Spring brings with it the pollinators that make our world possible, and the Beehive Cluster shines prominent in the sky this month. You may be able to spot these industrious little lights ‘buzzing’ around Mars on the night of June 2, when the Red Planet will be centrally located in this open cluster.
As one of the most clearly crimson objects in the night sky, Mars is easy to spot and should help you locate the Beehive Cluster above the southwestern horizon just after dusk. On many nights, and from dark skies, it’s easy to locate with the naked eye, as astronomers and observers have done for millennia.
A handful of these stars have always been visible to the eye, but when Galileo turned his telescope on the cluster in 1609 as one of his first observations, he was able to discern 40 individual stars. Modern observations have catalogued over 1,000 stars that are gravitationally linked in this area of space, within a radius of about twelve light-years, around 30% of them like our sun.
Just as bees are busily spreading life around our planet, the stars of the Beehive Cluster are busy forming new planets of their own. In 2012 researchers using the Kepler Space Telescope announced the discoveries of two planets orbiting separate stars in the cluster. Known as ‘hot Jupiters,’ these planets are among the largest gas giants, orbiting much closer to their host stars, making them — you guessed it — much hotter. While this is not in itself a unique discovery in this age of planets, what’s unique is that the stars they orbit are similar to our own in size and brightness. From our limited observations since the first exoplanet discovery in 1992 we’ve found 9,432 exoplanets, fewer than 5% of them being rocky, earthlike bodies, and K-type orange dwarf stars as the most common type to host planets. By comparison, our sun is a G-type yellow dwarf, slightly larger and hotter.
If you missed the conjunction of Mars and the Beehive Cluster on June 2, you can witness an earthlike planet join the cluster on the nights of June 12 and 13. Earth’s celestial twin, Venus, will be making a close approach to the cluster as it traverses the ecliptic. Though separated by millions of miles of empty space, both these wanderers appear to move along the same cosmic road, as determined by our solar system’s formation out of a disk of gas and dust, and few planets have strayed more than a few degrees from this original stellar plane.
If you would like to learn more about the sky, telescopes, or socialize with other amateur astronomers, visit us at prescottastronomyclub.org or Facebook @PrescottAstronomyClub to find the next star party, Star Talk, or event.
Adam England is the owner of Manzanita Financial and moonlights as an amateur astronomer, writer, and interplanetary conquest consultant. Follow his rants and exploits on Twitter @AZSalesman or at Facebook.com/insuredbyadam.
