8 ms·

The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years

164 points by dluan 7y ago

tantalor 7y ago
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Wolf_359 https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Wolf_359
- TwoNineA 7y ago
  Sleep. Sleep, Data.
saberdancer 7y ago
Players of Aurora 4x will recognize those names. Fun fact, new version developed in C# will be released in March for testing.
cryptoz 7y ago
Many of these stars have planets orbiting them, likely discovered after the author wrote this page. There are some references to planetary systems, but few compared to what has been discovered since. Proxima Centauri has at least one planet orbiting it (in the habitable zone!), for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri Barnard's star also has a planet, contrary to the claim on the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star#Planetary_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star#Planetary_sys...
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Yup - the page has basically not changed since it was first crawled by archive.org ~14 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20060401051712/http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/12lys.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060401051712/http://www.atlaso...
fbn79 7y ago
I can remember that star names from the very similar map in Frontiers: Elite 2.
- thom 7y ago
  Ah, the old Ross 154 <-> Barnard's Star milk run.
sllabres 7y ago
And Voyager 1, the furthest man made object has already completed 0,0023 lightyears from the 4.3 lightyears to the nearest star Alpha Centauri. But its heading in the wrong direction anyway...
- bArray 7y ago
  I wounder what would need to be done in order for a computer to still work that far out? Even removing every single point of failure, statistically the other components would still fail over time. I think whichever system you build, it would somehow need to be self-repairing.
  - thombat 7y ago
    Voyager 1 is still functioning, but within 10 years will finally run out of power. That's going to be the limiting factor even for self-repairing systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Future_of_the_probe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Future_of_the_probe
    - nojvek 7y ago
      It’s somewhat a very sobering thought that there is no intelligent life in all of solar system. The neighbouring stars are too far away for us to visit in our lifetimes. Man I feel so alone.
tyfon 7y ago
Playing Elite Dangerous, a lot of these names are quite familiar. I have at one point held base at Wolf 359 at least :) Maps like these are so fascinating, anyone know of something similar with updated planet information?
- ptrincr 7y ago
  I was thinking the same, but more so with Frontier: Elite II :-)
- kangnkodos 7y ago
  About 15 years ago, I used the open source program, Celestia. You could move around the solar system and beyond in 3D. It was cool at the time, but I haven't looked at it in a long time. It also allowed add-on data to be imported. Hobbyists would create accurate 3D models of weird shaped asteroids using the latest data from NASA, and you could download the data, and view it using the main Celestia program. Maybe someone has posted updated data in Celestia format somewhere?
  - tyfon 7y ago
    That sounds really awesome and it seems the project is still alive [1]. I'm going to play with this after work tomorrow! [1] https://celestia.space/ https://celestia.space/
    - brylie 7y ago
      I'd like to explore Celestia with my son but can't find an installer for Ubuntu 19.10. Anyone know of a Flatpak or Snap installer for Celestia?
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    You can script it in Lua. I once used that to make a presentation in it for my wife to use in class. Showed the Solar system from above, then visited Sol and each planet in turn, doing a split-screen with Earth and zooming whichever pane had the smaller body to compare sizes, that sort of thing. It was like having a scriptable Magic Schoolbus. Pretty cool.
lb1lf 7y ago
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough, Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at 900 miles an hour. It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned, The sun that is the source of all our power. Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, Are moving at a million miles a day, In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour, Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way. Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars; It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side; It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick, But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide. We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point, We go 'round every two hundred million years; And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe. Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, In all of the directions it can whiz; As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth; And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth! John de Prez / Eric Idle
