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ESA Releases Largest Star Map Ever Online (gizmodo.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the come-and-get-it dept.

S810 writes: The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a treasure trove of data from its Gaia Spacecraft; totaling around 1.7 billion stars. This star map is the largest of its kind to date. In addition to the star map, the data also contains motion and color data of 1.3 billion stars relative to the Sun. Furthermore, it includes "radial velocities, amount of dust, and surface temperatures of lots of stars, and a catalogue of over 14,000 Solar System objects, including asteroids," reports Gizmodo. You can view the data here, and view a guide for what the data contains and how to use it here.

1 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Eve Online by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > A space MMO based on this data and the exoplanet data would be insanely awesome.

    Yes and no.

    There are multiple problems.

    The #1 problem, as said famously by Douglas Adam, is: Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

    Unless you give players:

    * FTL (Faster then Light) / Warp Speed ,and
    * Multiple reasons to navigate around the galaxy

    Exploration alone is pretty boring. One of the primary reasons EVE Online has lasted so long because of POS - Player Owned Structures/Stations, such as Starbases and Citadels

    The #2 problem is: What does progression look like?
    i.e. What is the end game? What do players _actually_ do that will keep them interested?

    If you search for how scientifically accurate is elite dangerous you will come find that Elite:Dangerous already has part of its star map based on real star systems:

    Space.com: What's unique about Elite: Dangerous' Stellar Forge?

    David Braben: Everything we've got in the game is real. We've got some 160,000 star systems that are from star catalogs, and the rest are created using sophisticated algorithms ...

    We've got around 1,000 systems [in the game] discovered each minute by real people, where no one has ever been before. People can equip their ship and just head out into the unknown. But that's still 0.001 percent of the galaxy that has been discovered in the year since we went live.

    Elite:Dangerous even "loosely" predicted the Trappist-1 sytem.

    You may also be interested in:

    * Orbiter
    * Space Simulator
    * Kerbal space program

    I haven't played those so can't confirm their accuracy.