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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

00:02:19

Sedna

StarDate ·

2024/07/11

A dwarf planet far from the Sun may spend most of its time outside the Sun’s influence. In fact, it might have come from interstellar space – from another star. Sedna takes more than 11,000 years to orbit the Sun. It’s passing through the Kuiper Belt – a wide “doughnut” far beyond the orbit of Neptune, the Sun’s most distant major planet. Right now, Sedna’s almost eight billion miles from the Sun – about as close as it ever gets. At its most

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00:02:19

Eris

StarDate ·

2024/07/10

Pluto is the largest known member of the Kuiper Belt – a wide zone beyond the orbit of Neptune, the Sun’s most remote major planet. But Pluto isn’t the most massive member of the belt. That distinction goes to Eris – a fellow dwarf planet that may be a lot like Pluto. Eris was discovered almost 20 years ago. It wasn’t noticed earlier because it’s a long way from the Sun – almost three times Pluto’s distance. At that range, it looks quite faint. And it

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00:02:19

Dwarf Planets

StarDate ·

2024/07/09

The planets of the solar system come in three varieties: the rocky planets, like Earth; the giant planets, like Jupiter; and dwarf planets, like Pluto. The first two groups are well known. Except for Pluto, though, the third group is pretty much anonymous to everyone except scientists who study them.Astronomers created the dwarf-planet category in 2006, after they began finding bodies similar to Pluto in the outer system. A dwarf planet must orbit the Sun and not some other object, and it must be

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00:02:19

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2024/07/08

If astronomers at the star Regulus could pick up radio broadcasts from Earth, right about now they’d be hearing something like this: [1945 audio clips] They’d just now be hearing about the final days of World War II because Regulus is a bit more than 79 light-years away. That means it takes more than 79 years for light – including radio waves – to travel from Earth to Regulus, or from Regulus to Earth. So the light we see from Regulus tonight actually left the star in 1945

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00:02:19

Cygnus Loop

StarDate ·

2024/07/07

About 10,000 years ago, a massive star in Cygnus, the swan, blew itself to bits. For a few days or weeks, it blazed as the brightest object in the night sky other than the Moon – bright enough to see even during the day. Today, its glowing remains are still visible – a colorful bubble that’s more than a hundred light-years across and growing. The bubble is known as the Cygnus Loop. It’s a supernova remnant – the debris from a star that was about 20 times the mass of the

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00:02:19

Little Guys

StarDate ·

2024/07/06

Three tiny constellations are stacked up in the eastern evening sky this month: the arrow, the dolphin, and the little horse. There’s not a single bright star among them. But under moderately dark skies, at least one of them is pretty easy to make out. The arrow is at the top of the stack. It’s the third-smallest of the 88 modern constellations. In ancient times, it represented a weapon used by Hercules, but there were different takes on his target. All of its stars are faint, but under

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00:02:19

Brown Dwarfs

StarDate ·

2024/07/05

The Sun and the planet Jupiter are the heaviest objects in the solar system. But there’s a huge gap in their masses – the Sun is more than a thousand times heavier. There’s a class of objects between those masses. Known as brown dwarfs, they’re much heavier than Jupiter, but no more than seven or eight percent of the Sun’s mass. A brown dwarf probably forms in the same way as a star – from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. The heat of that collapse makes

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00:02:19

Aphelion

StarDate ·

2024/07/04

It may sound strange to hear during the heat of the summer, but Earth is farthest from the Sun for the entire year right now. Our planet is receiving almost seven percent less energy from the Sun than it did when it was closest to the Sun, in January. The average distance to the Sun is 93 million miles. But the distance varies by about one and a half million miles in either direction – a result of the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit. It defines how lopsided the orbit is. And it varies over

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00:02:19

Unsteady Giant

StarDate ·

2024/07/03

Betelgeuse grew dramatically fainter a couple of years ago. The supergiant star blasted out a giant blob of gas, which cooled to form a dust cloud that blocked part of the star from view. And a similar star might recently have gone through the same process. RW Cephei is at least 900 times the diameter of the Sun, making it one of the larger stars in the galaxy. It’s also hundreds of thousands of times brighter than the Sun. In late 2022, though, it dropped to a third of its usual brightness

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00:02:19

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2024/07/02

The four big moons of Jupiter probably are all about four and a half billion years old. But two of them look much younger. That’s because their surfaces are constantly repaved – one by fire, the other by ice.The fire moon is Io. It’s the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with more than 400 volcanoes on its surface. Some of them release gas or lava, while others produce big explosions. That activity covers up any impact craters – the scars of collisions with

