In article , Sam Wormley wrote:
"Jeremiah J. Burton" wrote:

I read somewhere that the sun is part of an open cluster. If thats true,
wouldn;t it have to be awefully OLD for an open cluster?

What other stars are in the cluster? How many? How large is it? Any
nebula still left?


Several of the stars in the "big dipper" have similar motions about the
galaxy as our sun.

I remember reading that in, I think, T. W. Webb's Celestial Objects
for Common Telescopes, and mentioned it here last year.
Another poster pointed out that the Big Dipper stars must be
much much younger than the Sun. Given that even the dimmest of the
bright ones, Megrez, is a main-sequence A star with about 20 times
the Sun's luminosity, it sure can't be anything approaching
5 billion years old, so presumably the similar space velocity is only
coincidental.

Are there stars with ages compatible with the Sun's that have
similar space velocities? I'm interested in this too.

Stuart