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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

Moon and Companions

StarDate ·

2024/10/19

The Moon barges through a region that’s packed with bright points of light the next couple of nights. All of them will lose a bit of their luster in the glare of the moonlight, but they’ll still form a beautiful ensemble. They’re all in good view by about 10 or 10:30, forming an arc around the Moon. The pinpoint that’s closest to the Moon is the star Aldebaran. It represents the eye of Taurus, the bull. If you hold out your fist at arm’s length, it will neatly span the

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00:02:20

Apollo Asteroids

StarDate ·

2024/10/18

More than 1.3 million chunks of ice and rock have been discovered in the asteroid belt – a wide zone between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But asteroids don’t always stay there. They can be kicked out of the belt by collisions, or by the gravity of Jupiter. Some of these outcasts come close to Earth’s orbit, so they’re called near-Earth asteroids. Astronomers group these objects based on their orbits. The largest group is the Apollos. They account for more than half of all

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00:02:20

Near-Earth Asteroids

StarDate ·

2024/10/17

The space around our planet feels a lot more crowded these days. Over the past few decades, astronomers have discovered more than 35,000 asteroids whose orbits come close to Earth’s orbit around the Sun. And the total keeps going up – they find a couple of hundred more every month. Asteroids are chunks of rock and ice. Most are tiny, but the largest are hundreds of miles in diameter. Most of them inhabit the asteroid belt – a wide zone between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter –

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00:02:20

Hunter’s Moon

StarDate ·

2024/10/16

The full Moon lights up the sky the next couple of nights. It’s full early tomorrow, when the Moon and Sun line up on opposite sides of Earth. And the Moon is especially close to us tonight – the second-closest passage of the year – so it’s especially bright. Because this is the first full Moon after the Harvest Moon, which we saw in September, it’s known as the Hunter’s Moon. The Hunter’s Moon follows the Harvest Moon because long ago, when the full Moons

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00:02:20

Seeing Double

StarDate ·

2024/10/15

If you have sharp eyes or good binoculars, you can sometimes see double in the night sky – two stars that are quite close together. In some cases, the stars really are close – they can be bound to each other by gravity, forming a binary. In other cases, though, it’s just a coincidence. The stars are unrelated, but they just happen to line up in the same direction. These stars are known as optical doubles. And some of them are beautiful sights – especially when viewed through

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00:02:20

Jumbo Planets

StarDate ·

2024/10/14

Stars aren’t always good neighbors. They can drag away planets from other stars. In some cases, they grab the planets for themselves. In others, they fling the planets away, to wander through space alone. And they might even fling away two or more planets, which then move through space together as “Jumbos” – Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects. Astronomers first reported these odd pairings a year ago. Webb Space Telescope found them in the Trapezium – a cluster of young stars

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00:02:20

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2024/10/13

This has been a big year for exploring the Moon. The highlight came in June, when a Chinese mission landed on the lunar farside – the side we never see from Earth. Chang’e 6 then scooped up some samples and brought them to Earth for study – the first samples ever collected from the farside. A couple of less-ambitious missions touched down earlier in the year. Both landers tipped over, but they managed to transmit some pictures. More lunar missions had been scheduled for later this

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00:02:14

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2024/10/05

The Moon probably was born in a “big whack” – a massive collision between the young Earth and another planet. Scientists are still working out the details of how that worked, but they mostly agree on the overall picture.But it took a long time to reach that conclusion. For much of the 20th century, in fact, scientists debated three other possible scenarios for the Moon’s birth. One said that Earth and Moon were born together – they both coalesced from the disk of gas

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00:02:14

Hera

StarDate ·

2024/10/04

Two years ago, a NASA spacecraft gave a small asteroid a big whack. And two years from now, a European craft will study the aftermath of that impact. It should reveal how the asteroid has changed, and why the impact was so effective. The impact took place in September of 2022. A projectile as big as a van slammed into Dimorphos, the smaller member of a binary asteroid. It’s about 500 feet across, compared to half a mile for the larger member, Didymos. The original mission was a test of a way

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00:02:14

Missing Satellites?

