Astronomy Picture Of The Day: Pleiades

 

#NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα

Black Hole

@konstructivizm

You’ve probably seen them, even if the name “Pleiades” doesn’t ring a bell. On a crisp winter night, look up: there’s that tiny, dazzling scoop of ice-blue stars, like someone spilled a handful of diamonds across black velvet. Most people just call them the Seven Sisters. For thousands of years, cultures around the world have woven stories about this little family in the sky, from Greek myths to the Subaru logo to Native tales of lost girls who became stars.We always thought of the Pleiades as a cozy stellar nursery: a few hundred young stars born together, still holding hands in a tight, tidy cluster.Well, buckle up.Astronomers just took data from NASA’s TESS planet-hunter, ESA’s hyper-precise Gaia satellite, and a slew of ground-based surveys… and blew the lid off the story.The Pleiades aren’t a small cluster.They’re just the glittering tip of a colossal, 1,900-light-year-long river of stars slicing through the Milky Way like a glowing cosmic wake. More than 3,000 stars belong to this stream, all born from the same giant gas cloud roughly 100 million years ago. Most of them are scattered so far and wide, and so much fainter, that we never noticed them before.That little jewel box you’ve admired every winter? It’s not a family. It’s the front door to an entire star-city sprawling across half the sky.Every time you look up at the Seven Sisters now, you’re not gazing at a modest handful of stars. You’re staring at the lighthouse of a vast stellar current flowing through our galaxy, and we’re only just realizing how mind-blowingly huge it really is. Credit: NASA/ESA/Caltech/AURA/Gaia/TESS