The Pleiades

About This Photograph

This familiar winter star cluster (summer for the southern hemisphere) is the Pleiades, also known as Subaru, and the Seven Sisters. It is a group of over 1,000 stars born within the last 100 million years, perhaps from a structure not unlike the present-day Orion Nebula. The wisps of textured dust and gas that now surround the brighter stars are currently not thought to be related to leftovers from the stars' formation, but rather simply clouds that the cluster is now passing through. This region is plentiful in interstellar dust, as can be seen from the fainter tendrils of material around the cluster.

Click here for an annotated photograph.