x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

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

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

en-US

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

en-US

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

en-US

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

en-US

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

en-US

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

en-US

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

en-US

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

en-US

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

en-US

0:00

Nereid

StarDate ·

2024/05/01

One of the larger moons of the planet Neptune has been through a lot. It might have started as an asteroid, and was captured by Neptune’s gravity. Or it might have started as a moon, but was hurled into a wild orbit when Neptune grabbed its largest moon. And since then, it’s been battered by impacts with other space rocks. Nereid was discovered 75 years ago today, by Gerard Kuiper. It was only the second moon seen around the giant planet, and it’s the third-largest of Neptune’s 16 known

en-US

00:02:20

Magnetic Flip-Flop

StarDate ·

2024/04/30

Earth’s magnetic field sometimes does a flip. The north magnetic pole becomes the south pole, and vice versa. On average, it happens once every few hundred thousand years. But sometimes, it’s more of a flip flop — the field flips right back over. One flip-flop took place about 42,000 years ago. Known as the Laschamps Excursion, the flip lasted only a few hundred years. And a recent study said the transition could have been a major problem for Earth’s environment. The magnetic field protects us from

en-US

00:02:20

Magnetic Anomalies

StarDate ·

2024/04/29

Earth’s magnetic field is a protective blanket. It keeps charged particles from the Sun and beyond from hitting the surface and much of the atmosphere, where they could cause a lot of problems. But it’s a lumpy blanket. It doesn’t provide the same level of protection for the whole planet. Instead, the magnetic field has peaks and valleys. Today, there’s a deep “valley” over parts of South America and the South Atlantic Ocean. Known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, it allows particles in Earth’s

en-US

00:02:20

Frances Baily

StarDate ·

2024/04/28

Be careful what you say — a single phrase can define a legacy. Consider Frances Baily. He served four terms as president of the Royal Astronomical Society and compiled some of the most important star catalogs in history. But he’s best known for five little words: “like a string of beads.” Baily was born 250 years ago today, in England. As a young man, he traveled to the wilds of North America, then joined the London Stock Exchange. He was especially good at the mathematical side of things, compiling

en-US

00:02:20

Izar

StarDate ·

2024/04/27

Russian astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm von Struve discovered and catalogued thousands of binary stars — pairs of stars that are gravitationally bound to each other. But a system that he first saw in 1829 was so striking that he gave it a special name: Pulcherrima — “the most beautiful.” It honors the contrasting colors of the two stars. One looks pale orange, while the other looks blue-white or even green. The system is also known by an even older name: Izar, “the girdle,” because it represents the

en-US

00:02:20

Sirius Disappears

StarDate ·

2024/04/26

The brightest star in the night sky is getting ready to leave it for a while. Sirius, the Dog Star, is low in the southwest as night falls. Over the next few weeks, it’ll sink deeper into the twilight, then disappear from view. Sirius is almost nine light-years away. And it actually consists of two stars, not one. The one we see is a good bit bigger, brighter, and heavier than the Sun. The other is about the same mass as the Sun, but a whole lot smaller — only as big as Earth. That star is a white

en-US

00:02:20

Moon and Antares

StarDate ·

2024/04/25

Stars are huge — anywhere from about 10 times the diameter of Earth to a hundred thousand times or more. Such a scale is just hard to fathom. One way to envision it is to consider how long it would take you to make one turn around such a giant body. An extreme example is Antares, the bright orange heart of Scorpius. It’s to the lower left of the Moon as they climb into good view tonight, after midnight, and about the same distance to the upper right of the Moon tomorrow night. Antares is a

en-US

00:02:20

Zosma

StarDate ·

2024/04/24

Over the millennia, stars acquire a lot of names. Some make sense, some don’t. And some of them might have gotten mixed up along the way.An example is the fourth-brightest star of Leo, the lion, which is about 58 light-years away. It represents the lion’s hip. A few centuries ago, it was assigned the name “Delta Leonis” — an indication of its ranking within the constellation. But it also has some older names, including Zosma and Duhr. Zosma comes from ancient Greek. It means “the girdle.” But that

en-US

00:02:20

Immanuel Kant

StarDate ·

2024/04/23

Immanuel Kant is best known for his ideas about philosophy, from ethics to the nature of knowledge. But he also played a role in the development of an idea about how planets are born. And while many of the details were off, his basic idea was sound. Kant was born 300 years ago this week, in the German state of Konigsberg. And during his 80 years, he never left it. He enrolled in the University of Konigsberg at age 16. But his father died, and he was forced to leave the university. He became a tutor

en-US

00:02:15

Moon and Spica

StarDate ·

2024/04/22

Few constellations have as many backstories as Virgo, the virgin. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was linked with several goddesses, each with her own story. In one story, she was Dike, the goddess of justice. She lived when the gods known as the Titans ruled the land. Everything was peaceful, it was always spring, and living was easy. But after Zeus and the Olympians defeated the Titans, life got much more complicated. The goddess had to work a lot harder to maintain peace. Eventually, things got so

en-US

00:02:15

Looking Up

StarDate ·

2024/04/21

If you look straight up as the sky gets dark this evening, you won’t see much of anything. The region that’s high overhead is populated by some especially faint stars and constellations. But there’s a ring of brighter stars around it. The point directly overhead is called the zenith. And most of the time, unless you’re lying on a blanket and just watching the stars, you’re not likely to pay it much attention. It’s just too uncomfortable to tilt your head back that much. Instead, most of us look at

en-US

642 results

Similar Podcasts

Classic Radio Science Fiction

solgoodmedia.com

Mission to Mars

Inception Point Ai

The 365 Days of Astronomy

365DaysOfAstronomy.org

Creek Devil

william Jevning

UFO Chronicles Podcast

Nik Hunter