You can get a nice sample of papers using VVV data using the Astrophysics Database System [0]. I mostly study other galaxies, which usually aren't variable on human lifespan-like timescales. Stars can vary on these shorter timescales, and VVV has compiled a huge list of those objects.
At a quick glance, I'd say some interesting results include:
* New star clusters discovered in our Galaxy [1]
* Galactic maps of dust reddening and stellar metallicity (enriched elemental abundances in stellar photospheres) [2]
* Galactic maps of stellar ages throughout the disk plane [3]
* Cataloguing other galaxies behind the plane of our own Galaxy [4]
this is very impressive. what is the term for lining up multiple images at different "zoom" levels like this? is it any way similar to google earth/space.
Pyramid tiling is the general technique used by Google Maps and similar systems to track images as different zoom levels; also similar techniques are used for progressive rendering for example in JPEG 2000.
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).
I'll post my fun fact as a reply to yours, also relating to the Milky Way and in some ways very much tied to this article.
We don't see something like 99% of the light from stars at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, because the Great Rift is in the way [0]. This fact is astonishing to me and I can't believe more people don't talk about it.
Our night sky would be substantially brighter and more spectacular if not for that rift. But the infrared light gets through and that light can be seen by the ESO telescope. Per the article:
>This has given us an accurate 3D view of the inner regions of the Milky Way, which were previously hidden by dust.
Isn't it unrealistic, combining months of data together with unseen light wavelengths(giving every wavelength different colour for aesthetic). Someone need to capture earth like that.
the data is just manipulated so that it is visible to our limited sight abilities. the data is not unreal. it's not a generativeAI type of product. the thing actually exists. they also "listen" to them in other frequencies, and then turn that data into pictures. again, it's not fake data. it's just interpreting it in a way our squishy lobes can understand it
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.
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.
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.
You’ve shifted and redefined the goalposts and even then requires orders of magnitude advancement in multiple areas (power generation, lasers, satellite shrinkage etc) and doing it all in space. Thinking any of this happens in a lifetime of anyone alive today seems unrealistically optimistic. And all of this ignores something critical OP said:
> we'll expect people to live hundreds of years by the time we can send a ship to alpha centauri.
Even hundreds of years is not a realistic life expectancy to reach the nearest star and requires not just an enormous overabundance of energy, the fuel source has to be available at the midway point so that you can decelerate. Humans at another star without discovery of faster than light travel mechanisms (mainly wormholes) seems purely in the realm of science fiction.
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.
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.
A fly by at relativistic speeds would be an accomplishment but what data are you realistically capturing?
And Wikipedia captures my critique of it accurately:
> According to The Economist, at least a dozen off-the-shelf technologies will need to improve by orders of magnitude
That’s about right. That kind of orders of magnitude improvement within a lifetime requires novel scientific theories (eg similar to quantum mechanics and the impact it had). Without that growth is drastically slower. And consider that even computational and communication capabilities have basically been maxed out at our current tech level - we’re no longer growing them exponentially due to thermal and physics constraints.
It’s an ambitious goal worth doing because of the “if you aim for the moon and miss you still hit the stars” kind of effect. And there’s plenty of directed research that needs to be funded. Thinking any of this happens in our lifetimes is ambitious and spaceships carrying humans going to the stars is fantasy*
* as always, completely new physics that upend our knowledge of what’s possible changes the calculus. But those come very rarely and there’s no reason to believe the next revolution will be as impactful as quantum mechanics in terms of impact on our technological capabilities.
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.
Honestly I don't think there's that big of a material difference in difficulty between being able to (consistently) live to 150 and being able to live indefinitely (barring catastrophic accidents and intractable diseases).
I feel like we're bumping up against the edges of the lifespan that we can reasonably achieve without figuring out how to actually stop or reverse aging.
Possibly there's a world where we figure out how to dramatically slow it without stopping it, because there's some entropic principle regarding our ability to reliably lengthen telomeres where we can't replace lost data but we can reduce the rate of loss, but my money's that we don't break 150 until we actually solve aging on a fundamental level.
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!
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.
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.
>“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?
You can get a nice sample of papers using VVV data using the Astrophysics Database System [0]. I mostly study other galaxies, which usually aren't variable on human lifespan-like timescales. Stars can vary on these shorter timescales, and VVV has compiled a huge list of those objects.
At a quick glance, I'd say some interesting results include: * New star clusters discovered in our Galaxy [1] * Galactic maps of dust reddening and stellar metallicity (enriched elemental abundances in stellar photospheres) [2] * Galactic maps of stellar ages throughout the disk plane [3] * Cataloguing other galaxies behind the plane of our own Galaxy [4]
[0] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3... [1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...532A.131B/abs... [2] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...534A...3G/abs... [3] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2019A%26A...623A.168S/abs... [4] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012AJ....144..127A/abstr...
If this telescope can detect planets not orbiting a star, I wonder if it could improve detection of some planets orbiting stars as well.
