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StarDate

StarDate, the longest-running national radio science feature in the U.S., tells listeners what to look for in the night sky.

science astronomy

All Episodes

00:02:19

Vega

StarDate ·

2025/05/27

If stars had trophy cases, Vega’s would be packed. The leading light of Lyra was the first star other than the Sun to have its picture taken, the first to have its spectrum taken, and the first with a published measurement of its distance. Vega is impressive in many ways. It’s more than twice the size and mass of the Sun, and about 50 times the Sun’s brightness. It’s encircled by a wide belt of dust, produced by collisions between big chunks of ice and rock. In about 12,000

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00:02:19

Lyra

StarDate ·

2025/05/26

One of the major beauties of the summer sky dangles in the northeast this evening like a piece of cosmic jewelry – the constellation Lyra. Its brightest star is Vega – the fifth-brightest star in the night sky. It sparkles like the diamond stud in an earring. The rest of Lyra hangs to its lower right like the rest of the earring. It forms a parallelogram – a slanted rectangle. Under fairly dark skies, it’s easy to see. Lyra represents a lyre – a small harp. In skylore,

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00:02:19

Second Leap

StarDate ·

2025/05/25

The names of the stars are a cultural mash-up. The names come from Greek, Latin, Arabic, and other cultures. And some names combine words from different languages. Two examples are the stars Tania Borealis and Tania Australis. “Tania” comes from an Arabic phrase that means “the second.” Borealis and Australis come from Latin, and mean northern and southern. Combined, the stars represent the second leap of the gazelle – a bit of skylore from Arabia. Skywatchers there saw

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00:02:19

Taking a Leap

StarDate ·

2025/05/24

A gazelle leaps past the feet of the great bear. In ancient skylore, in fact, it made three leaps – each marked by a pair of stars.The stars that mark the first jump are known as Alula Borealis and Alula Australis – the northern and southern first leaps. As night falls this evening, they’re high in the northwest. They’re far to the left of the Big Dipper, which has the most prominent stars of the great bear. The “alulas” are close together, so they resemble a

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00:02:19

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2025/05/23

About 44 lightning bolts flash through the skies of Earth every second. And for a while, it seemed there might be more flashes than that on Venus. Telescopes on Earth and spacecraft in orbit saw flashes of light in the planet’s clouds, or heard the sounds of lightning in the planet’s radio waves. One estimate said Venus could see several times more lightning bolts than Earth. But studies in recent years have suggested that lightning on Venus might be quite rare. Venus has a much thicker

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00:02:19

Moon and Companions

StarDate ·

2025/05/22

If you ever want to chat with someone on another planet, you better have a lot of patience. It takes a long time for a message from Earth to reach another world, and just as long for the reply to reach Earth. That’s because radio waves travel at the speed of light. And although light is pretty swift, its speed is limited – 670 million miles per hour. Given the scale of the solar system, that means there’s a long pause between halves of a conversation. Consider the planets that

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00:02:19

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2025/05/21

A 900-mile-wide, two-toned walnut orbits the planet Saturn. It’s Saturn’s third-largest moon, and definitely the most eye-catching. One hemisphere is as dark as coal, while the other is as bright as sea ice. And a mountain ridge wraps around the equator, making it look like a walnut. Iapetus was discovered in 1671. And right away, astronomers realized there was something odd about it. It was easy to see when it was on one side of Saturn, but invisible on the other. Today, we know why

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00:02:19

Padding the Middle

StarDate ·

2025/05/20

For the most part, black holes come in two varieties: small and jumbo. The small ones are the remnants of dead stars. They range from a few to about a hundred times the mass of the Sun. The jumbos inhabit the hearts of galaxies. They range from about a hundred thousand to several billion times the Sun’s mass. But there just isn’t much in the middle. In fact, astronomers have logged only a few dozen medium-sized black holes. And many of those are controversial – they’re hard

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00:02:19

Omega Centauri

StarDate ·

2025/05/19

The closest galaxy we can see other than our own Milky Way may be inside the Milky Way. Its outer precincts have been stripped away, leaving only its core – a tight ball of 10 million stars. And a rare type of black hole appears to lurk in its middle. Omega Centauri rolls low across the south during the night. The view is better from the southern half of the country. To the eye alone, it looks like a fuzzy star. Omega Centauri is classified as a globular cluster – a family of very old

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00:02:19

Kornephoros

StarDate ·

2025/05/18

Mighty Hercules stands well up in the east and northeast as night falls. His most prominent feature is the Keystone, a lopsided square of stars that represents his body. But the constellation’s brightest star isn’t part of the Keystone. Instead, it represents the entire strongman: Its name, Kornephoros, comes from a Greek word that means “the club bearer” – Hercules himself. Like many of the stars in the galaxy, there’s more to Kornephoros than meets the eye: It