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00:02:19

Moon and Planets

StarDate ·

2024/07/01

Mars and Jupiter are siblings. They were born at the same time, from the same cloud of material that encircled the embryonic Sun. Yet there’s absolutely no family resemblance – they could hardly be more different. Both planets appear near the Moon at dawn tomorrow. Mars looks like a bright orange star to the upper right of the Moon. Jupiter is even brighter, and crouches below the Moon, low above the horizon. Mars is small – about half the diameter of Earth. It’s made of rock

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00:02:19

Moon and Mars

StarDate ·

2024/06/30

The moons of Mars aren’t much more than big boulders that look a bit like potatoes. Phobos is about 17 miles long; Deimos, only about nine miles. But they’ve been the subject of a big scientific debate for decades — a debate about their origins. One possibility says they’re asteroids that were captured by Mars long ago. Both bodies look like asteroids. And some of the minerals on one of them are the same as those found in some meteorites that probably came from asteroids. The other

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00:02:19

The Shield

StarDate ·

2024/06/29

A small, faint “shield” of stars scoots across the southern sky on early summer nights. It represents the coat of arms on the shield of John Sobieski, a 17th-century king of Poland and one of the country’s great national heroes. The shield is the constellation Scutum. Johannes Hevelius first drew it around 1687, using a few stars from a fairly empty region of the sky. He originally named it Scutum Sobiescianum — the shield of Sobieski. But in more recent times, the last part of the

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00:02:19

Solar Protection

StarDate ·

2024/06/28

Hurricanes and other big storms can cause widespread damage that can take days or weeks to clean up. So can big space weather storms. They can knock out satellites, disrupt radio transmissions, and cause power blackouts. Especially big storms have the potential to knock out power grids for weeks or months. So scientists and power operators are looking for ways to minimize the damage. Space weather is powered by storms on the Sun. Big explosions send particles and energy racing out into the solar

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00:02:19

Nessie Nebula

StarDate ·

2024/06/27

A dark ribbon of gas and dust may be about to light up like a sequence of camera flashes. That’s because it could begin giving birth to new stars, with each star triggering the birth of more stars. The ribbon is called the Nessie Nebula — named for its resemblance to the Loch Ness monster. It’s the longest ribbon of its type yet seen in the Milky Way — about 300 light-years long, but only three light-years across. It’s chilled to about 20 degrees above absolute zero. And for every

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00:02:19

Arrokoth

StarDate ·

2024/06/26

After the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, in 2015, it still had some gas in the tank and some tread on the tires. Mission scientists wanted to take advantage of that by flying past another object in the outer solar system. But they didn’t know where to send it — there was no roadmap to other destinations.They solved that problem 10 years ago today. Using Hubble Space Telescope, they discovered a new body about four billion miles from the Sun. Eventually, it was named Arrokoth — a

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00:02:19

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2024/06/25

Just like magic, big “islands” appear to come and go on the lakes and seas of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. They first showed up in radar images snapped 10 years ago by the Cassini spacecraft. And planetary scientists have been trying to explain them ever since. Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury. It has a cold, thick atmosphere. Hydrocarbons at the top of the atmosphere create an orange haze — like the smog that blankets many cities. Methane and ethane form clouds. They also

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00:02:19

Morning Planets

StarDate ·

2024/06/24

Almost all of the planetary action is in the morning sky now. Mercury is trying to climb into view in the evening sky, but it’s low and tough to see. It’ll be in slightly better view in a few days. Three planets are in the morning sky. Two of them climb into view a good while before dawn, so there’s plenty of time to look for them. The third is just coming into view after passing behind the Sun. It’s quite bright, though, so it’s pretty easy to pick out. As twilight

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00:02:19

Tarazed

StarDate ·

2024/06/23

Altair is the brightest star in the constellation known as the eagle, and one of the 12 brightest stars in the night sky. But a fainter star that appears just above it as night falls is actually a whole lot brighter. It only looks fainter because it’s a whole lot farther away. Tarazed looks only about one-sixth as bright as Altair. But it’s 35 times farther than Altair. When you take that into account, Tarazed shines a couple of hundred times brighter. Over the past few years,

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00:02:19

Altair

StarDate ·

2024/06/22

A young eagle soars across the sky on summer nights. Right now, it’s low in the east at nightfall, due south in the wee hours of the morning, and high in the southwest at dawn. And it’s easy to spot — it’s the 12th-brightest star in the night sky. Altair represents the breast of the constellation known as the eagle. The name “Altair,” in fact, means “the flying eagle.” According to current understanding, it’s a young eagle — barely more than an eaglet

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