This year will be a treat for fans of gawping at space. As well as JWST casually spewing out images of , North America has an especially spectacular solar eclipse to look forward to, given that it may .
While you wait for that, space still has plenty to offer. This week, the will be turning their telescopes towards the Moon, live streaming as our satellite meets the Pleiades in the night sky. The Pleiades, also known as the , is a star cluster in the constellation Taurus, made up of over . The brightest of the stars are which formed around 100 million years ago.
The star cluster is referred to as the Seven Sisters by a surprising number of cultures around the world, which tell similar stories of why there are only six particularly bright stars in the sky, with the seventh having died in the Indigenous Australian myth, and gone into hiding in the Greek myth.
One intriguing explanation given for this by is that 100,000 years ago, a seventh star – Pleione – would have been visible, but it is now too close to Atlas and so they look like a single star to the naked eye. Given the lack of contact between Indigenous Australians and the rest of the world for 50,000 years, the team proposed that the myth was told a very long time ago indeed.
“We believe this movement of the stars can help to explain two puzzles: the similarity of Greek and Aboriginal stories about these stars, and the fact so many cultures call the cluster ‘seven sisters’ even though we only see six stars today,” the team wrote in a piece for .
“Is it possible the stories of the Seven Sisters and Orion are so old our ancestors were telling these stories to each other around campfires in Africa, 100,000 years ago? Could this be the oldest story in the world?”
During the live stream, of course, the stars will be no closer to Earth than usual, and will merely be positioned 1 degree away from the quarter moon on February 16. The event will be live streamed, beginning at 20:30 UTC on the website.