StarDate ·

2024/10/03

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, doesn’t have enough satellites – smaller galaxies in orbit around it. Unless it has too many. That’s the conundrum facing the scientists who study how galaxies are born. So far, astronomers have discovered about 60 galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Most of them are much smaller than the Milky Way. That makes them faint and hard to find. But models of galaxy formation say the Milky Way should have more than 200 satellites. The difference has been

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00:02:14

Dark Matter

StarDate ·

2024/10/02

Scientists have been playing a game of hide-and-seek for decades. They’re looking for most of the mass of the universe, which is hidden from view. So far, they haven’t found it. So they keep widening the search – coming up with new explanations for what the missing mass might be, and how they might find it.Their quarry is dark matter, which appears to account for about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. It doesn’t produce any energy of its own, and it almost never

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00:02:14

Annular Eclipse

StarDate ·

2024/10/01

Sometimes, nature is kind and generous. In April, for example, it produced a total solar eclipse that was seen by tens of millions.At other times, though, nature is more impish. An example of that comes up tomorrow. There’s another solar eclipse. But this time, the Moon will be farthest from Earth for the entire year. So the Sun will encircle the Moon with a wide ring of fire – an annular eclipse. And not many people will see it – almost its entire path is over the Pacific

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00:02:14

Cold Snap

StarDate ·

2024/09/30

This is the time of year when we start thinking about cold snaps – frontal systems that cause sudden drops in temperature, and often bring clouds. A recent study suggests that our entire planet went through a major cold snap a few million years ago. It was caused by a giant cloud – a dense clump of material between the stars. The space between stars contains many clouds of gas and dust. In fact, we’re inside one right now – the Local Interstellar Cloud. But it’s quite

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00:02:14

Fomalhaut

StarDate ·

2024/09/29

Royalty creeps across the southern sky on autumn nights: Fomalhaut, the brightest star of Piscis Austrinus, the southern fish. To the people of ancient Persia, it was one of four “royal” stars, along with Aldebaran, Regulus, and Antares. Each star ruled the sky during a different season. For Fomalhaut, it was the autumn sky. Fomalhaut probably was a pretty easy choice. It’s the only bright star in a large region of the sky. And at this time of year, it’s in view pretty much

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00:02:14

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2024/09/28

The Moon is a thin crescent in the dawn sky tomorrow. The Sun lights up only about one-tenth of the lunar hemisphere that faces our way. That’s the part of the Moon where it’s daylight. It’s nighttime across the rest of the disk. But that doesn’t mean you can’t see that part of the Moon. It forms a ghostly presence, illuminated by earthshine – sunlight reflecting off of Earth. And the earthshine is pretty bright now, because Earth would appear 90 percent

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00:02:14

Dyson Spheres

StarDate ·

2024/09/27

If you’re a super-advanced civilization and you’re running out of energy, there’s a simple solution: Dismantle part of your planetary system to build “megastructures” around your star. Known as Dyson Spheres, they’d gather most of the star’s energy, giving you an almost limitless supply. A recent study has found possible evidence of them. Most or all of the candidate objects are likely to have a natural origin: distant galaxies, or clouds of debris around a

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00:02:14

Shiva and Shakti

StarDate ·

2024/09/26

The Milky Way Galaxy is like a big blender filled with many ingredients. But it hasn’t been blended enough for all the ingredients to completely stir in. So it’s possible to make some of them out – to see some of the raw ingredients that created the galaxy. Astronomers recently reported the discovery of what could be two of the earliest ingredients – ribbons of stars that could be the remnants of two small galaxies. If so, they were stirred into the Milky Way about 12 billion

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00:02:14

Moon and Pollux

StarDate ·

2024/09/25

You can tell whether a train or a police car is moving toward or away from you just by listening. Its horn or siren changes pitch – higher if it’s moving toward you, lower if it’s moving away.The same principle applies to the stars. Their light is shifted to longer or shorter wavelengths. Measuring that shift reveals the star’s motion – its “radial velocity.” An example is Pollux, the brightest star of Gemini. It’s close to the Moon at first light

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00:02:14

Moon and Mars

StarDate ·

2024/09/24

When Mars was young, the planet was much warmer and wetter than it is today, with a fairly thick atmosphere. Most of that atmosphere leaked away into space. And scientists are still trying to understand how that happened.They should learn more from twin spacecraft that are scheduled to launch soon. The mission is called Escapade, while the individual craft are designated Blue and Gold. If they launch on time, they’ll enter orbit around Mars a year from now. The probes will study the weak

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00:02:14

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2024/09/23

Jupiter might have “blinked” for more than a century. A storm in its southern hemisphere might have winked out, with another eventually taking its place – today’s Great Red Spot. Scientists first reported a spot in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere as early as 1632, and definitely by 1665. But there were no records of it from the early 1700s to the early 1800s. So there’s been a debate about whether the spot disappeared, or astronomers simply missed it. A recent study

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