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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

Stellar Hearth

StarDate ·

2025/01/19

To the ancient Maya, the Orion Nebula was the fire of creation. The bright stars around it were the hearthstones that held the fire. And they were on the right track. The nebula is a giant stellar nursery. It’s given birth to thousands of stars, with more still taking shape. And the “hearthstone” stars are related to the fire. The whole group is part of a massive complex of young stars, plus lingering clouds of gas and dust. It’s known as the Orion O-B-1 association. The

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00:02:15

Arneb

StarDate ·

2025/01/18

The Sun is a middle-aged star. It’s been shining for about four and a half billion years, and it’s expected to keep on shining for billions of years more.But some stars that are only a fraction of the Sun’s age are well into the final stages of life. These stars are much more massive than the Sun, and it’s a star’s mass that determines its timeline. An example is Arneb, the leading light of Lepus, the rabbit. The constellation stands below the feet of Orion the hunter

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00:02:15

Venus and Saturn

StarDate ·

2025/01/17

Venus and Saturn look a bit jaundiced. But they achieve their yellowish color in different ways. Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It’s about the same size as Earth. It’s topped by a perpetual blanket of clouds. The clouds are made of sulfuric acid, so they give the planet a bright yellow-white color. Saturn is covered by clouds as well, but they consist of water vapor, ammonia, and hydrocarbons. The clouds are stretched into globe-encircling bands by Saturn’s high-speed

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00:02:15

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2025/01/16

Astronomy is just like any other human endeavor. It can stir up controversy, hurt feelings – and feuds. One of its most famous feuds involved some of the giants of science – Isaac Newton, who formulated laws of gravity and motion, and Edmond Halley, the namesake of Comet Halley. Newton and Halley were colleagues of John Flamsteed, Britain’s first astronomer royal and the founder of the Royal Observatory. Flamsteed had compiled a catalog of more than 2,000 stars. It included precise

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00:02:20

Mars Opposition III

StarDate ·

2025/01/15

The moons of Mars are puny little things – small, oddly shaped chunks of rock that orbit close to the planet. But Phobos and Deimos could be indirect descendants of a much larger moon – one that was up to a third as massive as Earth’s moon. And a recent study says that early moon could explain something about Mars itself. Mars is oddly shaped. It has two big “bulges” that line up roughly opposite each other on the globe. One of them is the highest landscape on the

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00:02:20

Mars Opposition II

StarDate ·

2025/01/14

As far as we can tell, the surface of Mars is lifeless. But there are hints that microscopic organisms might live below the surface. One of the strongest hints is occasional puffs of methane gas detected by the Curiosity rover, which has been scooting around Mars for more than a decade.On Earth, methane is mainly produced by life. It can come from volcanoes and from chemical reactions in the rocks. But there are no active volcanoes on Mars, and chemical reactions seem unlikely to produce big puffs

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00:02:20

Moon and Mars

StarDate ·

2025/01/13

Mars is at its closest and brightest this week. And it’s in view all night – almost. Tonight, it’ll vanish for a while for skywatchers from western Africa to the American west coast – hidden behind the Moon. The disappearing act is an occultation. The word comes from Latin, and means “to hide” or “to cover up.” And the occultation is the result of the geometry of the solar system. Mars and the other planets all stay close to the Sun’s path across

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00:02:20

Mars at Opposition

StarDate ·

2025/01/12

Mars is especially fetching this month. That’s because it lines up opposite the Sun on Thursday. It rises around sunset and remains in view all night. It’s also brightest for the year – it looks like a brilliant orange star. It shines as intensely as Sirius, the brightest true star in the night sky. Mars looks bright because it passes closest to Earth for the entire year today. It’s about 60 million miles away. That’s not an especially close opposition; at its best,

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00:02:20

River’s End

StarDate ·

2025/01/11

Because the Sun is a spinning ball of gas, it’s wider through its equator than through the poles. The difference is so small that you really can’t see it. But for the brightest star of Eridanus, the river, it’s a different story. Achernar is a binary – two stars held together by their gravity. They orbit each other once every seven years. The system’s main star, Achernar A, is much bigger and heavier than the Sun, and thousands of times brighter. And it spins like crazy

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00:02:20

Moon and Companions

StarDate ·

2025/01/10

The Moon anchors a beautiful lineup tonight. As night falls, the planet Jupiter and the star Aldebaran trickle off to the lower right of the Moon. The trio stays close as it arcs across the sky during the night.Aldebaran is the brightest star of Taurus. It represents the bull’s eye. When the glary Moon isn’t close by, the star shows a definite orange tint – an indication that its surface is thousands of degrees cooler than the surface of the Sun. Aldebaran is part of a V-shaped

