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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

Moon and Mars

StarDate ·

2024/06/01

There might be three ways to build a habitat on the Moon or Mars. You could bring along everything you need for the habitat from Earth. You could build it from local materials. Or, according to one NASA research team, you could grow it — using fungi.The team has been working on the technique for years. It uses mycelia — the part of a fungus that grows out of sight. It’s tough, and it can form large networks of interlocking threads. And it can grow quickly. Researchers have come up with

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00:02:14

Cannibal Stars

StarDate ·

2024/05/31

At heart, just about every star is a potential cannibal. Stars that travel through space alone don’t get the chance to act on that instinct. But those with close companions sometimes do act on it. They can pull gas from the companion, eventually leaving the companion with no more than its hot core. A recent study found a handful of such systems. Three of them are in Cygnus, the swan. One example is called 60 Cygni. Its two stars are about as far apart as Mars and the Sun. The main star appears

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00:02:14

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2024/05/30

Planetary scientists can hardly move these days without splashing into a new ocean — or at least a possible one. They’ve discovered that oceans of liquid water may be hidden below the icy crusts of many smaller bodies: several moons of the giant planets, the largest member of the asteroid belt, and even remote little Pluto. One of the more recent “ocean worlds” may be Mimas, a moon of Saturn. It’s less than 250 miles in diameter. Its main feature is a giant impact crater. It’s so big that it

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00:02:14

The Hand

StarDate ·

2024/05/29

Most people keep their hands as far from snakes as possible. But handling a snake was the job for the mythological serpent bearer. He’s represented in the stars as the constellation Ophiuchus, which is in the east and southeast at nightfall. The head of the snake is above Ophiuchus, with its tail below.In one story, the constellation represented a serpent god. In another, it was a god wrestling with a snake. And in still another, it was an ancient healer who learned the secret of life by

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00:02:14

Slimmed-Down Cluster

StarDate ·

2024/05/28

The giant families of stars known as globular clusters are like carnival rides: They do a lot of bobbing up and down. And they may lose a bit of themselves with every gyration. An example is the cluster Messier 12. It’s probably more than 16,000 light-years from Earth. It contains a couple of hundred thousand stars, all packed into a ball about 75 light-years across. That means the stars are much closer together than the stars in our part of the galaxy. Like all globulars, M12 travels at an

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00:02:14

Messier 5

StarDate ·

2024/05/27

The Sun is about four and a half billion years old, so it’s been around awhile. Compared to some of the galaxy’s oldest stars, though, it’s a youngster. Some stars have been around since shortly after the universe was born. In the Milky Way Galaxy, many of those ancient stars reside in globular clusters — giant balls of stars that may have formed as the Milky Way itself was taking shape. An example is Messier 5. It’s in the southeast at nightfall, in the constellation Serpens. It’s a bit too

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00:02:14

Serpent Rising

StarDate ·

2024/05/26

The head of the serpent slithers into the early evening sky this month, with its tail twisting along a bit later. Serpens is the only constellation that’s split apart. The two halves are separated by Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer. The snake’s head rises first. It’s in the east and southeast at nightfall, marked by a serpentine trail of faint stars. The tail, which is below Ophiuchus, climbs into view about an hour later. The brightest of the stars of Serpens is Unukalhai — an Arabic name that

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00:02:14

Sunny Skies

StarDate ·

2024/05/25

Aiello del Friuli is a village in northern Italy, about 75 miles from Venice. It’s home to about 2200 residents and more than a hundred sundials — so many that it’s known as the “village of sundials.” It hosts a sundial festival every year, in late May.The village began earning the nickname in 1994. A resident created a sundial and hung it on the side of his house. It was more than just a pointer and some numbers, though — it was a work of art. So others in the village asked him to make sundials

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00:02:20

Brightest Black Hole

StarDate ·

2024/05/24

Black holes are the darkest objects in the universe — they produce no light at all. Yet they power some of the brightest objects. Known as quasars, these beacons can outshine entire galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars. In fact, the brightest one seen so far emits more light every minute than the Sun will produce in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. A black hole’s gravity is so powerful that nothing can escape from it — not even light. But before anything disappears into the black hole,

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00:02:20

Black-Hole Sun

StarDate ·

2024/05/23

Stars like the Sun aren’t massive enough to become black holes when they die. But there’s a possible exception to that rule: if the star is born with a small black hole inside it. The idea was first proposed by Stephen Hawking. And it’s supported by a recent study. Normally, a star like the Sun just isn’t massive enough to collapse to make a black hole. But the universe might be sprinkled with black holes created in the Big Bang. Such black holes could be just about any mass — from almost

