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

00:02:15

Moon and Spica

StarDate ·

2025/11/16

If you ever warp over to another star, it would help to know its distance. Say, for example, you wanted to visit Spica, the brightest star of Virgo, which is quite close to the Moon at dawn tomorrow. The system is worth visiting because it consists of two giant stars. They’re so close together that their shapes are distorted, so they look like eggs.The best measurement we have says that Spica is 250 light-years away. But there’s a margin of error of about `four percent. So you could

en-US

00:02:15

Leonid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/11/15

The patchiest of all meteor showers will be at its best tomorrow night. Unfortunately, this is one of its off years. At best, it might produce a dozen or so “shooting stars” per hour. Over the past two centuries, though, the Leonids have produced some amazing outbursts. The first of these came in 1833. Skywatchers in parts of America reported rates of a hundred thousand meteors per hour – not a shower, but a storm. The nature of meteor showers was unknown at the time, so many saw

en-US

00:02:15

Cartwheel Galaxy

StarDate ·

2025/11/14

Galaxies frequently collide with each other, and the results can be spectacular. The encounters can pull out giant ribbons of stars. They can trigger intense bouts of starbirth. And they can scramble a galaxy’s stars and gas clouds, creating beautiful rings that look like cosmic bulls-eyes. One well-known galaxy that’s experienced a head-on collision is the Cartwheel. It’s about 500 million light-years away, in the constellation Sculptor, which is low in the south on November

en-US

00:02:15

Sculptor

StarDate ·

2025/11/13

Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille had a great imagination. In the 1750s, the French astronomer mapped more than 10,000 stars from the southern tip of Africa. Lacaille used those stars to create 14 new constellations. One of them is Sculptor. Lacaille originally called it the Sculptor’s Studio. It depicted a carved head atop a stool, plus a hammer and chisel and a block of granite. But all of that takes a lot of imagination to see. All of the constellation’s stars are so faint that Sculptor is

en-US

00:02:15

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2025/11/12

The brightness of any star that’s in the prime phase of life is controlled by the star’s mass: Heavy stars are brighter than lightweight stars. But it’s not a simple one-to-one kind of relationship. A star that’s twice the mass of the Sun isn’t twice as bright – it’s more than 15 times as bright. That’s because gravity squeezes the core of a heavier star more tightly. That increases the core’s temperature, which revs up the rate of nuclear

en-US

00:02:15

Vesto Slipher

StarDate ·

2025/11/11

Edwin Hubble gets the credit for discovering that the universe is expanding. But that finding was made possible by work done by Vesto Slipher. He was the first to measure the motions of distant galaxies – the key to Hubble’s discovery. Slipher was born 150 years ago today, in Mulberry, Indiana. He worked on the family farm, and developed an interest in astronomy. A college professor helped him get a job as an assistant at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, where he worked for the next five

en-US

00:02:20

Makahiki

StarDate ·

2025/11/10

There’s nothing in the night sky quite like the Pleiades. The star cluster forms a tiny dipper. Depending on sky conditions and the viewer’s eyesight, anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen stars or more are visible to the naked eye. Its unique visage has made the Pleiades one of the most important sky objects in many cultures. The people of the Andes timed the start of the harvest season to its first appearance in the dawn sky. The Aztec year began at about the same time. In Hawaii, the

en-US

00:02:20

Moon and Companions

StarDate ·

2025/11/09

The Moon shoots the gap between some bright companions tonight: the planet Jupiter and the star Pollux, the brighter “twin” of Gemini. They climb into good view by about 10:30 or 11, and stand high overhead at dawn tomorrow. Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, and it has the most turbulent atmosphere. Hurricane-like storms as big as continents twirl across it. Thunderstorms can produce lightning bolts far more powerful than any on Earth, as recorded by a passing

en-US

00:02:20

Cosmic Rays

StarDate ·

2025/11/08

In the early 20th century, scientists discovered a mysterious new type of radiation. The higher they went, the stronger it became. They realized that it came from beyond Earth. And 100 years ago tomorrow, it got a name: cosmic rays.Nobel Prize winner Robert Millikan had become fascinated by the rays from outer space in the early ’20s. He coined the name “cosmic rays” in a paper about them, which he presented to a meeting on November 9th, 1925. Millikan thought the rays were a form

en-US

00:02:20

Lunar Excursion

StarDate ·

2025/11/07

Nothing can survive the brutal conditions on the surface of the Moon. But a story that debuted 125 years ago depicted a vast civilization below the surface – a society of insects. First Men in the Moon was written by H.G. Wells. It was published over several months in two magazines – “The Cosmopolitan” in the United States, and “The Strand” in Britain. The first installment appeared in November of 1900. In the story, a man named Bedford befriends a scientist named

