An international research team led by scientists from the Italian University of Padova has concluded that the star cluster known as the Hyades likely contains a number of black holes, and the team calls for further examination of this distinctive region of the sky.
Open star clusters are groups of stars that arose together in the distant past from the same dust cloud, then persisted next to each other for millions of years. Like the Pleiades, the Hyades are star clusters that can easily be seen with the naked eye.
Star simulation
The team reached the results, which were published in the Monthly Bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society, by building a simulation that tracks the movement and evolution of all the stars in the Hyades to reproduce their current state.
The simulation showed that the mass and size of the Hyades could only reach the current state in one case, which is the presence of some black holes in the center of the open star cluster.
The team proposes, in a press release from the University of Barcelona participating in the study, to conduct more detailed monitoring of the Hyades cluster to confirm this hypothesis. If this is done, we will obtain the closest black hole to Earth at a distance of only about 150 light-years, after the closest one to it was “Gaia B.” H1 (Gaia BH1), which is located about 1,550 light-years from Earth.
The Pleiades appear in the shape of a small fishing hook (NASA)
“Nuq Al-Dabran”
The Hyades can be easily seen in the sky, as it is a group of faint stars that take the shape of the letter “V” and surround the bright star “Aldebaran”. In ancient Arab legend, they are the young camels and sheep of Aldebaran.
The legend tells that Aldebaran fell in love with the Pleiades (a nearby star cluster), and decided to marry her, but she refused, so he took his camels and sheep to her in the hope that she would agree to his request, but she never did, until it was said in the proverb, “More loyal than Aldebaran and more treacherous than the Pleiades.” What is meant is that one of them is so loyal that he resembles Aldebaran, who does not tire of following the Pleiades, or he is more treacherous than the Pleiades, which rejects everything Aldebaran offers forever.
The Hyades consists of several hundred stars that share chemical characteristics and movement through space, as well as age, as they are all estimated to be only about 625 million years old, which makes them young stars (the Sun, for example, is 4.5 billion years old until now).
As for the Pleiades, it appears at a distance from Aldebaran, taking the shape of a small fishing hook. We now know that it was formed over 100 million years ago, and contains several thousand hot blue stars.
