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Europe Has Added 1.1 Billion Stars To Its Milky Way Map (vice.com)

Posted by msmash on from the that's-the-milky-way dept.

Ben Sullivan, writing for Motherboard: The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the first batch of data from its Gaia star mapping project -- a mission that is currently on track to chart one billion stars in the Milky Way. The space telescope launched in 2013 and its first data dump contains the precise celestial position and brightness of a mammoth 1,142 million stars. The release also contains the distances and movements for more than two million stars so far. ESA's director of science Alvaro Gimenez told a press conference held at the European Space Astronomy Centre in Spain on Wednesday morning that the data release features around 490 billion astrometric, 118 billion photometric, and 10 billion spectroscopic measurements. "[The] Final survey will contain [around] 250,000 Solar System Objects, 1,000,000 galaxies, and 500,000 quasars," said Gimenez. Those numbers are almost unimaginable, but ESA has used the data so far to form an "all-sky" view of the stars in our galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on Gaia's observations from July 2014 to September 2015.

74 comments

  1. My God by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 1

    It's full of stars!

    *Queue* Richard Strauss

    --

    Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

    1. Re: My God by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's full of stars Chewie!

      Rraaarrgghhh!!

    2. Re:My God by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No, that would be "cue". And why did you put asterisks around "queue"? To highlight that you can't tell cue from queue?

    3. Re:My God by Penguinisto · · Score: 1

      Actually, they mis-named the project:

      from its Gaia star mapping project

      They should have named it Galaxia.

      (...bonus points if you thought of Trevize, Bliss, and Pelorat when you read the above sentence.)

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    4. Re: My God by tysonedwards · · Score: 1

      He could be in line like most people... I hear he's really down-to-earth.

      --
      Thirty four characters live here.
    5. Re:My God by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      Ah, the wonderful Foundation series. Partially what got me interested in psychology. That and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

    6. Re:My God by pushing-robot · · Score: 1

      *Pause*

      What, you don't use the script?

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
  2. Is there a new track? by dingleberrie · · Score: 2

    " -- a mission that is currently on track to chart one billion stars in the Milky Way."

    On track? It sounds like it passed that goal.

    1. Re:Is there a new track? by bruce_the_loon · · Score: 1

      It would appear so, unless by a slim-to-none the editors of the submission stuffed up and it should be 1.1 million as given in the summary itself. </sarcasm> My kingdom for a good Slashdot editor.

      --
      Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
    2. Re:Is there a new track? by tsqr · · Score: 1

      It would appear so, unless by a slim-to-none the editors of the submission stuffed up and it should be 1.1 million as given in the summary itself. </sarcasm> My kingdom for a good Slashdot editor.

      I thought so as well, until I looked at TFA. Its title is identical to the summary's, and the 1.14 million figure appears there in the same context (actually, TFS is a direct quote from TFA). Anyway, whether they're on track for a billion or they've already got a billion, they've barely made a start (the Milky Way is estimated to include roughly 100 billion stars).

    3. Re:Is there a new track? by bruce_the_loon · · Score: 3, Informative

      We fell into the thousand separator trap. The 1,142 million is actually 1142 million or 1.142 billion. The article has the non-separator number which is more globally recognized.

      --
      Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
    4. Re:Is there a new track? by Zaatxe · · Score: 1

      Actually counting and identifying the stars it the "easy part". But it takes time and several observations of each star to get information about the variable attributes, like proper motion, flux variations, etc. Most of the stars used don't have a reliable measurement of parallax and/or distance, only about 2 million stars have parallax measurements (most of them derived from the Tycho2 catalog from Hipparcos mission). The goal is to have all the attributes (or most of them) for all the stars, reaching one petabyte of data.

      --
      So say we all
    5. Re:Is there a new track? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is anything wrong with the mission? Their objective was 0.007 mas precision for stars at magnitude 10, and today (after 2.5 years out of a planned 5 years), they announce positions and parallaxes with a standard error of 0.3 mas?

