If you have not had the chance to check out the stars this winter, be sure to do so. The brightest stars in the sky all year long are on full display up there, but they will not be around much longer. As our little ball of rock careens around the solar system, the winter constellations will slowly fade into the sunset glare.
High up in the south, Orion the Hunter takes the center stage. He is the most familiar grouping of stars in the sky so if you do not recognize him, you had better get out a star chart. Ancient people before the Greeks thought of Orion as a giant, and many of his stars reflect his anatomy with their names.
Betelgeuse is in the upper left corner; its name means shoulder or even armpit of the giant. Rigel, in the lower right corner, is the foot of the giant. Saiph, in the lower left corner, means knee of the giant.
In the middle of the large rectangle of the constellation, three bright, evenly placed stars make up Orion’s famous belt. There is really nothing else in the sky like it. Their names mean the belt, pearls on a string and the pearl.
All of the stars I have mentioned are appropriately giant stars, far larger and brighter than our own modest star, the sun. They shine tens of thousands and some even hundreds of thousands times brighter than our sun. Burning the candle at both ends, so to speak, they are gobbling up their fuel of hydrogen like there was no tomorrow.
These stars will live lives of only a few millions years before exploding in supernova explosions, one of the most violent events in the universe. In contrast, our sun is about half way through a 10 billion year life span.
Keep looking
Line up the three stars in Orion’s Belt and point to the left to the very bright star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Known as the Dog Star, it is in the constellation portraying one of Orion’s hunting dogs. It is not a particularly bright star, shining at about 25 times the brightness of our sun. It just happens to be close to us, not quite our next door neighbor, but just down the block, so to speak. Rigel, at the bottom of Orion, is 100 times farther away. Do not be fooled into thinking that Elon Musk will be offering trips there in your lifetime. Our fastest rocket ships would take 150,000 years to make the journey to Sirius.
To the right of Orion, Aldebaran shines with a reddish glow. Farther right, the Pleiades star cluster glimmers like jewels tossed on black velvet. Farther right, a dimmer and much subdued Mars gleams with only a hint of its glory from just a few months ago.
Why is Mars getting dimmer? The earth in its orbit around the sun is pulling away from it at almost 67,000 miles per hour leaving the red planet in our dust. Turn around and look into the northeast. The Big Dipper is standing upright on its handle, a sure sign of spring. Follow the arc of that handle downwards and to the right to the bright star Arcturus shining low in the east. That star, a close neighbor of ours, is possibly an interloper from another galaxy which is amazingly flying by us right now. Catch it while you can. In another 100,000 years or so it will have moved on to another part of our galaxy.
Enjoy the last frosty nights of winter and all the twinkling stars it has to offer.
