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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

Moon and Companions

StarDate ·

2024/09/22

Three bright companions cradle the Moon early tomorrow: the planet Jupiter and the brightest stars of Taurus. The whole group climbs into good view by midnight, and stands high in the sky at dawn. The star Elnath is to the left of the Moon at that hour, with brilliant Jupiter to the lower left of the Moon, and Aldebaran a little farther below the Moon. There’s a big gap in the distances to the four bodies. Yet they’re all among our closest neighbors. On average, the Moon is the closest

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00:02:14

Fall Equinox

StarDate ·

2024/09/21

In many ways, fall has already arrived. The fall term has started for schools. Football season is underway. And September 1st marks the beginning of the fall weather season. Astronomical fall catches up to them tomorrow. Autumn officially arrives at 7:44 a.m. Central Daylight Time – the moment of the fall equinox. The change in seasons occurs as the Sun crosses the equator from north to south. The Sun rises due east and sets due west as seen from the entire planet. And the length of day and

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00:02:20

Neptune III

StarDate ·

2024/09/20

When Voyager 2 flew past Neptune, 35 years ago, its list of discoveries included six moons, a set of rings, a giant storm, and an odd magnetic field. Mission scientists converted some of its observations of the field to sound. And scientists are still trying to understand the magnetic field today. Neptune is the Sun’s most remote major planet. It’s about four times Earth’s diameter. Methane in its upper atmosphere absorbs red light, giving the planet a blue-green color. Neptune is

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00:02:20

Neptune II

StarDate ·

2024/09/19

The giant planets of the outer solar system are like mini-solar systems on their own, because each has a large entourage of moons. Consider Neptune, the solar system’s fourth-largest major planet, which is putting in its best showing of the year. It rises at sunset and remains in the sky all night. It’s also at its brightest for the year. But it’s still so faint that you need a telescope to see it, in the constellation Pisces. Until 1989, astronomers knew of only two moons orbiting

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00:02:20

Neptune at Opposition

StarDate ·

2024/09/18

A hidden giant lurks between the Moon and the bright planet Saturn tonight. Neptune is the fourth-largest planet in the solar system, and it’s putting in its best showing of the year this week. But it’s so far away that you need help to see it.Neptune is about four times the diameter of Earth. But it’s the Sun’s most-remote major planet – 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. As a result, it looks faint. It’s so faint, in fact, that it wasn’t

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00:02:20

Harvest Moon

StarDate ·

2024/09/17

The Moon has a lot going on tonight. For one thing, it’s full. And it’s the best-known full Moon of the year – the Harvest Moon. It’ll stage a minor eclipse that’ll be visible across almost all of the United States. And a couple of giant planets lurk near by – one of them especially close.The Harvest Moon honor goes to the full Moon that’s closest to the fall equinox. The equinox is coming up on Sunday – just five days after the full Moon. The lunar

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00:02:20

Lunar Eclipse

StarDate ·

2024/09/16

On March 2nd of the year 1105, the Moon barely dipped its toe into Earth’s outer shadow, the penumbra. The eclipse was so faint and short that it probably went unnoticed. But it marked the start of a cycle that will last 1300 years and feature 73 eclipses. And the next one takes place tomorrow night. The full Moon – the Harvest Moon – will pass through the penumbra, and barely touch the darker inner shadow, the umbra. Eclipses occur in cycles known as Saros. This eclipse is part of

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00:02:20

Blue Snowball

StarDate ·

2024/09/15

Andromeda is best known for the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. But that’s not the constellation’s only good “deep-sky” object. One of them is inside our own galaxy: a dying star known as the Blue Snowball Nebula. Even though it’s much closer than the Andromeda Galaxy, the Snowball is still a good jaunt from Earth – about 5500 light-years. It’s a bubble of gas and dust expelled by a star at the end of its life. The star’s nuclear reactor – its hot core

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00:02:20

Alpheratz

StarDate ·

2024/09/14

The flying horse has lost his belly button. Astronomers took it away from him a century ago. It’s represented by the star Alpheratz. For centuries, the star was shared by Pegasus the flying horse, and Andromeda the princess. It was his navel, and her head. It was the brightest member of both constellations. But in the 1920s, astronomers drew formal boundaries for all the constellations. So each star was assigned to a single constellation – no more sharing. Alpheratz was just on the

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00:02:20

First Blazar

StarDate ·

2024/09/13

Earth faces a non-stop barrage of particles from a supermassive black hole at the heart of a giant galaxy. Fortunately, it’s almost a billion light-years away – not close enough to cause any problems. BL Lacertae is in Lacerta, the lizard. The constellation is in the east-northeast at nightfall, to the left of the Great Square of Pegasus. It passes high overhead around midnight. Its stars are all so faint that you need fairly dark skies to see any of them. At first, BL Lac appeared to be

