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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

Earliest Sunset

StarDate ·

2024/12/03

The days are continuing to get shorter here in the northern hemisphere. That provides a lot of time to get out and enjoy the night sky. But over the next few weeks, one part of that trend will head the other way: The Sun will begin to set a little later each night – even though the shortest day of the year is still weeks away. The shortest day is the winter solstice, December 21st. So between now and then, the total length of time between sunrise and sunset will shrink. Yet the date of

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00:02:14

Jupiter at Opposition

StarDate ·

2024/12/02

Earth is about to catch up to Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet. We’ll pass between Jupiter and the Sun on Saturday. As a result, Jupiter is putting on its best performance of the year. It’s in view shortly after sunset and stays in view all night. Jupiter is brightest for the year as well. Jupiter is the fifth planet out from the Sun – about five times farther from the Sun than Earth is. At that distance, it takes almost 12 years for the planet to complete a single

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00:02:14

Antarctic Feedback

StarDate ·

2024/12/01

Stars can act like they don’t want company. Radiation and “winds” of charged particles – especially from young, heavy stars – can clear away the gas and dust around them. That can prevent the birth of more stars. On the other hand, that process can squeeze the gas and dust, creating new stars. The process is known as feedback. And it’s the subject of a mission that’s set to launch this month from Antarctica – aboard a giant balloon. ASTHROS is

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00:02:14

Cosmic Bruiser

StarDate ·

2024/11/30

Ann Hodges was taking a nap on her sofa when she did something that other people just sing about: She caught a falling star. Or to be more accurate, a falling star caught her. It left a big bruise on her hip and turned her into a media celebrity – 70 years ago today.The “falling star” was an eight-and-a-half-pound meteorite – a cosmic rock that had been orbiting the Sun. It was part of a larger rock that plunged into the atmosphere on November 30th, 1954, creating a streak

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00:02:14

Tachyons

StarDate ·

2024/11/29

Tachyons are a bit, well – tacky. These hypothetical particles would travel faster than light. They’ve never been detected, but scientists keep on studying them. The particles have implications for everything from the age of the universe to time travel. Tachyons were proposed many decades ago. They were named from a Greek word that means “quick” or “swift.” Many studies have dismissed them entirely. One objection is that faster-than-light particles could go back

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00:02:14

Vanishing Bubbles

StarDate ·

2024/11/28

We’re a long way from developing warp drive – a way to travel faster than light. But scientists have an idea of what the end of a warp trip might sound like – a short, high-frequency “chirp” in the form of gravitational waves. The laws of gravity say that warp drive isn’t impossible. A ship could enfold itself in a “bubble” of spacetime. The drive would “squeeze” the spacetime ahead of the ship, and expand the spacetime behind it. As seen

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00:02:14

Interstellar Travelers

StarDate ·

2024/11/27

We can’t travel to other stars yet – and maybe we never will. But other residents of the solar system can tour the galaxy. At the same time, former residents of other star systems can visit our own. In fact, the Sun and its close neighbors might even swap planets. Astronomers discovered a new comet earlier this year. They found that the comet had passed close to the giant planet Saturn a couple of years ago. Saturn’s gravity had given the comet a strong enough kick to escape the

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00:02:14

Moon and Spica

StarDate ·

2024/11/26

The next total eclipse of the Sun is almost two years away. But astronomers will watch many “total eclipses” between now and then. Known as occultations, they occur when one astronomical object passes in front of another, blocking the more distant one from view. The most frequent “blocker” is the Moon. And early tomorrow it’ll block out Spica, the brightest star of Virgo. Spica is just two degrees from the ecliptic, which is the Sun’s path across the sky. The Moon

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00:02:14

Big Families

StarDate ·

2024/11/25

The Alpha Persei cluster is a family of more than 500 stars, spanning almost 150 light-years. All of the stars were born at the same time, from the same giant cloud of gas and dust. Tens of millions of years ago, the family was a lot bigger. Alpha Persei was one of several dozen clusters born in the same nursery. The clusters have all gone their own way. But a recent study supports the idea that they were born together. Astronomers used observations from the Gaia space telescope. It’s

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00:02:14

Cosmic Ladder

StarDate ·

2024/11/24

Before you climb a ladder, you want to make sure all of its rungs are secure. And astronomers try to do the same thing – with the cosmic distance ladder. It’s a series of techniques that reveal the distances to objects that are farther and farther away. For it to work, all the rungs have to be secure. One of the first rungs on the ladder uses a class of stars called Cepheid variables – big stars that are nearing the end of life. They’re unstable, so they pulse in and out. The

