ...

As an example of what I wrote about yesterday -- that the universe is amazing enough without having to make shit up to embellish it -- today...

In the Star Trek episode "The Savage Curtain," the intrepid crew of the Enterprise  visit the planet Excalbia.  I forget why, bec...

In 2021, University of Washington astronomer Anastasios (Andy) Tsanidakis was reviewing data collected by the European Space Agency's Ga...

Coming right on the heels of yesterday's post about a star so large the astrophysicists are at a loss to explain how it even exists, tod...

Way back around 1910, Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung and American astronomer Henry Norris Russell independently found a curious patte...

The death of massive stars, ten or more times the mass of the Sun, is thought to have a predictable -- if violent -- trajectory. During most...

The list of confirmed exoplanets now exceeds six thousand.  Considering the fact that the three main ways they're detected -- direct me...