Soccer Dad

Of pleiades and potter

Reflecting MeropeIn the well known Pleiades star cluster, starlight is slowly destroying this wandering cloud of gas and dust. The star Merope lies just off the upper left edge of this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. In the past 100,000 years, part of the cloud has by chance moved so close to this star--only 3,500 times the Earth-Sun distance--that the starlight itself is having a very dramatic effect. Pressure of the star's light significantly repels the dust in the reflection nebula, and smaller dust particles are repelled more strongly. As a result, parts of the dust cloud have become stratified, pointing toward Merope. The closest particles are the most massive and the least affected by the radiation pressure. A longer-term result will be the general destruction of the dust by the energetic starlight. Picture courtesy of NASA

Among the pleasures of reading Harry Potter are JK Rowling's clever use of fractured Latin (oculus reparo) and creative use of names ( a shunpike is alternate route to avoid tolls.)

When I saw that there's a star called Merope - the name of Tom Riddle's mother was Merope Gaunt (Riddle) - I understood that the name Merope, must have significance. And according to Wikipedia this is it:

Merope is the faintest of the stars because she was the only of the Pleiades to have married a mortal. . . . Merope gave birth to Glaukos, Ornytion, and Sinon. Merope is often called the "lost Pleiad" because she was at first not seen by astronomers or charted like her sisters. One myth says that she hid her face in shame because she had an affair with a mortal man, another says she went to Hades with her husband, Sisyphus.

Merope of mythology married a mortal, as Merope Gaunt married a muggle. This is one more instance of JK Rowling's creativity.