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00:02:20

Vanishing Star

StarDate ·

2024/09/12

A massive star in a nearby galaxy may have winked out of existence with little or no pyrotechnics. Instead of blasting itself to bits as a supernova, leaving behind a neutron star or black hole, it skipped the “blasting” stage. Instead, the entire star collapsed to form a black hole. VFTS 243 is a binary system in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to the Milky Way. One member is a star that’s about two dozen times as massive as the Sun, and more than 150,000 times

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00:02:20

Plunging Zone

StarDate ·

2024/09/11

The phrase “taking the plunge” often suggests a combination of excitement and risk: making an investment, getting married, or literally jumping off a cliff into a pool of water. But for matter orbiting a black hole, taking a plunge is fatal – it’s entering a zone where it’s doomed to fall into the black hole, from which it can never escape. A team of astronomers recently published the first solid evidence of this “plunging zone.” The zone is outside the

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00:02:15

Stellar Black Holes

StarDate ·

2024/09/10

When a massive star dies, it probably blasts itself to bits as a supernova. All that’s left is its tiny but heavy core – a neutron star or black hole. But astronomers aren’t quite sure which stars are likely to end up in the two categories.All stars shine by “fusing” elements in their cores to make heavier elements. Stars like the Sun convert hydrogen to helium. But the heaviest stars continue making new elements all the way up to iron. At that point, the core

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00:02:15

Moon and Antares

StarDate ·

2024/09/09

Antares is a big loser. The star has lost enough gas to make one or more stars as massive as the Sun. And it’s destined to lose a lot more. It’ll explode as a supernova, blasting its outer layers into space. That could expel enough material to make 10 Suns or more. Antares is a supergiant – one of the bigger, brighter stars in the entire Milky Way Galaxy. If it took the Sun’s place in our own solar system, it would gobble up the four innermost planets – including

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00:02:15

Beta Pegasi

StarDate ·

2024/09/08

With summer just about ready to give way to fall, one of the signature star patterns of the new season is climbing higher into the evening sky. The Great Square of Pegasus is in the east at nightfall. It’s tilted as it rises, so it looks more like a diamond than a square. The jewel at the top of the diamond is Beta Pegasi. It’s a red giant – an old, bloated star that shines reddish orange. That color isn’t visible to the unaided eye because the star isn’t all that

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00:02:15

Messier 52

StarDate ·

2024/09/07

Charles Messier was a comet hunter. But he kept coming across annoying objects that resembled comets. So he compiled a catalog of them to keep both himself and others from wasting time – more than a hundred in all. And 250 years ago tonight, while studying a comet in Cassiopeia, he discovered object number 52 – a star cluster that’s thousands of light-years from Earth.Astronomers have been studying Messier 52 ever since then. Yet they still don’t know all of its details

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00:02:15

Moon and Spica

StarDate ·

2024/09/06

In most star systems, Spica B would be a monster. It’s about seven times the mass of the Sun, and more than 2,000 times brighter. Its heft puts it in the top one-tenth of one percent of all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. But Spica B has a companion that’s far more impressive. Spica A is more than 10 times the Sun’s mass, and 20 thousand times its brightness. And it has a more impressive fate: It’ll explode as a supernova. On the other hand, Spica B will live tens of

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00:02:15

Icy Ceres

StarDate ·

2024/09/05

The largest object in the asteroid belt isn’t like its neighbors. It contains a lot more frozen water, along with minerals that formed in a wet environment. Its crust may cover a deep layer of ice with pockets of salty liquid water. And some deep craters near its poles hold big slabs of ice that might have formed fairly recently. Ceres is about 600 miles in diameter. It’s classified as a dwarf planet – the only one in the inner solar system. It’s in the middle of the asteroid

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00:02:15

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2024/09/04

The two brightest objects in the night sky barely peek into view in the evening twilight tonight. But you don’t have much time to look for them – Venus and the Moon set by the time it gets dark. There’s building evidence that Venus is an active world. Volcanoes appear to erupt on its surface, and giant blocks of rock may shift position. There’s no doubt that Venus has been active in the past. More than 90 percent of its surface is covered by volcanic rock. In fact, the

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00:02:15

Planet Nine

StarDate ·

2024/09/03

If Planet Nine exists, it’s taunting astronomers. Several studies of the orbits of small bodies far from the Sun hint at the presence of a massive planet in the outer solar system. Yet the possible world has remained hidden. Planet Nine was suggested in 2014, based on the orbits of some big chunks of rock and ice beyond the orbit of Neptune, the Sun’s most-distant major planet. The orbits appear to be influenced by the gravity of a body many times as massive as Earth. The most recent

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