NASA’s Astronomical Picture of the Day is a stunning image of the Pleiades star cluster, a cosmic cloud located 400 light-years from Earth.
Stars are the most widely recognized astronomical objects and represent the most fundamental building blocks of galaxies. They are millions of years old objects floating in space. The older and larger the star, the brighter it is. They are formed in star-forming regions known as nebulae. The Nebula is composed of gases, mainly hydrogen and helium. Once formed, many stars form groups from the same Nebula, known as Star Clusters. According to NASA, star clusters can contain as few as ten stars or as many as millions of stars.
NASA Astronomy of the Day image of the Seven Stars Cluster with its striking blue reflection. It is one such cluster located about light-years away Earth in the constellation Taurus. It is an open cluster containing more than a thousand stars loosely bound by gravity. The Pleiades is also known as the Seven Sisters because its name derives from the famous Greek legend, in which the Pleiades were the seven daughters of the god. giant Atlas and the ocean goddess Pleione. Thus, their names together with their daughter form the 9 brightest stars in the cluster.
Image taken by Stefan Thrun Who is an astrophotography photographer and amazingly, a former German Air Force soldier.
NASA’s explanation of the picture
Swiping through a cloud of cosmic dust just 400 light-years away, the lovely Pleiades or Seven Sisters open star cluster is famous for its striking blue reflection nebulae. It is located in the night sky towards the constellation Taurus and the Orion Branch of our Milky Way. Are you not related to dust? cloud However. They just happened to be traveling through the same region of space. Known since antiquity as a compact group of stars, Galileo first sketched the cluster observed through his telescope with stars too faint to be seen with the naked eye. Charles Messier recorded the cluster’s place as the 45th entry in his famous catalog of non-comets.
In Greek mythology, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of the giant Atlas and the sea goddess Pleione. The names of their parents are included in the cluster’s nine brightest stars. This well-processed, color-corrected telescope image of small stars and detailed interstellar dust filaments was captured over 9 hours of exposure. It spans more than 20 light-years above the Pleiades star cluster.
