Most everyone on Earth can pick out a few basic star clusters, constellations or asterisms, despite differences in language, culture or even level of education. Orion’s belt is probably the most common of these, with the three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka forming a near perfect line in our Northern Hemisphere winter, but visible from latitudes spanning most of our planet. Similarly recognizable at this time of year is the Pleiades star cluster.
Rising in the east about an hour before Orion, we know the Pleiades as the Seven Sisters of Greek mythology, and the tight grouping of six bright blue stars has been an easy waypoint for seafarers, farmers, fisherman, calendar makers and sages for thousands of years.
Let’s back up to that: seven sisters, yet only six bright stars? Didn’t the Ancient Greeks discover all sorts of advanced mathematics? Certainly, they knew the difference between six and seven!
It turns out that the Greeks weren’t alone in this conundrum.
Danish folklore tells of six brothers who rescue a kidnapped princess who was torn between which brother she liked best, so God offered all seven to live forever together in the heavens.
In Ukraine the legend includes seven maids who so beautifully danced and sang to honor their gods that on their deaths they were brought to the stars to continue dancing for eternity.
The Nebra Sky Disc was found by metal detectorists in Germany in 1999, dated to around 1600BC, and is recognized as the oldest depiction of astronomical phenomena, including a grouping of seven stars believed to represent the Pleiades.
Jumping continents, the Cherokee warn rambunctious children to behave with the story of the Seven Boys, six of whom flew off to heaven while his mother pulled one back down to Earth, becoming the first pine tree.
Stretching even further across vast oceans and time, the aboriginal peoples of Australia have various regional stories of the Pleiades, including seven sisters who first learned to make fire and, separately, seven sisters who fled from the unwanted attention of a man chasing them. This is strikingly similar to the Greek story of Orion the Hunter chasing the daughters of Pleione.
It wasn’t till Galileo first gazed at the cluster though his rudimentary telescope in 1610 that he observed 36 stars in this grouping, and we now count more than 1,000 stars in this stellar nursery. So how did all of these ancient cultures, separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years, all include seven stars in their stories, while only able to see six with the naked eye?
Computer modeling of this volatile region of space shows that while some stars have moved farther apart in the relatively short 100 million years since their cosmic birth, gravity has pulled others closer together. Nearly 100,000 years ago the star Pleione would have been discernible as a separate, seventh star from its current position close to Atlas, which we see today as a double star through our binoculars and telescopes. As such, archeoastronomers have posited the theory that these stories may well predate any object, culture or language we know of, and that the genesis of the seven stars may have traveled across the globe with our earliest ancestors 100 millennia ago.
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.
