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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

00:02:20

New Identity

StarDate ·

2026/02/11

Ursa Major III is doomed. It’s falling apart, and may vanish completely in a couple of billion years.There’s not much to it even now. It’s so faint that it wasn’t discovered until 2023. It contains about 60 stars – all of them ancient, and all much smaller and fainter than the Sun. They add up to only about 16 times the Sun’s mass. They’re packed into a loose ball about 20 light-years wide. But the total mass is about 2,000 times greater than the mass of

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00:02:15

Pleiades Complex

StarDate ·

2026/02/10

Stars are born from huge clouds of gas and dust. Many of the stars remain close together, forming clusters. But as a cluster moves through the Milky Way, it gets pulled apart. The gravity of the rest of the galaxy tugs away the stars on the outskirts of the cluster. It also loosens the rest of the cluster, making it easier to pull away more stars.A recent study looked at how that’s played out in the region around the Pleiades cluster. Using telescopes in space and on the ground, researchers

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00:02:15

Moon and Antares

StarDate ·

2026/02/09

Antares is a rare star. It’s one of the few named for what it’s not. The name is Greek. It combines “anti,” which means “against” or “opposed to” – with Ares – the Greek version of Mars, the god of war. So the name means “not Mars” or “rival of Mars.” It was given the name because its color is similar to that of Mars – bright orange. The color indicates that the surface of Antares is thousands of degrees cooler

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00:02:15

Distant Relative

StarDate ·

2026/02/08

Family members don’t always stay close together – they can be separated by thousands of miles. But one member of the Milky Way Galaxy’s family takes the separation to extremes. It’s 300,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy – one of the most distant residents of the Milky Way yet seen.NGC 2419 is a globular cluster – a group of about a million stars. They form a dense ball a few hundred light-years across. Any star near the middle of the cluster would

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00:02:15

Lynx

StarDate ·

2026/02/07

Alpha Lyncis is only about a third of the age of the Sun. Yet the star has already zoomed through the prime phase of life. Now, it’s nearing the end of its life. And it’s letting us know about it – it’s the brightest star of the constellation Lynx. That’s not necessarily saying much. Lynx is a large constellation, but it’s faint – only a few of its stars are bright enough to see from light-polluted cities or suburbs. In fact, the astronomer who created it,

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00:02:15

Moon and Spica

StarDate ·

2026/02/06

The Moon snuggles close to the bright star Spica late tonight. They climb into good view by about midnight, and are high in the sky at dawn. At their closest, they’ll be separated by just a couple of degrees – about the width of your finger held at arm’s length. That closeness is just an illusion – the Moon and the star are separated by a vast gulf. The Moon is our closest neighbor. Tonight, it’s a little less than a quarter of a million miles away. At that distance,

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00:02:15

Messier 79

StarDate ·

2026/02/05

The star cluster M79 is messy. It’s shedding some of its stars, creating a “tail.” Over the eons, in fact, the cluster might have lost most of the stars it was born with. Messier 79 is a globular cluster – a ball-shaped family of about 150,000 stars. The cluster is more than 11 billion years old, so its stars are among the oldest in the entire Milky Way Galaxy. There’s a trail of stars behind the cluster. The stars probably were stripped away by the gravity of the rest

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00:02:15

Seeing Red

StarDate ·

2026/02/04

In 1845, British astronomer J.R. Hind saw an amazing star in the constellation Lepus, the rabbit. He wrote that the star looked “like a drop of blood on a black field.” Officially, the star is called R Leporis. But it’s also known as Hind’s Crimson Star – a star that looks redder than almost any other star in the galaxy.R Leporis is a little heavier than the Sun. But it’s much later in life, which makes it a lot more interesting. It’s “fused”

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00:02:15

Rare Hare

StarDate ·

2026/02/03

The brightest star of the rabbit is a member of a rare class. It’s a yellow supergiant – a star that’s about the same color as the Sun, but much bigger and brighter. It won’t stay in that class for long, though. It’ll quickly get hotter and bluer, then blast itself to bits as a supernova.Arneb is the leading light of the constellation Lepus, the hare. It’s in the southeast at nightfall, to the lower right of brilliant Orion. Its name is Arabic for hare – a

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00:02:15

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2026/02/02

From parts of the U.S., the Moon will briefly cover the heart of the lion tonight. The Moon will pass directly between Earth and the bright star Regulus, creating an occultation. The Moon can occult Regulus because the star lies almost atop the ecliptic – the Sun’s path across the sky. The Moon stays close to the ecliptic, but it does move a little to either side. So occultations of Regulus come in groups. This one is part of a cycle that began last July and will continue through the end

