The Astrology of Space - Matrix Software

The Astrology of Space
and lost favor several times among astronomers. It is
now considered a well-established fact.
It was first noticed by Herschel in 1887 that many of
the brightest stars in the southern sky occur in a band
inclined some 18° to the plane of the Milky Way. In
other words, the near and bright stars in the sky
concentrate along a great circle which is not
coincident with the galactic equator, but tilted or
inclined to it – a flattened local structure. Around
1880, this phenomenon was reexamined by American
Astronomer B. A. Gould, who guessed that the Sun
was located in a small cluster whose structure
seemed to be evident in the naked-eye (near) stars.
Gould's Belt, as it came to be known, contained the
"B" stars brighter than 5.25 magnitude, whereas stars
of "B" spectral class fainter than 7.25 magnitude were
confined to the plane of the galaxy. It was then
discovered that diffuse nebulae were also distributed
in two distinct belts, one coinciding with the plane of
the galaxy, the other matching Gould's Belt. At first, all
objects whose plane of symmetry deviated greatly
from the galactic equator were considered part of
Gould's belt. Today this belt (now called the local
system) is considered to be defined as a group of 100
million stars flanked by the Scorpio-Centaurs
association on one end and the Pleiades cluster at
the other.
This local system is made up of the luminous O-B5
stars within 400 parsecs of the Sun, the "A" stars in
the Henry Draper Catalogue, neutral hydrogen, the O-
associations: Scorpio-Centaurus, II Perseus, and I
Orion, and the two largest dust complexes within 500
parsecs of the Sun. These two dust complexes, the
great concentration of dust in the Taurus-Orion-Auriga
region below the galactic equator and the Ophiuchus-
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