The Pleiades Trivia
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46 free The Pleiades trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Pleiades trivia quiz covers the most famous star cluster in the sky from three directions. The astronomy questions ask which constellation it sits in, how far away it is and why Hipparcos got that wrong, how many stars it really contains, why its stars are blue, what the reflection nebulae are, how old the cluster is and how long it will hold together. The observing history runs from the Nebra sky disc and Babylonian star lists to Galileo's 36 stars, John Michell's probability argument and Messier's odd decision to catalogue something nobody could mistake for a comet. The mythology and culture questions cover Atlas and Pleione, the seven sisters and their Olympian lovers, the lost Pleiad who married Sisyphus, Orion's endless pursuit, the sailing season that probably gave the cluster its name, Krittika and Kartikeya, al-Thurayya, Subaru's six-star logo, the Māori new year of Matariki, the Kiowa story of Devils Tower and the three mentions in the Bible. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Orion and constellations quizzes next.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which constellation are the Pleiades found?
Taurus
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.
Q 02Charles Messier listed the Pleiades among objects easily mistaken for what?
Comets
Comets. An avid comet hunter, Messier listed fuzzy lookalikes so nobody wasted time on them, which makes the bright, unmistakable Pleiades a curious entry.
Q 03Which agency ran a supercomputer named Pleiades, ranked third fastest in the world in 2008?
NASA
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.
Q 04Roughly how far away are the Pleiades, one of the nearest star clusters to Earth?
About 444 light-years
About 444 light-years. The light you see tonight set out in the 1580s, when Elizabeth I was on England's throne.
Q 05Roughly how many stars belong to the Pleiades cluster in total?
About 1,000
About 1,000. Telescopes have confirmed more than a thousand members, yet the naked eye catches only a handful of the brightest.
Q 06What colour are the hot, luminous stars that dominate the Pleiades?
Blue
Blue. The hottest stars shine blue-white, and the dust around the Pleiades scatters that light, wrapping the cluster in a faint blue haze.
Q 07What are the reflection nebulae around the brightest Pleiades now thought to be?
An unrelated cloud they are drifting through
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.
Q 08Astronomers class the Pleiades as which kind of star group?
An open cluster
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.
Q 09What fate awaits the Pleiades within about 250 million years?
Its stars will drift apart
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.
Q 10Which famous stellar nursery did the Pleiades probably once resemble, according to computer simulations?
The Orion Nebula
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.
Q 11Together with which neighbouring star cluster do the Pleiades form the "Golden Gate of the Ecliptic"?
The Hyades
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.
Q 12One popular theory traces the name Pleiades to a Greek verb meaning what?
To sail
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.
Q 13In Homer's Iliad, a god forges the Pleiades onto a new shield for which hero?
Achilles
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.
Q 21Where is the 8.2-metre Japanese flagship telescope named after the cluster located?
Mauna Kea, Hawaii
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.
Q 22What do the Māori call the Pleiades, a name shared with a New Zealand public holiday?
Matariki
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.
Q 23According to one Māori tradition, whose eyes, torn out in rage at his parents' separation, became the Pleiades?
The wind god Tāwhirimātea's
Q 14Which Bronze Age artefact found in Germany shows seven gold dots usually read as the Pleiades?
The Nebra sky disc
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.
Q 15Which ancient people called the Pleiades MUL.MUL, 'the stars', and listed them first on the Moon's path?
The Babylonians
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.
Q 16Old folk names across Europe picture the Pleiades as which bird with her young?
A hen with chicks
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.
Q 17In which book of the Bible does God ask who can 'bind the chains of the Pleiades'?
Job
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.
Q 18Which bright planet glides in front of the Pleiades every eight years, as it did in April 2020?
Venus
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.
Q 19What is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, also used by a car maker?
Subaru
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.
Q 20Which poet's 'Locksley Hall' likens the Pleiades to 'a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid'?
Alfred Tennyson
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.
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.
Q 24Who was the first astronomer to view the Pleiades through a telescope?
Galileo Galilei
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.
Q 25Which Greek poet's 'Works and Days' tells farmers to harvest when the Pleiades rise and plough when they set?
Hesiod
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.
Q 26Which satellite produced a controversially short distance of only 118 parsecs to the Pleiades?
Hipparcos
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.
Q 27Stargazers often describe the Pleiades as a miniature version of which star pattern?
The Big Dipper
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.
Q 28Some researchers see the Pleiades in a cluster of dots painted in which famous Ice Age cave?
Lascaux
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.
Q 29Which objects, like Teide 1, may make up a quarter of the Pleiades' population but under 2% of its mass?
Brown dwarfs
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.
Q 30Which light element, destroyed inside ordinary stars, helps astronomers work out the age of the Pleiades?
Lithium
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.