Latest Eclipses Podcast Episodes
Moon and Antares
StarDate - June 19, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsYou might think that astronomers would know just about everything there is to know about the brighter stars in the night sky. That’s not the case, though. In fact, some of those stars can be especially vexing. An example is Antares, the orange supergiant that marks the heart of Scorpius, the sc...
William Lassell
StarDate - June 18, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsBuilding the Albert Dock in Liverpool gave a man a powerful thirst. Workers drank up to a dozen pints of beer a day — and that was during the work day, with beer provided by the company. And while the workers drank, beer baron William Lassell got rich. Lassell used some of that wealth to study ...
Gentleman Astronomers
StarDate - June 17, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsModern astronomy is a job for professionals. Amateurs discover comets and make many other contributions. But most of the cutting-edge research is done by professional scientists using expensive telescopes and other equipment. In the not-so-distant past, though, many major discoveries were made ...
Cat’s Eyes
StarDate - June 16, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsA pair of cat’s eyes glows just above the north-northwestern horizon as darkness falls. The glowing eyes drop from sight in a hurry. And they’ll drop even lower during the coming nights, before disappearing entirely in the evening twilight. The “eyes” are the stars Pollux and Castor. They mark ...
Moon and Spica
StarDate - June 15, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThis might come as a bit of a surprise, but no star is perfectly round. A star’s rotation, and the gravitational tug of any companion stars, can distort the shape. So most stars are slightly flattened. The Sun, for example, is about six miles wider through the equator than through the poles. The...
Thuban
StarDate - June 14, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsArchaeologists know of only a few major artifacts of the pharaoh Khufu, who ruled Egypt more than 4500 years ago. The list includes some small statuettes — some of which might have been created long after his reign. But one artifact is at the opposite end of the size scale: the Great Pyramid of ...
Flat Universe
StarDate - June 13, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsOur universe appears to be “flat” — like a sheet of paper stretching to infinity. If so, that would mean it’s finely balanced — a sort of “just right.” Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as General Relativity, allows the universe to assume one of three basic shapes. One shape is “closed...
Vega
StarDate - June 12, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsWhen it comes to understanding a star, it’s all a matter of perspective. The angle at which you view the star makes a big difference in what you know about it. Consider Vega, the leading light of the constellation Lyra and one of the brighter stars in the northern sky. It’s in the northeast at ...
Moon and Regulus
StarDate - June 11, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsLike a mixed litter of puppies, sibling stars don’t necessarily look alike. That can make it hard to figure out which stars are related to each other. One example is Regulus, the heart of the lion. It’s close to the left or lower left of the Moon as darkness falls. To the eye alone, Regulus lo...
Kapteyn’s Star
StarDate - June 10, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsOur home galaxy is a cosmic melting pot. While many of its stars were born in the Milky Way, many others came from outside. They were born in smaller galaxies that were captured by the Milky Way. Over time, the smaller galaxies were ripped apart, and their stars were scattered throughout the Mil...
Omega Centauri
StarDate - June 09, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe biggest globular star cluster in the Milky Way Galaxy may not be a child of the Milky Way. Instead, it may be a sort of orphan — the surviving core of a smaller galaxy that was captured by the Milky Way. Omega Centauri contains perhaps 10 million stars, all packed into a dense ball about 15...
Menkent
StarDate - June 08, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsAs you look out into the night sky, you might think that you’re seeing a true sampling of the stars — in other words, a little of everything. That’s not the case, though. Most of what you see is the Milky Way’s equivalent of the one percenters — stars that are among the galaxy’s biggest and brig...
Galactic Habitable Zone
StarDate - June 07, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsEarth lies in the middle of the Sun’s habitable zone. That’s the distance from the Sun where conditions are most comfortable for life. And astronomers are concentrating their hunt for life in other star systems in their habitable zones. There’s an idea that galaxies have habitable zones as well...
Getting Ready
StarDate - June 06, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsA possible new space telescope probably won’t launch for a couple of decades, if at all. But astronomers are already looking for targets for it to study — star systems with planets that could host life. Habitable Worlds Observatory will have several jobs. As the name suggests, one of those jobs...
Active’ Worlds
StarDate - June 05, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsMany factors are involved in making a planet habitable: the size and composition of the planet, the stability of its orbit, its distance from its star. But scientists are still trying to figure out which factors are important. An example is plate tectonics. Earth’s surface is divided into large...
