Talk:Hyades (star cluster)

Magnitude 0.5?

How can the Hyades cluster have magnitude 0.5 when the brighter star Aldebaran only has magnitude 0.85? --IanOsgood (talk) 00:06, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Good question. I see that Jerry Lodriguss provides exactly this value on this page: http://www.astropix.com/HTML/B_WINTER/HYADES.HTM. But my knowledge of astronomy is of the armchair variety (living in a very cloudy city), so I can't comment.

Meanwhile, I see some dubious or inaccurate statements in the present version of the article. The most notable is the misleading remark about Iota Horologii being reclassified as a member. However, the article by Vauclair et al. merely argues for i Hor's membership in the Hyades Stream, which is different from the Hyades Cluster. The former is a concentrated group of stars born at the same time, while the latter is a much more scattered, extended group of stars that have a space motion similar to that of the Hyades Cluster but were not necessarily formed out of the same cloud. On the Hyades Stream, see Famaey et al. 2007, A&A 461: 957-962 (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609785). It's true that Vauclair et al. conclude that i Hor was formed in the original Hyades starforming cloud, but that doesn't mean that they think i Hor is currently a member of the Hyades Cluster -- that's impossible. They call it an "evaporated" member -- i.e., a former member that has escaped the cluster's gravitational influence. Note also that Vauclair's claim has not yet been widely accepted among astronomers, so it shouldn't be stated as a fact -- just as a position argued by a group of prominent astronomers.

This article could also use some hard data on cluster membership and morphology. I'm in the process of researching that now.Thuvan Dihn (talk) 00:25, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I think the apparent magnitude of the cluster is the integrated visual magnitude of all stars in the cluster. Thus it is higher than the individual stellar magnitudes.—RJH (talk) 18:05, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Stalinesque Redacting of Aldeberan is Shameful

This article is a good example of the hijacking of a word by specialists. The entire asterism, inclucing Aldeberan, had been called the Hyades for centuries. Then astronomers took a closer look at it and determined that many of the stars were part of a star cluster. Instead of coming up with a new name for that, or calling it the "Great Hyades Star Cluster" or the like, they decided they'd just take the name Hyades and repurpose it. That's fine, but that's not the only meaning of Hyades, and the original folk version that includes Aldeberan deserves a mention.