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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

Moon, Mars, Spica

StarDate ·

2025/08/26

Mars is dry, cold, and quiet. But that hasn’t always been the case. Billions of years ago it was much busier – and perhaps a comfortable home for life. Mars has had three major geological ages. The oldest was the Noachian. It’s named for a large highlands region in the southern hemisphere. It began about 4.1 billion years ago, and lasted for 400 million years. The solar system was still packed with big “leftovers” from the birth of the planets then. Many of them slammed

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00:02:14

Weather Briefings

StarDate ·

2025/08/25

Every pilot knows to check the weather before takeoff – no one wants to fly into a storm. And in the future, they might want to check the space weather as well. Storms on the Sun can interfere with technology here on Earth – including aviation technology. Solar storms are giant explosions of energy and charged particles. When these outbursts hit Earth, the effects can range from damaged satellites to power blackouts on the ground. Some radio frequencies can be blacked out as

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00:02:14

Record Breaker

StarDate ·

2025/08/24

As Earth was thawing out at the end of the last ice age, it was hit by a powerful blast from the Sun. The storm would have triggered spectacular displays of the northern and southern lights. And it left an imprint in tree rings. Using that imprint, scientists have found that the storm was the most powerful yet recorded. And they even have a time for the event: the first quarter of the year 12,350 BC.Solar storms pelt Earth all the time. Most of the storms are small. But big ones can damage or

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00:02:14

Celestial Sphere

StarDate ·

2025/08/23

If you watch the stars on a dark night, it’s easy to think of the sky as a great dome. But as the night goes on, the dome rotates. New stars rise in the east, while others disappear in the west. So ancient skywatchers thought of the sky not as a dome, but a sphere that completely encircles us – the celestial sphere. To the Greeks, the sphere was real – a perfect crystalline surface, with the stars hanging from it like lanterns. Earth stood still at the middle of the sphere, which

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00:02:14

Ophion

StarDate ·

2025/08/22

Many “open” star clusters arch high overhead on summer nights. They’re lined up along the glowing band of the Milky Way – the outline of our home galaxy. Each cluster is a family of stars – from a few dozen to a thousand or more. But open clusters don’t stay together for long. Their stars eventually spread out, so the cluster disappears. Some families begin to spread out early – before many of their stars are even fully formed. One recently discovered

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00:02:14

Eos

StarDate ·

2025/08/21

Human eyes are perfectly tuned to see sunlight. But that’s a thin slice of the total range of light. As a result, we miss a lot of what’s out there – even objects that are big and close. A recently discovered example is a cloud of gas and dust that’s been named Eos. It spans about 40 times the width of the Moon. But it’s thinly spread, and it produces most of its light in the far-ultraviolet – wavelengths we can’t see. And even if we could see them,

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00:02:20

Moon and Mercury

StarDate ·

2025/08/20

Many centuries ago, people knew of only seven metals. That also was the number of known “planets” – the five true planets that are visible to the naked eye, plus the Sun and Moon. So each metal was associated with a planet – gold with the Sun, silver with the Moon, for example. Another metal with a good match was quicksilver. It’s the only metal that’s liquid at everyday temperatures, so it was associated with the quickest planet: Mercury. And it was even given

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00:02:20

Moon, Venus, and More

StarDate ·

2025/08/19

Early risers are in for a treat tomorrow. Venus, Jupiter, and the twins of Gemini congregate around the Moon. The group climbs into good view a couple of hours before dawn. Venus is close to the lower right of the Moon, Jupiter is farther to the upper right, and Gemini’s twins are to the upper left of the Moon. The brighter twin, Pollux, is especially close to our satellite world. Venus is the “morning star” – the brightest member of the group after the Moon. It shines so

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00:02:20

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2025/08/18

The crescent Moon will slide past three bright planets over the next three mornings, growing thinner as it does so. First up is Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. It looks like a bright star below the Moon at dawn tomorrow. The Moon is in the part of its orbit that carries it between Earth and the Sun. It’ll reach that point on Friday night. As it drops toward the Sun, the Earth-Moon-Sun angle changes. So the Sun lights up less and less of the lunar hemisphere that faces our way

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00:02:20

Moon and Elnath

StarDate ·

2025/08/17

The Moon butts up against the tip of one of the horns of Taurus early tomorrow. They’ll appear to almost touch as they climb into good view, around 2:30 or 3 a.m. They’ll be closest as viewed from the East Coast, especially the northeast. The tip of the horn is represented by Elnath. It’s the second-brightest star in the constellation. It’s outranked only by Aldebaran, the bull’s eye. Based on the calendar alone, Elnath is a youngster – roughly 100 million years

