Written by Dev Veer Vacher, a grade 9 student.

The teenage stars, which are also known as Matariki stars, are the brightest in the night sky, and are also amongst the galaxy’s youngest, being only seventy-five to one hundred and fifty million years old. To put that into perspective, the Earth is over four and a half billion years old. This is also the reason that the stars are called “teenage”. We are currently in the time period when the seven stars usually “rise” from behind our sun and are visible from Earth again.

The name “Matariki” comes from Maori folklore. The Maori are the natives of New Zealand and have watched these stars for many years. They are now a part of their religious practices and culture. According to the Maori Iwi, one of the stars is a mother, and the other six are her daughters. They always move across the sky every year to visit their grandmother, Earth. In some legends, the stars help the Earth prepare for the new year by making the plants grow, singing to the Earth, going to sea to make sure everyone has enough fish and water, bringing positivity and making all creatures work in harmony. This cluster has many other names too. The Pleiades in Greek, Subaru in Japan, Mao in China, and Makali’i in Hawaiian.

The Matariki Stars are all classified as blue supergiants, much hotter and larger than our sun. They all lie about three hundred light-years away from our planet and still are one of the nearest clusters. Most of them can be spotted in the constellation Taurus or near Orion. Apart from the Matariki stars, the cluster also includes a number of brown dwarfs, stars with only eight percent of the sun’s mass. It also contains the Merope Nebula, which will one day collapse to form yet another star. It is also an open star cluster, which means it will not be bound together forever.

Written by Dev Veer Vacher, a grade 9 student.

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