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OB association · spans Scorpius and Centaurus

The Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association

The nearest nursery of big young stars is right next door, and several of the brightest stars in the southern sky belong to it — they are all cousins, born from the same cloud! Most are only a few million years old.

🚀 Travel there
The Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association — Drawn, not photographed.

What it is

Sprawling loose group of young massive O and B type stars, the nearest OB association to the Sun.

OB association: A loose sprawl of hot blue giants, all born together. Every kind of thing there is →

What you will really see

With your own eyes

A loose gang of hot blue-white stars scattered across a wide patch of sky.

🔭 See it drawn as it looks through a telescope
🖨️ A sheet to print for this
🖨️ Print a sheet and go and look
🖨️ Sheet to take outside →

Worth knowing about the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association

On the 100-meter-track scale model of the Milky Way, this group of stars would be about 45 centimeters from the Sun. Light takes 450 Earth years to get here from the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association, so what you are looking at is the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association as it was 450 Earth years ago.

What it is made of
A loose, sprawling group of hundreds of young, massive, blue-white O and B type stars from the same gas cloud.
How we know: Members share a common age and direction/speed of motion, traced back to a common origin tens of millions of years ago. Rung 5 of the cosmic ladder — the distance to the stars
What makes it worth knowing
The nearest OB association to the Sun; a past supernova here may have helped carve the 'Local Bubble' around the Sun.
Its name and its story
Spans Scorpius and Centaurus, tied to centaur mythology (Chiron) and the giant scorpion sent to kill Orion.
The numbers
Distance from us~400-500 light-years

Next to it

The Milky Wayspiral galaxyNaked eyeProxima CentauristarWith effortAlpha Centauri A & Bbinary star systemNaked eyeSiriusstarNaked eyeVegastarNaked eyeArcturusstarNaked eye
📖 How the Milky Way fits together

Then go outside

Too big to look at all at once — but the things inside it are not. The Planetarium will show you which are up.

🌙 Plan an evening outside🌌 Everything else in the sky