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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

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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00:02:20

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2025/05/07

The Gaia spacecraft took its final look at the stars in January. But its work is far from over. Its observations will be producing new discoveries for decades. Above Earth’s blurring atmosphere, the space telescope kept a sharp eye on the heavens for more than a decade. It studied about two billion objects – mostly stars. It measured their temperature, composition, and motion. And it plotted their positions with amazing precision. That’s allowed astronomers to produce the best 3-D

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00:02:20

Windy Planet

StarDate ·

2025/05/06

The gusty winds of spring make it a good season for flying a kite. But you might not want to try it on the planet Wasp-127 b – it would be hard to hang on. Winds high above the surface blow at an astounding 20,000 miles per hour – a hundred times faster than winds in the strongest category five hurricanes on Earth.The star – Wasp-127 – is a lot like the Sun. But the planet isn’t much like any planet in the solar system. It’s much wider than Jupiter, the largest

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00:02:20

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2025/05/05

Over the millennia, every culture has named the bright stars. The names represented characters from mythology, things from the natural world, human traits and values, and more. Different cultures seldom agreed on what to call an individual star. But one exception seems to be Regulus, the brightest star of Leo. Just about everybody saw the star as a symbol of strength and power. The name “Regulus” means “the little king.” The name made its debut in the early 16th century

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00:02:20

Eta Aquarid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/05/04

No one has seen Comet Halley in decades. Even so, it’s reminding us of its presence about now. That’s because it’s responsible for the Eta Aquarid meteor shower. The shower is predicted to reach its peak tomorrow night, with top rates of about 40 or 50 meteors per hour. A meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through the orbital path of a comet. As a comet nears the Sun, some of the ice at its surface vaporizes in the heat. That releases small bits of rock and dust. Over time,

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00:02:20

Moon, Mars, and Beehive

StarDate ·

2025/05/03

The Moon and Mars are flirting with danger – they’re sneaking up on the Beehive star cluster, in the constellation Cancer. The cluster doesn’t have much of a “sting,” though – it’s about 600 light-years away.The Beehive contains about a thousand stars, which are maybe 700 million years old – fairly young in astronomical terms. That means the Beehive maintains a mixture of stars of different masses. Its heaviest stars have burned out, leaving only

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00:02:20

Timescape

StarDate ·

2025/05/02

The universe can be frustrating. Roughly two-thirds of everything in the universe appears to consist of dark energy. Despite decades of study, though, scientists haven’t been able to explain what dark energy is. Astronomers discovered dark energy by studying a type of supernova – exploding stars. The supernovas brighten and fade in a predictable way. That allows astronomers to measure their distance and their motion away from us. Stars that are farther were moving away faster than

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00:02:20

May Day

StarDate ·

2025/05/01

The modern western calendar tells us that summer arrives in the northern hemisphere this year on June 20th – the summer solstice. It’s the longest day of the year, and the Sun stands farthest north for the year as well. In ages past, many calendars had a less direct link to the solstices and equinoxes. The seasons began not on these dates, but about halfway between them. Such dates are known as “cross-quarter” days. And in the calendars of the ancient British Isles, one of

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00:02:15

Art Deco

StarDate ·

2025/04/30

Telescope domes are designed to keep the telescopes inside safe and on-target. But just because they’re practical doesn’t mean they can’t be beautiful. That’s especially true of some built in the 1930s. They were influenced by the design style that was all the rage – known today as art deco. The event that popularized art deco began 100 years ago this week – the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industries, in Paris. It was a showcase for

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00:02:15

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2025/04/29

Until about 30 years ago, Jupiter was the king of the planets – bigger and heavier than any other known planet. Today, it’s not even in the top 500. It’s still the giant of our own solar system – it’s more massive than all the other planets and moons combined. But hundreds of planets in other star systems outrank it. The total number of confirmed exo-planets is up to about 6,000. They range from chunks of rock about as massive as the Moon to super-planets up to about 80

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00:02:15

Jan Oort

StarDate ·

2025/04/28

Trillions of icy bodies mark the edge of the solar system. They form a shell that extends one or two light-years from the Sun in every direction. A passing star may sometimes give some of them a nudge toward the Sun. When they get here, they become comets – visitors from the icy deep. That distant region is known as the Oort Cloud. It’s named for Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who was born 125 years ago today. He proposed the existence of the cloud in 1950. And today, that’s his

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