Overview
- UNC–Chapel Hill researchers report in The Astrophysical Journal that 3,091 stars share the Pleiades’ age and motion, defining a Greater Pleiades Complex.
- By combining ESA’s Gaia positions and motions with NASA’s TESS rotation periods, the team filtered out older field stars to recover long-lost siblings.
- The findings expand the Pleiades from a compact core to a sky-spanning, dissolving association roughly twenty times larger than traditionally recognized.
- The approach offers a new roadmap for mapping nearby stellar families and could help probe whether the Sun formed within a larger stellar network.
- The study highlights the cluster’s scientific role as a young-star benchmark alongside its deep cultural presence in traditions from the Bible to Māori Matariki.