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00:02:15

Oddest Month

StarDate ·

2026/02/01

Odd little February is the shortest month of the year. Historians aren’t exactly sure just why that’s the case. But tracing its evolution gives us a capsule history of the evolution of the calendar. The modern western calendar is a descendant of the earliest Roman calendar. It included only 10 months, beginning with March. The months were followed by about 60 days that weren’t part of any month. That system didn’t work very well, though, so two months were added to the end of

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00:02:14

Blue Skies

StarDate ·

2026/01/31

Powerful cold fronts move across North America at this time of year. These blankets of dry, cold air push away the clouds and haze, providing some amazingly beautiful blue skies. That color is produced by the interaction of sunlight with Earth’s atmosphere.The Sun is classified as a yellow star because its energy output peaks at yellow wavelengths. And if we could see the Sun from a distance of a few light-years, where it would appear as only a pinpoint of light, it would have a yellow

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00:02:14

Moon and Companions

StarDate ·

2026/01/30

The constellation Gemini consists of two long lines of stars capped by two of the brighter stars in the night sky. Many cultures have seen these stars as two men. But the legend that endures is the Greek story of Castor and Pollux. The two bright stars bear their names. In the story, the twins had the same mother – Leda, the queen of Sparta. But they had different fathers. Castor was the son of the king – a mortal – while Pollux was the son of Zeus, the king of the gods. The boys

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00:02:14

Back to the Moon

StarDate ·

2026/01/29

Gene Cernan was the last American to walk on the Moon. As he prepared to leave it, he expressed optimism that his colleagues would return soon. CERNAN: As I take man’s last step from the surface for some time to come, but we believe not too long into the future… Well, it’s probably been a little longer into the future than Cernan expected, but NASA is preparing to send astronauts back to the Moon. The Artemis II mission is scheduled to launch in the coming weeks. It will carry four

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00:02:14

Moon and Taurus

StarDate ·

2026/01/28

The Moon is a tale of two faces. The side we see – the nearside – features giant volcanic plains and a fairly thin crust. The far side features more mountains and craters and much thicker crust. And the differences might go even deeper. The layer below the crust – the mantle – might be cooler on the farside – or was cooler billions of years ago. That difference is suggested by samples returned to Earth by a Chinese lander – the first samples from the farside. Some

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00:02:14

Chiron

StarDate ·

2026/01/27

In Greek mythology, Chiron was the wisest of the centaurs – creatures who were half human and half horse. He taught other centaurs about medicine, botany, and other sciences.Today, the astronomical Chiron is teaching scientists about the formation and evolution of ring systems. Chiron is one of about a thousand known centaurs – chunks of ice and rock between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. It’s one of the larger ones, at an average diameter of about 125 miles. Even so,

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00:02:14

Centaurs

StarDate ·

2026/01/26

The realm of the giant outer planets is like a transit station for some smaller bodies. They come from beyond the orbit of Neptune, the solar system’s most remote major planet. And like passengers at a hub airport, their destinations are all over the map. These objects are called centaurs. Like the half-human, half-horses of myth, they’re hybrids – they look like both asteroids and comets. Most of them are quiet chunks of rock and ice, like asteroids. But some have haloes or tails

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00:02:14

Visiting Astronomers

StarDate ·

2026/01/25

Many of the features on the Moon are named for astronomers. So are features on Mars and other planets and moons. And hundreds of asteroids are named for astronomers as well. But you won’t find many features named for astronomers here on Earth. Quite a few streets and schools are named after them. But when it comes to major features, the list is pretty thin – especially in the United States. One of the few is Mount Langley, a 14,000-foot summit in California. It’s named for Samuel

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00:02:14

Medusa Nebula

StarDate ·

2026/01/24

When a dying Sun-like star exhales its final breath, it’s a doozy. The star blows its outer layers of gas into space. That surrounds the star’s dying core with a colorful bubble. The bubble can last for tens of thousands of years before it fades away. One of those bubbles is on the edge of Gemini, which is well up in the east at nightfall. Known as the Medusa Nebula, the bubble is about 1500 light-years away, and it spans more than four light-years. It’s named for one of the

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00:02:14

Doubling Up

StarDate ·

2026/01/23

There just aren’t enough superlatives to describe the galaxy OJ 287. It’s a quasar – an especially bright object powered by two supermassive black holes. One of them is about 150 million times as massive as the Sun. The other is 18 billion times the Sun’s mass – one of the heaviest black holes yet seen. They team up to produce outbursts that are a trillion times brighter than the Sun – brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy combined. OJ 287 is always

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