If you should want to gaze on the seven sisters, I highly suggest that you take some binoculars. When we say there are six or seven stars in the Pleiades, what we really mean is that we can see six or seven stars. There are hundreds of stars in the Pleiades. A good pair of binoculars will show the bright stars we can see set in a glittering field of fainter stars. Stars are not born in isolation, but instead in batches of hundreds or thousands or more. The resulting star clusters do tend to evapo- rate with time as individual members escape. The Sun’s original family has long since dis- persed, and we patrol the Galaxy in lonely solitude. But the Pleiades is a young cluster. Its stars burn the bright blue of exuberant youth, and few members of the family have struck out on their own. Photographs show the cluster enshrouded in beautiful blue swirls, wispy remnants of the cloud of gas that gave it birth. We think of our night sky as beautiful, but we circle a lonely star stranded in the boondocks of our galaxy. The same space that contains hundreds of stars in the Pleiades contains a handful in our vicinity. If the Sun were to find itself at the heart of the cluster our night sky would blaze with bright blue diamonds, and ghostly tendrils would snake across the sky. Poets and minstrels would have mighty competition indeed.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 02:53:49 +0000
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