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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

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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00:02:14

Magnetic Zombie

StarDate ·

2025/02/05

An odd “zombie” star has grabbed its companion in a magnetic embrace. It keeps the two stars synchronized, and it pulls gas from the companion.The system is A-M Herculis. It’s almost 300 light-years away, in the constellation Hercules. The main star in the system is a white dwarf — the corpse of a once-normal star. It’s about two-thirds as massive as the Sun, but only about as big as Earth. That means it’s extremely dense, so its gravity is strong. The

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00:02:14

Eta Carinae

StarDate ·

2025/02/04

One of the most amazing star systems in the galaxy is only 7500 light-years away. In the 1800s, it shined brighter than only one other star in the entire night sky. And combined, its two stars are at least five million times brighter than the Sun. Yet no one has ever seen either star directly – they’re encased in a cocoon of their own making.Eta Carinae appears to consist of two supergiants. One of them may be a hundred times the mass of the Sun – one of the heaviest stars yet

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00:02:14

Sandy Skies

StarDate ·

2025/02/03

Clouds made of sand may scud across the skies of a pair of brown dwarfs – “failed stars” that are among the Sun’s closest neighbors. The clouds move in a hurry – they can change the appearance of the brown dwarfs over just a few hours. The system is known as Luhman 16. It’s just six and a half light-years away – about two light-years farther than the closest star system, Alpha Centauri. But it wasn’t discovered until about a decade ago because

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00:02:14

Groundhog Day

StarDate ·

2025/02/02

If you just can’t wait for spring, you might want to use one of the calendar markers of long-ago Europe and the British Isles. In their traditions, early February marked the end of winter and the start of spring. The days were getting longer and warmer, with the promise of even more sunlight to come. Early February falls roughly half way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Such midpoints are known as cross-quarter days. That means they cross between the quarter days – the

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00:02:14

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2025/02/01

Two Greek goddesses huddle close together in the sky this evening: Selene and Aphrodite – the Moon and Venus. They’re in good view well before night falls, shining through the twilight. Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty. She was identified with the brilliant morning and evening star. We know them today by her Roman name, Venus. Selene was one of several Moon goddesses, but the only one considered to be the human form of the Moon itself. Selene’s name has been applied to

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00:02:15

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2025/01/31

All of the Sun’s major planets are a bit flattened – they’re bigger through the equator than through the poles. For Mercury and Venus, the difference is only a few miles. For Earth, it’s about 20 miles. But for Saturn, it’s more than seven thousand miles. Such a big difference is obvious even to the eye alone: The giant planet looks like a squashed beachball. The planets are flattened because they’re spinning. The rotation pushes material outward. Solid bodies

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00:02:15

Messier 37

StarDate ·

2025/01/30

The constellation Auriga is high in the eastern sky as night falls. It’s usually drawn as a pentagon. The brilliant star Capella is at the top left corner, with fainter Elnath – a star that’s shared with Taurus – at the lower right. A trail of three prominent star clusters winds through the pentagon – Messier 36, 37, and 38. M36 and 38 are inside the pentagon. M37 is just below it. All three are easy targets for binoculars. M37 is about 4500 light-years away. And

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00:02:15

Old Ears

StarDate ·

2025/01/29

For decades, the DSS-28 radio antenna in the California desert listened to the faint whisper of spacecraft exploring the solar system. It’s still listening for artificial radio signals today – the faint whisper of other civilizations. It’s controlled by students around the country and around the world.DSS-28 is a radio dish more than a hundred feet in diameter. It was built for the Army, then transferred to NASA. It was decommissioned in the 1980s. But 40 years ago, a kindergarten

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00:02:15

NGC 2273

StarDate ·

2025/01/28

The Big Dipper is low in the northeast at nightfall, ready to climb high across the north during the night. The prominent constellations Gemini and Orion are far to its upper right. But the space between them looks dark and empty. There’s just not much to see – especially from light-polluted cities. In fact, the main feature in the gap is named for its faintness. The constellation Lynx was given its name because you need the sharp eyes of a lynx to see any of its stars. A telescope