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00:02:19

Corona Borealis

StarDate ·

2025/05/17

A pretty semicircle of stars crowns the sky on spring and summer nights: Corona Borealis, the northern crown. It’s in the east as night falls now, and stands high overhead a few hours later. In a couple of months, it’ll be overhead at nightfall.Most of the semicircle isn’t very bright – you need pretty dark skies to see it. It stands out because of the tight pattern, with a fairly bright star at the center: Alphecca, “the bright one.” Alphecca is really a binary

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00:02:19

Nancy Grace Roman

StarDate ·

2025/05/16

Hubble Space Telescope had many “parents” – people who conceived it, lobbied for it, designed it, and mapped out its science mission. But none was more important than Nancy Grace Roman. She served as NASA’s first chief astronomer, and later as director of one of its field centers. She pushed, prodded, and cajoled for the telescope for decades. And once it was approved, she helped get it running. Roman was born 100 years ago today, in Nashville. In sixth grade, she founded her

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00:02:19

NGC 2281

StarDate ·

2025/05/15

For the most part, the star cluster NGC 2281 has escaped the attention of astronomers. It hasn’t been studied in a lot of depth over the years. So many of its details haven’t really been locked down. So far, astronomers have cataloged more than 200 stars in the cluster. And they’ve ruled out many more stars that happen to line up in the same direction. That makes NGC 2281 a fairly puny cluster. The cluster’s distance is a bit uncertain as well. Measurements have been getting

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00:02:14

MACHOs

StarDate ·

2025/05/14

The “halo” that surrounds the Milky Way Galaxy is dark but heavy. It’s much more massive than the galaxy’s bright disk, but we don’t see much there. So the halo must be filled with dark matter. It produces no detectable energy, but it reveals its presence through its gravitational pull on the matter we can see. The leading idea says dark matter consists of some type of exotic particle. But efforts to find such particles have come up empty. Astronomers have also looked

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00:02:14

Moon and Antares

StarDate ·

2025/05/13

The human eye is amazing. It can focus on objects near and far, provide a three-dimensional look at the world, and see under both brilliant sunlight and the faint glow of the stars. It also sees all the colors of the rainbow – from red and orange to blue and violet.Yet there’s a lot more that the eye can’t see – wavelengths that are beyond its range. That means we’re missing much of what the universe is showing us. Consider Antares, the heart of the scorpion. The star

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00:02:14

Shifting Pole

StarDate ·

2025/05/12

Our planet’s north magnetic pole is on a journey across the top of the world. But it’s slowing down. Over the past five years, it’s put on the brakes – its position has changed much more slowly than over the previous couple of decades. Earth’s magnetic field acts like a giant bar magnet, with north and south poles. The poles aren’t tied to the geographic poles – they wander. The north magnetic pole was discovered in 1831. At the time, it was centered over

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00:02:14

Moon in Balance

StarDate ·

2025/05/11

The full Moon achieves a sort of celestial balance tonight. It’s passing across Libra, the balance scales – a symbol of justice. But the proper names of the constellation’s brightest stars have nothing to do with balance, justice, or anything similar. Instead, the names mean “the claws” – of nearby Scorpius, the scorpion. Originally, the stars did belong to Scorpius. But thousands of years ago, they were severed from the scorpion and placed in a new

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00:02:14

NSF at 75

StarDate ·

2025/05/10

As World War II wound to an end, President Franklin Roosevelt asked his top scientific advisor a question: How could the type of research that helped win the war be applied to peacetime? The advisor suggested a new agency to support basic research at colleges and universities. It took a few years to work out the details. But 75 years ago today, President Harry Truman signed the law establishing that agency: the National Science Foundation. Over the decades, its mission has expanded into many fields,

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00:02:14

Cecilia Payne

StarDate ·

2025/05/09

The star Spica, which is quite close to the Moon tonight, is quite different from the Sun. It consists of two stars, not one. Both stars are many times bigger and heavier than the Sun. And their surfaces are tens of thousands of degrees hotter, so the stars shine blue-white. On the other hand, the Sun and Spica are made of almost exactly the same ingredients: mainly hydrogen and helium, with only a smattering of heavier elements. That composition was figured out by an astronomer who was born 125

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00:02:14

Granulation

StarDate ·

2025/05/08

The surface of the Sun is like a pot of boiling water. Millions of bubbles of hot gas churn across it, constantly rising and falling. But the bubbles are a little bigger than those on your stovetop. The bubbles are known as granules. They form as energy from deep inside the Sun works its way to the surface. That heats the gas in the Sun’s top layer, forming bubbles. As they reach the surface, their gas cools and drops back into the Sun. This non-stop activity creates an easy-to-see pattern of

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