Unchanged for eons. The Pleiades or the 7 sisters look the same today as they did for the first humans that walked the earth 1.9 million years ago. Without doubt the most beautiful and most recognisable of all the objects we can see in the night sky, this cluster of stars shine and reflects a hypnotic blue light onto dust that the stars are passing through. There is even a bronze age 1600bc artifact called the Nebra sky disk that is believed to depict the cluster. Located at a distance of around 400 light years. This means the light we see today left at the time Galileo Galilei made his first observations with the first telescope.
Nebra Sky Disk image first published Dec 2006 Copyright Dbachmann
Galileo's drawings of the Pleiades
star cluster from Sidereus Nuncius. Image courtesy of the History of Science Collections,
University of Oklahoma Libraries.
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