>“We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever"
>The VVV and VVVX surveys have already led to more than 300 scientific articles.
While they do say what objects the survey included, the article seems to lack many examples of discoveries.
For those following this what do you consider the greatest discoveries and highlights?
Part of this dataset (VVV actually) can be explored interactively here:
https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-Co...
Very cool! A lot of my professors in the credits. Roberto Saito was the one who taught me Maxwell's Laws :-)
Fun fact. The estimated number of stars in the Milky Way (~2e11-4e11) is within an order of magnitude of the estimated number of individual particles of smoke in a cigarette (~1e12).
an amazing 3d map implementation of the taken images here: https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home
I have no idea what I'm looking at, but it is neat.
Uber will one day use this to plot my ride to planet Kepler 23420 1a
Spring for the UberX, fellow passengers can get pretty annoying over the decades.
> This gigantic dataset covers an area of the sky equivalent to 8600 full moons
What proportion of the celestial vault or sphere is that? Napkin calcul appreciated :)
The (average) full moon occupies roughly 1/129,600 of the sky, or 0.00077%
So this data set covers 6.6% of the night sky.
1 Full moon is about 0.5 degree if that helps
This is likely around less than 1% of the Milky Way using stars mapped as a calculation
Is it detailed enough for a realistic space flight sim?
still hoping for space .ycombinator .com (and/or spacetime.)
someday
the search engine unfortunately does not appear to properly support multiple keywords with AND/OR logic
Am I the only one who feels mind boggling amazement followed by a sense of depression that we are too short-lived, too primitive and too weak to be able to visit and explore these distant galaxies?
It is like we are given a glimpse of this insane and terrifyingly beautiful expanse with the knowledge that that's all it will ever amount to. Like a child looking through the glass window at the limitless world outside without any hopes of reaching it while knowing that she will never be able to get out of the house.
No need for nihilism.
Alpha centauri is approximately 4.37 light years away. Project starshot is already aiming to get there. This can take anywhere from 20 to 50 years depending on the mission. We already have a spacecraft from 1977 that is still operating today which proves our potential to build on a 50 year timeframe. We'll likely have humans somewhere in our solar system besides earth before anyone attempts to go to alpha centauri but besides that I also think we would be able to live much longer. Life expectancy increases are around 1% or 0.8% per decade at its current pace. There's no guarantee this continues but even so, if that's the average in the coming decades then we'll expect people to live hundreds of years by the time we can send a ship to alpha centauri.
So at 50 years, that requires traveling an average of 10% the speed of light. That’s 150x times faster than the peak speed ever built which got a significant amount of speed from gravitational assists. That’s a massive leap to assume we’ll have craft traveling that fast anytime soon considering the considerable fuel costs involved not to mention relativistic problems that going that fast requires (shielding against interplanetary dust, energy requirements growing exponentially etc).
And on top of everything, stopping is a huge question when you’re going that fast so how are you achieving that? Is that fuel you had to accelerate as well? And remember - that’s 150x average speed faster than peak so your actual peak to achieve a speed up followed by a slowdown would need to be even faster.
As for voyager, that craft is barely operational in some sense. At 10% and at significantly further distances than ever achieved it would be even harder to keep it operational I think.
Let’s be optimistic but let’s live in reality and not unrealistic sci-fi.
Optimistic reality means spreading cellular life, not the great ape in particular. People by and large are uninterested in this, they feel it is pointless if not somehow immoral. Our "weakness" is not in the flesh but our attachment to it, specifically, these would-be galaxy childs' personal flesh. The 20-50 year mission duration is not a cure for the nihilism but another expression of it.
Its not unrealistic sci-fi. We have particle accelerators that operate at much, much higher energies. The kind of energy that would succesfully leave earth and our sun behind if these particles were shot out of the LHC. That is to say, you'd be right that any vessel carrying fuel wouldn't reach such speeds. And while its true that even the smallest sattelites today are still at least 1000grams. Getting that up to relativistic speeds would require on the order of 2 billion MJ of energy. Or the equivalent of a large power plant runnning for 20 days to supply all the energy.
