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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

Moon and Antares

StarDate ·

2025/06/09

On average, Antares is the fifteenth-brightest star in the night sky. It looks like an orange-red gem at the heart of the scorpion. Tonight, though, it looks a little feeble. It hasn’t gotten any fainter. Instead, it stands especially close to the almost-full Moon. It looks a little washed out in the powerful moonlight. Antares really is one of the more impressive stars in the galaxy. It’s probably 12 to 15 times the Sun’s mass, hundreds of times the Sun’s diameter, and tens

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00:02:19

Divided Rings

StarDate ·

2025/06/08

The rings of Saturn are among the most beautiful features in the solar system. They’re wide enough to span the distance between Earth and the Moon. And they’re made of bits of ice and dust – like tiny “moonlets” orbiting the giant planet. The first person to propose that idea was Giovanni Cassini, who was born 400 years ago today. He worked in several fields, from astrology to engineering. But Cassini’s greatest love was astronomy. He became director of the Paris

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00:02:19

Giovanni Cassini

StarDate ·

2025/06/07

The world has known many great astronomers, but only a few great astronomy dynasties. One of those celebrates an anniversary tomorrow – the birth of its patriarch 400 years ago.Giovanni Cassini was born in a small Italian village just across the border from Nice, France. Cassini the first, as he’s often called, was the first of four generations of Cassini astronomers. And he definitely was the most productive. He’s best known for his discovery of a gap in the rings of Saturn

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00:02:19

Close Visitors

StarDate ·

2025/06/06

There was a lot of talk earlier this year about an asteroid with the highest odds of hitting Earth ever calculated. The chances of an impact by asteroid 2024 YR4 in December of 2032 peaked at about three percent. The asteroid is big enough to cause major damage if it hit. As astronomers tracked it a little longer, though, they realized that’s not going to happen – the asteroid will miss by at least 60,000 miles. Such close calls aren’t rare. Hundreds of asteroids pass within a few

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00:02:19

Ancient Scar

StarDate ·

2025/06/05

The Pilbara region of Western Australia is big, dry, and wide open. And it may contain the oldest cosmic “scar” on Earth: an impact crater gouged three and a half billion years ago. Scientists discovered evidence of the crater during a brief expedition in 2021. They found some rock formations called shatter cones. Some of the cones are as tall as a house. The only known way to make them is in giant collisions with space rocks. Follow-up work last year revealed many more of these

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00:02:19

Vera Rubin Observatory

StarDate ·

2025/06/04

You can’t tell just by looking, but the universe undergoes constant change. Stars explode. Quasars flare up. Asteroids zip past Earth. And soon, astronomers will be able to generate super-high-definition movies of those changes almost every night of the year. That’s because a new telescope dedicated to “time-domain” astronomy is about ready to take its first looks at the heavens. The telescope is the centerpiece of the Vera Rubin Observatory. It’s named for an

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00:02:19

Gemini IV

StarDate ·

2025/06/03

Before astronauts could land and walk on the Moon, NASA had to be sure they could do three things: live in space for days at a time, catch and link up with other spacecraft, and work outside their ship. And it took stabs at two of those goals 60 years ago today, with a mission called Gemini 4. [AUDIO: 3, 2, 1, Ignition … Liftoff …] Astronauts James McDivitt and Ed White were scheduled to spend four days in space. That was longer than the first seven American missions combined. And

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00:02:19

Morning Venus

StarDate ·

2025/06/02

If you step outside at dawn on June third of 2033, you’ll see the planet Venus standing due east – the brilliant “morning star.” But if you don’t want to wait that long to experience that beautiful view, then take a look at dawn tomorrow – Venus will be standing in the same spot in the sky. Not only that, it stands at that spot in the sky every eight years. In fact, anytime you see Venus – whether as the morning star or evening star – you can find it

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00:02:19

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2025/06/01

The Moon has regular dates with the stars. It returns to the same position relative to the stars every 27 days and eight hours. As an example, the Moon cozied up to Regulus, the bright heart of the lion, on May 5th, and it does so again this evening – 27 days, eight hours later. This encounter is especially close as seen from the United States – the Moon and Regulus will appear to almost touch each other. That time span is known as the lunar sidereal period – “sidereal”

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00:02:19

Moon and Mars

StarDate ·

2025/05/31

To the more poetic among us, summer is a time of soft breezes, warm nights, and fireflies: The livin’ is easy, the breeze makes us feel fine, the warm Sun shines kindly upon us.But there’s less poetry in the summers on Mars – especially in the northern hemisphere, where summer began on Thursday. It stays cold, and the only fireflies are occasional meteors blazing through the night. Like the seasons on Earth, those on Mars are caused by the planet’s tilt on its axis. Northern

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00:02:19

Lost Moon

StarDate ·

2025/05/30

The United States plans to send astronauts to the Moon later in this decade, aiming toward a permanent lunar base. But experience shows that plans come and go. In fact, if all the plans for lunar exploration had actually come about, we’d be skittering all across the Moon today. In 1958, for example, the Air Force developed Project LUMAN, a comprehensive plan for human spaceflight. It would culminate with a single astronaut landing on the Moon. Later, the service developed another plan –

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00:02:19

Messier 13

StarDate ·

2025/05/29

Globular clusters are the oldest members of the galaxy. They’re tight balls of hundreds of thousands of stars, most of which were born when the universe was no more than a couple of billion years old. Their most-massive stars have long since died. And most of the stars that remain are cool and faint. So a globular tends to be fairly quiet and calm. But that doesn’t mean that things don’t change. Consider Messier 13. It’s in Hercules, which is high in the east at nightfall

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00:02:19

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2025/05/28

Three of the four big moons of Jupiter appear to have something in common: oceans of liquid water below their crusts. For Europa, the ocean is considered a slam dunk. The case is also strong for Ganymede. But the case for the third moon, Callisto, is the weakest. Callisto is about 3,000 miles in diameter – bigger than our own moon. And it’s more heavily cratered than any other large body in the solar system. That indicates that the surface of Callisto is pretty much dead. But things

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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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