Zooming in on the unusual binary star V471 Tauri

This video starts with a wide-field view of the sky and zooms in on the bright northern constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The two very bright star clusters of the Pleiades and the Hyades are very prominent and the zoom ends with a close-up look at an apparently unremarkable star called V471 Tauri. This object has been imaged using the new SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope and this new improved view shows that there is no brown dwarf close to the double star, as had been expected.