A young star cluster trots along with the Dog Star, Sirius – the brightest star in the night sky. They’re in the south-southeast at nightfall, and due south by about 9 p.m. The cluster stands directly below Sirius at that hour. Under dark skies, it’s just visible to the eye alone as a small, hazy patch of light.

Messier 41 is about 2300 light-years away. And it’s about 25 light-years across. That volume is packed with hundreds of stars – as many as eight hundred, according to some estimates. By comparison, the same volume of space around the Sun contains only a few dozen stars.

That means the skies of any planets in the cluster would be packed with bright stars – especially in the middle of the cluster, where the stars are jammed together. Some of the stars there are bigger and brighter than the Sun. Some of them are still in the prime of life, but a few are already near the end. They’ve puffed up to giant proportions, so they shine hundreds of times brighter than the Sun.

The Sun probably was born in a similar type of cluster. But the Sun and its sibling stars have all gone their own ways – pulled away from each other by the gravity of the galaxy’s other stars and gas clouds.

The Sun has been around for four and a half billion years. But the stars of M41 are only about 200 million years old. So there hasn’t been enough time for the galaxy to rip apart this family of young stars.

Script by Damond Benningfield