WISE Image of Dusty Sisters

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

Dozens of stars in the Pleiades star clus­ter glow through a cool mist in this image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Sur­vey Explorer, or WISE.

Explore the image. Do you see any pat­terns in the dust cloud? Share what you find by leav­ing a com­ment below. WISE views the uni­verse in infrared. The orbit­ing tele­scope sees cool objects that are invis­i­ble to our eyes. WISE shows us an immense, thick cloud of dust. Not too long ago, astronomers believed that the dust around the Pleiades was just left­over dust from the for­ma­tion of the clus­ter. Recently, astronomers have found the clus­ter to be about 100 mil­lion years old; pretty young for stars but time enough for the gas and dust to have been blown away by the new stars. What we’re see­ing today is the Pleiades pass­ing through an inter­stel­lar cloud, heat­ing up the dust and caus­ing it to glow.

At 436 light-years from Earth, the Pleiades is one of the clos­est star clus­ters to Earth. From Earth, stargaz­ers through the cen­turies have noticed the tight, dipper-shaped clus­ter of stars in the con­stel­la­tion Tau­rus, just over the shoul­der of Orion, the Hunter. We now know it as the Pleiades but other cul­tures cre­ated other sto­ries and other names for the open star clus­ter; Parveen in ancient Per­sia, Tian­quiztli in the Aztec cul­tures, and Sub­aru in Japan.

Comments

CritterKeeper 11-05-2011, 08:45

Looks like a lion with a full golden mane.

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