Hacker News Reader

Comment by sradman | Hacker News Reader

The Pleiades[1], also known as the Seven Sisters:

> It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth... and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.

Only six stars in the cluster are visible to the naked eye yet mythology from several ancient cultures share the idea that one of the seven “sisters" is hidden. The article The world’s oldest story?, originally published in TheConversation [2], states:

> The star Pleione... was a bit further away from Atlas in 100,000 BC, making it much easier to see.

These two stars now appear as one to the naked eye which the author proposes is the source of the hidden sister. This dates the story to 100 kya.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades

[2] https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom...

View on HN

Pleiades myth of the sisters come from Babylonian star catalogues: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_star_catalogues

[..] Babylonian astronomy collated earlier observations and divinations into sets of Babylonian star catalogues, during and after the Kassite rule over Babylonia. These star catalogues, written in cuneiform script, contained lists of constellations, individual stars, and planets. The constellations were probably collected from various other sources. The earliest catalogue, Three Stars Each, mentions stars of Akkad, of Amurru, of Elam and others. Various sources have theorized a Sumerian origin for these Babylonian constellations, but an Elamite origin has also been proposed.[..]

MUL is ‘three stars each’ and Pleiades was a cluster of stars which is ‘star of stars’. MUL.MUL. While star was depicted as three star(looks like three asterisks), Pleiades was represented as twice that.. two MULs or six stars.

This could be the reason why Pleiades was depicted as six stars even though the cluster has more than 6. Everything came to us from Sumerians tho’

On Sumerian constellations and star names:

http://members.westnet.com.au/gary-david-thompson/page11-4.h...

(I am still reading up on this. Haven’t completed..but pinning the link for ref here if anyone is interested)

this MUL ("three stars each") is surely the same as LU.GAL (King), DINGIR (God King), ANU (God of the Sky), AN (Sky), may be "sun" (IIDRC), etc.

It is one of the simpler, more obvious signs to draw. I wouldn't read much into it, although one might argue 6ix was a perfect fit if they could only see six (all most of the time).

It is explained further down in the wiki link :

[..] The first formal compendia of star lists are the Three Stars Each texts appearing from about the twelfth century BC. They represent a tripartite division of the heavens: the northern hemisphere belonged to Enlil, the equator belonged to Anu, and the southern hemisphere belonged to Enki. The boundaries were at 17 degrees North and South, so that the Sun spent exactly three consecutive months in each third. The enumeration of stars in the Three Stars Each catalogues includes 36 stars, three for each month. The determiner glyph for "constellation" or "star" in these lists is MUL (𒀯), originally a pictograph of three stars, as it were a triplet of AN signs; e. g. the Pleiades are referred to as a "star cluster" or "star of stars" in the lists, written as MUL.MUL, or MULMUL (𒀯𒀯).[..]

Further clarification: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUL.APIN

Also: sun is Ut or Utu in the epic of Gilgamesh in early Mesopotamian pantheon and later became Shamash in Sumerian/Babylonian

Wait a second, this doesn't sound right. According to your wikipedia link, the "Seven Sisters" constellation actually has 9 stars (named after the 7 sisters + parents). They are all visible with the naked eye.

The pleiades are a cluster, not a constellation.

From the WP article, under "Folklore and Mythology": "Some Greek astronomers considered them to be a distinct constellation, and they are mentioned by Hesiod's Works and Day..." (emphasis mine) So it would appear that they are both. FWIW, I have no idea if there is some astronomical technical jargon distinction between "constellation" and "cluster" that inspires your comment. But to this layman, your correction comes across as pedantix and unnecessary. The term "constellation" is clearly valid, here, as common everyday English is spoken.

There is a difference: a constellation is an area of the sky where some stars appear to belong together to form an image. Their actual distance may be vast.

A cluster on the other hand actually is a group of stars that formed from the same material and are thus very close to each other.

So there is a difference, but it's only a problem to interchange the terms the other way round.

Given that the Pleiades are, I believe, the only cluster in the sky large enough to act as a constellation, it's certainly not irrational to treat them as both.

A cluster could be treated as a constellation, but not vice versa.

This is exactly what the comment you are replying to said.

While I'm glad to be educated about the technical definition, it's still not even remotely relevant. The point is to whether the commonplace usage is worthy of correction... In this case, the correction adds nothing of value to the discussion. It struck me as a rude, self-aggrandizing gesture by an adult who should know better.

What is the difference?

A cluster is a collection of stars that are relatively close to each other in space, and bound together as a group by each other's gravity.

For example, the Pleiades has a core radius of only about 8 light years, and almost all of the 1,000+ stars in the cluster are within a volume of radius 43 light years.

A constellation is a two-dimensional region of the sky, more like counties or states on a map. The "celestial sphere" is divided into 88 constellations, which were chosen essentially arbitrarily, based largely on historically significant apparent groupings of stars.

Stars in a constellation superficially look to us as though they're near each other, but they may be very different distances from us, because we see the night sky as two-dimensional.

For example, one of the furthest stars visible to the naked eye is over 16,000 light years away, called V762 Cas in the constellation Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia also contains many other stars that are much closer to us, such as Eta Cassiopeiae which is just 19.4 light years away, practically a next-door neighbor.

idk about you but when i look at it I see 6. been trying to spot #7, no luck so far.

