Courses › The Universe from Scratch › Lesson 8
Stars born together · premieres Wednesday, November 4
Stars are not born alone. They form in groups, from the same cloud of gas, and many stay together for millions of years. Those groups are called clusters.
In these images the distance, mass and size of each cluster are measured. But the stars are drawn at random following a model of how they are distributed: they are not the real stars one by one. In the globular clusters each point may stand for up to eighty stars, and the colours and brightnesses are approximate.
| Figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Pleiades | 135.15 pc ≈ 440 light-years; 132 (+26/−27) million years; 1,248 candidates | Lodieu et al. 2019 (A&A 628, A66), Gaia DR2 |
| Hyades | 47.03 pc ≈ 153 light-years; 640 (+67/−49) million years | Lodieu et al. 2019 (A&A 623, A35) |
| Beehive (Praesepe) | 187.35 pc ≈ 611 light-years | Lodieu et al. 2019 (A&A 628, A66) |
| 47 Tucanae | 4.52 kpc ≈ 14,700 light-years; 8.53 × 10⁵ M☉ | Baumgardt and Hilker 2018, updated table (read 5 Oct 2026) |
| Omega Centauri | 5.43 kpc ≈ 17,700 light-years; 3.94 × 10⁶ M☉; ≈9 million stars (calculated) | Baumgardt and Hilker 2018; template calculation |
| Age of the globulars | >10 billion years (the scene uses 12 billion for all of them) | Clusters template (README) — an approximate common value |
| Age of the Sun | ≈4.6 billion years (4,567 million) | Connelly et al. 2012 (Science 338, 651): age of the Solar System's first solids |
| Omega Centauri as a dwarf-galaxy core | Hypothesis, not fact; central black hole of ≥8,200 M☉ | Bekki and Freeman 2003 (MNRAS 346, L11); Häberle et al. 2024 (Nature 631, 285) |
They are Solaris Core Blender templates, built from measured data. You can download them, change the camera and make your own images.
See templates