Welcome to Learn the Sky, your online resource for learning about the stars and constellations. Welcome! My name is Janine and in this video we're going to review the star cluster known as the Pleiades, sometimes called the seven sisters stars.
I love this group of stars because it's so easy to point out in the sky. If you happen to have magnification such as a pair of binoculars or a telescope it's really gorgeous to view. Scientist today call this Messier 45, but it really has a ton of different names depending upon the culture that you're looking at.
It was really, really helpful to predict different weather patterns and seasonal patterns over the course of time for many different cultures. It's located in the constellation known as Taurus the Bull. If you want to learn more about how to find Taurus in the sky, be sure to go see that detailed video.
This, right here, is a picture of Taurus. The thing that probably stands out to you is the Pleiades Star Cluster. In fact, many people call this the Little Dipper because it does resemble the pattern of the asterisms known as the Big Dipper.
Sometimes they just call it the Little Dipper because it's like a tiny miniaturized version of the Dippers because it does have that shape to it. But really this is its own group of stars that were all born together and they are traveling together through space as well. So in this video we're going to explore how to find it- make sure that you can recognize it in different photos.
So when you do go outside to observe it in the sky, you can recognize it. Then we're going to take a closer look at the brighter stars that are in this star cluster and we're gonna look at the nine brightest stars. Keep in mind that there's really over a thousand stars in this star cluster.
So let's get started. The Pleiades Star Cluster is a very famous one and it has been viewed by humans for thousands of years and the earliest records we see of it date back to 17 500 years ago there's records of this in the lascal caves in france and it's also located next to another star cluster known as the heidi's star cluster which makes up the face of taurus aldebaran the brightest star antares is not a part of heidi's but this is a star cluster that's about 150 light years away from earth so it's very well studied and there are so many legends and names of this star cluster ancient mesopotamians egyptians chinese greek roman polynesians and so many more cultures have identified this tiny little group of stars and it has lots of names the seven sisters the japanese call it subaru makalii for the hawaiians matariki for new zealanders and so on and so forth so there are so many names and one of the really interesting things i just recently learned is that it's part of an asterism called the golden gate of the ecliptic which is both the heidi's and the pleiades and the reason this is called the golden gate is because the planets moon and sun pass through this particular area of the sky because taurus is a zodiacal constellation that means that the sun moon and planets all pass through it so if we take a look at this star map you can see the ecliptic line right here and this is where the pleiades are and if we were to zoom in here a little bit you can see that it's also called m45 and it's located next to the heidi's so if we were to point out what this actually looks like i love this picture and i tilted it so it mirrors what it looks like in the sky so here are the pleiades and then here is where the heidi's are so if we zoom up a little bit right here this is the asterism known as the golden gate of the ecliptic and i eventually will have a video on this topic because it's just so interesting to me and it's also a fairly recent uh discovery of mine so i'll take me time so to research it but here i found this picture which shows you both the pleiades and the heidi's right here and you can see the moon you can see jupiter and venus right here and you can see that in this direction is where they are they're not quite in the golden gate of the ecliptic but they're nearby and i thought this photo really just demonstrates that why it is called the golden gate of the ecliptic since these objects pass through the pleiades is classified as an open star cluster and it's estimated to be about 444 light years away there are two different types of star clusters open star clusters and globular clusters and if you want to learn more about that topic be sure to go see that video so we're going to go through these pictures really quickly and i just want you to spot the pleiades because if you can find them then you can start to find the other constellations that surround it so here we have a picture can you find the pleiades it's not the brightest thing in this photo but it definitely stands out here's where the pleiades are this is the moon traveling through it and then here i actually i would probably say this is a planet if this were a moon i think it would be really difficult to capture all of these bright stars even though it's a long exposure photograph and then right here is orion you can use the belt stars of orion to guide you towards taurus here's another photo as you look at the night sky are you able to find taurus are you able to find the pleiades i can see it right here you can use orion the belt stars to aim you towards taurus and then there's that little group and you can kind of see how it does look like a little dipper here's another gorgeous photo i have of the pleiades with a comet going through and it has been observed from the international space station as well so are you able to see the pleiades right here i just think this is such a gorgeous shot and in fact i have another one of them as well so as you're looking at the night portion of the sky hopefully you're starting to recognize it in the next portion of this video we're going to look at the brighter stars of this star cluster but keep in mind that scientists have identified over a thousand stars that are in this group this star cluster group but we're only going to really look at the brighter ones how gorgeous is this photo by the way i just love it so let's go ahead and get started looking at the stars going from brightest to dimmest in terms of the ones that we can visually see in the sky so first we have alcioni that's the brightest the second brightest is atlas then there's electra and in fact in mythology terms uh atlas was the father of the seven sisters and then we have elektra then maya merope taguetta pleoni and that was the mother of the seven sisters celino is the next one and steropy so those are the stars that we are going to talk about it's not the seven sisters there's actually nine because it's the whole family here but these are the brighter stars in this group so let's dive in a little bit deeper and learn about these in greater detail so alcione is a b-class blue star in fact all of these stars are b cats blue stars and they all formed together it's estimated that they're 100 million years old and this one is a multi-star system i say multi-star because i couldn't nail down how many stars are actually a part of this group i found some of the literature a little confusing on that but it's estimated to be 440 light years away but plus or minus 50 or so light years in fact all of these distances have plus or minus quite a few light years so you're going to see a range and the distances are also different depending upon the sources that you consult at least that's what i found during my research our next brightest star is atlas again a b-class blue star and it's proposed to be a binary star system but i couldn't confirm that perhaps with further study it will be confirmed in the future and in the mythology stories atlas was the daughter of the seven sisters next we have elektra this is the third brightest star in this star cluster and also a b-class blue star and what this what that even means is that these stars are much bigger than the sun and they're much hotter so they burn blue a different color and this star is known for its fast rotation so when stars spin and have a really really fast rotation what we observe is that they're flattened at the poles and then stretched at the equator so this one has a star rotation of about one and three quarter days so that is really really fast our own sun rotates about between 25 to 35 days and the rotation is different at the equator than it is at the poles because it's made of gas it's not solid so it rotates unevenly our next star the fourth brightest star is known as maya and this is a another b-class blue star and it's called a chemically peculiar star in the literature and what that even means is that there's an unusual abundance of certain types of metals so in this case maya tends to be helium weak but it's very high in manganese and it's known for its reflection nebula that surrounds it which is called the maya nebula and if we zoom in here that's what the maya nebula looks like it's very very beautiful the light is reflected off these gases that are here moving forward we have merope this is a b-class blue star i first heard of this name ropey in when i was reading harry potter and i noticed with harry potter that many of some of the names that she chooses are chosen after names of stars or constellations in the sky but this one is interesting because it's surrounded by the murobi nebula which we are going to zoom in here right there is where it looks like and it's really really gorgeous and the hubble telescope has really zoomed in on this particular area and has shown us some gorgeous features in this particular nebula our next star is called taguetta and again b-class blue star larger and hotter and a different color than our own sun and this is estimated to be a double star system next we have pleoni i hope i'm saying that correctly i get nervous with star star name pronunciations but this one is a binary star and in greek mythology this was the um this was the mother of the seven sisters and this also has a really fast rotation at 11.
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