StarDate
StarDate
Episodes
Episodes of StarDate
Mark All
Until about 30 years ago, Jupiter was the king of the planets – bigger and heavier than any other known planet. Today, it’s not even in the top 500. It’s still the giant of our own solar system – it’s more massive than all the other planets and
Trillions of icy bodies mark the edge of the solar system. They form a shell that extends one or two light-years from the Sun in every direction. A passing star may sometimes give some of them a nudge toward the Sun. When they get here, they be
Dark spots sometimes dot the surface of the Sun – magnetic storms that can last for days or weeks. But the storms on other stars can make those on the Sun look puny. They can be so monstrous that they can change the star’s brightness by quite a
The stars Kochab and Pherkad serve several roles. They’re part of the body of Ursa Minor, the little bear. They form the outer edge of the bowl of the Little Dipper. And they’re “guardians of the pole” – they circle around Polaris, the star tha
A Chinese spacecraft that’s scheduled for launch as early as next month has a double destination: a “quasi-moon” of Earth and an asteroid that acts like a comet.The first destination for Tianwen-2 is an asteroid, Kamo’oalewa. It’s a chunk of r
A beautiful triangle decorates the dawn sky tomorrow. Two of its points are easy to see: the crescent Moon and the planet Venus, the “morning star.” The final point is a bit tougher: the planet Saturn, to the upper right of the Moon. It’s just
Two bright crescents team up in the early morning the next couple of days: the Moon and the planet Venus – the brilliant “morning star.” They’re quite low as twilight begins to paint the dawn sky.The Moon is an obvious crescent. The Sun illumi
The story of a black hole in Cygnus, the swan, is like the tale of an angler – there’s the star it caught, and the one that got away.V404 Cygni is about 7800 light-years away. It appears fairly close to the star that marks the intersection of
The most amazing object visible through a small telescope doesn’t look all that remarkable. In fact, it looks like a faint star. Yet that point of light packs the power of 10 trillion Suns – the power of a quasar.3C 273 is the first quasar eve
The mild nights of spring are good times for skywatching. Only one thing is missing: a great meteor shower. The best showers are clustered in fall and winter, with the Perseids of August sometimes joining the list.Although the season doesn’t o
The Sun is four and a half billion years old – a third of the age of the universe. Compared to the stars in globular clusters, though, it’s a youngster. Those stars were born when the universe was young.An example is Messier 3 – a family of ab
The Lucy spacecraft is headed for the Trojan asteroids – big chunks of rock and metal that share an orbit with Jupiter. But it’s checking out some other sights along the way. This weekend, for example, it’ll pass just a few hundred miles from a
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 classica
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 s
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 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
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
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, b
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
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 sc
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
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
The star that marks the heart of the lion has received a giant gift from a companion star. That gift has completely changed both stars.Regulus is below the Moon as night falls this evening, and even closer to the Moon as they set, in the wee h
Most stars consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the lightest and simplest chemical elements. But there’s a smattering of other ingredients as well – everything from oxygen to platinum. These elements can be tough to measure, though.
The Mars InSight lander has been silent for two and a half years. Yet the craft is still teaching us about the Red Planet. In particular, it’s revealing more about what killed it: dust and the fickle Martian winds.InSight landed in late 2018 a
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