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00:02:20

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2025/01/09

Jupiter is all about big numbers. One example is the length of its year: more than 10,000 Jovian days. Jupiter is more than five times farther from the Sun than Earth is. At that distance, it takes the solar system’s largest planet almost 12 Earth years to make a single orbit around the Sun. That’s the length of a single year on the giant planet. But Jupiter spins like crazy, so a day lasts only about 10 hours. That means more than 10,000 sunrises and sunsets in every Jovian year. The

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00:02:20

Mercury Flyby

StarDate ·

2025/01/08

Bepi-Colombo is scheduled to be only the second mission to orbit Mercury, the Sun’s innermost planet. But getting there hasn’t been easy. The craft has made eight close passes by Earth, Venus, and Mercury to slow itself against the Sun’s powerful gravity. And it’ll make its final close approach to Mercury tomorrow.Bepi-Colombo actually consists of two probes that are linked up. When they enter orbit around Mercury they’ll split apart. One of them will make a detailed

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00:02:20

More Rigel

StarDate ·

2025/01/07

Rigel is one of the more impressive stars in our part of the galaxy: It’s the seventh-brightest star in the night sky, it’s many times the size and mass of the Sun, and it’s fated to explode as a supernova.But a closer look shows that Rigel is even more impressive than it seems. It appears to be a system of at least four stars – the one that’s visible to the eye alone, plus three others that are grouped fairly close together. The companions include a binary – two

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00:02:20

Rigel

StarDate ·

2025/01/06

The bright orange star that marks the shoulder of Orion gets most of the attention, but the hunter’s blue-white heel is even brighter. And it faces a similar fate: Both stars will blast themselves to bits. The shoulder is represented by Betelgeuse. The supergiant star has been unpredictable in recent years. It’s grown dramatically fainter and brighter – the result of “puffs” of gas from its surface that are many times the size of the Sun. The heel is marked by Rigel

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00:02:20

Double Trouble

StarDate ·

2025/01/05

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs might have had a little help. Geologists have confirmed that a second asteroid hit Earth at about the same time. It wasn’t nearly as big as the dinosaur killer, but it would’ve had deadly effects across a large area. An asteroid as big as a mountain slammed into Earth 66 million years ago. A fireball, shockwaves, and tsunamis destroyed everything within hundreds of miles. The impact also blasted huge amounts of water and rock into the atmosphere

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00:02:20

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2025/01/04

Saturn leads the Moon down the western sky this evening. The planet looks like a bright star just below the Moon. Venus, the much brighter “evening star,” is to their lower right at nightfall. Saturn is best known for its beautiful rings. But it’s not the only “ringed” planet in the solar system. The three other giants also have rings. There’s also evidence that Mars had rings in the distant past. And Earth might have had rings, too – more than 450 million

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00:02:20

Earth at Perihelion

StarDate ·

2025/01/03

For those who are caught in the throes of winter, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true – Earth is snuggling closest to the Sun for the entire year this week. We’ll be at our absolute closest tomorrow, at about 91 and a half million miles – about a million and a half miles closer than average. That change in distance doesn’t make much difference in the temperature – Earth’s oceans and atmosphere do a good job of distributing heat around the

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00:02:20

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2025/01/02

Few sights in the night sky are more eye-catching than a conjunction between the Moon and Venus. And we get to enjoy such a meeting both tonight and tomorrow night. Venus is the brilliant “evening star.” It’s well above the Moon this evening, but much closer to it tomorrow night. We’ve explored both worlds in detail. But more missions are being planned – especially to the Moon. Some day, swarms of people and machines might be on the surface or in orbit. Scientists are

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00:02:20

Quadrantid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/01/01

Two hundred years ago tonight, an Italian astronomer saw something new. He described it this way: “The atmosphere was traversed by a multitude of the luminous bodies known by the name of falling stars.” In other words, he saw a brand-new meteor shower.The shower is still with us. And it’ll be at its best tomorrow night. It’s known as the Quadrantid shower. Its meteors appear to rain into the atmosphere from the extinct constellation Quadrans Muralis. It represented an

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00:02:15

Pleiades III

StarDate ·

2024/12/31

For many, this time of year is a time for reflection – to think about the year that was, and ponder the year to come. So it might be a good time to ponder a reflection in the stars – a giant cloud of gas and dust that’s reflecting the light of some hot young stars.The stars belong to the Pleiades – a cluster of perhaps a couple of thousand stars. The cluster probably is about a hundred million years old – quite young as stars go. The cluster began as a giant cloud of

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