Gould's Belt

A formation of many of the brightest, most conspicuous stars in the sky, which appear to lie in a band tilted at 16° to the plane of the Milky Way. The belt includes the bright stars of Orion and Taurus in the northern hemisphere and of Lupus and Centaurus in the southern hemisphere. Its existence was first noted in 1847 by Sir John Herschel and later studied by B. A. Gould (1879). Gould's Belt is thought to be a band-like structure of young stars in the form of a spur off the nearest spiral arm of the Galaxy.