Part of this dataset (VVV actually) can be explored interactively here:
https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-Co...
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.
it's putting you in space from the vantage point of earth with the sun conveniently moved out of the way to not be blinded by it.
this is very impressive. what is the term for lining up multiple images at different "zoom" levels like this? is it any way similar to google earth/space.
Pyramid tiling is the general technique used by Google Maps and similar systems to track images as different zoom levels; also similar techniques are used for progressive rendering for example in JPEG 2000.
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.
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).
I'll post my fun fact as a reply to yours, also relating to the Milky Way and in some ways very much tied to this article.
We don't see something like 99% of the light from stars at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, because the Great Rift is in the way [0]. This fact is astonishing to me and I can't believe more people don't talk about it.
Our night sky would be substantially brighter and more spectacular if not for that rift. But the infrared light gets through and that light can be seen by the ESO telescope. Per the article:
>This has given us an accurate 3D view of the inner regions of the Milky Way, which were previously hidden by dust.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rift_(astronomy)
A compelling argument for the galaxy is someone's weed dream theory.
so if every star smokes a cigarette, there will be roughly 1 mol (6.02e23) of said particles?
> 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
Isn't it unrealistic, combining months of data together with unseen light wavelengths(giving every wavelength different colour for aesthetic). Someone need to capture earth like that.
the data is just manipulated so that it is visible to our limited sight abilities. the data is not unreal. it's not a generativeAI type of product. the thing actually exists. they also "listen" to them in other frequencies, and then turn that data into pictures. again, it's not fake data. it's just interpreting it in a way our squishy lobes can understand it
it's very realistic, reality isn't bound by what we can perceive directly
Is it detailed enough for a realistic space flight sim?
Wouldn't you need a fully 3D map for that?
So I suppose that's part of my question - do we have enough data about the distances of all these celestial bodies from us?
Some sort of 3D visualization of this dataset would be very, very nice.
This is of course hard ... the distance (3rd number) is not one that is very precise.
But still, I always have a hard time picturing what our galaxy looks like when looking at 2D pics.
This is likely around less than 1% of the Milky Way using stars mapped as a calculation
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.
If you do feel that way, beware that it's a rhetorical trick. More:
https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning
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.
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.
You’ve shifted and redefined the goalposts and even then requires orders of magnitude advancement in multiple areas (power generation, lasers, satellite shrinkage etc) and doing it all in space. Thinking any of this happens in a lifetime of anyone alive today seems unrealistically optimistic. And all of this ignores something critical OP said:
> we'll expect people to live hundreds of years by the time we can send a ship to alpha centauri.
Even hundreds of years is not a realistic life expectancy to reach the nearest star and requires not just an enormous overabundance of energy, the fuel source has to be available at the midway point so that you can decelerate. Humans at another star without discovery of faster than light travel mechanisms (mainly wormholes) seems purely in the realm of science fiction.
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.
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.
A fly by at relativistic speeds would be an accomplishment but what data are you realistically capturing?
And Wikipedia captures my critique of it accurately:
> According to The Economist, at least a dozen off-the-shelf technologies will need to improve by orders of magnitude
That’s about right. That kind of orders of magnitude improvement within a lifetime requires novel scientific theories (eg similar to quantum mechanics and the impact it had). Without that growth is drastically slower. And consider that even computational and communication capabilities have basically been maxed out at our current tech level - we’re no longer growing them exponentially due to thermal and physics constraints.
It’s an ambitious goal worth doing because of the “if you aim for the moon and miss you still hit the stars” kind of effect. And there’s plenty of directed research that needs to be funded. Thinking any of this happens in our lifetimes is ambitious and spaceships carrying humans going to the stars is fantasy*
* as always, completely new physics that upend our knowledge of what’s possible changes the calculus. But those come very rarely and there’s no reason to believe the next revolution will be as impactful as quantum mechanics in terms of impact on our technological capabilities.
Worse yet (for an equivalent vehicle mass), that's 22,500x (150^2) the energy needed.
Ah, that explains why 5,000 years ago the average life expectancy was just over 6 months.
Also in 1.3 Million years this star will pass 1/6 Light year from earth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710
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!
> Project starshot
Is it a live project? Their news section is dishearteningly quiet [1]. They still talk about 2018 in the present tense [2].
[1] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/news
[2] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/solicitations/3
Honestly I don't think there's that big of a material difference in difficulty between being able to (consistently) live to 150 and being able to live indefinitely (barring catastrophic accidents and intractable diseases).
I feel like we're bumping up against the edges of the lifespan that we can reasonably achieve without figuring out how to actually stop or reverse aging.
Possibly there's a world where we figure out how to dramatically slow it without stopping it, because there's some entropic principle regarding our ability to reliably lengthen telomeres where we can't replace lost data but we can reduce the rate of loss, but my money's that we don't break 150 until we actually solve aging on a fundamental level.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
You haven’t even finish exploring your own planets in solar system
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.