    6. Re:Is there a new track? by Zaatxe · · Score: 1

      Well, I don't work with this aspect of the mission, only with one of the data indexing and visualization solutions. This is just the first data release, not all data acquired by the satellite was included in this data release, some are still to be processed. Besides, Gaia is orbiting the Sun, not Earth so each parallax measurement of a star is 6 months apart and to increase the precision several measurements must be taken (so I was told, I am a software engineer, not an astrophysicist).

      --
      So say we all
    7. Re:Is there a new track? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You only need some math background to have some doubts about the precision. In general it's hard to imagine a relationship between "number of measurements" and "precision" that would give that type of outcome. Of course some minimum number of measurements are necessary to solve for your unknowns, but a few more measurements beyond the minimum should make the system well-conditioned and be enough to get close to the final precision (say within a factor of 2). With the data dump they're effectively claiming that equations are solvable but very ill-conditioned for each of 2,000,000 stars. Sorry but that doesn't pass the sniff test.

  3. Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've been going through the data dump and I calculate that there are several we can reach within 20 years that might contain Earth-like planets fit for human habitation. That is really exciting!

    1. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As far as I know, we can only reach one such planet in 20 years... our own.

    2. Re:Impressive by r_nux · · Score: 1

      How possible, if the nearest solar system (Alpha Centauri) is 4.37 light years away?

    3. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      By building a starship that can reach only 30% of the speed of light. It is definitely possible with todays technology.

    4. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow, so is a leisure society with a 10 hour workweek. I know what is more important for humanity.

    5. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      If we use the definition of "Earth-like" that we use with exoplanets then we've got 3... Venus and Mars both rocky planets in the habitable zone.... Though I wouldn't recommend trying to habbitate either without a protective suit or 10....

    6. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You have a strange, child-like vision of reality.

    7. Re:Impressive by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      Venus is pretty easily habitable. It has earth-like gravity, earth-like temperatures, and earth-like pressures. You don't even need a protective suit, just a gas mask.

      The catch is that to live like this on Venus, you have to live in a giant dirigible or "floating city". The conditions on the surface are hellish, but several kilometers high in the atmosphere, it's actually quite nice. (I'm not sure what the situation is with radiation.)

      Of course, this does make me wonder what you'd do there if you can't visit the surface, and the conditions on the surface are so bad you can't even land R/C equipment there for any substantial length of time without it failing.

      At least on Mars you don't have to worry about hellish conditions on the surface, and can walk around all you want. But the gravity is too low (1/3 g), the air pressure almost negligible (about 1/200 atm), and radiation is a health problem long-term (no magnetosphere), so you definitely would need a protective suit at least for the pressure. But you could probably establish mining colonies there and live underground, though that obviously wouldn't be easy. If we want to do mining, it'd be a lot easier to just capture asteroids with (semi-)automated spacecraft and bring them near Earth.

      Personally, I think there's a great economic case for asteroid mining, which would make it feasible and worthwhile to have either large facilities in space (for ore processing) or on the Moon. For other planets or moons in the solar system, I just don't see any good reason for humans to go there except for scientific curiosity (which is great, but hardly a reason to establish any kind of human presence larger than what we have at the scientific bases in Antarctica).

    8. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are right. We will just live in a floating city in the sky on Venus. Just like we can do on Earth! Of course we will just make it out of asteroids that we mine in our space factories. Definitely doable!

    9. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Venus is pretty easily habitable"

      Sure it is, Sparky. So easy that I see you doing this in your spare time this weekend.

    10. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Venus is pretty easily habitable"

      Hallucinatory delusion. You have a mind-boggling interpretation of reality.

      I seriously wonder about your mental health.

    11. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ol' Grishy up there is one of the most rabid Space Nutters on here. Total disconnect from reality; he must know his Star Trek by heart.

      I suspect he's quite an old man, probably raised during the peak of the Space Age, hence the emotional baggage associated with space.

    12. Re:Impressive by mark-t · · Score: 1

      ... except for building a spaceship that can reach 30% of the speed of light part.

      Sure, it's physically possible, but not really doable with today's technology.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    13. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "I know what is more important for humanity."

      Working for what is effectively a day or two a week is important for humanity? I'll admit that there should be a lot of priorities above spaceflight, but turning the populace into a bunch of layabouts isn't one of them. If you want a place to start I suggest the tens of billions each year we're burning to "defeat" a few heat stroked nutjobs in a foreign country. Or the $100 Million per day we're spending on the "War on Drugs".

