How many stars in m44

And 2, years ago, it was the Praesepe, the Latin word for manger. Then, not quite one-fifth of the way across the sky to the east, locate Regulus, the brightest star in Leo the Lion. M44 lies roughly midway between them. Although the Beehive Cluster shines at 3rd magnitude, it measures more than a degree across.

That means its light spreads out over an area equal to 5. In such illustrious company, M50 might feel a bit intimidated. At magnitude 5. The brightest glows at 8th magnitude, and many more 8th- to 10th-magnitude stars form curving chains within the cluster. Most observers recognize it as a single deep-sky wonder. Several dozen stars — a half dozen brighter than 8th magnitude — lie within an oval region elongated northwest to southeast.

To best observe the Rosette Nebula, use a inch or larger telescope and an eyepiece that gives a magnification of 50x. A nebulous wall with a well-defined border forms its northern edge.

Although astronomers classify the Rosette as an emission nebula, your eye will also notice the many small dark nebulae superimposed on the bright background. Expand your observing at Astronomy. This tool will help you locate this week's targets. The Sky this Week Get a daily digest of celestial events coming soon to a sky near you.

Observing Talk After you listen to the podcast and try to find the objects, be sure to share your observing experience with us by leaving a comment at the blog or in the Reader Forums. Both clusters also contain red giants and white dwarfs, which represent later stages of stellar evolution, along with main sequence stars of spectral classes A, F, G, K, and M.

Brown dwarfs, however, are extremely rare in this cluster, probably because they have been lost by tidal stripping from the halo. Messier 44 is home to 5 red giant stars and a handful of white dwarf stars.

But, M44 also contains one peculiar blue star. Among its members, there is the eclipsing binary TX Cancri, the metal line star Epsilon Cancri, and several Delta Scuti variables of magnitudes , in an early post-main-sequence state.

As Sergei M. Andrievsky indicated in a study :. Two stars exhibit a remarkable barium overabundance. The chemical composition of their atmospheres is typical for Am stars. One star of our sample does not share such uniform elemental distribution, being generally deficient in metals.

But is there more hiding in there? Perhaps the kind of stuff that could eventually make planets? According to a study done by A. However, follow-up investigations in have revealed that the Pr system in fact consists of two planets, the second planet having the designation Prc. Before this rivalry, though, the ancient Greeks and Romans saw in the cluster a manger from which the two donkeys that carried Dionysos and Silenus into battle against the Titans, are feeding. The two donkeys are represented by the adjacent stars Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis.

Prior to this, Hipparchus c. To ancient Chinese astrologers, M44 was a part of [the] Ghost, which was the 23rd lunar mansion. Home About. M44 and M67 lie almost in the same line of sight, but M67 is about five times more distant from Earth. The Beehive Cluster has been known since ancient times. Hipparchus included the object in the earliest known star catalogue around BC. Only four of these objects turned out to really be nebulae. Messier The Beehive Cluster. Image: Eclipse.

The Greeks knew the cluster as Phatne, which was translated into Latin as Praesepe. In mythology, these were the donkeys on which Dionysus and Silenius rode into battle when the Olympian gods were at war with the Titans. To commemorate the victory, the donkeys were placed in the sky along with Phatne.

M44 was also one of the first deep sky objects that Galileo observed with his telescope, in The inclusion of the cluster has been noted as curious because Messier mostly included objects that were fainter and more easily confused with comets. Praesepe, the Pleiades cluster in Taurus , and the Orion Nebula Messier 42 in Orion are not likely to be confused for different kinds of objects as they are all quite easy to observe.

It is possible that Messier simply wanted to have a more comprehensive catalogue of deep sky objects and added some well-known objects to the list. Praesepe shares a number of similarities with the Hyades , the famous open star cluster in Taurus constellation.

These include age and proper motion, which indicates that the two clusters may share a similar origin and may have been formed in the same molecular cloud. Both the Beehive Cluster and the Hyades contain white dwarfs and red giants, stars that are in the later stages of their life cycle, along with class A, F, G, K, and M-class main sequence stars.