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Europe Has Added 1.1 Billion Stars To Its Milky Way Map (vice.com)
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.
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.
" -- 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.
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!
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.
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.
...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.
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
The lion's share of this data is WAY out of date.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?
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.
probably meant 1.1 million. 1 billion is the goal
But can it help me find where I parked?
Is the data already in SIMBAD? If yes, I need to update my 3D starmap...
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/
They'll need to update this awesome thing then !
http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/
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.
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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
Rocky Mozell can sell to a billion fools.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
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
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"?
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?
Tryin' to hide it, eh?
thanks and sorry, the switch between english and french confused me. in french "," is a decimal :-{
pretty neat graphic by the way!
Love me some spectroscopic measurements. Those be my favorite.
It is official; Surveys now confirm: The EU is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered EU when Apple CEO Tim Cook described the power grabbing supranational's investigation of its Irish tax affairs as "political bullshit". Coming close on the heels of the EU centralized tax identification number, their attempt to subsume the taxation rights of sovereign states is now clear for all to see. The EU is collapsing in complete disarray, as dead in the water as one of Merkel's drowned migrants.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the EU's future. The writing is on the wall: The EU faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the EU because the EU is dying. Things are looking very bad for the EU. As many of us are aware, the currency is becoming worthless. Negative interest rates are a tax on capital.
Let's stick to the facts and look at the numbers.
Germany has admitted over 1 million migrants, 80% are unfit for anything other than menial work. Integration, housing and welfare costs will out-weigh their net economic contribution. Sex attacks committed by migrants have reached pandemic proportions across the entire continent. Tourism numbers in France and Germany have dwindled due to terrorism yet Angela Merkel continues with her migration push and Hollande suggests the French "embrace Islam".
Greece is bankrupt and unable to escape the crushing debt burden imposed by its membership in the eurozone. Italian banks are insolvent. Deutsche Bank, one of Germany's largest banks has an estimated derivatives exposure equal to global GDP. The pension liabilities of the various EU institutions total over â63 billion.
All major surveys show that the EU has lost the confidence of Europe's peoples. The EU is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the EU is to survive at all it will be as a third world hellhole. The EU continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save the EU from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the EU is dead.
Fact: The EU is dying
You suffer from a hearing impediment which turned "b" into "m". You might want to see a doctor.