[Lively Music]
[Preston Dyches] What's Up for March?
Meet the morning planets, the nearest star cluster
and some do-it-yourself exoplanets...
Saturn joins Venus and Mars this month in the morning sky.
Beginning around March 18th and 19th,
early risers may notice Saturn steadily moving toward Mars
and Venus each day
to form a trio low in the east before sunrise.
The crescent moon joins the crowd on the 27th and 28th.
Saturn and Mars are headed toward a super close meeting
at the start of April.
(More about that in next month's video.)
[whoosh]
Look high in the Southwest on March evenings
and you'll find
the tall Y-shaped constellation Taurus, the bull.
And at the center of Taurus, forming the bull's face
is a group of stars known as the Hyades star cluster.
It's the closest open
star cluster to our solar system containing hundreds of stars.
Now, an open cluster is a group of stars
that are close together in space
and loosely bound together by their mutual gravity.
These are stars that formed together around the same time,
from the same cloud of dust and gas.
Over time,
they blow away that leftover nebula material and drift apart.
Because of this, and their open,
or diffuse, structures, they're called "open" clusters.
Our own sun formed in a cluster like this, and studying these
structures helps us understand how stars form and evolve.
Another well-known open
cluster is the Pleiades,
which is also located in Taurus.
The Hyades and the Pleiades
are actually about the same size
at about 15 or so light years across.
But the Pleiades is
about three times farther away, so it appears more compact.
You don't need a telescope to find the Hyades.
Look for this V-shaped grouping of stars in Taurus.
Use the stars of Orion's belt
as a handy pointer leading you to bright orange Aldebaran.
Aldebaran isn't actually part of the star cluster.
It's located halfway to the Hyades
and just happens to appear in the foreground.
So check out the Hyades in March, where you'll see
a handful of stars with the unaided eye,
and more than a hundred with binoculars.
[whoosh]
March skies contain several
easy-to-find, bright stars that are known to have planets
of their own orbiting around them.
Locate these distant "suns" for yourself and you'll know
you're peering directly at another planetary system.
First is Epsilon Tauri, the right eye of Taurus the bull.
This orange dwarf star has a gas giant
planet around eight times the mass of Jupiter.
Next is seven Canis Majoris
This is the star at the heart of the dog
constellation that contains blazing bright Sirius.
This star is known to have
two planets: a gas giant, nearly
twice the mass of Jupiter, and another
just a little smaller than Jupiter.
Moving on, we find Tau Geminorum from the star at the heart of
Castor—northernmost of the twins
in Gemini.
Tao Geminorum has a huge gas giant planet 20 times
the mass of Jupiter in an orbit only slightly larger than that
of Earth.
And finally, wheeling around to the north is Beta Ursae
Minoris, the brightest star in the bowl of the Little Dipper.
This star
has a 6-Jupiter-mass planet in orbit around it.
Researchers expect that most stars
have a family of planets orbiting them
because forming planets is
a natural part of forming stars.
And now you know how to find a few of them yourself,
no telescope required.
[whoosh]
Here are the phases of the moon
for March.
Stay up to date with all of NASA's missions
to explore the solar system and beyond at NASA.gov.
I'm Preston Dyches from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And that's What's Up for this month.