Hyades

The Hyades are a nearby open star cluster in the constellation Taurus, forming the distinctive V-shaped face of the bull and visible to the naked eye under suitable conditions. It is one of the closest open clusters to the Solar System and has long served as a local reference point in the study of stellar populations.

The cluster lies at about 153 light-years (roughly 47 parsecs) from the Sun and is estimated to be around 625 million years old. Its stars share a common motion through space, indicating a common origin, and the Hyades forms the dense core of a larger moving group that extends through the solar neighborhood.

The Hyades spans about 5 degrees on the sky and contains hundreds of stars. The bright star Aldebaran lies along the same line of sight but is a foreground star and not a member of the cluster. Distance measurements from missions such as Hipparcos and Gaia have refined membership lists and improved the precision with which the cluster’s age and distance are known, making it an important benchmark for calibrating stellar distances and evolution.

In mythology, the name Hyades derives from the Greek for “rainy ones,” referring to the rainy season. The Hyades is often contrasted with the nearby Pleiades cluster, another prominent open cluster in Taurus, and together they are among the sky’s most recognizable nearby stellar groups.