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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 and Planets

StarDate ·

2025/03/01

Our three closest celestial neighbors highlight the early evening sky tonight – the Moon and the planets Venus and Mercury. Venus is the brilliant “evening star.” Fainter Mercury stands well below the Moon. It looks like a bright star, but it’s so low in the sky that it’s easy to miss.The Moon is the closest neighbor. It orbits Earth once every four weeks, at an average distance of less than a quarter of a million miles. Venus and Mercury are our closest planetary

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00:02:15

Valles Marineris

StarDate ·

2025/02/28

The Grand Canyon is impressive – a multi-colored chasm that’s 275 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and more than a mile deep. But compared to the largest canyon system on Mars, it’s like something a toddler dug in a sandbox. Valles Marineris extends a quarter of the way around the planet – almost 2500 miles from end to end. At its widest, it spans 120 miles – so far that you couldn’t see from one rim to the other. And it’s more than four miles deep. Valles

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00:02:15

Martian Stroll

StarDate ·

2025/02/27

A stroll on Mars would be quite different from one here on Earth. It would look different, feel different, and sound different. The surface of Mars features many of the same landforms as Earth – mountains, canyons, sand dunes, and wide-open plains. But much of the surface is coated with orange dust. A lot of it is lofted into the sky by the winds. The dust colors the sky in shades of pink and yellow. The winds also stir up dust devils – rotating columns of dust that resemble tornadoes

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00:02:15

Lafayette Meteorite

StarDate ·

2025/02/26

Vomitoxin is as nasty as the name suggests. It’s produced by fungus that grows in damp conditions on corn, wheat, and other grains. It can cause an upset stomach for anything that eats it – animal or human. But it helped geologists work out the history of a meteorite from Mars, which was born in its own wet conditions. The Lafayette meteorite was discovered more than a century ago. No one kept a record of the date, but it probably was found in 1919. A student at Purdue University in

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00:02:20

Martian Ocean

StarDate ·

2025/02/25

Water covers more than 70 percent of the surface of Earth. It’s the only world in the solar system with liquid water on its surface. But that hasn’t always been the case. Water once filled rivers and lakes on Mars. And it might have filled an ocean that covered a third of the planet. If the ocean existed, it filled a large basin in the northern hemisphere. Today, the elevation of that region is thousands of feet lower than average – a good “bowl” for holding

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00:02:20

Stirring Things Up

StarDate ·

2025/02/24

Most of the little moons of Jupiter and Saturn are oddballs. Their orbits are stretched out and tilted at odd angles. And some of them orbit in the opposite direction from the planets’ major moons. A study last year proposed that Jupiter and Saturn captured those moons thanks to a passing star. Researchers used computers to study the orbits of many objects in the Kuiper Belt – a broad region beyond the realm of the planets. Many of their orbits are odd as well. The work showed that all

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00:02:20

Messier 41

StarDate ·

2025/02/23

A young star cluster trots along with the Dog Star, Sirius – the brightest star in the night sky. They’re in the south-southeast at nightfall, and due south by about 9 p.m. The cluster stands directly below Sirius at that hour. Under dark skies, it’s just visible to the eye alone as a small, hazy patch of light. Messier 41 is about 2300 light-years away. And it’s about 25 light-years across. That volume is packed with hundreds of stars – as many as eight hundred,

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00:02:20

Marine Nightlights

StarDate ·

2025/02/22

When a sea turtle hatches, it heads toward the light. Under natural conditions, that means the ocean. But if the beach is near a bright city, it might head inland, where it can be nabbed by a predator, hit by a car, or die of exhaustion. Baby turtles aren’t the only sea creatures affected by artificial light. Among its many impacts, the light can throw off the reproductive cycles of corals and others, make it harder for fish to hide from predators, and endanger beds of kelp by providing extra

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00:02:20

Dust Bunnies

StarDate ·

2025/02/21

We live on a cosmic dust bunny – a planet built from grains of dust made of elements forged in the stars. A star “fuses” lightweight elements in its core to make heavier ones. The process begins with hydrogen, the lightest and simplest element, followed by helium, the next element. Near the end of its life, a star like the Sun makes carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. When the star dies, it expels some of these elements into space. Stars that are more massive than the Sun make even

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00:02:20

Moon and Antares

StarDate ·

2025/02/20

The supergiant star Antares could use a supergiant dust mop. The star has created clumps of dust that can be more than a billion miles across. The dust can be both a help and a hindrance. It tells us something about the star itself. But it also makes it more difficult to see the “edge” of the star. Antares is in good view early tomorrow, just a whisker away from the Moon. The star is many times heavier than the Sun, hundreds of times wider, and tens of thousands of times brighter. But

