Their results are amazing - the Orion Nebula will ultimately bear a remarkable resemblance to the familiar Pleiades or Seven Sisters. The Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye as a misty patch in Orion's 'sword', just below the three bright stars forming the 'belt'. In the constellation Taurus, the Pleiades is a cluster of about 3000 stars in all.
Most people can pick out the six brightest without the help of binoculars or a telescope.
Over several decades, the Norwegian astrophysicist Sverre Aarseth who works at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK, has developed a powerful and complex computer program that makes it possible to calculate the way in which a star cluster alters over time taking into account how the gravity of each star influences all of the other stars. Thanks to his computing techniques, researchers can calculate realistic predictions involving thousands of stars, including binary star systems. Building binary stars into the calculations is important because most stars form in pairs and some are born in systems with three or more members. But close encounters between binary stars as they move around in a cluster are particularly difficult to compute. Working with Aarseth and his former Australian student Jarrod Hurley at Cambridge, Pavel Kroupa reprogrammed the computer to deal effectively with the significant mass of gas expelled from a large interstellar gas cloud when a star cluster forms within it.