Astronomers have discovered that the iconic Pleiades constellation has thousands more “sibling” stars hidden across the sky, making it 20 times larger than currently estimated.
Tracing the origins of stars provides astronomers a better framework for mapping our cosmic neighbourhood. But stars are often born in groups that tend to drift apart over time, making it difficult to trace their collective origin.
Now, using precise position and motion data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia and Nasa’s Tess satellites, researchers have redefined the Pleiades constellation, also called seven sisters, as the dense heart of a vast stellar association rather than a small cluster of seven stars.
“We find that the Pleiades constitutes the bound core of a much larger, coeval structure that contains multiple known clusters,” astronomers noted in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal.
“We refer to this structure as the Greater Pleiades Complex,” they said, adding that most stars in this association originated from the same giant cloud of cosmic debris.
They also identified “stellar bridges” made of streams of gas connecting the Pleiades with other young star clusters.
Overall, researchers estimated the Greater Pleiades Complex spanned “at least 600 parsecs”, with one parsec equalling about 31 trillion kilometres.
The Pleiades constellation has significance not only in astronomy but history and culture as well. It’s featured in the Old Testament and the Talmud, celebrated as Matariki in New Zealand and is even represented by the logo of Subaru in Japan.
“This study changes how we see the Pleiades – not just seven bright stars but thousands of long-lost siblings scattered across the whole sky,” Andrew Boyle, astronomer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said.
The new study also tracked the rotation of stars, creating a new framework for mapping our cosmic neighbourhood.
“By measuring how stars spin, we can identify stellar groups too scattered to detect with traditional methods, opening a new window into the hidden architecture of our Galaxy,” Dr Boyle explained.
Researchers suspect that many seemingly independent star clusters may be parts of sprawling stellar families.
They hope that future studies using the new method will help trace the origin of our Sun, uncovering whether it too was born in a much larger stellar family.
“We’re realising that many stars near the Sun are part of massive extended stellar families with complex structures,” said Andrew Mann, another author of the study.
“Our work provides a new way to uncover these hidden relationships.”
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