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Credit & Copyright: David Lane
Explanation:
The well known
Pleiades
star cluster is slowly destroying part of a passing cloud of
gas and dust.
The Pleiades
is the brightest
open cluster of stars
on Earth's sky and
can be seen from almost any northerly location with the
unaided eye.
The passing young dust cloud is thought to be part of
Gould's belt, an
unusual ring of young star formation surrounding the Sun in the
local Milky Way Galaxy.
Over the past 100,000 years, part
Gould's belt
is by chance moving right through the older
Pleiades and is causing
a strong reaction between stars and dust.
Pressure from the star's light significantly repels the dust in the surrounding blue
reflection nebula, with
smaller dust particles being repelled more strongly.
A short-term result is that parts of the dust cloud have become
filamentary and
stratified, as seen in the
above deep-exposure image.
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A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: pleiades - star cluster - dust
Publications with words: pleiades - star cluster - dust
See also: