The Hyades is the nearest open star cluster to the Sun, a loose crowd of stars that forms the V-shaped face of Taurus, the bull, in the winter sky.
At a glance
| type | open star cluster |
|---|---|
| distance from the Sun | 153 light-years (47 pc) |
| its light left it | 153 years ago |
| size in the piece | about 33 light-years acrossmodel |
Read off the piece’s own catalogue, the same values it draws with. Model marks a property of the piece’s galaxy model rather than a measurement.
About Hyades
An open cluster is a family of stars born together from a single cloud and still drifting through space as a group. The Hyades is old for one, long past its youth: its most massive stars have already swollen into red giants, and the brightest of them mark the arms of the V. Beyond the bright core, Gaia has traced long tidal tails of former members, pulled out of the cluster by the tides of the Galaxy and strung out along its orbit.
Because it is so close and its members move together across the sky, the Hyades has served as a first rung on the ladder of cosmic distances. Measuring how its stars converge toward a common point gave astronomers a distance long before space-based parallaxes, and that distance in turn calibrated the brightness of stars of each colour, used to gauge clusters much farther away.
Aldebaran, the orange eye of the bull, sits in the middle of the V but is not a member. It lies in front of the cluster, much closer to us, and only lines up with it by chance.
What you see in the piece
Fly to it and the V comes apart: its stars spread through a volume so wide that from inside the cluster they no longer look like a group at all, and Aldebaran slides away in front of them.
Measured or modelled
The cluster’s outline in the piece is a modelled extent, not a measured edge; a cluster dissolves gradually into the field stars and its tidal tails reach well beyond its core.
Questions
How far away is the Hyades cluster?
The Hyades is 153 light-years (47 pc) from the Sun, which makes it the nearest open cluster to us.
Is Aldebaran part of the Hyades?
No. Aldebaran appears in the middle of the V but lies much closer to us, in front of the cluster, and moves differently through space.