Moon, Mars, and Beehive

The Moon and Mars are flirting with danger – they’re sneaking up on the Beehive star cluster, in the constellation Cancer. The cluster doesn’t have much of a “sting,” though – it’s about 600 light-years away.

The Beehive contains about a thousand stars, which are maybe 700 million years old – fairly young in astronomical terms. That means the Beehive maintains a mixture of stars of different masses.

Its heaviest stars have burned out, leaving only their dead cores. About two-thirds of the remaining stars are red dwarfs – cool, faint embers only a fraction of the mass of the Sun. About a third are similar to the Sun. And about two percent are heavier than the Sun. Because more-massive stars burn through their nuclear fuel more quickly, those stars will expire first.

The cluster’s brightest star is Epsilon Cancri. Although it looks like a single point of light, instruments reveal that it consists of at least three stars. All three are more than twice as massive as the Sun, so they’re nearing the end of the prime phase of life. Soon, they’ll puff up to giant proportions. After that, they’ll blow away their outer layers, exposing their dead cores – and the Beehive will lose some of its luster.

The Beehive is close to the lower left of the Moon at nightfall, and is an easy target for binoculars. Mars looks like an orange star below the Moon. It’ll slip past the cluster over the next couple of days.

Script by Damond Benningfield