Saturday, February 26, 2011

What is Brightest of the Pleiades?

brightest of the pleiades

The brightest of the Pleiades are named for characters in Greek mythology. eta Tau: Alcyone is the brightest member of this cluster.
The Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45.

In astronomy, the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters (Messier thing 45), is a wide open star cluster containing middle-aged warm B-type celebrities located in the particular constellation of Taurus. It really is among the local star clusters in order to Earth and may be the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the evening sky. Pleiades has several meanings in different cultures and customs.

The cluster is dominated by hot blue and very luminous stars which have formed within the final 100 million many years. Dust that varieties a faint expression nebulosity around the particular brightest stars had been thought at very first to be left over from the development of the group (hence the alternate name Maia Nebula after the actual star Maia), however is now regarded as an unrelated airborne dirt and dust cloud in the interstellar medium the stars are at present passing through. Astronomers estimate the cluster will survive for about one more 250 million decades, after which it'll disperse due in order to gravitational interactions with its galactic neighborhood.

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