Forget the 'Seven Sisters': The Pleiades Is a Star Empire

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—The Pleiades, those seven bright stars near Orion’s shoulder that everyone mistakes for a miniature Big Dipper, sit roughly 445 light-years away and have been mythologized for millennia.

Known as “the Seven Sisters,” the star cluster is essentially the Universe’s oldest girl group, a celestial Spice Girls revered from Ancient Greece to New Age philosophy. But according to a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, that famous cluster is actually more like Themyscira, the mythical DC comic home of the Amazons and Wonder Woman, with the seven sisters actually just the front-facing celebrities of a sprawling, 3,000-member star clan.

The new study, titled Lost Sisters Found: TESS and Gaia Reveal a Dissolving Pleiades Complex, found 3,000 stars secretly connected to the Pleiades scattered across nearly 2,000 light-years of space. The team calls this sprawling structure the Greater Pleiades Complex, and it turns out Earthlings have only been seeing the dense, photogenic core while the rest of the family ghosted into the galactic background.

By combining rotation data from TESS and motion/position data from Gaia, the team tracked stars moving like the Pleiades and spinning at similar rates, indicating a common origin around 100 million years ago. The method they used—“gyro-tagging” stellar rotation rates—lets them pick out stars that have drifted far from their birth cluster and would be invisible to older techniques.

“This study changes how we see the Pleiades — not just seven bright stars, but thousands of long-lost siblings scattered across the whole sky,” said lead author Andrew Boyle in an accompanying press release from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“By measuring how stars spin, we can identify stellar groups too scattered to detect with traditional methods—opening a new window into the hidden architecture of our Galaxy.”

So why does this matter? Besides rewriting the cosmic family tree, it opens questions about how many star clusters thought to be isolated are actually remnants of dramatic star-birth events. It even shines light on where Earth’s Sun might have come from: was it part of a giant stellar family, now dispersed? The paper suggests that’s a possibility.

It also adds new depth to one of humanity’s most influential nightly visitors.

Across human history, the Pleiades have been an interstellar touchstone, appearing in myths, calendars, and navigation systems from Greece to the Pacific. They earned the seven sisters distinction in ancient Greece, supposedly the daughters of Atlas pursued by Orion until Zeus placed them in the sky. Their rising and setting guided harvests, sailing seasons, and festivals referenced in both Homer and Hesiod.

In Japan, the cluster became known as Subaru, a symbol of unity later immortalized in an automaker’s logo. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Māori celebrate the Pleiades winter rising as Matariki, the start of the Māori New Year. Indigenous nations across the Americas, including the Hopi, Lakota, and Navajo, tie the Pleiades to migration stories, lost children, ancestral origins, or seasonal change, while the Inca used its brightness to predict rainfall and agricultural success. Even in ancient Mesopotamia, the cluster appeared in cuneiform as MUL.MUL, an omen tied to kingship and cosmic order.

More recently, a fringe but enduring theory in UFO and New Age communities has claimed that certain extraterrestrial beings known as Pleiadians or the Nordics originate from the Pleiades star cluster. Believers describe these beings as tall, humanlike, and spiritually advanced, acting as benevolent guides warning humanity about nuclear weapons, environmental collapse, and the need for higher consciousness. The idea surged in the 1970s and ’80s through contactees and channelers who said they received telepathic messages from Pleiadian civilizations.

However, scientists and debunkers note there is no tangible evidence for life in the Pleiades, and the stars are far too young, at roughly 100 million years old, to host mature planetary ecosystems. Still, the narrative remains one of the most popular and persistent storylines in modern alien lore.

While the new findings add little to the claims of a Pleiadian race visiting Earth, they do prove that humans still have much more to discover about the distant star cluster looming large in the night sky.

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