Overview
- The Pleiades is redefined as the dense core of a vast, dissolving stellar family that stretches almost 2,000 light-years.
- Researchers combined TESS rotation data, Gaia astrometry, and SDSS chemistry in a Bayesian “gyro-tagging” analysis to pinpoint true siblings.
- The team identified 3,019 stars with a common age near 127 million years distributed across roughly 600 parsecs.
- Shared chemical fingerprints and motion patterns indicate a single giant birth cloud linking several previously labeled groups.
- The peer-reviewed study in The Astrophysical Journal establishes a method to map other dispersed clusters and could guide work on the Sun’s origins.