46 Fun Facts About The Pleiades

In which constellation are the Pleiades found?

Taurus. The cluster rides on the Bull's shoulder, and the Bull's reddish eye, Aldebaran, is Arabic for 'the follower', probably because it trails the Pleiades across the sky.

Charles Messier listed the Pleiades among objects easily mistaken for what?

Comets. An avid comet hunter, Messier listed fuzzy lookalikes so nobody wasted time on them, which makes the bright, unmistakable Pleiades a curious entry.

Which agency ran a supercomputer named Pleiades, ranked third fastest in the world in 2008?

NASA. The machine at its Ames centre in California sifted a space telescope's data for distant worlds, and it ran for 17 years before being switched off.

Roughly how far away are the Pleiades, one of the nearest star clusters to Earth?

About 444 light-years. The light you see tonight set out in the 1580s, when Elizabeth I was on England's throne.

Roughly how many stars belong to the Pleiades cluster in total?

About 1,000. Telescopes have confirmed more than a thousand members, yet the naked eye catches only a handful of the brightest.

What colour are the hot, luminous stars that dominate the Pleiades?

Blue. The hottest stars shine blue-white, and the dust around the Pleiades scatters that light, wrapping the cluster in a faint blue haze.

What are the reflection nebulae around the brightest Pleiades now thought to be?

An unrelated cloud they are drifting through. Astronomers once took the haze for leftover birth material, but the dust and the stars move at different speeds, so the two are only crossing paths.

Astronomers class the Pleiades as which kind of star group?

An open cluster. Its stars were all born from one cloud about 100 million years ago, so astronomers treat the nearby Pleiades as a benchmark for how young stars behave.

What fate awaits the Pleiades within about 250 million years?

Its stars will drift apart. The Pleiades are only loosely bound, and tugs from giant gas clouds and the galaxy's spiral arms will scatter the stars along their orbit.

Which famous stellar nursery did the Pleiades probably once resemble, according to computer simulations?

The Orion Nebula. In simulations, a newborn cluster like the one inside it blows out its gas, loses two-thirds of its stars and ends up remarkably like the Pleiades.

Together with which neighbouring star cluster do the Pleiades form the "Golden Gate of the Ecliptic"?

The Hyades. The two clusters stand like gateposts on either side of the Sun's yearly path, so the Moon and the planets regularly pass between them.

One popular theory traces the name Pleiades to a Greek verb meaning what?

To sail. The cluster's dawn rising in spring opened the Greek seafaring season, though rival theories link the name to Greek words for 'many' and for doves.

In Homer's Iliad, a god forges the Pleiades onto a new shield for which hero?

Achilles. He had lent his own armour to his friend Patroclus, who was killed in it, so the god Hephaestus forged a replacement and worked the heavens into the shield.

Which Bronze Age artefact found in Germany shows seven gold dots usually read as the Pleiades?

The Nebra sky disc. Treasure hunters dug it up illegally in 1999, and police seized it from black-market dealers in a sting in Basel three years later.

Which ancient people called the Pleiades MUL.MUL, 'the stars', and listed them first on the Moon's path?

The Babylonians. The cluster earned first place in the third millennium BC, when it sat close to the Sun's position at the spring equinox.

Old folk names across Europe picture the Pleiades as which bird with her young?

A hen with chicks. Old English and German names saw a mother hen and her brood in the tight huddle of stars, rather than the daughters of Greek myth.

In which book of the Bible does God ask who can 'bind the chains of the Pleiades'?

Job. God answers Job's complaints with a list of wonders no human could command, in one of only three Bible passages that name the cluster.

Which bright planet glides in front of the Pleiades every eight years, as it did in April 2020?

Venus. Thirteen of its orbits take almost exactly eight Earth years, so the planet returns to nearly the same spot in our sky on that cycle.

What is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, also used by a car maker?

Subaru. The word also means 'unite' in Japanese, and the car maker's six-star badge marks the five firms that merged into one parent company.

Which poet's 'Locksley Hall' likens the Pleiades to 'a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid'?

Alfred Tennyson. The same 1842 poem looks forward as well as up, picturing skies full of trading ships and 'airy navies' at war decades before powered flight.

Where is the 8.2-metre Japanese flagship telescope named after the cluster located?

Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The telescope stands more than 4,100 metres up, where the air is so thin that most of its staff work from the town of Hilo at the foot of the mountain.

What do the Māori call the Pleiades, a name shared with a New Zealand public holiday?

Matariki. Its return to the dawn sky in midwinter, with the harvest stored away, was the signal to gather, farewell those who had died that year and feast.

According to one Māori tradition, whose eyes, torn out in rage at his parents' separation, became the Pleiades?

The wind god Tāwhirimātea's. He fought his brothers for forcing apart sky and earth, lost to the war god Tūmatauenga, then crushed his eyes and threw them onto his father's chest, the sky.

Who was the first astronomer to view the Pleiades through a telescope?

