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SCORPIUS
The Scorpion
Scorpius - Alexander Jamieson - 1822
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One of the largest and most impressive constellations in the sky, Scorpius actually looks very much like a scorpion, and has been recognized as such since the beginning of recorded history. In Greek mythology, the constellation represents the scorpion sent by Apollo to kill Orion, to stop him from making advances towards his sister, Diana. It is said that when Zeus (Jupiter) put the members of the Orion Story in the heavens, he made sure to place the scorpion in the opposite side of the sky from the others, so that Orion would be safe from its lethal sting. As a result, Orion and his companions are winter constellations (in the northern hemisphere), while Scorpius graces the sky during the summer months.
The alpha star, and the brightest star in Scorpius is Antares, which is Greek for rival of Mars, because of its deep red colour. The Romans referred to the star as Cor Scorpionis, the heart of the scorpion. Antares is a red giant star, and it is truly enormous with a diameter 700 times larger than our Sun. At a distance of 520 light years, and a magnitude of 0.92, Antares is the fifteenth brightest star in the sky.
The beta star is Graffias, sometimes known as Akrab. Graffias comes from the ancient Greek for crab, with which scorpions were closely associated. The star is 600 light years away, and shines with a magnitude of 2.55.
The gamma star is Dschubba, from the Arabic for forehead or front. It is 590 light years away, with a magnitude of 2.34.
Theta Scorpionis is the star Sargas, an ancient Babylonian name. With a magnitude of 1.87, the star is 650 light years away.
Lamda Scorpionis is the star Shaula, from the Arabic for sting. It is 310 light years away, and shines with a magnitude of 1.62.
The other star of the close pair that form the scorpion's stinger is Lesuth, from another Arabic word for the sting. At a distance of 540 light years, it has a magnitude of 2.71.
The last of the named stars in Scorpius is Al Niyat, which means the shield of the heart. It is 900 light years away, with a magnitude of 2.86.
Since most of the constellation lies within the rich star fields of the Milky way, Scorpius is a very busy place, full of star clusters and nebulae. M80 (NGC 6093) is one of the densest of the 147 known globular star clusters in our galaxy. It is 28,000 light years away and contains hundreds of thousands of stars. With a magnitude of 7.87, it is a good target for a small telescope.
M4 is another bright globular cluster, with a magnitude of 7.12, and easy to find in a backyard telescope. At a distance of 7,200 light years, it is the closest known globular cluster in our galaxy. It is also one of the smallest and sparsest known globular cluster. The Hubble Space Telescope looked deep into the interior of M4, and found white dwarf stars that were determined to be 13 billion years old. These are the oldest stars so far discovered, and since it would have taken at least a billion years for the first stars to form after the big bang, this discovery confirms the age of the Universe to be at least 14 billion years.
One of the many nebulae in Scorpius is NGC 6334, known as The Cat's Paw Nebula. Looking like a giant paw print in the sky, NGC 6334 is a vast cloud of mostly hydrogen gas (accounting for its red color) 50 light years across, where stars are being born. It is 5,500 light years away.
NGC 6302 is a different kind of nebula. Known as the Butterfly Nebula, it is not where stars are being born, but rather where a star is dying. At the heart of this nebula is the remnant of a star about five times the size of out Sun, hidden behind its own emissions. When its supply of fuel ran out, the star grew to a red giant, and then started shedding its outer layers. The nebula is about two light years across, and about 3,800 light years away.
So far there are thirteen stars in Scorpius that have been found to support planetary systems, but they are all beyond the limits of naked eye visibility, and the planets are all gas giants. The one exception to this is a planet discovered through a technique known as gravitational microlensing, first proposed by Albert Einstein, where the gravity of a close star acts as a lens to temporarily greatly magnify the light of a much more distant star. In this case the star is 20,000 light years away and normally not visible at all, but the microlensing technique was able to magnify its light to such a degree it was possible to detect the minute fluctuations caused by closely orbiting planet only five times the size of Earth.
The photo of Scorpius below was taken at the Mexican Skies Observatory, Santa Elena, Oaxaca, Mexico, when the planet Jupiter was visiting the constellation. It is best viewed in a dark room.
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