Do you live in the middle of nowhere, far away from any light pollution? If not, your inability to see more than 6 means nothing about what someone 2000 years ago would have been able to see.

Not the OP, but I have been observing the naked eye sky for decades from many different locations, including locations far from light pollution. In my best nights, when I was young, and far from light pollution, I could never make out more than 6 stars. And I'm able to spot Alcor very easily, even in suboptimal conditions.

no matter where I am, if i have the night sky, I check for Pleiades and take note of how many I can see. sometimes it's fewer than 6 depending on light pollution, but I have never been able to see 7, even on nights in deeply rural areas where the milky way is stunningly bright and clear.

I imagine hunter-gatherers, whose life depended on their eyesight acuity, would be find it easier to spot than most modern humans do.

Plus light pollution and air pollution. Maybe some other changes in the atmosphere. And very careful looking. You don't need lenses, just looking through a hole in a leaf could be helpful.

I think the problem is not that the star is faint but it's drowned in the light of other star nowadays

They also probably didn't Netflix subscriptions so the only way to entertain themselves was "Star look and chill."

For skeptical downvoters: http://darwinian-medicine.com/the-perfect-eyesight-of-hunter...

Indigenous Australians also have incredibly good eyesight, and are probably the people group best preserved in our deeper evolutionary past. See, for example, this article on their special military unit https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/prince-harry-may-stru....

All people are equally old of course, but if you mean the ones closest related to a 100k-year-old hunter gatherer group I think that would be the San or another African group. (They of course aren't completely the same either.)

The Australians encountered multiple non-homo-sapiens species on their way to Australia and might have even picked up better vision from them. They do apparently have better temperature regulation suited to desert nights.

Being technically visible to the naked eye does not mean they are easily discernable. It's like how the Galilean moons are technically visible to the naked eye, but Jupiter's overwhelming brightness makes them nigh on impossible to see except in specific circumstances.

Right, but that they are ever visible to anyone means that the story could just as easily be inspired by the rarely-seen 7th sister, rather than the last-seen-100k-years-ago 7th sister.

This is a much more likely explanation but in all non-scientific accademic fields it's usually more important to come up with a narrative that's appealing to the general public or the political class than with an accurate narrative. Hence the explanation that makes the most sense but is less "Wow"-inducing will be swept under the rug.

There are plenty of fields where we entertain "mysteries" that have perfectly rational explanations but settling the question once and for all with a rational argument would dry up the funding stream for accademicians and could have other undesirable consequences on some countries' political narrative.

one would like to think the most accurate story was awesome-most precisely because of its accuracy. IMHO you are merely complaining that it isn't precise enough to convince you, though it couldn't be improved much without written accounts?

And then it a sense of incredulity is showing, it's unimaginable, 100,000 kya is unimaginable, as if the world was fashioned in the mesolithic.

A nother comment mentions indigenous Australians.

Who, if I remember correctly, are estimated to have settled about 50kya. There are later intrusions into the peninsula, as it were back then. Oceania was settled even later by boat. The language divide in Australia is overwhelmingly that of earlier indians (if you'll excuse the pun, the land bridge was connected to the Indian subcontinent), with other language families mostly limited to the north end

This I think might strengthen the argument significantly.

The land bridge connected Australia to New Guinea and the eastern parts of Indonesia, not to India. No one has any idea what the precise relation of Australian languages to any other set of human languages is.

The abstract of the preprint [1] starts:

> There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in vastly separated cultures, such as the Australian Aboriginal cultures and Greek mythology? Second, why do most cultures call them “Seven Sisters" even though most people with good eyesight see only six stars?

Most people see six bright stars, like those depicted in the Subaru logo. Yet, you are quite correct to point out that the overlapping stars in question, Atlas and Pleione, are named after the parents of the seven sisters in Greek mythology. Six-vs-Seven or Eight-vs-Nine are valid criticisms and raise the question of when the names of the stars were first used.

The narrative-based approach is imprecise but, like Historical Linguistics [2], it might be useful in identifying origins and connectedness. Regardless, knowing that the bright stars Atlas and Pleione were separated in the past is a useful fact for generating and testing hypotheses.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?d...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics

I wonder if this means there is something we are missing here. Like maybe there was a 10th star in the cluster long ago that for some reason is no visible to us today

This is unlikely. A star can disappear if it goes supernova, or it implodes to become a neutron star or a black hole. The Pleiades are very close to us (astronomically speaking) at around 400 light-years. It would be virtually impossible for the remnants of a supernova at that distance to remain undiscovered, and also for a neutron star/ black hole to be so close to us and us not know about it.

For example the remnant of Tycho Brahe's supernova is at about 8000 light-years from us [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1572

Our ancestors could well have seen these 7 stars up to 100 kya. Indigenous Australians probably have eyesight most similar to our hunter gatherer ancestors, at 6:14 (approx. 20:46), much better than ours.

Quoting from an article on their eyesight:

> As an example of how extraordinary the vision can be, Professor Taylor recounted how astronomers were looking at records from the 1840s into Aboriginal descriptions of constellations of stars.

> "The astronomers just couldn't work out how these constellations worked," he said.

> "They talked to me then they went back with binoculars and suddenly they could pick out all the missing stars that the Aboriginal people could see just with the naked eye."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/prince-harry-may-stru...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com