Counting the stars

[Dominique_K 10,149]

The European Space Agency has just released a catalogue of  more than 300 000 stars that are at a maximum of 100 parsecs (326 light-years) away around the sun.

The article :  Gaia EDR3 - GCNS - Gaia - Cosmos (esa.int)

and a video of a 3D travel through these stars.The vector representation made me think (absurd comparison I know) of the brownian motion . How tiny in our Galaxy is this bubble of stars !  

 

 

[Victoroos 205]

I watched this together with : 

That was epic, hahaha

[martin-w 3,235]

That was great. 👍 And who knows, maybe, just maybe, we will develop something like an Alcubierre warp drive and be out there amongst the stars one day.

[Fielder 3,677]

One two three, O'Leary, four five six O'Leary...this will take awhile...

[RichieFly 730]

Thanks for post that. Very relaxing to watch. They should have kept zooming out to show some galactic scale. Talk about feeling small...

When they talk about star vectors, what is the reference point? The sun? Galactic center?

 

[Christopher Low 5,354]

The reference point of the vectors is almost certainly from the Sun (or to be more precise, the Gaia telescope that made the observations).

[HighBypass 2,339]

Someone went to a heck of a lot of trouble dangling all 331311 * torches above our flat earth... 

* one has a burnt out bulb.. 

[Dominique_K 10,149]

On 12/3/2020 at 10:38 PM, RichieFly said:

 

When they talk about star vectors, what is the reference point? The sun? Galactic center?

 

From the GAIA site :

The Gaia Celestial Reference Frame (Gaia-CRF2) is realised by the accurate positions of 556,869 quasars. This is the first realisation of a non-rotating full sky optical reference frame meeting the ICRS prescriptions, i.e. built only on extragalactic sources constrained to have no global rotation. With a mean density of more than 10 quasars per square degree it represents a more than 100-fold increase in the number of objects from the current realisation at radio wavelengths.

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/gaiadr2_rf