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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

00:02:20

New Strategies

StarDate ·

2025/12/02

Scientists have been searching for dark matter for decades. They haven’t found it – every experiment they’ve devised has come up empty. But they haven’t given up. Among other ideas, they’re thinking about ways to use moons, planets, and stars as detectors.Dark matter appears to make up about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. We know it’s there because its gravity pulls on the visible stars and galaxies around it. Dark matter may consist of a type of

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00:02:20

Toasty Future

StarDate ·

2025/12/01

Things are heating up for a planet that orbits the brightest star of Aries. The star is expanding to become a giant, so it’s pumping more energy into space. That will make temperatures extremely uncomfortable on the planet. Hamal is at the end of its life. It’s converted the hydrogen in its core to helium. Now, it’s getting ready to fuse the helium to make other elements. That’s made the core hotter. And that’s caused the star’s outer layers to puff up – to

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00:02:14

‘Minor’ Constellations

StarDate ·

2025/11/30

As most parents can tell you, coming up with names isn’t easy. It sometimes takes a while to settle on something that sounds just right. It wasn’t easy for the people who named the constellations, either. Some of the names sound like they just gave up. They picked a region of the sky with few stars, gave it the name of a nearby bright constellation, then added the word “minor.” All three of these minor constellations are in good view at dawn: Ursa Minor, Canis Minor, and Leo

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00:02:14

Martian Equinox

StarDate ·

2025/11/29

The shortest season on the planet Mars begins today – autumn in the northern hemisphere, and spring in the southern hemisphere. It will last for 142 Mars days – almost eight weeks less than the longest season. Mars has seasons for the same reason that Earth does – it’s tilted on its axis. And the tilt is at almost the same angle as Earth’s. But the seasons on Mars are more exaggerated because the planet’s orbit is more lopsided. A planet moves fastest when

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00:02:14

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2025/11/28

The Moon slides by Saturn the next couple of nights. The planet looks like a bright star. It’s to the left of the Moon as night falls this evening, and to the lower right of the Moon tomorrow night. Saturn is best known for its rings. They’re almost wide enough to span the distance from Earth to the Moon. Right now, we’re viewing them almost edge-on, so they look like a thin line across the planet’s disk. Saturn isn’t the only world with rings. The solar system’s

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00:02:14

Pulsar Planets

StarDate ·

2025/11/27

Planets are tough little buggers. They can form and survive in some extreme environments. In fact, the first confirmed planets outside our own solar system orbit the remnant of a dead star – a pulsar. A pulsar is tiny – the size of a small city. But it’s more massive than the Sun. A teaspoon of its matter would weigh as much as a mountain. Yet a pulsar spins rapidly – up to several hundred times per second. It has an extreme magnetic field. The field shoots “jets”

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00:02:14

Pulsars

StarDate ·

2025/11/26

[pulsar audio] This is the rhythm of the stars – the beat of dead stars. It’s the “pulses” of radio waves produced by rapidly spinning stellar corpses. They produce beams of energy that sweep around like the beacon of a lighthouse. Radio telescopes detect the beams when they sweep across Earth. The stars are known as pulsars. They’re some of the most extreme objects in the universe. They’re neutron stars – the dead cores of some of the most massive stars

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00:02:14

Magnetars

StarDate ·

2025/11/25

Getting too close to a black hole is bad news. The black hole’s gravity can pull apart anything that’s falling into it atom by atom. A magnetar can do the same thing. And it’s not just its gravity you have to worry about. Its magnetic field can do the job as well – from hundreds of miles away.A magnetar is a neutron star -the crushed corpse of a once mighty star. It’s heavier than the Sun, but only a little bigger than Washington, D.C. It’s born when a massive

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00:02:14

Neutron Stars

StarDate ·

2025/11/24

When the most massive stars die, they can leave behind two types of corpse. The heaviest ones probably form black holes. But the fate of the others is no less exotic. They form neutron stars – ultra-dense balls that are more massive than the Sun, but no bigger than a small city. A massive star “dies” when its core can no longer produce nuclear reactions. For a star of about eight to 20 or more times the mass of the Sun, the core collapses, while the star’s outer layers

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00:02:14

Speedy Star

StarDate ·

2025/11/23

You can always count on the constellations. Over the course of a human lifetime, their configuration doesn’t change – they don’t appear to move at all. That’s an illusion, though. The stars are all so far away that we don’t see any motion. But they’re all moving in a hurry. And one of the fastest is in view on autumn evenings. Gamma Piscium is the second-brightest member of Pisces, the fishes. The constellation stretches across the east and southeast at nightfall