But that's only the start, any advancements in making sattelites on a chip could massively reduce the weight and therefore power requirements. Even with all losses accounted for. I believe this could be doable in the next 50 years. You just need to build the most powerful laser anyone has every built and power it for as long as you can.
Project star shot is still very much s research project at this point, but it seems serious.
The idea is to not use self powered rockets, but launch a thousand small solar sail based probes. These would launched into orbit traditionally, then accelerated individually from a massive earth based laser array, solving the rocket equation problem while introducing a host of its own.
Many probes will not make the trip, but the hope is enough would survive to do a fly by.
Worse yet (for an equivalent vehicle mass), that's 22,500x (150^2) the energy needed.
> Project starshot
Is it a live project? Their news section is dishearteningly quiet [1]. They still talk about 2018 in the present tense [2].
Also in 1.3 Million years this star will pass 1/6 Light year from earth:
Quote: Gliese 710 has the potential to perturb the Oort cloud in the outer Solar System, exerting enough force to send showers of comets into the inner Solar System for millions of years, triggering visibility of about ten naked-eye comets per year, and possibly causing an impact event.
Wild stuff!
Ah, that explains why 5,000 years ago the average life expectancy was just over 6 months.
Unlike a grassy field in a sunny Earth day, space is cold, dark, deprived of oxygen and bombarded by radiation, and the few rocks that exist in the vast void of nothingness are pretty much just lifeless rocks. So yeah, enjoy our house, it's pretty neat here. It would be cool to explore this dark desert, but it's not hard to find happiness inside if you try.
Mortality can be a tough thing to accept. But, if it helps, just know that it is always a spectrum - it is never binary - in that everything has an end (as far as we, and our physical/cosmological models, can understand).
We've got it better than pretty much every other type of animal life on earth (with a few exceptions) - insects or our pets, for example - so while we might not have "cosmological endurance", let's call it, we've still got it pretty good. :)
Agreed that it's a shame we can't explore everything, though!
Have you gone to a National Park?
(assuming you live in the US)
You can get similar amazement here on earth, normally within 1-day drive of where most people live, by just visiting a National Park.
We take for granted the beauty of Earth, and so much is still undiscovered here at home.
You can always redirect your depression into constructive optimism by working to help ensure that eventually, our descendants might have a chance to be able to do so.
Nope, I feel the same sense of depression about space. I love it but I absolutely feel that. We see these beautiful things and will likely never, as a species or as individuals, even get NEAR seeing them in person.
You haven’t even finish exploring your own planets in solar system
What exactly do you hope to find ? It's not like we're living in a Star Trek universe where every solar system has a warp civilization.
Unless you believe in fairy tales and santa claus, mankind will never reach them. Sure, we will settle surrounding few hundred light years, maybe a thousand in next million years, if we as mankind are extremely lucky, I talk range somewhere 1:1000 to 1:million. Other chance is show or quick death.
Beyond that, no real settling, just some probes that will take tens of millenia to come back (or send signal back).
Think about all the stuff and beauty we have now, to experience and explore it on our pale blue dot, trivially reachable considering our recent past, and all that will be almost inevitably lost to future generations. Compared to what we have here, stuff in cold hard vacuum or some illusions of beauty pale in comparison (and that comes from a guy who loves astronomy). You can experience it now, in its original form and not some crappy re-creation of good ol' days. Trust me, future generations will be wishing for many reasons to be able to live now (at least those healthy).
I don't believe we will find some magic above-c transport in Star trek style. Sure, its a nice fantasy and we would love for it being true, but thats not how reality works. Same as some beardy old dude in the clouds fantasy, having for some reason very strict bronze-age morals yet letting billions innocents suffer immeasurably without a care in the world(universe). But of course there is magical wonderland after its over here, pure magic in D&D style with alternate realities/planes/universes or whatever those folks who wrote it up thought made sense back then.
> The team is composed of […]
A lot of people. Looks like a movie credits roll.