The Seven Sisters
Apart from the cold, my favourite time of year for looking at the stars is in winter. And one of the most spectacular sights in my opinion is visible right now,
The Pleiades.
The Pleiades (ply-a-dees) is a very tight group of stars that have been described as the jewel box of the sky, sprinkled with diamonds. If you have a pair of binoculars you will definitely want to go and use them to have a look at the Pleiades after reading this!
To the naked eye most people can make out seven stars forming a very tight knit group of stars in the constellation of Taurus the Bull. To find them, go outside around 9 o’clock and look to the southeast and you will see the really bright planet Jupiter shining brighter than anything else in the sky. Now look towards the left of Jupiter (about two fists held at arm’s length) and you will see the Pleiades.
They are so tightly grouped together that at first they look like a fuzzy smudge in the sky but now that you have found them you will see that they are all individual stars. If you can’t count seven stars then ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’ springs to mind!
The Pleiades are a special group of stars; they are ‘baby stars’ about 360 light years away from Earth. Our Sun is a middle aged star about six billion years old. In another six billion years it will use up all its supply of hydrogen. It will expand and swallow up the Earth before collapsing down to a white dwarf. Its light will go out and it will eventually die. But our star began its life from a gaseous nebula of hydrogen gas that condensed to create a star. After billions of years this gas grew and grew. The pressure and heat inside the core created a thermo-nuclear reaction that converted hydrogen into helium that caused the gasses to shine and a star was born.
The Pleiades are in the first stages of their birth – they are about 100 million years old. Compare that to our Sun’s six billion years and you will see that they are nothing more than toddlers. Photographs taken of the Pleiades through the best telescopes even show the remaining gasses from their creation. These gases will undoubtedly go on to create new planets orbiting around these stars and – who knows? – create new life.
So take your binoculars and have a look at the Pleiades and you will see not seven but thousands of stars. The Pleiades are rich in a myriad of stars. You may even be able to see the gas clouds surrounding them and I guarantee you will be impressed with what you can see. Notice too the blue/white colour of the stars indicating that they are very hot and very new.
The Pleiades are possibly the most well known of all the star clusters and are mentioned in almost every culture around the world from Aboriginal Australians, Chinese, Mayan and even native American Indians. They are even mentioned three times in the Bible and in Homer’s Odyssey. Charles Messier who was a French astronomer living in the 18th century drew up an extremely accurate chart listing all ‘fuzzy objects’ in the sky that could be mistaken for comets. He listed the Pleiades as number 45 hence the astronomical designation of M45.
But while we are talking about the birth and death of stars, look just below the Pleiades at a bright red star called Aldebaran (Al-deb-ran). Aldebaran is 65 light years away from Earth and marks the red eye of Taurus the Bull; the light you are seeing left Aldebaran in 1946 and has only just arrived here.
Aldebaran is a very old star and has used up most of its fuel of hydrogen and begun to swell in size. It is classed as a red giant star – it is huge. If Aldebaran was placed where the Sun is then its outer edge would reach out further than the planet Venus and the Earth would be its next meal on the menu!
By Ken Campbell
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