By Professor Todd Brown / Contributor

The Bull Market has ended, at least in the astronomical sense, for the year. With the first days of spring upon us, the winter constellations are rapidly leaving the night skies. In a few weeks, warmer weather on or not, you will be hard pressed to be able to see constellations such as Orion and Taurus as they will be setting right after the sun.

Taurus is something like the younger sibling of the celestial family compared to Orion: always being compared and never mentioned first. As Rodney Dangerfield (who was a standup comedian in my college days) would say, it gets no respect. I have been guilty of this as well as I have been hailing the wonders of Orion without a mention of the Zodiac constellation that treks through the sky along with it. As a farewell to winter, I think Taurus has deserves its column.

In mythology, Taurus does not represent a mid-sized car from Ford with mediocre gas mileage but, instead, a bull. Even though we typically associate current celestial stories behind constellation names with Greek mythology, cultures that predated the rise of Athens described the stars with a similar character. Coincidence? Nah, the Greeks just “borrowed” the tale from the earlier civilizations and modified it to suit their beliefs. In this way, Taurus can rightly hold claim as to one of the earliest constellations that humanity made. Its original name and story are forever lost, but the Greeks did a great job beefing up the tale (yeah, that was a pun).

It all starts with their main god, Zeus. Zeus could be compared to, just for argument’s sake, a fictitious governor of a heavily populated state in the northeast United States. Like such a hypothetical leader, he was very powerful but had a wondering eye. Perhaps because he was immortal and physical beauty was not, Zeus’s personal life was a series of handling wayward immortals, punishing mortals and trying to impress the ladies. Having god-like talents gave him a definite advantage in the dating game but he had one slight problem: he was married and Hades knows no fury like a goddess (in this case his wife Hera) scorned.

One day, Zeus caught site of Europa, the beautiful daughter of the King of Tyre. Europa was in charge of taking her father’s cattle out to graze and the king always had guards watching his daughter to prevent any unwanted suitors. Zeus could hurl lightning bolts, so getting around some guys with swords doesn’t seem like much of a problem for the head of the gods. Perhaps to be sporting, he decided to get to Europa tactfully. So, he changed himself into a white bull with golden horns and mingled with the rest of the herd. Europa noticed the bull (being from a farm, I can vouch that bulls with golden horns do stand out) and was impressed by his gentleness.

Zeus immediately, still in bull form, scooped her up onto his back and spirited her away to the island of Crete. He kept Europa on the island and fathered three children with her. One of the children, a son called Minos, is the future king of the island but this son’s connection with bulls is not over. Minus eventually earns the wrath of Poseidon. In punishment, his wife is made to fall in love with a bull. The unusual union yields a ‘son’: the half-man, half-bull monster called the Minotaur. Every year, human sacrifices were made to the beast as they were thrown into its home: an intricate and confusing series of twists and turns that was called the Labyrinth. I have to wonder how Greek children could sleep at all after a re-assuring tale like this at bedtime.

The constellation itself holds more positive attributes compared to the story. The brightest star of Taurus is a red giant called Aldebaran that is 40 times the size of our own sun. One of the closest stars to earth at 60 light years away, it is still 65,000 times farther away than Pluto … hence we won’t be visiting this neighbor any time soon. From our vantage point, the star seems to be among a group of slightly dimmer stars but actually the cluster, called the Hyades, is about twice as far away. Still, there is only one other cluster of stars closer to the earth: the majority of the stars making up the Big Dipper in Ursa Major.

If you would like to see what the Hyades star cluster would look like from a about eight times a greater distance, then look west of Aldebaran and see the Pleiades star cluster. A tightly knit cluster of seemingly six or seven stars, it is also called The Seven Sisters (which is from mythology) or M45 (which is from a modern day astronomy nomenclature meaning Messier Object #45). It really consists of over a thousand young stars that only recently (100 million years ago) have formed. Infants on galactic time scales, the cluster is destined to break apart within another 200 million years or so due to the interactions of the individuals stars with each other.

One of the last treasures in Taurus is only visible today with a good telescope: the Crab Nebula (also called M1). In the spring of 1054, early astronomers in China and the Middle East noticed a “new” star appear among the constant lights of Taurus. By that summer, this new star was so bright it could be seen during the daytime. Over the next two years, it gradually faded from view. The star was not really new but the explosion of a giant star that had exhausted its fuel and could no longer resist an inward gravitational collapse. The result was a supernova. Today, what remains of the star is a very compact, rapidly spinning object called a neutron star. The rest of the star makes up the still expanding cloud that forms the nebula. After almost 1000 years, this cloud is growing in size at a rate of about 900 miles per second. Photographs from large telescopes easily show how the cloud subtlety changes shape as the years roll by.

Maybe Taurus isn’t as flashy as its neighbor Orion, but it does have its highlights. Just try to catch them in the western sky as soon as it grows dark soon because this Bull, just like that fictitious governor, is rapidly fading from view.

What else is out there this week: