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Gemini. A story of the love and loyalty of two brothers parted only by death. Includes a star that's actually a system of six stars, and a giant star that can help us measure distances in space. Contains an object that completely baffled astronomers for twenty years.

Gemini – the Celestial Twins

If you look at the constellation Gemini without optical aids (binoculars or telescope) Castor and Pollux look quite similar. But here's a telescopic view of the bright stars of Gemini. Pollux, on the left, is a swollen giant with twice the mass of the Sun. It's 33 light years away and has at least one planet circling it. Castor, on the right, is 51 light years away. It's a hot blue star that is the brightest part of what seems to be a star system made up of six stars.

Image Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

Interesting and awesome!

There's something weird 800 light years away in the constellation Gemini. It took NASA twenty years to find out what it was. It was called Geminga, a contraction of Gemini gamma-ray source because it was emitting high energy radiation. (Interestingly, apparently, gh'è minga also means "it's not there" in the Lombard dialect of Milan, Italy.)

But it is there. And it turns out to be a pulsar, a spinning neutron star. A neutron star is the remnant of a massive star that's exploded as a supernova at the end of its life.

M35 is a star cluster in Gemini. The cluster is scattered over an area of the sky almost the size of the full moon and is located 850 parsecs (2,800 light-years) from Earth.

Image Credit: Atlas Image obtained as part of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Wow!