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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

00:02:15

Cor Caroli

StarDate ·

2025/04/27

Dark spots sometimes dot the surface of the Sun – magnetic storms that can last for days or weeks. But the storms on other stars can make those on the Sun look puny. They can be so monstrous that they can change the star’s brightness by quite a bit. An example is one of the stars of Cor Caroli – the Heart of Charles. As seen by the eye alone, the star is the leading light of Canes Venatici, the hunting dogs. It’s to the right of the handle of the Big Dipper as night falls,

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00:02:15

Guardians of the Pole

StarDate ·

2025/04/26

The stars Kochab and Pherkad serve several roles. They’re part of the body of Ursa Minor, the little bear. They form the outer edge of the bowl of the Little Dipper. And they’re “guardians of the pole” – they circle around Polaris, the star that marks the north celestial pole. Both stars are giants – they’ve puffed up at the end of the prime phase of life. Kochab is about 50 times the Sun’s diameter, and 450 times its brightness. Pherkad looks fainter

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00:02:15

Double Destination

StarDate ·

2025/04/25

A Chinese spacecraft that’s scheduled for launch as early as next month has a double destination: a “quasi-moon” of Earth and an asteroid that acts like a comet. The first destination for Tianwen-2 is an asteroid, Kamo’oalewa. It’s a chunk of rock no more than the length of two or three football fields. What makes it intriguing is that it weaves around the Sun in a pattern that makes it look like a satellite of Earth. The asteroid spends half of its time farther from

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00:02:15

Moon and Companions

StarDate ·

2025/04/24

A beautiful triangle decorates the dawn sky tomorrow. Two of its points are easy to see: the crescent Moon and the planet Venus, the “morning star.” The final point is a bit tougher: the planet Saturn, to the upper right of the Moon. It’s just half of one percent as bright as Venus, but its proximity to the brighter bodies will help it stand out. Saturn is about as faint as it ever looks right now. One reason is that it’s just emerging from behind the Sun, so it’s about

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00:02:15

Lyrid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/04/20

The mild nights of spring are good times for skywatching. Only one thing is missing: a great meteor shower. The best showers are clustered in fall and winter, with the Perseids of August sometimes joining the list.Although the season doesn’t offer a great shower, a pretty good one should reach its peak tomorrow night: the Lyrids. Under a dark sky, you might see up to a couple of dozen meteors per hour between midnight and dawn. The number of meteors increases closer to dawn, as your part of

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00:02:15

More Messier 3

StarDate ·

2025/04/19

The Sun is four and a half billion years old – a third of the age of the universe. Compared to the stars in globular clusters, though, it’s a youngster. Those stars were born when the universe was young. An example is Messier 3 – a family of about half a million stars. The cluster is about 11.4 billion years old. That means its stars were born just a couple of billion years after the Big Bang. All of the cluster’s remaining original stars are fainter and less massive than the

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00:02:15

Lucy Encounter

StarDate ·

2025/04/18

The Lucy spacecraft is headed for the Trojan asteroids – big chunks of rock and metal that share an orbit with Jupiter. But it’s checking out some other sights along the way. This weekend, for example, it’ll pass just a few hundred miles from a body in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. Lucy is named for the fossilized remains of a human ancestor. The name was selected because the Trojans are fossil remnants of the early solar system. The mission’s

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00:02:15

Red Nova

StarDate ·

2025/04/17

A tight pair of stars got a lot tighter a few years ago. The stars merged, forming a single star. And it’s still settling into its new configuration. V1309 Scorpii produced a brilliant outburst in 2008. At first, it was classified as a classical nova. Such an eruption occurs when a small dead star pulls gas from a close companion. When enough gas piles up, it causes a nuclear explosion. Over the months after V1309 erupted, though, it became clear that something else had happened. The two stars

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00:02:15

Sharing Stars

StarDate ·

2025/04/16

If you look up the details of W Ursae Majoris, you’ll find that its two stars are about a million miles apart. The way astronomers figure that distance, though, is from the centers of the two stars. When you measure the distance between their surfaces, the stars are a whole lot closer. In fact, they’re touching. That makes them a contact binary – one of thousands discovered so far. Many stars move through the galaxy with one or more companion stars. Their distances from each other

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00:02:15

Moon and Antares

StarDate ·

2025/04/15

The most massive stars are seldom alone. Most of them have one or more companions – stars that are bound to each other by their mutual gravitational pull. Such stars were born together, from the same giant cloud of dust and gas. Dense clumps in the cloud collapsed and split apart, giving birth to heavy stars. One possible example is Antares, the bright star that represents the heart of Scorpius. It stands close to the left of the Moon at dawn tomorrow. The star we see as Antares is a

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00:02:15

Lost Twin?