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00:02:14

Expanding the Universe

StarDate ·

2024/11/23

A hundred years ago today, the New York Times reported that Edwin Hubble had made a big discovery. He confirmed that many of the spiral objects known as nebulae were really separate galaxies – “island universes” of stars far outside the Milky Way. The story ran on page six, and it misspelled Hubble’s name. But it was the first public announcement of one of the greatest scientific findings of the 20th century. The discovery dramatically expanded the known universe. Instead of

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00:02:14

Whirling Dipper

StarDate ·

2024/11/22

The stars of the Big Dipper dip quite low at nightfall at this time of year. In fact, from south of about Kansas City, one or more of its stars dip below the horizon and out of view. And from south of about Dallas, the entire dipper vanishes. Like all the stars north of the celestial equator, the stars of the dipper circle around the north celestial pole, which is marked by the star Polaris. How high or low the dipper stands depends on your latitude. From the northern half of the United States, the

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00:02:14

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2024/11/21

For the Moon, it’s another night, another bright companion. After passing close to the brightest star of Gemini and the planet Mars over the past couple of nights, tonight it takes aim at Regulus, the heart of the lion. The star climbs into good view directly below the Moon after midnight. The Moon will move toward the star during the night, so they’ll be much closer at dawn. The Moon passes near these bright lights because, just like the Moon, they all stay close to the ecliptic

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00:02:14

Stellar Message

StarDate ·

2024/11/15

The first intentional message to other civilizations was beamed into the galaxy 50 years ago tomorrow. There wasn’t much to it – just 1,679 bits of data. When properly decoded, the message yields a picture – stick-figure outlines of a person and the message’s planet of origin, for example. The image also features the facility that beamed it into space: the giant Arecibo radio telescope, which collapsed a few years ago.The Arecibo message was conceived by Frank Drake. He was

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00:02:14

Uranus Opposition III

StarDate ·

2024/11/14

Half of the planets discovered in other star systems are about the same size and mass as Uranus and Neptune, two of the giants of our own solar system. But we don’t know much about these exoplanets – in part because we don’t know much about Uranus and Neptune themselves. They’re billions of miles away, and only one mission has visited either planet. But scientists hope to learn more around the middle of the century. A panel of scientists recommended a “flagship”

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00:02:14

Uranus Opposition II

StarDate ·

2024/11/13

It’s cold in the outer solar system. The planet Uranus, for example, is 20 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. As a result, its 28 known moons all shiver at hundreds of degrees below zero. Yet several of the planet’s bigger moons might have active volcanoes. Instead of molten rock, they’d belch out molten ice – a slushy brew from buried oceans of liquid water.We don’t know for sure if any of the moons have ice volcanoes, but there’s evidence that they do

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00:02:14

Uranus at Opposition

StarDate ·

2024/11/12

Polar vortex has entered the American lexicon with a fury in recent years. It’s used to describe especially bitter outbreaks of winter weather. The northern hemisphere actually has two polar vortexes. The one that gives us the extreme cold is fairly low in the atmosphere. It’s formed by jet streams that encircle the pole that sometimes plunge southward. The other is much higher in the atmosphere.The higher vortexes are seen on every planet and moon in the solar system with much of an

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00:02:14

Mars Equinox

StarDate ·

2024/11/11

It’s springtime – on Mars, anyway – because today is the spring equinox for the Red Planet’s northern hemisphere. Like the seasons on Earth, the seasons on Mars are the result of the planet’s tilt on its axis. In fact, the two planets are tilted at almost the same angle. So the north pole dips toward the Sun at the start of northern summer, while the south pole dips sunward at the start of northern winter. The equinoxes are half way between those points. But there are

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00:02:14

Twin Cover-Ups

StarDate ·

2024/11/10

The Moon will stage a pair of cover-ups over the next couple of nights. The first happens tonight, when the Moon covers up the planet Saturn. And the second happens just 24 hours later, when it covers the planet Neptune. The cover-ups are known as occultations. They occur because the Moon and planets all stay close to the ecliptic – the Sun’s path across the sky. But they all stray a few degrees to either side of the ecliptic. So most months, the alignment is off by a bit, so the Moon

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00:02:14

Vanquished Pictures

StarDate ·

2024/11/09

The bright Moon washes out the fainter stars tonight. One that shines through is Hamal, the leading light of Aries, the ram. It’s in the east at nightfall. It’s about 65 light-years away. And it’s a giant – bigger, heavier, and brighter than the Sun. The other stars of Aries are tougher to see. And some stars that once formed separate constellations around it are impossible to see. In fact, they were tough to spot even when they were first outlined. To the left of Hamal is

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