[HN Gopher] ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared ma...
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ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared map of the Milky
Way
Author : belter
Score : 228 points
Date : 2024-10-01 10:57 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eso.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eso.org)
| bestest wrote:
| an amazing 3d map implementation of the taken images here:
| https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home
| tpierce89 wrote:
| I have no idea what I'm looking at, but it is neat.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Uber will one day use this to plot my ride to planet Kepler
| 23420 1a
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Spring for the UberX, fellow passengers can get pretty
| annoying over the decades.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| skaushik92 wrote:
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Is it detailed enough for a realistic space flight sim?
| mcejp wrote:
| Wouldn't you need a fully 3D map for that?
| falcor84 wrote:
| So I suppose that's part of my question - do we have enough
| data about the distances of all these celestial bodies from
| us?
| leonheld wrote:
| Very cool! A lot of my professors in the credits. Roberto Saito
| was the one who taught me Maxwell's Laws :-)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| 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.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| 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.
| afh1 wrote:
| 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.
| mway wrote:
| 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!
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| ridgeguy wrote:
| Worse yet (for an equivalent vehicle mass), that's 22,500x
| (150^2) the energy needed.
| woopsn wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| Also in 1.3 Million years this star will pass 1/6 Light year
| from earth:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710
| ljf wrote:
| 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!
| zesterer wrote:
| Ah, that explains why 5,000 years ago the average life
| expectancy was just over 6 months.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| 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.
| jajko wrote:
| 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.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| 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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You haven't even finish exploring your own planets in solar
| system
| skybrian wrote:
| If you do feel that way, beware that it's a rhetorical trick.
| More:
|
| https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _The team is composed of_ [...]
|
| A lot of people. Looks like a movie credits roll.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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
| molticrystal wrote:
| >"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?
| jwuphysics wrote:
| 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...
| aziaziazi wrote:
| > 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 :)
| ljf wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 1 Full moon is about 0.5 degree if that helps
| tominspace7 wrote:
| Part of this dataset (VVV actually) can be explored interactively
| here:
|
| https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-Co...
| jcims wrote:
| 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).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| A compelling argument for the galaxy is someone's weed dream
| theory.
| konstantinua00 wrote:
| so if every star smokes a cigarette, there will be roughly 1
| mol (6.02e23) of said particles?
| glenstein wrote:
| 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)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| This is likely around less than 1% of the Milky Way using stars
| mapped as a calculation
| ur-whale wrote:
| 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.
| HaroonSaifi17 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| it's very realistic, reality isn't bound by what we can
| perceive directly
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| If this telescope can detect planets not orbiting a star, I
| wonder if it could improve detection of some planets orbiting
| stars as well.
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