Her Amber Tresses

In the dark triangle formed by Arcturus, Leo, and the Big Dipper lies the faint constellation of Coma Berenices, Berenice's hair. None of the individual stars is very bright, but together they give an impression of a scattering of silver dust against the black sky.

Berenice was the wife of Ptolemy III, Pharaoh of Egypt about 300 B.C. As he was leaving for battle, Berenice vowed to sacrifice her beautiful amber tresses to Venus if he returned safely. He did, and cutting off her hair, Berenice left it as an offering in the temple of Venus. It disappeared, said to have been placed in the sky by Venus as a sign of the love of Berenice for her husband. That's what we see in the sky.

In Coma is one of the nearest star clusters, dozens of stars born together and circling one another as they move together through space. Like the stars of the Big Dipper and the Hyades cluster in Taurus, these stars are so near to us that they don't form a tight group, like the Pleiades or the Beehive. The way we know they belong together is that they're all going in the same direction, and at the same speed. To see this cluster, head toward the bowl of the Big Dipper from the tail of the lion, about a quarter of the way.

But what is really spectacular is something you can't see without a telescope: the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. Like people clustering in a village, and stars clustering together in nearby space, even galaxies cluster together. Each galaxy is a fantastic assemblage of hundreds of billions of stars linked by the threads of gravity as they circle a common center. And even these cluster together, by the hundreds, by the thousands.

These superclusters of galaxies are the largest structures in the universe. Stars are lit by the fusion of their atoms, just about the smallest objects in the universe. The smallest and the largest: they meet in the sky.

(04/16/08)