    14. Re:Impressive by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      Er, no. I could even be called a "space nutter" but with current tech 10% C with fission fragment rocket is the best we could conceivably do, and about 3-5% C the more likely number.

    15. Re:Impressive by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      Not even doable with tomorrows tech, a fusion craft won't go that fast, maybe 10-12 percent C tops

      Not until we could produce tons of antimatter to use as fuel will we be able to get 30% or more of light speed.

    16. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Working for what is effectively a day or two a week is important for humanity?"

      Yes. There are finite resources, and finite amounts of energy, and having everyone on the planet driving around to perform 50 hours of corporate kabuki theater for each other per week is neither desirable nor feasible.

      We have the technology and resources to achieve a leisure society right now. No magical materials are required.

      " but turning the populace into a bunch of layabouts "

      Right there you need to work on yourself and ask yourself why you have such a horrendous anti-social misanthropic view of your fellow man, or woman.

    17. Re:Impressive by rgmoore · · Score: 1

      You don't even need a protective suit, just a gas mask.

      The catch is that to live like this on Venus, you have to live in a giant dirigible or "floating city". The conditions on the surface are hellish, but several kilometers high in the atmosphere, it's actually quite nice.

      Actually, you will need more protective gear than just a gas mask. The temperature and pressure may be tolerable, but the atmosphere is full of sulfuric acid, and there are constant hurricane-force winds. I guess you could live there in a floating city if you could build one that would survive the environment- better be very confident in your design if you plan on living there- and you never wanted to go outside. But why bother?

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

    18. Re:Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is only one solar system. You must mean Star System in this case.

    19. Re:Impressive by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      Here's an article about it. It seems the hurricane-force winds aren't that big a deal, probably because they're constantly moving across the planet, in one direction, rather then in a tight swirl the way they do with Earth-based hurricanes, and also because if you're living in a big balloon, it'll just move with the winds. The problem with hurricane-force winds here on Earth is that we're trying to stay in one place on the ground, fighting against the wind. The article even cites the wind as an advantage, because it'd give the colony a more normal-length day (a day on Venus is 243 Earth days due to its slow rotation).

      But yeah, the "why bother?" question is foremost. I guess it'd be kinda cool for tourism, but I can't think of any other reason.

    20. Re:Impressive by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      We should totally colonize the sol system, there doesn't seem to be much intelligent life there yet.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  4. there goes the night by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Funny

    If they keep adding stars pretty soon the sky is going to be brilliantly light at night and we'll have to sleep during the day.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  5. Very useful! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This will be very useful in the future when we take our place among the stars. Like navigational charts used in the journey to the New World this will assist us while we are journeying to other systems in our generational starships.

    1. Re:Very useful! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is our destiny to live among the stars and not to be limited to this rock. Just like we went to the new world, we will populate the galaxy. It is our manifest destiny to do so. Someone said once that you could never reach the new world because you would fall of the edge. He was wrong.

    2. Re:Very useful! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't need to eat the rocks at -40C. We will process them into fuel in our space factories. We can also live in the sky on Venus in our floating cities (see post above). You can read my blog all about it. It lays it all out for you.

    3. Re:Very useful! by coastwalker · · Score: 1

      Well useful or not I found it quite profound. I had never seen the stars in our galaxy dance around us before in a simulation. Go look how far back and far forward in time you have to move before our familiar constellations zip apart across the sky. Now that is something else and it blew my mind.

      --
      Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
    4. Re:Very useful! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even if falling off the flat earth proved wrong, (free) fall out of the galaxy is how it may happen one day if we ever leave the Milky Way.

    5. Re:Very useful! by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      This is our destiny to live among the stars and not to be limited to this rock.

      Says who?

      Just like we went to the new world, we will populate the galaxy. It is our manifest destiny to do so.

      What a bunch of jingoist crap.

