A thousand stars are fleeing home in a hurry, and scientists don't know why

The location of the stars of Ophion (the yellow dots) as seen in the sky. Ophion appears to cover a wide area of sky because it is relatively close to us.

A huge family of newborn stars seem to now be going their separate ways: Over 1,000 stars are hurriedly fleeing their nest in record time, leading to something of a mystery as to the cause of this stellar breakup.

Typically it takes a few hundred million years for a cluster of stars that are born together to break up, gradually nudged apart by gravitational tidal forces from each other and other passing objects. For example, the famous Pleiades star cluster (Messier 45), which is a tight grouping of young stars visible to the naked eye in the constellation of Taurus, the Bull, is 100 million years old, while the Beehive Cluster (Messier 44) in Cancer, the Crab, is around 600 million years old (and a little more dispersed than the Pleiades).