Star clusters are only the tip of the iceberg
“Clusters form big families of stars that can stay together for large parts of their lifetime. Today, we know of roughly a few thousand star clusters in the Milky Way, but we only recognize them because of their prominent appearance as rich and tight groups of stars. Given enough time, stars tend to leave their cradle and find themselves surrounded by countless strangers, thereby becoming indistinguishable from their neighbors and hard to identify,” says Stefan Meingast, lead author of the paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “Our Sun is thought to have formed in a star cluster but has left its siblings behind a long time ago,” he adds.
phys.org
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