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00:02:20

Man in the Moon

StarDate ·

2024/05/22

Our brains can see things that aren’t there. They connect points and shapes to create “pictures.” So we might see a dragon in some puffs of clouds, “canals” on the surface of Mars, or a scorpion in the stars. One of the most persistent pictures is the “man in the Moon” — a face created from features on the lunar surface. Stories about the man in the Moon — or, in some cases, the woman in the Moon — go back centuries, from cultures around the planet. In China, for example, the face represented

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00:02:20

Balanced Moon

StarDate ·

2024/05/21

The Moon is in a sort of cosmic balance tonight. It’s passing through Libra, the balance scales — the only constellation of the zodiac that doesn’t represent a living thing. But the scales are associated with two living things — Virgo, which represents a goddess, and Scorpius, the scorpion. In various cultures of the Mediterranean, the stars of Libra were attached to one or both of those figures. In ancient Babylon, the stars represented a scale held by Shamash, the Sun god. He was also the

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00:02:20

Sun Rays

StarDate ·

2024/05/20

One of the icons of classic western movies is the sunset. Even in black and white, rays of sunlight radiate into the sky like jets of water erupting from a fountain. They add a bit of grandeur to any sunrise or sunset. They’re known as crepuscular rays, from the Latin word for twilight. Technically, the name applies to rays that appear during morning or evening twilight, while the Sun is below the horizon. In modern usage, though, it applies to rays of sunlight shining from behind clouds or other

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00:02:20

Moon and Spica

StarDate ·

2024/05/19

When astronomers look at Spica, they see double. Or at least their instruments do. The system consists of two stars. But they’re so close together that even the biggest telescopes see them as a single point of light. So it took a technique called spectroscopy to “see” the system as a binary. The technique splits the light from a star into its individual wavelengths. Each chemical element imprints its own “barcode” in that spectrum of light. In the case of Spica, there are two sets of those

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00:02:20

Mizar and Alcor

StarDate ·

2024/05/18

A horse and rider gallop across the north and northwest on May evenings. They’re in the handle of the Big Dipper, which is high in the sky at nightfall and low in the northwest at dawn. They’re the stars Mizar and Alcor. Mizar is the brighter of the two, with fainter Alcor just a whisker away. They’re so close together that the skywatchers of bygone centuries thought of them as a horse and rider. Mizar is a system of four stars, all of which are a little hotter and brighter than the Sun. Alcor

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00:02:20

Black-Hole Binary

StarDate ·

2024/05/17

Millions of black holes inhabit our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Most of them probably roam the galaxy alone, so we never see them. Luckily for science, though, many of them have companion stars. That makes it possible for astronomers to “see” and learn about the black holes. An example is a system called Swift J1357. It was discovered in 2011 by Swift, a space telescope that studies the X-ray sky. The system is thousands of light-years away, and appears to be outside the galaxy’s disk of

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00:02:15

Missing Giant

StarDate ·

2024/05/16

Jupiter is missing. The solar system’s biggest and heaviest planet is nowhere to be seen. And it won’t return to view for a few weeks. Jupiter is passing behind the Sun as seen from Earth, so it’s hidden in the Sun’s brilliant glare. It’ll be closest to the Sun on Saturday afternoon. That point is known as conjunction, and it happens every 12 and a half months. Jupiter is known as a “superior” planet. That means its orbit is outside Earth’s orbit around the Sun. So Jupiter sometimes lines up

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00:02:11

Moon and Mercury

StarDate ·

2024/05/04

Over the centuries, no planet has been as frustrating to study as Mercury. The Sun’s closest planet never moves far from the Sun in our sky. So when astronomers pointed telescopes at Mercury, it was almost always screened by twilight and a thick layer of Earth’s atmosphere. So most of what we know about Mercury has come from spacecraft that visited the planet.You can see the difficulty yourself the next few days. Mercury is quite low in the east not long before sunrise. It’s almost at its

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00:02:11

Moon and Planets

StarDate ·

2024/05/03

The atmosphere of Mars is quite different from Earth’s. It’s colder, thinner, and it’s made mainly of carbon dioxide. In one way, though, the skies of the two planets are similar: both of them have clouds. And for the most part, the clouds themselves are alike as well. Because Mars is so cold, the clouds are made entirely of ice — frozen water or carbon dioxide. There’s not much water in the Martian atmosphere, so the clouds are thin. And they’re usually much higher than even the highest clouds

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00:02:11

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2024/05/02

The solar system is pretty settled. The planets appear to be following orbits that have remained stable for billions of years. But in the early days, things might have been a lot more chaotic. According to one model, in fact, the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn might have moved much closer to the Sun before they moved back out again. The planets probably took shape from a disk of gas and dust around the Sun. Small bits of material stuck together to make bigger bits, all the way up to planets

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