50 free The Pleiades trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which constellation are the Pleiades found?
Taurus
They sit in the bull's northwest corner and, with the Hyades, form the so-called Golden Gate of the Ecliptic.
Q 02What is the Pleiades' designation in Charles Messier's catalogue?
M45
It is the Messier object nearest to Earth and an odd inclusion, since nobody could mistake it for a comet.
Q 03By what popular name, referring to a family, are the Pleiades also known?
The Seven Sisters
Their myths worldwide almost always explain why only six can easily be seen.
Q 04Roughly how far from Earth are the Pleiades?
About 444 light-years
That is about 136 parsecs, and it makes them one of the nearest star clusters to Earth.
Q 05About how many stars does the Pleiades cluster contain?
Over 1,000
Only the brightest six or seven are easily visible to the naked eye, though sharp-eyed observers can see up to 14.
Q 06What colour are the hot, luminous stars that dominate the Pleiades?
Blue
They are young B-type stars formed within the last 100 million years.
Q 07What are the reflection nebulae around the brightest Pleiades thought to be?
An unrelated dust cloud the stars are passing through
Rather than leftover birth material, the dust is an unrelated cloud moving at about 18 km/s relative to the cluster's stars.
Q 08What is NGC 1435, the reflection cloud around one of the Pleiades, called?
The Merope Nebula
NGC 1432 is the cluster's other catalogued nebula, an HII region.
Q 09For roughly how much longer are the Pleiades expected to survive as a cluster?
About 250 million years
Gravitational interactions with the galactic neighbourhood will eventually pull it apart.
Q 10Which famous stellar nursery did the Pleiades probably once resemble, according to computer simulations?
The Orion Nebula
The cluster is now slowly drifting towards the feet of Orion.
Q 11Together with which nearby open cluster do the Pleiades form the "Golden Gate of the Ecliptic"?
The Hyades
In Greek myth the Hyades were the Pleiades' sisters, also daughters of Atlas.
Q 12The name Pleiades probably derives from a Greek verb meaning what?
To sail
Their heliacal rising marked the start of the Mediterranean sailing season, and the myth of mother Pleione came later.
Q 13Around what year did the Pleiades mark the vernal equinox point?
2330 BC
That is why Babylonian star lists put MUL.MUL, "the stars", at the head of the ecliptic.
Q 21Where is the 8.2-metre Japanese flagship telescope named after the cluster located?
Mauna Kea, Hawaii
It had the largest monolithic primary mirror in the world from 1998 to 2005.
Q 22What do the Māori call the Pleiades?
Matariki
Their first rising in late June or early July marks the Māori new year.
Q 23In which year did New Zealand first observe the Māori new year as an official public holiday?
2022
The celebration had declined in the 20th century before a revival that began in the early 1990s.
According to Māori tradition, whose eyes are the stars of the Pleiades?
Q 14Which Bronze Age artefact found in Germany carries the earliest known depiction of the Pleiades?
The Nebra sky disc
Dated to about 1600 BC, it shows the cluster between the Sun and the Moon and was found by looters in 1999.
Q 15What did the Babylonian name for the Pleiades, MUL.MUL, literally mean?
Star star
On cylinder seals of the first millennium BC the cluster appears as seven dots.
Q 16Under what name are the Pleiades known in Hinduism, associated with the war god Kartikeya?
Krittika
They were the first nakshatra, or lunar station, in the Atharvaveda; the name means "the Cuttings".
Q 17How many times are the Pleiades mentioned in the Bible, under the Hebrew name Kimah?
Three
Each passage, in Amos and Job, also mentions Orion; God asks Job whether he can bind the Pleiades' chains.
Q 18What Arabic name for the Pleiades was so famous that pre-Islamic Arabs often just said 'the Star'?
al-Thurayya
The name lives on in the Thuraya satellite phone system of the United Arab Emirates.
Q 19What is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, also used by a car maker?
Subaru
It comes from a verb meaning "to cluster together", and the eighth-century Kojiki called the group Mutsuraboshi, six stars.
Q 20How many stars appear in the logo of the car maker named after the cluster?
Six
They stand for the five companies that merged to form the firm plus the whole, echoing the six visible sisters.
The wind god Tāwhirimātea's
Enraged at his parents' separation, he plucked out his own eyes and flung them into the sky.
Q 25Who was the first astronomer to view the Pleiades through a telescope?
Galileo Galilei
His sketch of 36 stars appeared in Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610.
Q 26How many Pleiades stars did Galileo show in his 1610 sketch in Sidereus Nuncius?
36
The telescope revealed many stars too dim for the naked eye.
Q 27Which English natural philosopher put a chance alignment of the Pleiades at 1 in 500,000 in 1767?
John Michell
He concluded that the Pleiades and other clusters must be physically related groups.
Q 28Which satellite produced a controversially short distance of only 118 parsecs to the Pleiades?
Hipparcos
Later Hubble, VLBI and Gaia measurements settled on about 136 parsecs, and the Hipparcos figure is now considered an error.
Q 29What distance to the Pleiades does the Gaia Data Release 3 give?
135.74 pc
That is with an uncertainty of just 0.10 parsecs.
Q 30What is the estimated total mass of the Pleiades cluster?
About 800 solar masses
Fainter, redder stars dominate the mass even though blue giants dominate the light.