      Face it, we're never leaving this planet. Leave that to superior species. We'll be lucky if we're not extinct within a century or two. Most likely, some interstellar explorers will come across this planet in a few centuries and find the ruins of our civilization, and send some xenoarchaeologists to investigate and see where we went terribly wrong. They'll probably spend a short amount of time and then decide there's much more interesting and accomplished civilizations to investigate out there than us.

      Maybe we've already been visited: we used to have a lot of eerie reports about UFOs. These days, they're all gone. Probably because they came, they saw, and they decided we were a waste of their time.

    6. Re:Very useful! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You laugh, but that "blog" is called
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps

      You want to have hours upon hours of belly-laughs on a rainy weekend? Pick up a copy, and see what an English professor thinks about colonizing the galaxy. Hey, at least you can't accuse him of hubris, he doesn't want to colonize the universe...

      I wonder how many Space Nutters there were back in the Space Age as compared to now. Like any religion, the further away in time you get from the original event, the stronger the faith. I mean, did you read what that nutcase up there wrote about "destiny" and "this rock" and "we"? That's religious talk.

  6. An ounce of prevention by fyngyrz · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...we should burn the observatories so this can never happen again

    (credit: Simpsons / Moe)

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  7. Gaia? by Quirkz · · Score: 1

    Is anyone else confused that they named a star search program Gaia? Isn't that supposed to be another name for the Earth?

    --
    The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
    1. Re:Gaia? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Gaia is actually a goddess as in "mother earth", and by coincident the name of the planet from which earth was terraformed, seeded and settled ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    2. Re: Gaia? by Zoxed · · Score: 1

      Yes. FWIW, IIRC, GAIA started as an acronym for the instrument technology to be used, but that was later replaced but the name kept and de-capitalised.

  8. Current Events by dugrrr · · Score: 1

    The lion's share of this data is WAY out of date. Many of those stars don't even exist anymore. Where's the Echelon when you need them?

  9. This Is For Tax Purposes by alternative_right · · Score: 0

    The EU estimates that 2% of these stars are near planets with intelligent life, and of those, 40% are starving and will provide immigrants who can then be worked and taxed to pay for the social welfare system in Europe.

    --
    Alternative Right.
  10. 1 billion? by ordirules · · Score: 1

    probably meant 1.1 million. 1 billion is the goal

  11. This all good and everything.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But can it help me find where I parked?

    1. Re:This all good and everything.... by Wintermute__ · · Score: 1

      Of course. You parked on Earth.

  12. SIMBAD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is the data already in SIMBAD? If yes, I need to update my 3D starmap...

    http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/

  13. 3d Star map needs updating ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They'll need to update this awesome thing then !

        http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/

  14. Parallax by Sebastopol · · Score: 3, Informative

    After reading the historical book "Parallax: The race to measure the cosmos", I'm in awe of this machine. It took millennia and massive improvements in lens making technology and machining for astronomers to measure the first star's distance. Now a satellite can nail down a billion. Just amazing.

    --
    https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
    1. Re:Parallax by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Good book on related topic: "The Clockwork Universe"

      For this narrative of the seventeenth century's scientific revolution, Dolnick embeds the mathematical discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz in the prevailing outlook of their time. God was presumed integral to the universe, so discerning how it worked was a quest as theological as it was intellectual. By directing readers to the deistic drive in their famous achievements, Dolnick accents what otherwise strikes moderns as strange, such as Newton's obsession with alchemy and biblical hermeneutics. Those pursuits held codes to God's mind, as did motion and, especially, planetary motion, and Dolnick's substance follows the greats' progress in code-breaking, depicting Kepler's mathematical thought process in devising his laws, Galileo's in breaking out the vectors of falling objects, Newton's and Leibniz's in inventing calculus, and Newton's in formulating his laws of gravitation. Including apt biographical detail, Dolnick humanizes the group, socializes them by means of their connections to such coevals as the members of the nascent Royal Society, and captures their mental coexistence in mysticism and rationality. A concise explainer, Dolnick furnishes a fine survey introduction to a fertile field of scientific biography and history.

    2. Re:Parallax by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We can also plot this information into models of the Milky Way and map out the longer term evolution of the system. Sadly, with out equally good positions for stars in Andromeda (and a lot of dark mater fudge) you'd not be able to simulate past where orbits start being affected.

