Cosmic Perspectives from Amid the Stars:
Astronomy Blog

The solar eclipse is the well-known event when the Moon passes between the Earth and Sun, blocking the Sun from view. Less known is the lunar eclipse, where the Earth passes between the Sun and Moon, blocking the light of the Sun that usually reflects off the Moon. The morning of March 3, 2026, at around 3:00 am PST, will provide this special show of celestial alignment.

Social media is buzzing with news of a so-called “planet parade” on Saturday, February 28. But before you get your hopes up, let’s separate the astronomical reality from the viral hype.

You might have heard before that the nearest star is 4.24 light-years from Earth. Or that the closest galaxy is 2.5 million light-years from the Milky Way. Or even that the most distant observed objects are 33.8 billion light-years away. But how do we measure these distances in space? After all, there’s no such thing as a cosmic ruler. That’s where the cosmic distance ladder comes in.

There is an estimated septillion stars in the observable universe (that’s a one followed by 24 zeroes). They’re everywhere you look and come in all sorts of varieties. Every star is unique, but they all follow a similar life cycle. A star is a ball of gas, usually hydrogen and helium, that is so dense, it can fuse that hydrogen into heavier elements, creating energy. Depending on its size and rate of fusion, a star can live anywhere from a few million years to trillions of

For as long as humans have been telling stories, we’ve dreamed of worlds beyond our own. Today those worlds are no longer mere stories. We live in a golden age of exoplanet discovery. An exoplanet is any planet that exists beyond our Solar System, and since the 1990s, we’ve confirmed over 6,000 of them. It’s safe to assume that planets would exist around other stars. After all, there’s nothing special about the Sun. It’s a very average star.

When you look up at the night sky, you’re not only looking out into space, but also back in time. You’re seeing stars that exist hundreds to thousands of light-years away, and that means you’re looking back hundreds to thousands of years into the past.

Are we alone? It’s a question that humanity has long asked itself. Is the universe beyond this rock we call Earth teeming with life, or is biology a fluke never to be repeated? The only way to know the answers is to hunt for them ourselves.

We live in an age of light. At night, we travel by streetlight and read by lamplight. The dark of night no longer hinders our ability to simply live. As much of a blessing as this feels, it can also be a curse. Less than a hundred years ago, anyone, anywhere, could look up into the sky and see the bright swath of the Milky Way, but that becomes less and less true every day for those living in the modern age of electric lighting.