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  I like to jump in the air when I think of that song and try to visualise how far I actually traveled (wrt centre of the galaxy) in that 1 second or so. One day I'll actually do the math... But back on topic, I've been looking for a small data set of stars for a little project that I've had in the back on my mind for the last 10 years or so, and this article has one: awesome.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    Many years ago I was doing a lot of reading on astronomy and spent some time thinking intently about the scale of things in the solar system. After a few months of this I woke one morning from a hyper-real dream in which I was in a 'high-Earth' orbit and felt like I was seeing the solar system with a lot more clarity. That was it's own reward and I also think that it shows our minds are much more capable than we let on.
lubesGordi 7y ago
Why 12.5?
- Koshkin 7y ago
  You can click 'Zoom Out'.
- hinkley 7y ago
  That'd be a 25 light year sphere, but then that just leads to the same question with a different number.
Koshkin 7y ago
I guess we should feel lucky that there aren't that many stars nearby...
adamwong246 7y ago
I wish these were 3d or animated, to give more perspective.
- fauria 7y ago
  You can try Stellarium, a multi platform software that lets you navigate instantly across space: https://stellarium.org/ https://stellarium.org/ Not sure if you can get as far as this, but certainly worth a try if you are looking for a more detailed experience.
DennisP 7y ago
3D star maps would be a great application of VR.
- vhold 7y ago
  The closest I know of to a true "map" you can search for things in, put all of space into any scale, move around in, is SpaceEngine. The VR support is a bit unwieldy but still impressive. You might want to turn off the procedurally generated stars and planets if you want a strict map. The procedurally generated stars are interesting because you can get a sense of density at various scales. https://store.steampowered.com/app/314650/SpaceEngine/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/314650/SpaceEngine/ Titans of Space Plus is probably the most educational space VR program I've used. It takes you on a guided tour of our solar system and puts everything into perspective at various scales, including some other stars. But it's not a map of the stars very much. It does the best job of conveying the relative sizes of things. https://store.steampowered.com/app/468820/Titans_of_Space_PLUS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/468820/Titans_of_Space_PL... Universe Sandbox isn't a map either, but it's worth mentioning as as a VR astronomy program. https://store.steampowered.com/app/230290/Universe_Sandbox/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/230290/Universe_Sandbox/ I have not tried this one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/751110/OVERVIEW_A_Walk_Through_The_Universe/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/751110/OVERVIEW_A_Walk_Th...
pinewurst 7y ago
Note - this seems to be about 20 years old. The nearest stars list is different now plus so many discovered planets.
bpodgursky 7y ago
My take on this: http://uncharted.bpodgursky.com/ http://uncharted.bpodgursky.com/ (out to 75 lys, w/ click-around exploration) (not super maintained, apologies for visual glitches or stale data)
proc0 7y ago
[Fermi Paradox Intensifies]
not2b 7y ago
I guess it is an old site, before Kepler discovered planets around many of these stars? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets
brownbat 7y ago
Was fun zooming out and comparing stars to the cubic area. If it's a sphere, we're at about 250 cubic light years per star at both 12.5 lt yr out, and at 20. It heads to around 900 ly^3 per star when you look at everything within 5000 lt yrs. Makes sense, given that the Milky Way--while 150-200 kly wide--is only about 2000 light years thick. Of course, we could rapidly zoom much, much farther out, like in this intergalactic redshift survey: https://www.universetoday.com/21914/the-closest-galaxy-to-the-milky-way/ https://www.universetoday.com/21914/the-closest-galaxy-to-th... Space is incomprehensibly big.
- andrepd 7y ago
  In a similar vein, Scale of the Universe: https://htwins.net/scale2/ https://htwins.net/scale2/
  - samoa42 7y ago
    can some1 please please make a html/pwa version of this?
nlitsme 7y ago
It would be interesting to have the relative speeds of all these stars visualized as well.
JoeDaDude 7y ago
One of google's experiments presents a very cool visualization of a map of our stellar neighbors. See: http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/ http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/
rwmj 7y ago
If you had a suitable form of transport, which of these 33 stars would you visit? Red dwarfs are probably not very interesting places to visit. Sirius or Procyon (which I'd not heard of before) sound the most interesting: Sirius A,B - Type=A1+DA, Magnitudes=-1.4+8.4, Distance=8.60 ly This brilliant white star is the brightest star in the night sky and the most luminous star within 25 light years. Its white dwarf companion was first seen in 1852, the first white dwarf ever seen. The orbital period is 50 years. Procyon A,B - Type=F5+DA, Magnitudes=0.4+10.7, Distance=11.41 ly A brilliant yellow-white star, and the eighth brightest star in the sky. With twice the diameter of the Sun, Procyon is also the largest star within 25 light years. Procyon is orbited by a white dwarf companion first seen optically in 1896. The orbital period is 41 years.

