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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

00:02:14

Wobbly Times

StarDate ·

2025/10/27

Big “wobbles” in Earth’s magnetic field more than 40,000 years ago could have made the cultures of the time feel wobbly as well. Early modern humans might have adapted to the wobbly field better than Neanderthals. Earth’s magnetic field protects the surface from high levels of solar radiation. But during a period known as the Laschamp Excursion, which began 42,000 years ago, the field weakened to just 10 percent of its current intensity. And instead of acting like a bar

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00:02:14

Pole Stars

StarDate ·

2025/10/26

As seen from most of the United States, the Big Dipper is plunging toward the northern horizon as night falls, as if it’s about to dip into a pail of water.If you line up the stars at the outer edge of the dipper’s bowl, and follow that line to the upper right, the first moderately bright star you come to is Polaris, the Pole Star or North Star. Earth’s north pole aims toward it, so Polaris forms the hub of the northern sky – all the other stars appear to rotate around it

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00:02:14

Interstellar Waltz

StarDate ·

2025/10/25

The Blue Danube has been performed for some pretty lofty audiences – kings and queens, emperors and empresses, presidents and prime ministers. But a performance earlier this year topped them all: it was aimed at the stars. The waltz was composed by Johann Strauss II, who was born 200 years ago today. His birthday was one of the motivations for the performance. The other was the 50th anniversary of ESA – the European Space Agency. So the broadcast was mostly symbolic – not a real

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00:02:14

Mirach

StarDate ·

2025/10/24

A giant companion to a giant star faces an uncertain fate. The star is dying. As it expires, it will blast the companion, drag it inward, zap it with radiation, then loosen its grip on whatever remains. Mirach is the second-brightest star of Andromeda. It’s passed through the prime phase of life, and now is in the red-giant phase. It’s puffed up to about 85 times the diameter of the Sun, making it shine about 1700 times brighter than the Sun. Two years ago, astronomers discovered that

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00:02:14

Fast Eater

StarDate ·

2025/10/23

The black hole at the heart of a distant quasar has the biggest appetite astronomers have ever seen. It gobbles down the equivalent of one Sun per day – more than any other known black hole. It’s fed by the widest disk of gas and dust yet seen. And it outshines everything else in the known universe – 500 trillion times the Sun’s brightness. The quasar is so far away that we see it as it looked when the universe was a little more than one-tenth of its current age. It was

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00:02:14

First Look

StarDate ·

2025/10/22

We got our first picture from the surface of another planet 50 years ago today, when the Soviet Union’s Venera 9 landed on Venus. It transmitted data from the surface for 53 minutes, including a wide panorama. Venus is completely covered by thick clouds, so we can’t see its surface from Earth, or even from orbit around Venus – orbiters use radar to peer through the clouds. Venus also has a hot, dense atmosphere, so landing there is tough. Venera 9 parachuted through the clouds,

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00:02:15

Pulsating Stars

StarDate ·

2025/10/21

A star in the constellation Cetus brightens and fades dramatically every 11 months. At its brightest, it’s fairly easy to see. At its faintest, it’s visible only through a telescope. Because of that change, a 17th-century astronomer called the star Mira – from the Latin word for “wonderful.” The star changes because it pulses in and out like a beating heart. Mira’s in the final stages of its red-giant phase of life. Its core is no longer producing nuclear

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00:02:15

Eclipsing Binaries

StarDate ·

2025/10/20

Algol does something amazing. Every 2.9 days, the star fades to just one-third of its usual brightness. In centuries past, the stars were thought to be unchanging. A star that changed so blatantly was a bit scary. So it was given a name to match: “Algol” comes from an Arabic phrase that means “head of the demon.” But the star’s odd behavior isn’t scary it all – Algol fades as the result of eclipses. The system consists of three stars. Two of them form a

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00:02:15

Orionid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/10/19

The Orionid meteor shower should be at its most active the next few nights. And there’s no Moon to get in the way, so it should be a pretty good show. The shower is named for Orion because its meteors appear to “rain” into the sky from Orion the hunter. The constellation climbs into good view after midnight, so that’s when the shower is at its best – between midnight and dawn. You don’t have to look at Orion to see the meteors, though – they can blaze across

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00:02:15

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2025/10/18

Venus doesn’t have any moons. But it does share its orbit around the Sun. Astronomers have discovered 20 asteroids known as “co-orbitals,” but there could be many more. These big space rocks follow roughly the same path as Venus. But they won’t stay in that lane forever. And when they leave it, they could threaten Earth. These objects are nudged along by the gravity of Venus and the Sun. They generally stay well ahead of or behind Venus. Only one follows exactly the same