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00:02:20

Changing Planet

StarDate ·

2025/08/16

Planets can really get around. In the early days of our own solar system, for example, the giant outer planets may have moved toward or away from the Sun by hundreds of millions of miles. And many of the planets seen in other star systems probably have spiraled inward from their birthplaces.One example is a planet orbiting the star Gliese 1214. The star is smaller and less massive than the Sun, and just one-third of one percent as bright. The planet is a “mini-Neptune” – bigger

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00:02:20

RS Ophiuchi

StarDate ·

2025/08/15

A star system in the constellation Ophiuchus keeps blowing up. Every 15 years or so, it flares about 1500 times brighter than average. And it could be building up to an even bigger outburst – a final act that would make it shine billions of times brighter. RS Ophiuchi consists of two stars. One of them is a white dwarf – a small, hot stellar corpse. The other is a red giant – a dying star that’s much bigger than the Sun. Gas from the giant flows toward the white dwarf. It

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00:02:20

Ophiuchus Clusters

StarDate ·

2025/08/14

For a few weeks in the spring of 1764, Charles Messier was a star-cluster-discovering machine. He found five globular clusters in Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer. He cataloged them as Messier 9, 10, 12, 14, and 19. Messier wasn’t interested in the clusters – or even in the stars. Instead, he was looking for comets. At the time, finding a comet was a way to fame and fortune. Kings offered prizes to those who found comets. And comets were named for their discoverers – a bit of

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00:02:20

Barnard 68

StarDate ·

2025/08/13

Barnard 68 is one of the darkest objects in our section of the galaxy. It’s a small cloud that absorbs the light of the stars behind it, so it looks like a dark “hole” in the Milky Way. Before long, though, that void may shine with the warmth of newly forming stars. Barnard 68 is a Bok globule – a small, dark sphere of gas and dust. It’s about 500 light-years away, half a light-year wide, and about three times the mass of the Sun. It’s part of a complex of dark

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00:02:20

Ophiuchus

StarDate ·

2025/08/12

The gods of ancient Greece had complicated relationships. As an example, consider Ophiuchus. He’s represented by a constellation that passes across the southern sky on summer evenings. The constellation represented Asclepius, the god of medicine and the son of the god Apollo. In one version of the story, Asclepius killed a snake with his staff. But another snake dropped some herbs on the dead one, bringing it back to life. Asclepius then used those herbs to resurrect the son of King

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00:02:20

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2025/08/11

Earth has something in common with Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. They’re the only two bodies in the solar system with liquids flowing and ponding on the surface. In the case of Earth, that liquid is water. But on frigid Titan, it’s liquid hydrocarbons – methane and ethane. Titan is the second-largest moon in the solar system – a bit bigger than the planet Mercury. Its surface is extremely cold – hundreds of degrees below zero. Its atmosphere is thicker than

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00:02:15

Perseid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/08/10

One of the best-known meteor showers will be at its best the next couple of nights. Unfortunately, the gibbous Moon will be in the sky during the best hours for meteor watching. That will spoil the view of all but the brightest meteors. Perseid meteors are spawned by Comet Swift-Tuttle. The comet orbits the Sun once every 133 years or so. As it plies the interplanetary space lanes, it sheds tiny bits of rock and dust. The grains spread along the comet’s path. Earth flies through this path

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00:02:15

Venus and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2025/08/09

Social media may go wild the next few days – filled with reports of UFOs in the early morning sky. Ignore them. The objects are fully identified. They’re the planets Venus and Jupiter – the brightest objects in the night sky after the Moon. They’re crossing paths, as Jupiter pulls away from the Sun as seen from Earth, and Venus drops toward it. Venus is the brighter of the two. Venus and Jupiter could have a big influence on our own planet – not astrologically, but

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00:02:15

Deneb

StarDate ·

2025/08/08

Based on how bright the stars look to our eyes alone, Deneb ranks among the 20 brightest stars in the night sky. Because the stars are at different distances, though, that ranking is a little misleading. If we could arrange them based on their true brightness, Deneb would outshine them all. In fact, it might be the brightest of all the stars that are easily visible to the unaided eye. Deneb is high in the east-northeast at nightfall, at the lower left corner of the bright Summer Triangle. Deneb is a

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00:02:15

Altair

StarDate ·

2025/08/07

Altair is a close neighbor – just 16.7 light-years away. Only about 50 star systems are closer. And it’s bigger and brighter than the Sun, so it’s easy to study. Even so, not even the largest individual telescopes can see it as more than a bright dot. Yet astronomers have managed to take a fairly detailed picture of it. They’ve done so with a technique known as interferometry. It combines the views from several fairly small telescopes that are linked together. That reveals as

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