From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 27114
Date: 2003-11-13
----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 11:03 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: All of creation in Six and Seven
> One star of the Pleiades is imperfect, since it blew up some thousand
> years back, reducing the perfect seven stars of that constellation to
> an imperfect six.
I don't think that's correct. Some people see the six brightest stars,
others, sharper-sighted can see seven (there are actually many more of them:
http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/pleiades-t.html
)
The whole cluster is very young in astronomical terms, and as far as I know
none of the Pleiades has exploded since its birth. The so-called Merope
Nebula is a wisp of interstellar gas through which the cluster happens to be
passing, genetically unrelated to the stars. On the other hand, the
brightness of some of the Pleiades (e.g. Pleione) varies considerably over
the years.
Piotr