The Beehive is an open cluster, which means the stars formed together and and are still loosely bound by gravity. It’s around 600 – 700 million years old, and 610 light-years from Earth. For comparison, the famous Pleiades open cluster is 100 million years old, and 444 light-years away.

One of the stars within the Beehive is called Pr0211. It’s quite similar to the Sun, but is noteworthy because astronomers have discovered two planets orbiting it. These are called Pr0211b and Pr0211c. They’re gas giants that orbit close to their star; what we call “hot Jupiters”. They were discovered in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Pr0211b has the claim to fame of being the first hot Jupiter to be found within an open cluster of stars. Here’s the paper that documents this find.

Unfortunately these planets can’t be seen directly through telescopes (and especially not amateur level!) Instead, they were discovered using the radial velocity method, which is when a star can be seen to very slightly “wobble” in space due to the gravitational force of its planets. Still, I think it’s neat that the star can be seen from a city centre, and that we know it’s orbited by at least two planets.

Thanks go to my astro pal Richard Hook for pointing out that I’ve captured some quasars in my image. A quasar is a supermassive black hole “feeding” on gas and dust. As this material spirals into the black hole, it heats up due to friction and becomes incredibly bright — often outshining the entire galaxy of stars that surrounds it. They’re almost unbelievably distant though, so they’re still hard to spot.

Here’s a quasar, with the catchy name J083857.85+193335.7. It’s 7 billion years old, meaning the photons of light recorded in my image travelled through space for half the age of the entire universe before they hit my camera sensor! That’s quite a journey…