Locating the Hyades tidal tails

The Hyades is an easily recognisable star cluster in the night sky. The brightest handful of stars define the face of Taurus, the Bull. Telescopes show that the central cluster itself contains many hundreds of fainter stars in a spherical region roughly 60 light years across. Previous studies have shown that stars were ‘leaking’ out of the cluster to form two tails that stretch into space. Gaia has now allowed astronomers to discover the true extent of those tails by tracing former members of the Hyades across the whole sky. The animation was created using Gaia Sky.