* Astronomy

The distance, structure, dynamics and age of the Hyades cluster have been studied with Hipparcos data. This structure is now for the first time mapped in 3 dimensions from directly measured distances (parallaxes) for each individual member of the Hyades.


In the movie you will see the Hyades rotate around the Galactic Z-axis.
The last 20 frames of the Hyades movie show the motions of the stars within the cluster as inferred from the residual velocities with respect to the centre of mass motion of the cluster. The time steps are 50.000 years. Note that these motions are not representative of the true internal motions in the cluster. All the motions in the movie can be explained as observational errors.