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00:02:15

Black Hole Snack

StarDate ·

2025/01/27

Astronomers will keep a close eye on a distant galaxy later this year. They’ll be looking to see if a giant black hole is once again feasting on a star. The system is known as AT2018fyk. It was discovered in 2018, when a galaxy 860 million light-years away flared brightly. The flare-up happened when a star flew too close to a black hole about 50 million times the mass of the Sun. The black hole appeared to rip the star to bits and gobble up the debris. A couple of years later, though, the

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00:02:15

NGC 1502

StarDate ·

2025/01/26

For the casual skywatcher, Camelopardalis, the giraffe, is a dud. Only a few of its stars are visible to the unaided eye, and you need dark skies to see even those. With binoculars, though, you can pick out some nice sights within the giraffe’s borders. One example is Kemble’s Cascade – a string of about 20 stars along the giraffe’s neck. The stars aren’t related – they just happen to line up in the same direction. Near one end of the cascade, though, is a group

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00:02:15

Mars and Pollux

StarDate ·

2025/01/25

There’s a double burst of color in the sky right now. The planet Mars and the star Pollux stand side by side. They’re in the east at nightfall and soar high across the sky later on. Mars is by far the brighter of the two, with Pollux close to its left.Mars and Pollux both shine bright orange. But they achieve that color in different ways. Mars is a planet – a chunk of rock and metal about half the size of Earth. Much of its surface is coated with dust. It’s made mostly of

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00:02:15

Trappist-1

StarDate ·

2025/01/24

Two of the eight planets of the solar system highlight the western evening sky. Venus is the brilliant “evening star.” Saturn is below it. It looks like a fairly bright star, although not nearly as bright as Venus. A bunch more planets lurk in the background. They’re in the star system Trappist-1. It’s in the constellation Aquarius, right next to Saturn’s current location. The star is a red dwarf. It’s only a fraction the size and mass of the Sun. In fact,

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00:02:15

Moon and Antares

StarDate ·

2025/01/23

In Greek mythology, Orion and Scorpius were mortal enemies. So the gods placed them on opposite sides of the sky. When one is rising, the other is dropping from view. The constellations have a lot in common. And so do their best-known stars – Betelgeuse in Orion, and Antares in Scorpius. Both stars are red supergiants. Both are many times more massive than the Sun, and a hundred thousand or more times brighter. And each is destined to explode as a supernova – probably within the next

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00:02:15

Hunter and Hunted

StarDate ·

2025/01/22

In the mythology of the sky, constellations don’t have to be close together to be related. Orion and Scorpius, for example, are on opposite sides of the sky. Yet they share a common basic story, although with some variations on the details. Orion was a great hunter. But in more than one version of the story, he took the “great” part a little too far. In one version, he boasted that he would kill every animal on Earth. But that didn’t please Gaia, a goddess who was the mother

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00:02:15

Orion Arm

StarDate ·

2025/01/21

We can think of our location in the universe along the lines of an address. The street would be planet Earth, the county would be the solar system, and the country would be the Milky Way Galaxy. The state would be the Orion Arm – a ribbon of stars that wraps part of the way around the galaxy.The Milky Way is a disk that’s about a hundred thousand light-years wide. It has a long “bar” of stars in its middle. Spiral arms extend from the ends of the bar and wrap all the way

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00:02:15

Orion’s Belt

StarDate ·

2025/01/20

Individually, the stars of Orion’s Belt aren’t that impressive. We pay attention to them mainly because they’re tightly grouped – a short line that’s easy to pick out. But their appearance is wildly deceiving. The stars are among the most impressive in the entire galaxy. They have to be impressive for us to see them at all, because they’re about 1200 light-years away. Orion’s Belt is low in the east-southeast at nightfall. It extends almost straight up from

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