164 points by dluan 7y ago

tantalor 7y ago

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Wolf_359 https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Wolf_359

TwoNineA 7y ago
Sleep. Sleep, Data.

saberdancer 7y ago

Players of Aurora 4x will recognize those names. Fun fact, new version developed in C# will be released in March for testing.

cryptoz 7y ago

Many of these stars have planets orbiting them, likely discovered after the author wrote this page. There are some references to planetary systems, but few compared to what has been discovered since. Proxima Centauri has at least one planet orbiting it (in the habitable zone!), for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri Barnard's star also has a planet, contrary to the claim on the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star#Planetary_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star#Planetary_sys...

oh_sigh 7y ago
Yup - the page has basically not changed since it was first crawled by archive.org ~14 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20060401051712/http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/12lys.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060401051712/http://www.atlaso...

fbn79 7y ago

I can remember that star names from the very similar map in Frontiers: Elite 2.

thom 7y ago
Ah, the old Ross 154 <-> Barnard's Star milk run.

sllabres 7y ago

And Voyager 1, the furthest man made object has already completed 0,0023 lightyears from the 4.3 lightyears to the nearest star Alpha Centauri. But its heading in the wrong direction anyway...

bArray 7y ago
I wounder what would need to be done in order for a computer to still work that far out? Even removing every single point of failure, statistically the other components would still fail over time. I think whichever system you build, it would somehow need to be self-repairing.
- thombat 7y ago
  Voyager 1 is still functioning, but within 10 years will finally run out of power. That's going to be the limiting factor even for self-repairing systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Future_of_the_probe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Future_of_the_probe
  - nojvek 7y ago
    It’s somewhat a very sobering thought that there is no intelligent life in all of solar system. The neighbouring stars are too far away for us to visit in our lifetimes. Man I feel so alone.

tyfon 7y ago

Playing Elite Dangerous, a lot of these names are quite familiar. I have at one point held base at Wolf 359 at least :) Maps like these are so fascinating, anyone know of something similar with updated planet information?

ptrincr 7y ago
I was thinking the same, but more so with Frontier: Elite II :-)
kangnkodos 7y ago
About 15 years ago, I used the open source program, Celestia. You could move around the solar system and beyond in 3D. It was cool at the time, but I haven't looked at it in a long time. It also allowed add-on data to be imported. Hobbyists would create accurate 3D models of weird shaped asteroids using the latest data from NASA, and you could download the data, and view it using the main Celestia program. Maybe someone has posted updated data in Celestia format somewhere?
- tyfon 7y ago
  That sounds really awesome and it seems the project is still alive [1]. I'm going to play with this after work tomorrow! [1] https://celestia.space/ https://celestia.space/
  - brylie 7y ago
    I'd like to explore Celestia with my son but can't find an installer for Ubuntu 19.10. Anyone know of a Flatpak or Snap installer for Celestia?
- karatestomp 7y ago
  You can script it in Lua. I once used that to make a presentation in it for my wife to use in class. Showed the Solar system from above, then visited Sol and each planet in turn, doing a split-screen with Earth and zooming whichever pane had the smaller body to compare sizes, that sort of thing. It was like having a scriptable Magic Schoolbus. Pretty cool.

lb1lf 7y ago

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough, Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at 900 miles an hour. It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned, The sun that is the source of all our power. Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, Are moving at a million miles a day, In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour, Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way. Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars; It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side; It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick, But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide. We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point, We go 'round every two hundred million years; And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe. Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, In all of the directions it can whiz; As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth; And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth! John de Prez / Eric Idle

cmroanirgo 7y ago
I like to jump in the air when I think of that song and try to visualise how far I actually traveled (wrt centre of the galaxy) in that 1 second or so. One day I'll actually do the math... But back on topic, I've been looking for a small data set of stars for a little project that I've had in the back on my mind for the last 10 years or so, and this article has one: awesome.
- itronitron 7y ago
  Many years ago I was doing a lot of reading on astronomy and spent some time thinking intently about the scale of things in the solar system. After a few months of this I woke one morning from a hyper-real dream in which I was in a 'high-Earth' orbit and felt like I was seeing the solar system with a lot more clarity. That was it's own reward and I also think that it shows our minds are much more capable than we let on.

lubesGordi 7y ago

Why 12.5?

