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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.
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.
How possible, if the nearest solar system (Alpha Centauri) is 4.37 light years away?
...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
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....
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?
probably meant 1.1 million. 1 billion is the goal
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).
Of course. You parked on Earth.
Sure, it's physically possible, but not really doable with today's technology.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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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.
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.
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"?
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.
thanks and sorry, the switch between english and french confused me. in french "," is a decimal :-{
pretty neat graphic by the way!
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.
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?
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.