Universe Finder

Almost everyone has seen the Pleiades - the tiny dipper-shaped knot of stars you can cover with your thumb. In 2025, astronomers connected it to something much larger: a family of more than 3,000 related stars, identified by shared age, chemistry and orbit, streaming across roughly 1,900 light-years of sky. Most of that family is slowly dispersing. The familiar cluster is its surviving bound heart. This short is a flight into the cluster, built from published measurements: 958 member stars at their Gaia-measured positions, about 444 light-years away - a distance astronomers argued over for twenty years until radio interferometry and Gaia settled it. The fly-through views are visualizations, and the video labels them as such while they are on screen - the star positions are data; only the flight path is invented. That distinction matters to us. You can fly to the Pleiades yourself, and to everything else we have catalogued, at https://universefinder.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=pleiades_short Sources: Boyle et al. 2025 (ApJ) - the Greater Pleiades Complex, 3,000+ related stars across ~1,900 light-years; A&A 677, A163 (2023) - 958 Gaia astrometric members; Melis et al. 2014 (Science) - VLBI distance ~444 light-years; Gaia Collaboration 2018 - distance confirmed. Member positions: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. All-sky complex map: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; background: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; Boyle et al. 2025. #pleiades #sevensisters #astronomy #space #stargazing #starcluster #gaia #science #universe #nightsky