Today Phil follows up last week's look at the death of low mass stars with what comes next: a white dwarf. White dwarfs are incredibly hot and dense objects ...
In today's episode, Phil looks at how gravity plays out across the universe. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace: ...
Today Phil explains that YES, there are other planets out there and astonomers have a lot of methods for detecting them. Nearly 2000 have been found so far.
While Jupiter is nowhere near massive enough to initiate fusion in its core, there are even more massive objects out there that fall just short of that achievement ...
Before moving on from Jupiter to Saturn, we're going to linger for a moment on Jupiter's moons. There are 67 known moons, and 4 huge ones that we want to ...
Today Phil explores the world of tides! What is the relationship between tides and gravity? How do planets and their moons become tidally locked? What would ...
Massive stars fuse heavier elements in their cores than lower mass stars. This leads to the creation of heavier elements up to iron. Iron robs critical energy from ...
The fourth planet from the sun and the outermost of the terrestrial planets, Mars has long been a popular spot for missions and imagination. Phil walks you ...
Here it is, folks: the end. In our final episode of Crash Course Astronomy, Phil gives the course a send off with a look at some of his favorite topics and the big ...
Saturn is the crown jewel of the solar system, beautiful and fascinating. It is a gas giant, and has a broad set of rings made of ice particles. Moons create gaps in ...
Today on Crash Course Astronomy, Phil explains comets. Comets are chunks of ice and rock that orbit the Sun. When they get near the Sun the ice turns into ...
Today we're taking a break for another round of "Bad Astronomy" Crash Course Astronomy posters available at DFTBA.com ...
Astronomers study a lot of gorgeous things, but nebulae might be the most breathtakingly beautiful of them all. Nebulae are clouds of gas and dust in space.
Gamma-ray bursts are not only incredible to study, but their discovery has an epic story all its own. Today Phil takes you through some Cold War history and then ...
Now that we've finished our tour of the planets, we're headed back to the asteroid belt. Asteroids are chunks of rock, metal, or both that were once part of ...
How do astronomers make sense out of the vastness of space? How do they study things so far away? Today Phil talks about distances, going back to early ...
One last round of laughs with Phil as he struggles through some Bad Astronomy. -- Crash Course Astronomy Poster: ...
Today we're rounding out our planetary tour with ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Both have small rocky cores, thick mantles of ammonia, water, and methane, ...
The majority of the universe is made up of a currently mysterious entity that pervades space: dark energy. We don't know exactly what it is, but we do know that ...
This week we build on our naked eye observations from last week and take a look at the cyclical phenomena that we can see at work in the universe. -- Table of ...
In the aftermath of a 8 – 20 solar mass star's demise we find a weird little object known as a neutron star. Neutrons stars are incredibly dense, spin rapidly, and ...
Venus is a gorgeous naked-eye planet, hanging like a diamond in the twilight -- but it's beauty is best looked at from afar. Even though Mercury is closer to the ...
Welcome to the first episode of Crash Course Astronomy. Your host for this intergalactic adventure is the Bad Astronomer himself, Phil Plait. We begin with ...
Today Phil helps keep you from ticking off an astronomer in your life by making sure you know the difference between a meteor, meteorite, and meteoroid.
In today's Crash Course Astronomy, Phil takes a look at the explosive history of our cosmic backyard. We explore how we went from a giant ball of gas to the ...
Today we are talking about the life -- and death -- of stars. Low mass stars live a long time, fusing all their hydrogen into helium over a trillion years.
Last week we covered multiple star systems, but what if we added thousands or even millions of stars to the mix? A star cluster. There are different kinds of ...
Today Phil's explaining the stars and how they can be categorized using their spectra. Together with their distance, this provides a wealth of information about ...