Let’s take a drive. No car needed. No tolls. Leave your wallet behind. Let’s plan it for around March 10, but if you’re busy and not available, you can go it alone for another week or so before a full moon lights up the sky. And, if need be, you can even wait until the first week of April—when the sky is dark once again—to go on this spin.
With just a glance, let’s drive just to the west and a little “above” the constellation Orion. That is where we find a group of stars in the shape of the letter “V.” The giant red star, Aldebaran, shines distinctly within the “V” and marks the eye of Taurus, the Bull. All those points of light around Aldebaran are part of an open star cluster called the Hyades.
A star cluster is a group of stars that were formed at the same time and have been gravitationally bound together through time. Open clusters contain fewer members than the much denser, and older, globular clusters.
The Hyades is about 600 million years old and, at 153 light years away, it is the closest open cluster to Earth. In comparison, the beautiful Pleiades, another open cluster, is 440 light years away. While the V-shaped group seems to occupy a rather small piece of the sky, from end to end it spans ten light years, or about 58 trillion miles.
Interestingly, Aldebaran is not part of the family. It is simply in our line of sight. Indeed, it’s hard to miss the mighty red giant. After all, it is approximately 44 times bigger than the sun and one of the brightest stars in the night sky. For me, though, it is also a reminder that shiny objects, if we allow them, can pull us away from the bigger picture.
In space, with such vast distances, it’s easy to see how objects seem close together even when they are light years apart. Knowing this, we can zero in on Aldebaran while realizing that something even more extraordinary lies beyond it: hundreds of stars that have been entangled for hundreds of millions of years.
With amazing instrumentation, we can observe black holes at the heart of blazing quasars billions of light years away that were just waiting to be discovered once we looked past the stars in our own galaxy. For all who look at the sky, there is the knowledge that there’s a whole lot more than what is revealed to us through light-polluted skies.
Space seems to always provide a lesson. Shiny objects like Aldebaran deserve our attention, but shouldn’t detract us, shouldn’t make us forget that there is much more to see and to understand. There are times to narrow one’s focus but, often, it’s the broader, wider view that serves us best.
Today, there are so many diversions to deal with, so many “breaking news” pieces that pull our gaze away from such existential issues like climate change. Some are designed to do just that, to be shiny objects that take advantage of our natural inclination to learn more about something new, something that makes us forget—if only for a short time—about the crises that rage everywhere.
So, this month, as I take that drive to Aldebaran and then further out to the Hyades, I’ll find a place to put aside the shiny objects, to push back against those that want me to think that some mundane matter, some manufactured event, or some piece of misinformation is somehow more important than national or global concerns that have existed for decades, or even longer.
We’re being bombarded with shiny objects. None match Aldebaran. None can hide the magnificence of the Hyades.
Harold Meckler can be contacted at glusk@proton.me