Galileo Galilei. His 1610 sketch in Sidereus Nuncius set thirty new stars beside the six familiar ones, showing that the sky held far more stars than the naked eye could reach.

Which Greek poet's 'Works and Days' tells farmers to harvest when the Pleiades rise and plough when they set?

Hesiod. Around 700 BC his farming poem used the cluster as a calendar: its dawn rising in late spring meant harvest, and its dawn setting in late autumn meant ploughing.

Which satellite produced a controversially short distance of only 118 parsecs to the Pleiades?

Hipparcos. Its short figure made the cluster's stars look oddly dim and threatened models of how young stars shine, until radio telescopes showed in 2014 that the satellite was wrong.

Stargazers often describe the Pleiades as a miniature version of which star pattern?

The Big Dipper. The brightest stars trace a tiny ladle with a stubby handle, but the real Little Dipper lies elsewhere, circling the North Star.

Some researchers see the Pleiades in a cluster of dots painted in which famous Ice Age cave?

Lascaux. The German researcher Michael Rappenglück reads the dots as a star map, but few can check for themselves: the cave has been shut since 1963 because crowds of visitors were damaging the paintings.

Which objects, like Teide 1, may make up a quarter of the Pleiades' population but under 2% of its mass?

Brown dwarfs. Too light to sustain hydrogen fusion, they cool and dim with age, so astronomers hunt them in young clusters like this one while they still glow.

Which light element, destroyed inside ordinary stars, helps astronomers work out the age of the Pleiades?

Lithium. Ordinary stars burn it away quickly while the lightest objects in a cluster keep theirs, so finding the dividing line between the two works as a clock.

Which star is the brightest in the Pleiades?

Alcyone. In 1846 the astronomer Johann Mädler argued that it was the central sun around which our whole star system turned, a claim other astronomers soon rejected.

Which two stars in the Pleiades are named after the sisters' mythical parents?

Atlas and Pleione. The pair now sit so close that the eye blends them, and one study argues they stood further apart 100,000 years ago, which could explain the tales of a lost seventh sister.

Which of the Pleiades was the eldest sister and the mother of Hermes by Zeus?

Maia. She bore the messenger god in a cave on Mount Cyllene and later fostered Arcas, the son Zeus had with the nymph Callisto.

Which of the Pleiades married the mortal Sisyphus and, in some tellings, faded from the sky in shame?

Merope. She was the only sister to marry a mortal, though a rival telling makes the missing star Electra, hiding her face in grief at the fall of Troy.

In one Greek telling, which hunter chased the Pleiades for seven years until Zeus made them stars?

Orion. He became a constellation too, so he still trails the cluster across the night and never catches it.

In one Greek telling, the Pleiades were the virgin companions of which goddess?

Artemis. In that telling the nymphs and their mother were chased through Boeotia until the gods heard their prayers and changed them first into doves, then into stars.

A Kiowa legend links the origin of the Pleiades to which American landmark?

Devils Tower. In the story a low rock grows skyward to lift seven girls away from bears, whose claws score its sides, until the girls are pushed into the sky as stars.

Andean farmers watch how brightly the Pleiades shine each June to decide when to plant which staple crop?

Potatoes. Scientists found the folk forecast works: in El Niño years thin high cloud dims the cluster, warning of poor rains months ahead, so farmers shift their planting dates.

Which fantasy author gave the Pleiades the name Remmirath?

J. R. R. Tolkien. In his invented Elvish the name means a group of jewels caught in a net, a picture of the cluster's tight knot of stars.

Compared with the full Moon, how wide do the Pleiades appear in the sky?

About four times as wide. The cluster spans roughly two degrees, so when the Moon drifts in front of it, as it regularly does, it can hide only a few of the stars at a time.

Which girl's name comes, through Persian, from the Arabic name for the Pleiades?

Soraya. The Arabic original is Thurayya, and the cluster was so familiar to early Arabs that they often called it simply 'the Star'.

The names are Greek, but who first matched each bright Pleiades star to a particular sister?

Early telescope astronomers. The Greeks never said which star was which sister; the earliest known list, published by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Riccioli in 1665, credits a Mallorcan observer, Vicente Mut.

In 1885 the Henry brothers of Paris found a new nebula in the Pleiades using which young technique?

Photography. Their plate caught a haze around one star that no observer at the eyepiece had seen, and within three years cameras had revealed the cluster's whole web of nebulae.

An unusual amount of hot dust around the Pleiades star HD 23514 is thought to signal what?

Rocky planets forming. Dust so close to a star is swept away quickly, so astronomers suspect it is being renewed by young planet-sized bodies smashing together.

In Renaissance France, La Pléiade was a celebrated circle of seven what?

Poets. Led by Pierre de Ronsard, they took the name from seven poets of ancient Alexandria and set out to write French verse that could stand beside the Greek and Latin classics.

Kartika, the Hindu month named after the Pleiades, hosts which major festival?

Diwali. Its five days surround the darkest, moonless night of the season, which families answer with the rows of lamps that give the festival its name.