StarDate

Apr 16 2025 10 ep. 2 mins 340

StarDate Podcast artwork

StarDate, the longest-running national radio science feature in the U.S., tells listeners what to look for in the night sky.

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Red Nova

Apr 16 2025 2 mins

A tight pair of stars got a lot tighter a few years ago. The stars merged, forming a single star. And it’s still settling into its new configuration. V1309 Scorpii produced a brilliant outburst in 2008. At first, it was classified as a classical nova. Such an eruption occurs when a small dead star pulls gas from a close companion. When enough gas piles up, it causes a nuclear

Sharing Stars

Apr 15 2025 2 mins

If you look up the details of W Ursae Majoris, you’ll find that its two stars are about a million miles apart. The way astronomers figure that distance, though, is from the centers of the two stars. When you measure the distance between their surfaces, the stars are a whole lot closer. In fact, they’re touching. That makes them a contact binary – one of thousands

Moon and Antares

Apr 14 2025 2 mins

The most massive stars are seldom alone. Most of them have one or more companions – stars that are bound to each other by their mutual gravitational pull. Such stars were born together, from the same giant cloud of dust and gas. Dense clumps in the cloud collapsed and split apart, giving birth to heavy stars. One possible example is Antares, the bright star that represents th

Lost Twin?

Apr 13 2025 2 mins

The Sun is an unusual star in several ways. It’s the only star known to support life. It’s in the top 10 percent of the most-massive stars in the galaxy. And it’s in the minority in another way: it moves through the galaxy alone. Like all stars, the Sun probably was born in a cluster – a group of hundreds or thousands of stars. But the Sun’s birth clus

Bellatrix

Apr 12 2025 2 mins

Orion is packed with stars that are much bigger, brighter, and heavier than the Sun. But only one of them is likely to draw hisses from Harry Potter fans: Bellatrix. Its name comes from Latin, and means “female warrior.” The name was applied to one of Harry Potter’s nastiest foes – Bellatrix Lestrange. Regardless of its name, the star itself is impressive. I

Moon and Spica

Apr 11 2025 2 mins

The full Moon has an especially close companion tonight: Spica, the brightest star of Virgo. From the eastern half of the country, they’ll appear to almost touch each other as night falls. They’ll be a bit farther apart for those in the west, but still close. A dozen American astronauts walked on the Moon, with the final steps coming half a century ago. Their missions a

Jantar Mantar

Apr 10 2025 2 mins

Jantar Mantar, in Jaipur, India, is a fantasy land of science and architecture. Built in the 1700s, it houses about 20 astronomical instruments: beautiful arches, domes, and spires designed to plot the motions of the Sun and other objects. The observatory was founded by Maharaja Jai Singh II. It was one of five observatories he built across northern India, in the 1720s and ’3

Ulugh Beg Observatory

Apr 09 2025 2 mins

Ulugh Beg was a poor politician and warrior. Just a year after becoming leader of the central Asian kingdom of Transoxiana, he was deposed by his son – then beheaded. Yet he was one of the top scientists and educators of his time. He built a school and observatory at the capital city of Samarkand. Astronomers there made highly accurate measurements of the heavens – two

The First Stars

Apr 08 2025 2 mins

In the modern-day universe, stars face a weight limit – about 150 times the mass of the Sun. Anything heavier would be so hot and bright that it would blow away any more gas that tried to fall on its surface, keeping it from getting bigger. In the early universe, though, the weight limit might have been much higher – hundreds of times the mass of the Sun. Such stars wou

Heavy Metal

Apr 07 2025 2 mins

Almost every star is a ball of hydrogen and helium, the simplest of all chemical elements. All of the hydrogen and most of the helium were forged in the Big Bang. Stars also contain smatterings of heavier elements. In astronomical jargon, these elements are known as metals. They were forged by the stars themselves. As the stars die, they expel some of these elements into space, whe