Martian Traveler
StarDate - June 04, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsIt’s pretty remarkable that scientists have figured out that some meteorites come from Mars. What’s even more remarkable is they may know just where on Mars one of them came from. The meteorite is cataloged as Northwest Africa 7034. It was discovered in 2011, in the Sahara Desert. The rock weig...
Martian Lakes
StarDate - June 03, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe landing sites of the two most recent American Mars rovers are about 2300 miles apart — roughly the distance from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Yet the sites are a lot alike. Both are inside impact craters that formed at least three and a half billion years ago. And both craters once held l...
Zapping Mars
StarDate - June 02, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe Perseverance Mars rover packs a laser gun. It’s not for defense against Martians. Instead, it’s a scientific instrument — a way to learn about Martian rocks without drilling into them. And the sound of the laser helps in that effort. Perseverance zaps a target rock dozens of times in just a...
Messier 5
StarDate - May 27, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe Sun is about four and a half billion years old, so it’s been around awhile. Compared to some of the galaxy’s oldest stars, though, it’s a youngster. Some stars have been around since shortly after the universe was born. In the Milky Way Galaxy, many of those ancient stars reside in globular...
Serpent Rising
StarDate - May 26, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe head of the serpent slithers into the early evening sky this month, with its tail twisting along a bit later. Serpens is the only constellation that’s split apart. The two halves are separated by Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer. The snake’s head rises first. It’s in the east and southeast at ...
Sunny Skies
StarDate - May 25, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsAiello del Friuli is a village in northern Italy, about 75 miles from Venice. It’s home to about 2200 residents and more than a hundred sundials — so many that it’s known as the “village of sundials.” It hosts a sundial festival every year, in late May. The village began earning the nickname in...
Brightest Black Hole
StarDate - May 24, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsBlack holes are the darkest objects in the universe — they produce no light at all. Yet they power some of the brightest objects. Known as quasars, these beacons can outshine entire galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars. In fact, the brightest one seen so far emits more light every minute th...
Black-Hole Sun
StarDate - May 23, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsStars like the Sun aren’t massive enough to become black holes when they die. But there’s a possible exception to that rule: if the star is born with a small black hole inside it. The idea was first proposed by Stephen Hawking. And it’s supported by a recent study. Normally, a star like the Sun...
Man in the Moon
StarDate - May 22, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsOur brains can see things that aren’t there. They connect points and shapes to create “pictures.” So we might see a dragon in some puffs of clouds, “canals” on the surface of Mars, or a scorpion in the stars. One of the most persistent pictures is the “man in the Moon” — a face created from fea...
Balanced Moon
StarDate - May 21, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe Moon is in a sort of cosmic balance tonight. It’s passing through Libra, the balance scales — the only constellation of the zodiac that doesn’t represent a living thing. But the scales are associated with two living things — Virgo, which represents a goddess, and Scorpius, the scorpion. In ...
Sun Rays
StarDate - May 20, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsOne of the icons of classic western movies is the sunset. Even in black and white, rays of sunlight radiate into the sky like jets of water erupting from a fountain. They add a bit of grandeur to any sunrise or sunset. They’re known as crepuscular rays, from the Latin word for twilight. Technic...
Mizar and Alcor
StarDate - May 18, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsA horse and rider gallop across the north and northwest on May evenings. They’re in the handle of the Big Dipper, which is high in the sky at nightfall and low in the northwest at dawn. They’re the stars Mizar and Alcor. Mizar is the brighter of the two, with fainter Alcor just a whisker away. ...
Moon and Twins
StarDate - May 12, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe Moon passes especially close to the star Pollux tonight — the brighter “twin” of Gemini. The star stands just to the right of the Moon at nightfall. The other twin, Castor, is farther along the same line. The Moon always passes closer to Pollux than to Castor. That’s because of the relation...
Cape Canaveral
StarDate - May 11, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsIt’s hard to think of the White Sands region of New Mexico as confining. It covers thousands of square miles, and few people live there. In the late 1940s, though, the U.S. military was feeling hemmed in. It was launching rockets from White Sands. They could go high, but they couldn’t go very fa...
Krypton
StarDate - May 10, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsScience and science fiction can intertwine in some interesting ways. Consider krypton — the chemical element and the fictional planet. The element was discovered in 1898. It makes up a tiny fraction of Earth’s atmosphere — about one part in a million. It’s colorless, odorless, and tasteless. An...
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