(CNN) Apart from the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, there aren't many connections between space and dinosaurs outside of the imagination. But that all changed when NASA research scientist Jessie Christiansen brought the two together in an animation on social media this month.

For the past decade, Christiansen has studied planet occurrence rates, or how often and what kinds of planets occur in the galaxy, while studying data from exoplanet hunters such as NASA's Kepler, K2 and TESS missions.

During a stargazing party at the California Institute of Technology, Christiansen was explaining how young the stars were that they observed. The skywatchers were looking at the Pleiades, a bright young cluster of stars that are some of the youngest in our sky.

They're 13 million years old, which sounds ancient. Christiansen wanted to convey that astronomically, that's still a young age.

She told her fellow stargazers that before they went extinct, dinosaurs wouldn't have even seen these stars in the sky because they didn't exist until millions of years after the extinction event. And she told them that when dinosaurs such as stegosaurs roamed the Earth, our entire solar neighborhood was on the opposite of the Milky Way galaxy that it is now.