seven stars. It contains more than 1,000 stars, according to the Royal Observatory Greenwich, and the brightest handful are young, hot, blue-white B-type stars. Their color is real, not a camera artifact, which is part of why the cluster photographs with that distinctive cool tint.
Wisps of blue haze around the brightest members become especially noticeable in long exposures. This is a reflection nebula, created as an unrelated cloud of interstellar dust scatters the stars’ light. To the naked eye, the cluster’s softer appearance mainly comes from stars that the eye cannot fully resolve individually. So the “strange light” is not one object at all. It is a young open star cluster containing more than a thousand stars, currently passing through an unrelated cloud of interstellar dust.
Source: Unsplash
Cultures That Watched the Same Lights for Thousands of Years
None of this is new. The Pleiades is one of
