astronomy

Phil Plait

Phil Plait is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Phil Plait rather than just read about it. In short: Philip Cary Plait (born September 30, 1964), also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an American astronomer, skeptic, and popular science blogger. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, on images and spectra of astronomical objects, as well as on engaging in public outreach advocacy for NASA missions.

Key takeaways

Phil Plait belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Phil Plait to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Phil Plait from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Philip Cary Plait (born September 30, 1964), also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an American astronomer, skeptic, and popular science blogger. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, on images and spectra of astronomical objects, as well as on engaging in public outreach advocacy for NASA missions. He has written three books, Bad Astronomy, Death from the Skies, and Under Alien Skies. He has also appeared in several science documentaries, including How the Universe Works on the Discovery Channel. From August 2008 through 2009, he served as president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Additionally, he wrote and hosted episodes of Crash Course Astronomy, which aired its last episode in 2016.

Early life Plait grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He has said he became interested in astronomy when his father brought home a telescope when Plait was 5 years old or so. According to Plait, he "aimed it at Saturn that night. One look, and that was it. I was hooked."

Education and research Plait attended the University of Michigan and received his PhD in astronomy at the University of Virginia in 1995 with a thesis on supernova SN 1987A, which he studied with the Supernova Intensive Study (SINS). During the 1990s, Plait worked with the COBE satellite and later was part of the Hubble Space Telescope team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, working largely on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. In 1995, he published observations of a ring of circumstellar material around SN 1987A, which led to further study of explosion mechanisms in core-collapse supernovae. Plait's work with Grady, et al. resulted in the presentation of high-resolution images of isolated stellar objects (including AB Aurigae and HD 163296) from the Hubble Space Telescope, among the first of those recorded. These results have been used in further studies into the properties and structure of dim, young, moderate-size stars, called Herbig Ae/Be stars, which also confirmed results observed by Grady, et al.

Public outreach After his research contributions, Plait concentrated on educational outreach. He went on to perform web-based public outreach for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other NASA-funded missions while at EdEon STEM Learning at Sonoma State University from 2000 to 2007. In 2001, he coauthored a paper on increasing accessibility of astronomy education resources and programs. A large proportion of his public outreach occurs online. He established the badastronomy website in 1998 and the corresponding blog in 2005. The website remains archived but is no longer actively maintained, while the blog has continued, through several changes of platform, to the present day. His first book, Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax", deals with much the same subject matter as his website. His second book, Death from the Skies, describes ways astronomical events could wipe out life on Earth and was released in October 2008. Plait's work has also appeared in the Encyclopædia Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future and Astronomy magazine. He is also a frequent guest on the SETI Institute's weekly science radio show Big Picture Science. Plait has contributed to a number of television and cinema productions, either onscreen as host or guest or in an advisory role offscreen. He hosted the three-part documentary series Phil Plait's "Bad Universe" on the Discovery Channel, which first aired in the United States on August 29, 2010, but was not picked up as a series. He has appeared in numerous science documentaries and programs including How the Universe Works. Plait was a science advisor for the 2016 film Arrival and the 2017 CBS TV series Salvation. He was the head science writer of the 2017 show Bill Nye Saves the World on Netflix.

Scientific skeptical advocacy

From 2008 to 2009, Plait served as the president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, which promotes scientific skepticism, a position he eventually stepped down from in order to focus on the "Bad Universe" television project. He has also been a regular speaker at widely attended science and skepticism events and conferences, such as The Amazing Meeting (TAM), Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS), and DragonCon. Plait writes and speaks on topics related to scientific skepticism, such as advocating in favor of widespread immunization.

Personal life Plait used to live in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, Marcella Setter, and daughter. In a 2009 interview, Plait stated that his daughter is interested in astronomy and science, as well as anime and manga. Between 2011 and 2018, Setter and Plait ran Science Getaways, a vacation company that provides science-based adventures. As of January 2024, he lives in rural Virginia outside of Charlottesville.

Internet presence

Badastronomy.com

Plait began publishing explanatory Internet postings on science in 1993. Five years later, Plait established Badastronomy.com with the goal of clearing up what he perceived to be widespread public misconceptions about astronomy and space science in movies, the news, print, and on the Internet, also providing critical analysis of several pseudoscientific theories related to space and astronomy, such as the "Planet X" cataclysm, Richard Hoagland's theories, and the Moon landing "hoax". It received a considerable amount of traffic after Plait criticized a Fox Network special accusing NASA of faking the Apollo missions. Astronomer Michelle Thaller has described Badastronomy.com, as well as Plait's book and essays called Bad Astronomy, as "a monumental service to the space-science community".

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Phil Plait

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Phil Plait claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Phil Plait before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Phil Plait ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Phil Plait

In research: Phil Plait appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Phil Plait in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Phil Plait is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1964 births, 21st-century American science writers, American astronomers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Phil Plait outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Phil Plait in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Phil Plait means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Phil Plait out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Phil Plait in simple terms?

Why does Phil Plait matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Phil Plait?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Phil Plait.