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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

Alioth

StarDate ·

2026/03/31

For skywatchers, tonight’s a time for old friends. There’s an almost-full Moon, so its glare overpowers most of the stars in the night sky. But the brighter stars shine through – the most familiar ones. That includes the stars of the Big Dipper, which are in the northeast at nightfall.The dipper’s leading light is Alioth. It’s the first star in the handle. It’s about 80 light-years away. But it’s an easy target because it’s about a hundred times

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00:02:20

Making Contact

StarDate ·

2026/03/30

Astronomers have been trying to hear from other civilizations for two-thirds of a century. So far, not a peep. But finding E-T might be the easy part. Actually having a conversation might be a lot harder. We wouldn’t know what the other folks were saying – or whether they were interested in talking at all. To gain some insight, scientists have been studying some “non-terrestrial” intelligences here on Earth – whales and dolphins – species that live in the oceans

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00:02:20

Moon and Regulus

StarDate ·

2026/03/29

The star Regulus leads the Moon across the sky tonight. The bright heart of the lion is close to the upper right of the Moon at nightfall, with the gap increasing as the hours roll by. Regulus is about 79 light-years away. That means the light you see from Regulus tonight actually left the star about 79 years ago. So when a particle of light from Regulus hits your eye, it’s ending a journey of 79 years. As with many things astronomical, though, it’s all relative. For the particle of

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00:02:20

Greedy Planet

StarDate ·

2026/03/28

A young planet is getting greedy. It’s gobbling up gas and dust from its surroundings. And observations last summer showed that its appetite got a lot bigger – it was consuming as much as eight times more material than in the spring.The planet is known by a catalog designation – Cha 1107. That indicates it’s in the constellation Chamaeleon, which is too far south to see from the United States. It’s hundreds of light-years away. Most planets are born in disks of

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00:02:20

Circumbinary Planets

StarDate ·

2026/03/27

If you’re looking for a world like Tatooine, good luck. Of the more than 6,000 known planets in other star systems, fewer than 20 orbit both stars of a binary system. So those double sunsets are few and far between. Just to refresh your memory, Tatooine is the home world of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Such planets are called “circumbinaries” because they circle around both stars in the system. Over the past decade, astronomers have searched for such worlds in a project with a

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00:02:20

Moon and Gemini

StarDate ·

2026/03/26

In the lexicon of astronomy, Pollux is known a class K-zero-3 star. That tells us that the star’s surface is a little cooler and redder than the Sun’s. It tells us that the star has puffed up to many times its original size. And it tells us that the star is nearing its end. Pollux is the brightest star of Gemini. It’s quite close to the Moon tonight. Its “twin,” the star Castor, and the brilliant planet Jupiter are a little farther from the Moon. The system that

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00:02:20

Moon and Jupiter

StarDate ·

2026/03/25

Jupiter is the “big boy” of the solar system. It’s more than twice the mass of all the other planets combined. In many other star systems, though, Jupiter wouldn’t seem quite so impressive. Astronomers have discovered hundreds of planets that are heavier than Jupiter – up to 80 times Jupiter’s mass. Astronomers aren’t sure how such monster planets get to be so heavy. But they have a couple of main ideas. One says they grow from the mergers of smaller

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00:02:20

Moon and Elnath

StarDate ·

2026/03/24

Elnath has dual citizenship. Officially, it’s the second-brightest star of Taurus, so it’s known as Beta Tauri. It marks the tip of one of the bull’s horns. But it’s also known as Gamma Aurigae – one of the bright stars that outlines Auriga, the charioteer. That designation is un-official – it’s been considered defunct for almost a century.The dual identity is a result of changes in how astronomers define the constellations. At first, the constellations

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00:02:20

Hyades

StarDate ·

2026/03/23

Just about every star is born in a cluster – a family of dozens to thousands of stars. Most of these families fall apart, with the individual stars going their own way. The Sun’s cluster, for example, dissipated billions of years ago. One cluster that’s in the process of dissipating is the Hyades, which outlines the face of Taurus, the bull. It’s the nearest cluster, at a distance of about 150 light-years. Today, the Hyades contains several hundred stars – probably less

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00:02:20

Solar Temple

StarDate ·

2026/03/22

For the kings of ancient Egypt, the Sun was much more than just a glowing orb in the daytime sky. It was the god Ra, one of the most important of all the gods. Ra was a creator of life, the king’s father, and a representation of the king as a god himself.So the kings of the Fifth Kingdom, about 4500 years ago, built temples to honor the Sun. Archaeologists have recently excavated about half of the largest one yet discovered – a massive complex that might have been topped by a spot for

