Spring also 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 2nd, when the Red Planet will be centrally located among this open cluster. Mars is easy to spot, being one of the most crimson objects in the night sky and should help you locate the beehive cluster above the Southwestern horizon just after dusk. On many nights, and from dark skies, it is easy to locate with the naked eye, as astronomers and observers have done for millennia. A handful of stars have always been visible to the eye; however, Galileo turned his telescope to the cluster in 1609 as one of his first observations and was able to discern 40 individual stars. Modern observations have catalogued over 1000 stars that are gravitationally linked in this area of space with a radius of about 12 light years, with around 30% of the stars being Sun-like.
Just as our bees are busy spreading life around our planet, the stars in the Beehive Cluster too are busy forming new planets of their own. In 2012 researchers using the Kepler Space Telescope announced that two planets had been discovered orbiting two separate stars in the cluster. Known as “Hot Jupiters” these planets are some of the largest gas giants, though they orbit much closer to their host star, making them – you guessed it – much hotter. While this is not in itself a unique discovery in this age of planets, what is unique is that both of the stars they orbit are similar in size and brightness to our own star. From our limited observations since the first exoplanet discovery in 1992 we have found 9432 exoplanets, with less than 5% being rocky, earth like bodies, and K type “orange dwarf” stars being the most common type of star to host a planet. By comparison, our Sun is a G type yellow dwarf, being slightly larger and hotter.
If you missed the conjunction of Mars and the Beehive Cluster on June 2nd, you could witness an earth-like planet join the cluster on the nights of June 12th and 13th. 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 of 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.
The Backyard Astronomer 