Koshkin 7y ago
You can click 'Zoom Out'.
hinkley 7y ago
That'd be a 25 light year sphere, but then that just leads to the same question with a different number.

Koshkin 7y ago

I guess we should feel lucky that there aren't that many stars nearby...

adamwong246 7y ago

I wish these were 3d or animated, to give more perspective.

fauria 7y ago
You can try Stellarium, a multi platform software that lets you navigate instantly across space: https://stellarium.org/ https://stellarium.org/ Not sure if you can get as far as this, but certainly worth a try if you are looking for a more detailed experience.

DennisP 7y ago

3D star maps would be a great application of VR.

vhold 7y ago
The closest I know of to a true "map" you can search for things in, put all of space into any scale, move around in, is SpaceEngine. The VR support is a bit unwieldy but still impressive. You might want to turn off the procedurally generated stars and planets if you want a strict map. The procedurally generated stars are interesting because you can get a sense of density at various scales. https://store.steampowered.com/app/314650/SpaceEngine/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/314650/SpaceEngine/ Titans of Space Plus is probably the most educational space VR program I've used. It takes you on a guided tour of our solar system and puts everything into perspective at various scales, including some other stars. But it's not a map of the stars very much. It does the best job of conveying the relative sizes of things. https://store.steampowered.com/app/468820/Titans_of_Space_PLUS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/468820/Titans_of_Space_PL... Universe Sandbox isn't a map either, but it's worth mentioning as as a VR astronomy program. https://store.steampowered.com/app/230290/Universe_Sandbox/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/230290/Universe_Sandbox/ I have not tried this one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/751110/OVERVIEW_A_Walk_Through_The_Universe/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/751110/OVERVIEW_A_Walk_Th...

pinewurst 7y ago

Note - this seems to be about 20 years old. The nearest stars list is different now plus so many discovered planets.

bpodgursky 7y ago

My take on this: http://uncharted.bpodgursky.com/ http://uncharted.bpodgursky.com/ (out to 75 lys, w/ click-around exploration) (not super maintained, apologies for visual glitches or stale data)

proc0 7y ago

[Fermi Paradox Intensifies]

not2b 7y ago

I guess it is an old site, before Kepler discovered planets around many of these stars? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets

brownbat 7y ago

Was fun zooming out and comparing stars to the cubic area. If it's a sphere, we're at about 250 cubic light years per star at both 12.5 lt yr out, and at 20. It heads to around 900 ly^3 per star when you look at everything within 5000 lt yrs. Makes sense, given that the Milky Way--while 150-200 kly wide--is only about 2000 light years thick. Of course, we could rapidly zoom much, much farther out, like in this intergalactic redshift survey: https://www.universetoday.com/21914/the-closest-galaxy-to-the-milky-way/ https://www.universetoday.com/21914/the-closest-galaxy-to-th... Space is incomprehensibly big.

andrepd 7y ago
In a similar vein, Scale of the Universe: https://htwins.net/scale2/ https://htwins.net/scale2/
- samoa42 7y ago
  can some1 please please make a html/pwa version of this?

nlitsme 7y ago

It would be interesting to have the relative speeds of all these stars visualized as well.

JoeDaDude 7y ago

One of google's experiments presents a very cool visualization of a map of our stellar neighbors. See: http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/ http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/

rwmj 7y ago

If you had a suitable form of transport, which of these 33 stars would you visit? Red dwarfs are probably not very interesting places to visit. Sirius or Procyon (which I'd not heard of before) sound the most interesting: Sirius A,B - Type=A1+DA, Magnitudes=-1.4+8.4, Distance=8.60 ly This brilliant white star is the brightest star in the night sky and the most luminous star within 25 light years. Its white dwarf companion was first seen in 1852, the first white dwarf ever seen. The orbital period is 50 years. Procyon A,B - Type=F5+DA, Magnitudes=0.4+10.7, Distance=11.41 ly A brilliant yellow-white star, and the eighth brightest star in the sky. With twice the diameter of the Sun, Procyon is also the largest star within 25 light years. Procyon is orbited by a white dwarf companion first seen optically in 1896. The orbital period is 41 years.