Reflecting Merope

In the well known Pleiades star cluster, starlight is slowly destroying this wandering cloud of gas and dust . The star Merope lies just off the upper left edge of this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope . In the past 100,000 years, part of the cloud has by chance moved so close to this star - only 3,500 times the Earth-Sun distance - that the starlight itself is having a very dramatic effect. Pressure of the star's light significantly repels the dust in the reflection nebula , and smaller dust particles are repelled more strongly. As a result, parts of the dust cloud have become stratified, pointing toward Merope . The closest particles are the most massive and the least affected by the radiation pressure . A longer-term result will be the general destruction of the dust by the energetic starlight .