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Pleiades star cluster revealed as just one part of a vast stellar family
Researchers identified 3,091 stars forming the Greater Pleiades Complex, revealing the cluster is 20 times larger and reshaping understanding of stellar families, UNC-Chapel Hill said.
- On November 12, astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced that researchers uncovered thousands of previously unseen stars forming the Greater Pleiades Complex, about 20 times larger than the Pleiades star cluster.
- The team combined rotation measurements from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite with position and motion data from European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope, using a Bayesian 'gyro-tagging' method that treats stellar rotation as a cosmic clock.
- Using clustering algorithms on that dataset, researchers identified 3,091 stars fitting membership tests across nearly 600 parsecs, or about 2,000 light-years.
- The method could help reconstruct the Milky Way's family tree and reveal whether the Sun was once part of a stellar clan, researchers said.
- Beyond science, the Pleiades serves as an astrophysical benchmark about 440 light-years from Earth and weighs roughly 850 suns, with cultural ties to the Old Testament, the Talmud, Matariki, and Subaru logo.
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Total News Sources15
Leaning Left3Leaning Right0Center5Last UpdatedBias Distribution62% Center
Bias Distribution
- 62% of the sources are Center
62% Center
L 38%
C 62%
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