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00:02:14

Messier 30

StarDate ·

2025/11/22

An interloper from another galaxy scoots low across the south on October evenings. It’s a tight family of stars – hundreds of thousands of them. The stars probably belonged to another galaxy that was consumed by the Milky Way in the distant past.Messier 30 is low in the south at nightfall, in Capricornus. The sea-goat’s brightest stars form a wide triangle. M30 is on the lower left side of the triangle Messier 30 is a globular cluster – a ball of stars about 90 light-years

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00:02:14

Uranus Opposition IV

StarDate ·

2025/11/21

If you’ve ever left a can of soda in the freezer for too long, you can appreciate what happened to the largest moon of the planet Uranus: It cracked. Titania is almost a thousand miles in diameter – less than half the size of our moon. But it orbits Uranus at about the same distance as the Moon does from Earth. And like the Moon, it’s locked in such a way that the same hemisphere always faces its planet. When Titania was born, its interior was warm. But it quickly froze. As it did

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00:02:15

Uranus at Opposition III

StarDate ·

2025/11/20

The planet Uranus has always been an oddball. It lies on its side, so it rolls around the Sun like a giant bowling ball. Its magnetic field is tilted and offset more than any other planet’s. And for the past four decades, it’s seemed that the planet radiated less energy into space than it receives from the Sun. The solar system’s other giant planets all radiate at least twice as much energy as they receive – mainly in the form of heat left over from their formation. But two

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00:02:15

Uranus Opposition II

StarDate ·

2025/11/19

If you suffer from seasonal affective disorder during the dark winter months, then stay away from the poles of Uranus. The giant planet is tilted on its side. So during each 84-year-long orbit around the Sun, the polar regions have 42 years of daylight followed by 42 years of darkness – a looong time to feel sad. Planetary scientists have been watching the slow change of seasons for two decades with Hubble Space Telescope. At visible wavelengths, Uranus looks like an almost-featureless ball

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00:02:15

Uranus at Opposition

StarDate ·

2025/11/18

Uranus is the seventh planet of the solar system, so it’s a long way from both the Sun and Earth. Right now, it’s about 1.7 billion miles away. At that distance, under especially dark skies it’s barely bright enough to see with the eye alone. It’s easy to pick out with binoculars, though. This is an especially good week to look for the planet because it reaches opposition, when it lines up opposite the Sun. It rises around sunset and is in view all night. And it shines

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00:02:15

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2025/11/17

A barely-there crescent Moon teams up with the disappearing “morning star” in tomorrow’s dawn twilight. But there’s not much time to look for them. The Moon will cross between Earth and the Sun in a couple of days. It’ll be lost in the Sun’s glare. It will return to view, in the evening sky, by Friday or Saturday. Venus is getting ready to disappear in the dawn twilight as well. It will cross behind the Sun on January 6th. It’s a slower passage, so the

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00:02:15

Moon and Spica

StarDate ·

2025/11/16

If you ever warp over to another star, it would help to know its distance. Say, for example, you wanted to visit Spica, the brightest star of Virgo, which is quite close to the Moon at dawn tomorrow. The system is worth visiting because it consists of two giant stars. They’re so close together that their shapes are distorted, so they look like eggs.The best measurement we have says that Spica is 250 light-years away. But there’s a margin of error of about `four percent. So you could

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00:02:15

Leonid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/11/15

The patchiest of all meteor showers will be at its best tomorrow night. Unfortunately, this is one of its off years. At best, it might produce a dozen or so “shooting stars” per hour. Over the past two centuries, though, the Leonids have produced some amazing outbursts. The first of these came in 1833. Skywatchers in parts of America reported rates of a hundred thousand meteors per hour – not a shower, but a storm. The nature of meteor showers was unknown at the time, so many saw

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00:02:15

Cartwheel Galaxy

StarDate ·

2025/11/14

Galaxies frequently collide with each other, and the results can be spectacular. The encounters can pull out giant ribbons of stars. They can trigger intense bouts of starbirth. And they can scramble a galaxy’s stars and gas clouds, creating beautiful rings that look like cosmic bulls-eyes. One well-known galaxy that’s experienced a head-on collision is the Cartwheel. It’s about 500 million light-years away, in the constellation Sculptor, which is low in the south on November

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00:02:15

Sculptor

StarDate ·

2025/11/13

Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille had a great imagination. In the 1750s, the French astronomer mapped more than 10,000 stars from the southern tip of Africa. Lacaille used those stars to create 14 new constellations. One of them is Sculptor. Lacaille originally called it the Sculptor’s Studio. It depicted a carved head atop a stool, plus a hammer and chisel and a block of granite. But all of that takes a lot of imagination to see. All of the constellation’s stars are so faint that Sculptor is

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