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00:02:15

California Nebula

StarDate ·

2025/10/17

California is the land of the stars. It’s also in the stars as the California Nebula – a cloud of gas and dust that looks like the outline of the state. It’s more than a thousand light-years away, in Perseus. The nebula belongs to a giant star-forming complex – the Perseus O-B-2 association. The region has given birth to many class O and B stars – the biggest and brightest of all stars. The California Nebula probably is energized by one of those stars, known as Xi

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00:02:20

Lucky Stars

StarDate ·

2025/10/11

If you’d like to thank your lucky stars for a bit of good fortune, we have two stars for you to look at. They’re the brightest stars of Aquarius. Both of them have names that mean “lucky.”The brighter of the two is Sadalsuud. The name comes from an Arabic phrase that means something along the lines of “luckiest of the lucky.” When the name was bestowed, the star first appeared in the dawn sky around the spring equinox. The days were getting longer and warmer, and

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00:02:20

Moon and Aldebaran

StarDate ·

2025/10/10

Stars like the Sun go through several distinct phases of life, from embryo to corpse. Consider Aldebaran, the bright eye of Taurus, which accompanies the Moon tonight. It’s more than six billion years old – older than the Sun. And it’s well into “old age.” Aldebaran was born when a cloud of gas and dust collapsed. For millions of years, it shined as a result of the heat generated by that collapse – its “embryonic” phase. Eventually, its core got hot

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00:02:20

Moon and Pleiades

StarDate ·

2025/10/09

The Moon barrels through the Pleiades star cluster this evening. It’ll pass directly in front of the cluster, briefly blocking most of its stars from view. The Pleiades is the most famous of all star clusters. It’s also known as the Seven Sisters, but under dark skies – with no Moon in the way – you might actually see nine stars or more. But that’s only the beginning. The cluster contains more than a thousand stars. In fact, it was the first cluster to be recognized as

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00:02:20

T Tauri

StarDate ·

2025/10/08

An embryonic star may be about to vanish – perhaps for a century. It’s not going anywhere. Instead, it’ll be cloaked by a dense cloud that encircles two companions. T Tauri is the prototype for a class of proto-stars. The gravity of such a star is causing it to collapse, making it hot and bright. But its core isn’t hot enough to ignite the fires of nuclear fusion, so it’s not yet a true star. The star we see as T Tauri is about twice as massive as the Sun. It’s

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00:02:20

Charging In

StarDate ·

2025/10/07

The bull is charging into the evening sky. Taurus is in full view by about 11 o’clock, low in the east. He stands high in the south before dawn. He’s rising earlier each night, and will be in view all night long by about Thanksgiving. All the stars rise four minutes earlier each night – a result of Earth’s motion around the Sun. Earth makes one full turn on its axis against the background of distant stars every 23 hours and 56 minutes. So, if you looked at the sky every 23

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00:02:20

Harvest Moon

StarDate ·

2025/10/06

The Moon is full tonight, and it’s especially bright as well. And to top things off, it’s the most famous full Moon of them all – the Harvest Moon. Harvest Moon is the full Moon closest to the fall equinox, so most years it falls in September. But once every five years or so it skips into October. This year, September’s full Moon came 15 days and 10 minutes before the equinox, which took place on the 22nd. This month’s full Moon comes 14 days, 9 hours, 29 minutes after

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00:02:20

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2025/10/05

It’s pretty easy to measure the length of a day on Mars or most other solid bodies. Just pick a feature on the surface and see how long it takes to spin back into view. It’s not so easy for planets that don’t have a solid surface. We can track bands of clouds, but different bands can move at different speeds. That’s been an especially tough problem for Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system. Scientists have been trying to pin down its rotation rate – the

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00:02:20

Morning Brackets

StarDate ·

2025/10/04

Saturn and Venus bracket the pre-dawn sky now. As Saturn drops from view in the west, Venus nudges into view in the east. Saturn looks like a bright star, while Venus is the brilliant morning star. The planets are both sliding eastward against the background of distant stars. Saturn lined up opposite the Sun a couple of weeks ago. For a few months around that point, the planet looks like it’s “backing up” against the background of stars – a result of the relative motions of

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00:02:20

Deep Search

StarDate ·

2025/10/03

Scientists don’t know what dark matter is. But they have some ideas of what it isn’t. And they took a big step in ruling out some possibilities with the release of a study last year. Dark matter produces no energy – the reason it’s described as “dark.” But we know it’s there because its gravity pulls on the visible matter around it. In fact, it appears to make up about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. The leading idea says dark matter consists

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