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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

00:02:15

Moon and Mercury

StarDate ·

2025/12/16

The planet Mercury is shrinking. It’s contracted by several miles since its birth. And it’s continuing to get smaller even now.Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun. It’s also the smallest major planet in the solar system – a little more than 3,000 miles in diameter – about the width of the 48 states. It has a core of iron and nickel, surrounded by dense layers of rock. And it’s topped by a thin crust. The surface of the planet is marked by lots of impressive

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00:02:15

Confusing Planet

StarDate ·

2025/12/15

Here’s what we know for sure about the planet K2-18b. It’s about 125 light-years away. It’s bigger and heavier than Earth. It orbits a cool, faint star once every 33 days. It receives about the same amount of energy from its star as Earth gets from the Sun. And it has an atmosphere. After that, things get muddled. Astronomers aren’t sure about the structure of the planet or the make-up of its atmosphere. And ideas about whether it might be habitable are all over the place

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00:02:15

Diphda

StarDate ·

2025/12/14

For stars that are similar to the Sun, the end comes in stages. And each stage is triggered by changes in the star’s core. One star that’s going through those changes is Diphda, the brightest star of Cetus, the sea monster. The star is several hundred million years old – billions of years younger than the Sun. For most of its life, it “fused” hydrogen atoms in its core to make helium. When the hydrogen was gone, it began fusing hydrogen in a shell around the core. That

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00:02:15

More Geminid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/12/13

People collect all kinds of things, from baseball cards to Persian rugs. Over the past 40 years, some NASA aircraft have collected dust – grains of dust from beyond Earth. Many of the collection efforts have taken place during meteor showers. That’s included the Geminid shower, which is at its peak tonight.A meteor shower takes place when Earth flies through a trail of particles that were shed by a comet or asteroid. Many of the particles burn up in the upper atmosphere, creating the

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00:02:15

Geminid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/12/12

A couple of thousand years ago, a large asteroid or comet might have been blasted apart. And we’re still seeing the fireworks from its destruction – as the Geminid meteor shower, which will reach its peak tomorrow night. Most meteor showers flare to life when Earth passes through the orbital path of a comet. The comet sheds bits of rock and dirt, which spread out along its orbit. As Earth flies through this trail of debris, the solid grains ram into the atmosphere, forming the glowing

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00:02:15

Stabilizing Influence

StarDate ·

2025/12/11

The Sun isn’t easy to influence. It’s more than a thousand times the mass of Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, and more than 330,000 times the mass of Earth. Even so, a recent study says the planets might influence our star’s magnetic cycle – perhaps making conditions more comfortable for life. The Sun goes through many cycles of magnetic activity. The best known lasts an average of 11 years. At the cycle’s peak, the Sun is much more active than average

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00:02:20

High Blood Pressure

StarDate ·

2025/12/10

Storms on the Sun can cause all kinds of problems. They can knock out satellites and black out power grids. They can interfere with GPS and disrupt some radio broadcasts. They can even have an impact on human health.Solar storms happen when the Sun’s magnetic field gets tangled up. Lines of magnetic force can snap, then reconnect. That produces outbursts of radiation and charged particles. When the particles hit Earth, they’re funneled toward the surface by our planet’s own

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00:02:20

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2025/12/09

The Moon and the heart of the lion just miss each other tonight – at least as seen from the United States. As they climb into good view, after midnight, the Moon and the star Regulus will be separated by just a skosh. The farther north and east your location, the closer together they’ll appear. From some spots, they’ll be almost touching.And from much of Canada across to northern Norway they will touch – the Moon will occult the star. It’ll pass directly in front of

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00:02:20

Einstein Rings

StarDate ·

2025/12/08

A couple of years ago, a space telescope discovered something odd about NGC 6505. The galaxy is encircled by a ring. It isn’t part of the galaxy itself. Instead, it’s an image of a background galaxy – one that’s billions of light-years farther. Einstein Rings are named for Albert Einstein because they were predicted by his theory of gravity. The gravity of a foreground object acts as a lens – it bends and magnifies the light of a background object. On small scales,

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00:02:20

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2025/12/07

The Moon is a “dead” world. It trembles with a few small moonquakes, and there may be occasional “burps” of gas. But for the most part, not much happens inside it. That’s definitely not the case for one of the moons of the giant planet Jupiter. Io is the most volcanically active world in the solar system. It’s covered by hundreds of volcanoes and pools of hot lava. Some of the volcanoes are larger than anything on Earth, and the lava is much hotter. The volcanoes

