In the January 22 issue of the journal Nature, astronomers from the California Institute of Technology and NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena, Calif., report the best-ever distance to the double-star Atlas. The new results will be useful in the longstanding effort to improve the cosmic distance scale, and to conduct research on the stellar life-cycle. Now, a group of astronomers has obtained a highly accurate distance to one of the stars of the Pleiades known since antiquity as Atlas. The cluster of stars known as the Pleiades is one of the most recognizable objects in the night sky, and for millennia has been celebrated in literature and legend. This new measurement shows that Hipparcos was incorrect, and the established theory still holds. This is important because the European Hipparcos satellite previously measured a distance to the cluster that would have contradicted theoretical models of the life cycles of stars. After a decade’s worth of interferometric measurements, the team found that the star cluster is between 434 and 446 light years from Earth. Astronomers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have measured the distance to the Pleiades star cluster to greatest precision ever.
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