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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.
" -- 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.
...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.
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....
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).
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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