Open Cluster Alyssa-Bailey
in NGC 695 Galaxy My Hero


open cluster

Open Cluster Alyssa-Bailey
in NGC 695 - Galaxy My Hero

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Welcome to Open Cluster Alyssa-Bailey,

Alyssa-Bailey is an open cluster of young stars located in one of the spiral arms of NGC 695 Galaxy My Hero. This cluster is too far away to be seen without a telescope, but there is lot we can tell you about it.

As you look at this picture you will see mostly young blue stars with a yellow star like our own Sun. Our Sun is a G-class star with a 10 billion year life similar to the yellow sun in Open Cluster Alyssa-Bailey. The young blue stars will not live as long by stellar lifetimes; maybe only 1or 2 billion years.

What makes open clusters so special is that they are young families of stars that are slowly getting closer and closer together through gravitational attraction. The stars in the picture look very close but they actually are at least 5 light years apart or 30 trillion miles. To get some sense of that distance, think about the distance of the Earth to the Sun, which is 8 light minutes or 93 million miles.

So if you were living in Open Cluster Alyssa-Bailey, it would take at least 5 years for the light from any of your other family members to reach you. As time goes on, each of these stars will get a little closer to each other until finally they might get close enough for extraterrestrials on planets of these suns to visit each other. They would still have to travel at very high speeds. Using the Space Shuttle, it would take humans 50,000 years to reach the nearest star from earth.








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