Located about 153 light-years (47 parsecs)[1][2][3][4] away from the Sun, it consists of a roughly spherical group of hundreds of stars sharing the same age, place of origin, chemical characteristics, and motion through space.

[1][5] From the perspective of observers on Earth, the Hyades Cluster appears in the constellation Taurus, where its brightest stars form a "V" shape along with the still-brighter Aldebaran.

[6] Four of these stars, with Bayer designations Gamma, Delta 1, Epsilon, and Theta Tauri, form an asterism that is traditionally identified as the head of Taurus the Bull.

Epsilon Tauri, known as Ain (the "Bull's Eye"), has a gas giant exoplanet candidate,[7] the first planet to be found in any open cluster.

An alternative method of computing the distance is to fit the cluster members to a standardized infrared color–magnitude diagram for stars of their type, and use the resulting data to infer their intrinsic brightness.

[10] However, about 85% of stars in the Hyades Stream have been shown to be completely unrelated to the original cluster on the grounds of dissimilar age and metallicity; their common motion is attributed to tidal effects of the massive rotating bar at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The Hyades are unrelated to two other nearby stellar groups, the Pleiades and the Ursa Major Stream, which are easily visible to the naked eye under clear dark skies.A 2018 Gaia DR1 study of the Hyades Cluster determined a (U, V, W) group velocity of (−41.92 ± 0.16, −19.35 ± 0.13, −1.11 ± 0.11) km/sec, based on the space velocities of the 138 core stars.

[14] Another DR2 study from 2019 focused on mapping the 3D Topology & Velocities of the Hyades main body out to 30 parsecs, and included Sub-Stellar members as well.

[16] Together with the other eye-catching open star cluster of the Pleiades, the Hyades form the Golden Gate of the Ecliptic, which has been known for several thousand years.

[18] In Book 18 of the Iliad the stars of the Hyades appear along with the Pleiades, Ursa Major, and Orion on the shield that the god Hephaistos made for Achilles.

In 1869, the astronomer R.A. Proctor observed that numerous stars at large distances from the Hyades share a similar motion through space.

[23] For much of the twentieth century, scientific study of the Hyades focused on determining its distance, modeling its evolution, confirming or rejecting candidate members, and characterizing individual stars.

[26] Extensive surveys have revealed a total of 8 white dwarfs in the cluster core,[29] corresponding to the final evolutionary stage of its original population of B-type stars (each about 3 M☉).

[30][32] The remaining population of confirmed cluster members includes numerous bright stars of spectral types A (at least 21), F (about 60), and G (about 50).

[33] The Hyades' cohort of lower-mass stars – spectral types K and M – remains poorly understood, despite proximity and long observation.

The tidal radius of ten parsecs (33 light-years) represents the Hyades' average outer limit, beyond which a star is unlikely to remain gravitationally bound to the cluster core.

[1][26] Stellar evaporation occurs in the cluster halo as smaller stars are scattered outward by more massive insiders.

From the halo they may then be lost to tides exerted by the Galactic core or to shocks generated by collisions with drifting hydrogen clouds.

It may eventually be reduced to a remnant containing about a dozen star systems, most of them binary or multiple, which will remain vulnerable to ongoing dissipative forces.