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00:02:20

Moon, Jupiter, and Gemini

StarDate ·

2025/12/06

The Moon forms a beautiful grouping with the planet Jupiter and the twins of Gemini tonight. Jupiter looks like a brilliant star. It’s below the Moon as they climb into view, by about 8:30. Castor, the fainter of Gemini’s twins, is to the left of the Moon. And Pollux, the brighter twin, is to the lower left. The grouping is even tighter at first light tomorrow.The Moon circles through Gemini roughly once a month – the time it takes to complete one full turn through the background

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00:02:20

Radio Interference

StarDate ·

2025/12/05

For radio astronomers, there’s some good news and some bad news. On the good side, a pilot project with SpaceX has devised a way to reduce the radio interference produced by satellites. On the bad side, the satellites can produce accidental interference. Radio telescopes tell us things about the universe that we can’t get any other way. But the telescopes are extremely sensitive. Transmissions from an orbiting satellite are like bright headlights – they overpower the subtle signals

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00:02:20

Moon and Elnath

StarDate ·

2025/12/04

Most of the stars are so small and far away that they’re nothing more than pinpoints even in the largest telescopes. That makes it impossible to measure the size of a star. But astronomers can measure the sizes of some stars – not with a giant telescope, but with a collection of smaller ones. The technique is called interferometry. It links up several telescopes. The combo provides an especially sharp view of the heavens. If the telescopes are, say, 300 feet apart, then the combined view

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00:02:20

SOHO

StarDate ·

2025/12/03

[3, 2, 1, ignition, and liftoff of SOHO and the Atlas vehicle on an international mission of solar physics.]Generally speaking, staring at the Sun non-stop for decades is a bad idea. But a spacecraft launched 30 years ago this week has done just that. It’s told us about the Sun’s interior, its surface, and its extended outer atmosphere. That’s helped scientists develop better forecasts of space weather – interactions between Sun and Earth that can have a big effect on our

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00:02:20

New Strategies

StarDate ·

2025/12/02

Scientists have been searching for dark matter for decades. They haven’t found it – every experiment they’ve devised has come up empty. But they haven’t given up. Among other ideas, they’re thinking about ways to use moons, planets, and stars as detectors.Dark matter appears to make up about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. We know it’s there because its gravity pulls on the visible stars and galaxies around it. Dark matter may consist of a type of

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00:02:20

Toasty Future

StarDate ·

2025/12/01

Things are heating up for a planet that orbits the brightest star of Aries. The star is expanding to become a giant, so it’s pumping more energy into space. That will make temperatures extremely uncomfortable on the planet. Hamal is at the end of its life. It’s converted the hydrogen in its core to helium. Now, it’s getting ready to fuse the helium to make other elements. That’s made the core hotter. And that’s caused the star’s outer layers to puff up – to

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00:02:14

‘Minor’ Constellations

StarDate ·

2025/11/30

As most parents can tell you, coming up with names isn’t easy. It sometimes takes a while to settle on something that sounds just right. It wasn’t easy for the people who named the constellations, either. Some of the names sound like they just gave up. They picked a region of the sky with few stars, gave it the name of a nearby bright constellation, then added the word “minor.” All three of these minor constellations are in good view at dawn: Ursa Minor, Canis Minor, and Leo

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00:02:14

Martian Equinox

StarDate ·

2025/11/29

The shortest season on the planet Mars begins today – autumn in the northern hemisphere, and spring in the southern hemisphere. It will last for 142 Mars days – almost eight weeks less than the longest season. Mars has seasons for the same reason that Earth does – it’s tilted on its axis. And the tilt is at almost the same angle as Earth’s. But the seasons on Mars are more exaggerated because the planet’s orbit is more lopsided. A planet moves fastest when

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00:02:14

Moon and Saturn

StarDate ·

2025/11/28

The Moon slides by Saturn the next couple of nights. The planet looks like a bright star. It’s to the left of the Moon as night falls this evening, and to the lower right of the Moon tomorrow night. Saturn is best known for its rings. They’re almost wide enough to span the distance from Earth to the Moon. Right now, we’re viewing them almost edge-on, so they look like a thin line across the planet’s disk. Saturn isn’t the only world with rings. The solar system’s

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00:02:14

Pulsar Planets

StarDate ·

2025/11/27

Planets are tough little buggers. They can form and survive in some extreme environments. In fact, the first confirmed planets outside our own solar system orbit the remnant of a dead star – a pulsar. A pulsar is tiny – the size of a small city. But it’s more massive than the Sun. A teaspoon of its matter would weigh as much as a mountain. Yet a pulsar spins rapidly – up to several hundred times per second. It has an extreme magnetic field. The field shoots “jets”

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