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00:02:20

Caelum

StarDate ·

2025/02/15

The boldest and brightest of all constellations wheels across the south on February nights: Orion. It’s marked by the hunter’s bright belt of three stars, surrounded by a box of four bright stars.One of the meekest and faintest constellations also wheels across the south on February nights. Caelum, the chisel, is due south in early evening. It sits directly atop the horizon for those at the middle latitudes of the United States, and a little higher for those farther south. No matter

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00:02:20

Golden Merger

StarDate ·

2025/02/14

This might be Valentine’s Day, but some of the trappings of the day sound like they might be more suitable for Halloween. That’s because most of the gold in the universe – along with silver and platinum – may have been forged in collisions between dead stars. Astronomers watched that process in action in 2017, when two neutron stars rammed together. That triggered a burst of gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime that were “heard” on Earth. A neutron

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00:02:20

Nuke ‘Em

StarDate ·

2025/02/13

To nuke or not to nuke? That is the question: whether ’tis nobler to suffer the impacts of outrageous asteroids or to take arms against them, and by doing so end them. And a recent study says that, if necessary, nuke ’em. When an asteroid a few miles wide hit Earth 66 million years ago, it wiped out the dinosaurs and most of the other life on our planet. Such planet killers are rare, but they could still hit us. So scientists have studied ways to deflect them. With enough warning, we

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00:02:20

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2025/02/12

You don’t have to actually see something to know it’s there. You might feel it, hear it, or smell it. In other words, you use all your senses to suss it out. Astronomers do that all the time. They may not see a star through their telescopes, for example, but they know it’s there because they use all their senses – special instruments that “see” what the eye cannot. An example is Regulus, the brightest star of Leo. What we see as Regulus looks like a single point

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00:02:20

Interstellar Space

StarDate ·

2025/02/11

The weather can be a bit blustery at this time of year, with strong winds lofting dust into the sky. The dust can make the setting Sun look especially orange or red. Astronomers see that same “redness” when they look at the stars beyond the Sun, and for the same reason: clouds of dust. In fact, the space between the stars is far from empty. It’s filled with gas and dust that form the “interstellar medium” – the ISM. This material accounts for about 15 percent of

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00:02:14

Outer Space

StarDate ·

2025/02/10

Outer space is one of those things you know when you see it. The sky is dark and quiet, with not enough air to sustain life. But just where space begins is hard to say – there’s no single definition that’s accepted by one and all. In the last century, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – the forerunner of NASA – said that space begins 50 miles up. At that altitude, the air pressure is only about a hundred-thousandth of the pressure at sea level. NASA and

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00:02:14

Moon and Companions II

StarDate ·

2025/02/09

Things are changing on Mars. The Red Planet is about half way through spring in the northern hemisphere and autumn in the southern hemisphere. The switch triggers a kind of “see-saw” effect. As the north gets warmer, its polar ice cap gets smaller. And as the south gets colder, its ice cap gets bigger. That transition can cause the air pressure to vary by as much as a third across the entire planet. The ice caps are made mainly of frozen water. They’re up to a couple of miles

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00:02:14

Asterisms

StarDate ·

2025/02/08

The Big Bear is more than just the Big Dipper. The dipper outlines the body and tail of Ursa Major, the big bear. But the constellation covers much more territory. Some fainter stars outline the bear’s legs and head. But it’s the stars of the dipper that we most notice – not only because they’re fairly bright, but because they form an easy-to-see pattern.The dipper is an “asterism” – a group of stars that forms a discernible pattern, but that doesn’t

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00:02:14

Anticenter

StarDate ·

2025/02/07

The gibbous Moon passes across a special spot tonight. It lines up opposite the center of the Milky Way Galaxy – the galactic anti-center. In that direction, we’re looking toward the rim of the galaxy’s disk. The rim is about 25,000 light-years away, with intergalactic space beyond. The center of the galaxy is in Sagittarius. When we look in that direction we stare into thick clouds of stars, along with dark clouds of dust – places where more stars are being born. But when we

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00:02:14

Moon and Companions

StarDate ·

2025/02/06

The Moon probably was born when the young Earth was hit by another planet. That blasted a lot of debris into space. Much of it came together to form the Moon. But Earth wasn’t the only world to get smacked around in the early solar system. One of the others might have been Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter. A recent study suggested that a giant asteroid slammed into it, making it wobble for a thousand years. Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system – bigger than the planet

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