      We can also plot this information into models of the Milky Way and map out the longer term evolution of the system. Sadly, with out equally good positions for stars in Andromeda (and a lot of dark mater fudge) you'd not be able to simulate past where orbits start being affected.

      Once you know the position and spectra from Gaia you can go back and watch for changes.

      With current technology we can find and resolve planets or other hidden partners of stars out to 10 parsec (35 light years) or so. Doing that with Kepler on a small patch of sky turned up over 3,000 planetary candidates with hundreds of confirmed worlds.

      A similar Gaia-scale scan could tell us things about the distribution of planetary systems and other low-mass stellar companions. I, for one, would be very interested in the distribution of planet-size objects. Are such systems are evenly distributed around the disk and halo? Could any deviation from isotropic impact theories of stellar evolution? And the distribution could also just be boring 'same everywhere' that tells us we need better instruments.

      But the first step is knowing where to look. And Gaia has done a stellar job at that.

  15. Re:1 billion? by Zaatxe · · Score: 1

    No, that's 1.1 billion, the article is correct. (Source: I work at the team that produced the density map that illustrate the article)

    --
    So say we all
  16. Entrepreneurial opportunity by ChrisMaple · · Score: 1

    Rocky Mozell can sell to a billion fools.

    --
    Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
  17. Let's keep checking and look for changes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If there's anybody smarter than us out there, we ought to be able to notice something changing -- Dyson spheres being created, solar systems or planets fleeing the explosion of the core of the galaxy (hat tip to the Puppeteers), exhaust flares from really really fast ramjet spacecraft, disappearance or explosion of stars when someone screws up an attempt at FTL technology, or something.

    We need this baseline for regular repeated comparisons.

    Thank you, EU. Glad someone's doing science in those directions.

    1. Re:Let's keep checking and look for changes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can be as smart as you want, but you can't actually *think* your way across space, you have to *physically* do something! So unless there are new chemical elements and new different forces out there, how exactly would these fantasy structures be built? Out of what? How? Aluminum? Kerosene? By biological lifeforms like you and me with barely two decades of useful lifespan?

      It's over, finished, done. There simply is no way to achieve any of the sci-fi scenarios.

      The end.

      Prepare to organize a better planet for all 7.3 billion of us already here, now. But that would require something more than daydreaming and consuming sci-fi, and this is not what Space Nutters want to hear. Space Nutters are happy to spout their miserable misanthropic religious screeds about "this rock" and destinies...

  18. slackers by rubycodez · · Score: 1

    they're going to call it quits after only mapping 1 percent of the Milky Way's stars? 99% just left flapping in the galactic breeze? talk about unmotivated

  19. If you could visit one star every second by istartedi · · Score: 1

    If you could visit one star system every second, it would take you approximately 31.7 years to visit a billion stars.

    We can't even visit one in a lifetime, except of course for the one we're orbiting.

    Even with Star Trek warp, a second is a pointless amount of time to spend. The captain and crew might want to spend at least a few hours doing a basic survey of the star and any planets, asteroids, or other interesting things orbiting nearby.

    Thus, even with sci-fi technology it's not possible to explore all of that. Very humbling.

    Oh. And it's just one lousy galaxy. There are an estimated 100 billion of those in the observable Universe.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  20. Re:1 billion? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OK, but I'm confused. 1.1 billion stars in the Milky Way? All stellar population estimates for the Milky Way that I've ever heard, have ranged from 150 million to 250 million. What accounts for the huge increase?

    Are we finding large numbers of brown dwarf stars, previously unaccounted for? Were the stellar population estimates way too low?

  21. Afraid of the truth, mods? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Tryin' to hide it, eh?

  22. Re:1 billion? by ordirules · · Score: 1

    thanks and sorry, the switch between english and french confused me. in french "," is a decimal :-{ pretty neat graphic by the way!

  23. Measurements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Love me some spectroscopic measurements. Those be my favorite.

  24. Re:1 billion? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You suffer from a hearing impediment which turned "b" into "m". You might want to see a doctor.

  25. Re:EU by Maritz · · Score: 1

    Dumbass opinion: The EU is dying.

    --
    I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.