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00:02:20

The Astronomer

StarDate ·

2026/03/21

An astronomer greets visitors to a science museum in Canberra, Australia. He’s made of riveted iron plates, and he stands atop a wide ring, gazing skyward through a smaller ring in his right hand. He’s the last remnant of an historic telescope that was destroyed in a massive wildfire. The fire blazed across Australia in January of 2003. It destroyed most of Mount Stromlo Observatory, one of the major astronomy research centers in the southern hemisphere. The fire consumed five

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00:02:15

Moon and Venus

StarDate ·

2026/03/20

The crescent Moon and the planet Venus team up in the evening twilight tonight. Venus is the brilliant “evening star.” It’s below the Moon, and it sets by the time the sky gets fully dark. Venus is enveloped by an unbroken layer of clouds – one of the reasons the planet looks so bright. The clouds are a few dozen miles above the surface. And they’re speedy – they race around the planet at up to 335 miles per hour – twice as fast as the winds in a category-5

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00:02:15

Vernal Equinox

StarDate ·

2026/03/19

Spring arrives in the northern hemisphere tomorrow morning, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator from south to north – the vernal equinox. Over the next three months, the Sun will travel ever farther northward, bringing longer, warmer days north of the equator. Vernal comes from the Latin word for spring. And equinox means “equal nights.” Theoretically, all points on Earth should see equal amounts of daylight and darkness on the equinox. But for several reasons, the interval

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00:02:15

Messier 87

StarDate ·

2026/03/18

The heart of the galaxy Messier 87 is a cosmic maelstrom. A disk of super-heated gas that’s hundreds of times the size of our solar system encircles a monster black hole. Gas at the inner edge of the disk spirals into the black hole, producing huge amounts of X-rays. Enormous magnetic fields channel some of the gas into powerful “jets.” It’s not a place you’d ever want to visit. But it’s a fascinating region to study from far away.M87 is a giant elliptical

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00:02:15

Virgo Cluster

StarDate ·

2026/03/17

A galaxy cluster is like a cosmic blender. It stirs up the galaxies and the space between them. Nothing is left undisturbed.A perfect example is the Virgo Cluster. It consists of more than 1500 individual galaxies, centered about 55 million light-years away. Most of them are fairly small and faint. But a few are monsters – many times the size and mass of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The cluster’s galaxies are packed fairly close together. So the gravity of each galaxy pulls at its

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00:02:15

The First Step

StarDate ·

2026/03/16

Snow blanketed the launch pad, and the rocketeers sipped hot malted milk to ward off the chill. But the launch they conducted a century ago today turned the idea of space travel from fantasy to possibility – and provided the first small step toward the Moon. The rocket was designed by Robert Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Massachusetts. Goddard was brilliant but secretive. He refused to collaborate with other scientists, and seldom even talked about his research. Instead,

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00:02:15

Leo Triplet

StarDate ·

2026/03/15

A three-way tug-of-war isn’t a common sight – unless you look toward the constellation Leo. Three galaxies there are tugging at one another, producing some spectacular results. The galaxies are M65, M66, and NGC 3628 – the Leo Triplet. All three galaxies are about the same size as our home galaxy, the Milky Way. And each may resemble the Milky Way – a beautiful spiral with a long “bar” of stars across its middle. The triplets are close enough together that the

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00:02:15

Pi Day

StarDate ·

2026/03/14

It sounds like a toddler’s attempt to say “Friday” or, even better, a day to gorge on apple crumb or coconut cream. Alas, “Pi Day” is something completely different. It’s a commemoration of a mathematical constant that’s represented by the Greek letter pi – one of the most important quantities in science. Pi is the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference. When it’s rounded off to two digits, it’s 3.14 – the numerical

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00:02:15

Adhara

StarDate ·

2026/03/13

To the eye alone, the brightest star in the night sky is Sirius, the leading light of Canis Major, the big dog. It’s well up in the south at nightfall – a brilliant beacon less than nine light-years away. If we could shift the sensitivity of our eyes to shorter wavelengths, the brightest star would appear a little below Sirius. Adhara is already the second-brightest star in the constellation. But it produces most of its energy in the extreme ultraviolet – wavelengths that are far

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00:02:15

Messier Highway

StarDate ·

2026/03/12

For Charles Messier, star clusters were a nuisance. The French astronomer was mainly interested in comets. In the 18th century, finding a comet could bring fame and fortune – kings sometimes awarded medals and fat stipends for their discovery. Through a telescope, star clusters could resemble comets. Messier and others might spend time following a cluster, only to find out that it wasn’t the prize. So Messier compiled a catalog of clusters and similar nuisances – a list of objects

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