[NASA] Dim Delights in Cancer

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Dim Delights in *******

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Another Hubble view of the outskirts of Messier 44 shows a variety of bright stars and many background galaxies.

Credits:
NASA, ESA and C. Scarlata (University of Minnesota – Twin Cities); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

******* the Crab is a dim constellation, yet it contains one of the most beautiful and easy-to-spot star clusters in our sky: the Beehive Cluster. ******* also possesses one of the most studied exoplanets: the superhot super-Earth,

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Find the M44, the Beehive Cluster, at the center of the ******* constellation, using nearby stars such as Regulus in Leo, Pollux in Gemini, and Procyon in Canis Minor.

Stellarium Web

Find *******’s dim stars by looking in between the brighter neighboring constellations of Gemini and Leo. Don’t get frustrated if you can’t find it at first, since ******* isn’t easily visible from moderately light-polluted areas. Once you find *******, look for its most famous deep-sky object: the Beehive Cluster! It’s a large open cluster of young stars, three times larger than our Moon in the sky. The Beehive is visible to the unaided eye under good sky conditions as a faint, cloudy patch, but is stunning when viewed through binoculars or a wide-field telescope. It was one of the earliest deep-sky objects noticed by ancient astronomers, and so the Beehive has many other names, including Praesepe, Nubilum,

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, the Ghost, and Jishi qi. Take a look at it on a clear night through binoculars. Do these stars look like a hive of buzzing bees? Or do you see something else? There’s no wrong answer, since this large star cluster has intrigued imaginative observers for thousands of years.

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The super-Earth exoplanet 55 Cancri e, depicted with its star in this artist’s concept, likely has an atmosphere thicker than Earth’s but with ingredients that could be similar to those of Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

55 Cancri is a nearby binary star system, about 41 light-years from us and faintly visible under excellent dark sky conditions. The larger star is orbited by at least five planets, including 55 Cancri e (a.k.a. Janssen, named after one of the first telescope makers). Janssen is a “super-earth,” a large rocky world 8 times the mass of Earth, and orbits its star every 18 hours, giving it one of the shortest years of any known planet! Janssen was the first exoplanet to have its atmosphere successfully analyzed. Both the Hubble and retired Spitzer space telescopes confirmed that the hot world is enveloped by an atmosphere of helium and hydrogen, with traces of hydrogen cyanide: not a likely place to find life, especially since the surface is probably scorching-hot rock. NASA’s

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allows us to imagine what it would be like to

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and other worlds.

How do astronomers find planets around other star systems? The Night Sky Network’s “

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” activity helps demonstrate both the transit and wobble methods of exoplanet detection. Notably, 55 Cancri e was discovered using the wobble method in 2004, and the transit method confirmed its orbital ******* in 2011!

Want to learn more about exoplanets? Get the latest NASA news about worlds beyond our solar system at

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!

Originally posted by Dave Prosper: March 2020

Last Updated by Kat Troche: March 2026

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