View Scorpion’s sting from a safe distance

  • By Mike Lynch
  • Thursday, July 17, 2014 9:33am
  • Life

I have good news and bad news about the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion. The good news is that it’s one of the few constellations that resembles what it’s supposed to be in our Everett sky. The bad news is that around here we have a tough time seeing the great celestial scorpion because it’s a low rider in the southern sky. After twilight, Scorpius is at its highest point in the southern sky, barely above the horizon. If you have any tree line above the southern horizon you probably won’t see the entire stinger. Look in a dark enough sky and you’ll see Scorpius, from the three stars in a nearly vertical row on the right that make up his head, to the big curve of bright-to-moderate stars on the left that outline his tail and stinger. The brightest star in Scorpius is the brick red star Antares at the heart of the beast. Antares is derived from the Greek and means “rival of Mars” since it has the same ruddy tone as the planet Mars. You can easily confuse Mars and Antares if you’re new to stargazing. Mars is not far away from Antares, shining very brightly in the low southwestern sky.

There’s no confusion between Mars and Antares when it comes to size. Mars is only about 4,000 miles across, a far celestial cry from the over 600 million-mile diameter of Antares. That’s over 700 times the diameter of our sun. If we replaced the sun as the center of our solar system with Antares, the outer edge of our new sun would extend beyond the orbit of Mars.

Antares is what’s known as a red supergiant star near the end of its life. All stars fuse hydrogen to helium atoms in their cores, but eventually they run out of hydrogen and start fusing helium into carbon and oxygen. That causes the star to swell out, turning the color to red as the expanded stellar surface cools off. This will happen to our sun in about five billion years, although it won’t grow as large since it was born a much smaller star than the original Antares.

Take a small telescope or a good pair of binoculars and check out Antares’ deep ruddy hue. It can turn into quite a light show, often flashing with many colors due to the interference from the Earth’s atmosphere.

See if you can spot a “fuzzy” star just to its right, about a half degree or one moon-length away. That star is better known as Messier Object 4. It’s a globular cluster made up of hundreds of thousands of very old stars over 12 billion years old, shining away at a distance of more than 42,000 trillion miles away!

There are many stories in mythology about how Scorpius wound up as a constellation. The one I like is the Greek myth of Zeus dispatching a giant Scorpion to kill the mighty hunter Orion in an attempt to end an affair he was having with Zeus’ daughter Diana. Zeus sent the scorpion to kill Orion, who fought the scorpion but eventually was stung and died instantly.

Diana discovered the body of her dead boyfriend and lifted Orion’s body to the sky. She saw the giant scorpion fleeing from the scene. She flung it up into the opposite end of the sky, and that’s why Orion and Scorpius are never seen in the sky at the same time.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist.

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