The Newly Discovered TRAPPIST-1 Star System Was Hiding In Elite: Dangerous All Along

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Nice coincidence!

http://kotaku.com/the-newly-discovered-trappist-1-star-system-was-hiding-1792747651

Quote

NASA had some big news this past week. No, it wasn’t aliens. It was the next best thing: the discovery of seven new “Earth-sized exoplanets,” a few of which could be hospitable to life. Now, it turns out that Elite: Dangerous actually predicted the existence of the TRAPPIST-1 star system where they’re located.

Elite: Dangerous, the game you’re probably constantly hearing about but have perhaps been too intimidated to play, is a large-scale space trading simulator. Players explore and trade goods inside a 1:1 scale open world galaxy based on the real Milky Way, leading to any number of strange and uncanny experiences, like playing Grand Theft Auto in space.

But to generate its numerous star systems and other cosmic phenomena, the game’s Stellar Forge engine takes the total measured matter for our galaxy and allocates it between known objects and other, procedurally generated ones. Using some of the leftover “unaccounted mass,” the game, unprompted, created a star system very much like TRAPPIST-1.