StarDate ·

2025/04/14

The Sun is an unusual star in several ways. It’s the only star known to support life. It’s in the top 10 percent of the most-massive stars in the galaxy. And it’s in the minority in another way: it moves through the galaxy alone. Like all stars, the Sun probably was born in a cluster – a group of hundreds or thousands of stars. But the Sun’s birth cluster fell apart, with the stars going their own ways. Most stars hang on to one or more of their siblings. Most of them

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00:02:15

Bellatrix

StarDate ·

2025/04/13

Orion is packed with stars that are much bigger, brighter, and heavier than the Sun. But only one of them is likely to draw hisses from Harry Potter fans: Bellatrix. Its name comes from Latin, and means “female warrior.” The name was applied to one of Harry Potter’s nastiest foes – Bellatrix Lestrange. Regardless of its name, the star itself is impressive. It’s almost eight times the mass of the Sun, so it “burns” its nuclear fuel in a hurry. As a result,

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00:02:15

Moon and Spica

StarDate ·

2025/04/12

The full Moon has an especially close companion tonight: Spica, the brightest star of Virgo. From the eastern half of the country, they’ll appear to almost touch each other as night falls. They’ll be a bit farther apart for those in the west, but still close. A dozen American astronauts walked on the Moon, with the final steps coming half a century ago. Their missions are among those commemorated today – the International Day of Human Spaceflight. The day was established by the

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00:02:15

Jantar Mantar

StarDate ·

2025/04/11

Jantar Mantar, in Jaipur, India, is a fantasy land of science and architecture. Built in the 1700s, it houses about 20 astronomical instruments: beautiful arches, domes, and spires designed to plot the motions of the Sun and other objects. The observatory was founded by Maharaja Jai Singh II. It was one of five observatories he built across northern India, in the 1720s and ’30s. All of them were known as Jantar Mantar – a name that means “calculating machine.” The Jaipur site

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00:02:15

Moon and Mars

StarDate ·

2025/04/05

The Mars InSight lander has been silent for two and a half years. Yet the craft is still teaching us about the Red Planet. In particular, it’s revealing more about what killed it: dust and the fickle Martian winds.InSight landed in late 2018 and operated for four years. It listened for marsquakes, and monitored the weather. It even recorded the soft sigh of the winds. The wind lofts the dust that coats much of Mars high into the sky. The dust then settles back to the surface. That

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00:02:15

Moon and Gemini

StarDate ·

2025/04/04

The first-quarter Moon is gliding across the constellation Gemini tonight. Gemini’s twin stars and the planet Mars form a bright arc above and to the upper left of the Moon at nightfall. Mars is the brightest member of the arc. It’s roughly twice as bright as the star Pollux, which is twice as bright as Castor. Pollux is just 34 light-years away. And it hosts a giant planet – one of our closest planetary neighbors. The planet isn’t likely to be inhabited, though – the

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00:02:15

Snapshot

StarDate ·

2025/04/03

The United States has launched a couple of dozen nuclear-powered space missions. But only one used nuclear fission – the process that powers commercial power plants on Earth. Called Snapshot, it was launched 60 years ago today. The Atomic Energy Commission had been experimenting with nuclear power systems for space for years. It came up with a couple of alternatives. One used the decay of radioactive elements to generate heat, which is converted to electricity. That system has powered many

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00:02:15

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2025/04/02

Io, one of the big moons of Jupiter, might be the toughest solid body to map in the entire solar system. That’s because its surface is constantly changing – the result of major volcanic activity. Io is about the same size as our own moon. And it’s the “rope” in a tug-of-war between Jupiter and two of its other big moons. They pull at Io, squeezing and heating its interior. That’s created about 400 major volcanic features – mountains, lava flows, and lakes of

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00:02:15

Moon in Taurus

StarDate ·

2025/04/01

The Moon is taking a journey through time the next couple of nights. It’s crossing the constellation Taurus. It’ll pass close to several of the bull’s most prominent features, plus another visitor – the planet Jupiter. Jupiter looks like a brilliant star well to the upper left of the Moon. The bull’s brightest stars, Aldebaran and Elnath, line up below and above Jupiter. And the Pleiades star cluster is close below the Moon. These objects are at different distances from

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00:02:15

Close Black Hole

StarDate ·

2025/03/31

Black holes are creeping up on us. A space telescope has discovered several black holes in recent years that are much closer than any found before. The closest is just 1,560 light-years away – right in our cosmic back yard. The black hole is a member of a binary system known as Gaia BH1. Gaia is a European space telescope that’s been looking at more than a billion stars. It’s plotting the distances to those stars with amazing accuracy. And that’s how it found BH1. Gaia was

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