en-US

00:02:20

Biggest Black Hole

StarDate ·

2025/11/06

The black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is like the monster lurking under your bed. It’s four million times the mass of the Sun, and about 15 million miles across – just waiting to gobble up anything that gets too close. But compared to the black holes in many other galaxies, the one in the Milky Way is less like a monster and more like a dust bunny. The largest ones yet seen are thousands of times bigger. They’re known as ultra-massive black holes. Informally, they’re

en-US

00:02:20

Oldest Black Hole

StarDate ·

2025/11/05

A Little Red Dot might have a big black hole in its heart. And that’s a bit of a challenge to explain. Little Red Dots are galaxies from the first 1.5 billion years of the universe. The name comes from their appearance – they’re small and red, but they’re especially bright. They don’t appear to have enough stars to make them so bright. So a good bit of their “shininess” could come from giant black holes that are devouring material around them. As they tumble

en-US

00:02:20

Hunter’s Moon

StarDate ·

2025/11/04

With the autumn harvest safely stowed away, many people in bygone centuries turned their attention to hunting. And just as the Harvest Moon helped them bring in the crops, the Hunter’s Moon helped them find game. The moonlight made it easier to track animals through the empty fields and beyond. Although most present-day Americans don’t have to worry about storing food for the winter, we still keep the names for those full Moons. We had the Harvest Moon last month. And tonight, it’s

en-US

00:02:20

Terrible Taurids?

StarDate ·

2025/11/03

In 1908, a space rock the size of a small office building exploded above Siberia, flattening hundreds of square miles of forest. In 1975, several “fireballs” blazed across the night, and instruments on the Moon recorded several impacts. And 30 years later, scientists saw an impact on the Moon. These events might all be related to the Taurid meteor shower, which is underway now. The shower is created by two objects – a comet and an asteroid. They might be the remnants of a larger

en-US

00:02:20

Taurid Meteors

StarDate ·

2025/11/02

The Taurid meteor shower has a double identity. It’s split into two different streams, which peak a few nights apart in early November. Neither stream is particularly impressive, but things pick up when they overlap. Their story begins thousands of years ago, with the breakup of a big ball of ice and dust – Comet Encke. The biggest remaining chunk kept that name. But the breakup created several other big pieces, plus clouds of dust. The whole messy bunch is known as the Encke

en-US

00:02:20

Settling In

StarDate ·

2025/11/01

AUDIO: We have contact. We have initial contact – initial contact of the Soyuz capsule with the Expedition 1 crew to the International Space Station.A key milestone in the human exploration of space took place 25 years ago tomorrow. The first permanent crew took up residence in the International Space Station. And people have been living on the station ever since. They weren’t the first to actually visit the station. Several groups of astronauts and cosmonauts had spent time assembling

en-US

00:02:14

Abandoned Observatories

StarDate ·

2025/10/31

Like other buildings, observatory domes can outlive their usefulness. They may not be big enough for the latest telescopes. The light from encroaching cities can make it hard for them to see the heavens. Or time may just catch up to them. Many domes and related buildings have been torn down. Others have been converted into offices or libraries. And still others have been abandoned – left to the elements and the ravages of time. Several of these buildings are scattered around the country

en-US

00:02:14

The Gorgons

StarDate ·

2025/10/30

The night sky is filled with monsters. And none are more fearsome than the Gorgons – three sisters who were so hideous that a single glance at them turned the observer to stone. One of them was beheaded by Perseus the hero. His constellation shows him holding the head, which is outlined by four stars – the Gorgons. In mythology, two of the sisters were immortal. But the third, Medusa, was not. Perseus managed to lop off her head with the help of the gods. They gave him an invisibility

en-US

00:02:14

Self Destruction

StarDate ·

2025/10/29

A young “cotton-candy” planet is hastening its own demise. As it dips close to its star, it appears to trigger giant explosions that erode the planet’s atmosphere. The planet orbits HIP 67522, a star roughly 400 light-years from Earth. The star is a little bigger and heavier than the Sun, but less than one percent the Sun’s age. Such young stars generate strong magnetic fields. Lines of magnetic force tangle and snap, producing powerful flares. The planet, HIP 67522 b, orbits

en-US

00:02:14

Distant Visitor

StarDate ·

2025/10/28

A visitor from far beyond the solar system is getting better acquainted with the Sun this week. Tomorrow, it’ll make its closest approach to the Sun – just 126 million miles. After that, it’ll head back toward interstellar space. The visitor is 3I/ATLAS. It was discovered on July 1st by an automated telescope that looks for comets and asteroids. Calculations of its orbit quickly showed that it came from outside the solar system. That makes it the third known visitor from

en-US

545 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