Latest Sandy wood Podcast Episodes
Cygnus Loop
StarDate - July 07, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsAbout 10,000 years ago, a massive star in Cygnus, the swan, blew itself to bits. For a few days or weeks, it blazed as the brightest object in the night sky other than the Moon – bright enough to see even during the day. Today, its glowing remains are still visible – a colorful bubble that’s mor...
Little Guys
StarDate - July 06, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThree tiny constellations are stacked up in the eastern evening sky this month: the arrow, the dolphin, and the little horse. There’s not a single bright star among them. But under moderately dark skies, at least one of them is pretty easy to make out. The arrow is at the top of the stack. It’s...
Brown Dwarfs
StarDate - July 05, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe Sun and the planet Jupiter are the heaviest objects in the solar system. But there’s a huge gap in their masses – the Sun is more than a thousand times heavier. There’s a class of objects between those masses. Known as brown dwarfs, they’re much heavier than Jupiter, but no more than seven ...
Aphelion
StarDate - July 04, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsIt may sound strange to hear during the heat of the summer, but Earth is farthest from the Sun for the entire year right now. Our planet is receiving almost seven percent less energy from the Sun than it did when it was closest to the Sun, in January. The average distance to the Sun is 93 milli...
Unsteady Giant
StarDate - July 03, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsBetelgeuse grew dramatically fainter a couple of years ago. The supergiant star blasted out a giant blob of gas, which cooled to form a dust cloud that blocked part of the star from view. And a similar star might recently have gone through the same process. RW Cephei is at least 900 times the d...
Moon and Jupiter
StarDate - July 02, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe four big moons of Jupiter probably are all about four and a half billion years old. But two of them look much younger. That’s because their surfaces are constantly repaved – one by fire, the other by ice. The fire moon is Io. It’s the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with ...
Moon and Planets
StarDate - July 01, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsMars and Jupiter are siblings. They were born at the same time, from the same cloud of material that encircled the embryonic Sun. Yet there’s absolutely no family resemblance – they could hardly be more different. Both planets appear near the Moon at dawn tomorrow. Mars looks like a bright oran...
Moon and Mars
StarDate - June 30, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsThe moons of Mars aren’t much more than big boulders that look a bit like potatoes. Phobos is about 17 miles long; Deimos, only about nine miles. But they’ve been the subject of a big scientific debate for decades — a debate about their origins. One possibility says they’re asteroids that were ...
The Shield
StarDate - June 29, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsA small, faint “shield” of stars scoots across the southern sky on early summer nights. It represents the coat of arms on the shield of John Sobieski, a 17th-century king of Poland and one of the country’s great national heroes. The shield is the constellation Scutum. Johannes Hevelius first dr...
Solar Protection
StarDate - June 28, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsHurricanes and other big storms can cause widespread damage that can take days or weeks to clean up. So can big space weather storms. They can knock out satellites, disrupt radio transmissions, and cause power blackouts. Especially big storms have the potential to knock out power grids for weeks...
Nessie Nebula
StarDate - June 27, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsA dark ribbon of gas and dust may be about to light up like a sequence of camera flashes. That’s because it could begin giving birth to new stars, with each star triggering the birth of more stars. The ribbon is called the Nessie Nebula — named for its resemblance to the Loch Ness monster. It’s...
Arrokoth
StarDate - June 26, 2024 05:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 205 ratingsAfter the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, in 2015, it still had some gas in the tank and some tread on the tires. Mission scientists wanted to take advantage of that by flying past another object in the outer solar system. But they didn’t know where to send it — there was no roadmap to ...
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...
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