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First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars
- fellerts 2y agoTFA specifies "more than 1,500 billion". That's more than a _trillion_, not "billions"! Why the reluctance to use the proper number?
- Rebelgecko 2y agoThe UK used a different definition of trillion until ~50 years ago (10^18 vs 10^12), so it probably helps avoid ambiguity
- qingcharles 2y agoAnd billion too, though. In the 80s the term was still confusing; no longer though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
- sammyoos 2y agoThe designation of trillion is ambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion
- philomath_mn 2y agoSame for one billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion I've never heard someone use the long scale, it is only ever mentioned as a novelty. I think the scientific community, at the very least, has standardized on the short scale.
- pxndxx 2y agoThe long scale is common in French, German and Spanish for example. English usually uses the short scale. The scientific community uses SI prefixes, which aren't part of either scale (you don't say a billion joules which is ambiguous, you either say a terajoule for a long-scale billion or a gigajoule for a short-scale one).
- piva00 2y agoAlso common in Swedish, miljon = 10^6, miljard = 10^9, biljon = 10^12, biljard = 10^15, triljon = 10^18.
- philomath_mn 2y agoFair enough, but I still would be surprised to see the long scale used in scientific communications written in English. Re SI Prefixes: you _could_ make the argument that they are essential another short scale since they are named every 3 orders of magnitude.
- hifromwork 2y agoMy country uses long scale. I've never seen long scale used in English, so I don't think it's ambiguous. But! When non-native speakers read news, they are not always completely fluent in English, or even aware the short scale exists. This is true even for journalists. I've seen articles written in a serious newspapers where a journalist confused "billion" and "trillion", because they incorrectly translated English "billion" to my language "bilion". Journalists! A cross-cultural mistake not unlike foots vs meters. So that's one thing to consider if one wants to avoid miscommunication at all cost. I'm not sure if it is important enough to take into account - after all people should know better.
- whimsicalism 2y agowhat? the scientific community absolutely also uses billion and trillion by short scale it’s all over papers and nobody is ever using the long scale that i’ve seen
- ivan_gammel 2y agoAre those papers in English? Long scale may be translated to short scale if the paper is translated from the original language where long scale is common.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
- rob74 2y agoThe long scale is far from just a novelty, most European countries other than the UK use it. Actually I thought it was used in all non-English-speaking countries, but Wikipedia showed me that the situation is far more complicated than I thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/File:EScalas_corta_y_larga.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/F... Besides short scale and long scale, there is a sizable "short scale with milliard instead of billion" fraction, and of course some countries (China, India, Japan, Greece) have completely different systems. Most interesting is that Portugal uses the long scale, while Brazil uses the short scale. That must be confusing...
- whimsicalism 2y agoalmost all scientific writing i can find from people in portugal uses the short scale. english formal communication has standardized around the short scale
- alenrozac 2y agoAll scientific writing in Slovenia uses long scale. I've heard it being used in EU institutions too.
- whimsicalism 2y ago> All scientific writing in Slovenia uses long scale. I've heard it being used in EU institutions too. I am able to easily find plenty of Slovenian academics using short scale in their scientific writing. Remember, English is standard for scientific writing and publishing in international journals. I have yet to find a single one using the long-scale, actually. https://link.aps.org/accepted/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.123540 https://link.aps.org/accepted/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.123540 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/abe6a7/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/abe6a7/... https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40294-016-0017-8.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40294-016-001... > observations by cataloging positions and redshifts of billions of galaxies in the next decade > and the configuration is stable over billions of years. > (networks having up to a billion of vertices; there is no limit—except the memory size—on the number of lines
- phkahler 2y ago>> Same for one billion: So that's how the US government will make the mult-trillion dollar debt go away. They'll just call it Billions.
- tzot 2y agoOTOH the phrase “a thousand million” for 10⁹ is not that uncommon. From what I've seen, in places where billions/trillions are mentioned and it's important that the number is accurately specified, a representation with digits or the exponent of 10 are typically provided.
- FabHK 2y agoAgreed that the short scale has become more prevalent, lamentably. I find 6n more pleasing than 3n+3.
- whimsicalism 2y agomy understanding is the long scale has largely died out think it is more than permissible to use what is scientifically standard (trillion = 10^12)
- tzot 2y ago“Scientifically standard” are the SI prefixes. So, given the ambiguity of what 1 gigastar is (1/1000th of 1 terastar or a really huge star?) one should say “10¹²s of stars” maybe.
- whimsicalism 2y agoYes, the SI prefixes are one example of something that is scientifically standard. The short scale is another.
- Tor3 2y agoDied out in English. Not in other languages where long scale was and is used, that hasn't changed at all. I'm not aware of any other language shifting from long scale to short scale (for languages traditionally using long scale).
- whimsicalism 2y agothink it is also dying out among many other languages like portuguese
- jl6 2y agoBillions is not wrong. Trillions (plural) would be wrong. "More than a trillion" would be needless words.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 2y agoA very famous person is very well known for his particular style of enunciating billions. After that, saying any other word is just a wasted chance of having Sagan's voice in their head reading the word.
- BurningFrog 2y agoA lot of people outside of HN don't know what a trillion is.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wrycoder 2y agoTell them it's comparable to $1 bills laid end to end from here to the sun. And tell them it's only 1/35 of the US national debt, which is roughly $350,000 per US taxpayer.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoEasy fix, just use $100 bills and we are only 35% of the way to sun. Problem solved.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dwaltrip 2y agoHow many Olympic swimming pools is that?
- withinboredom 2y agoIt’s several football fields full of cash.
- bregma 2y agoAmerican football or the more globally popular kind?
- withinboredom 2y agoWhich do you think? :p
- rurban 2y agoThe proper unit would be Parsec, imho
- seanhunter 2y agoParsec is a unit of distance[1]. They were counting a number of stars. [1] Defined as the distance at which 1AU subtends an angle of one arc second or 648000/pi AU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec
- rurban 2y agoOh, my bad. I thought they were talking about trillions of lightyears
- fnordpiglet 2y agoI assume this is being hugged to death? 504 Gateway Time-out The server didn't respond in time.
- CapitalistCartr 2y agoHN often Slashdots stuff.
- pictureofabear 2y agoNow that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. https://i.imgflip.com/kj336.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/kj336.jpg
- floxy 2y agoWebsite seems down. Alternate links: https://scitechdaily.com/euclid-mission-uncovers-1-5-trillion-orphan-stars-drifting-in-space/ https://scitechdaily.com/euclid-mission-uncovers-1-5-trillio... https://thedebrief.org/euclid-first-look-stunning-new-images-from-esa-mission-reveal-billions-of-mysterious-orphan-stars/ https://thedebrief.org/euclid-first-look-stunning-new-images... ...I was under the impression that there was a faint blue glow coming from everywhere, that was hypothesized to be extra galactic stars. Has there been any follow up on that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_star#Observation_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_star#Observation...
- cuSetanta 2y agoAlways a bit special to see science come from a spacecraft I had the pleasure of working on. Honestly there were a lot of issues during the build of Euclid that I was very glad to not be a part of, but seeing the images coming out of it now is pretty damn impressive. Hope all of the engineers that struggled to get this mission spacebourne can enjoy!
- acyou 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kortilla 2y agoWhere did OP say failures? Don’t attack random strawmen with a prosecutorial line of questioning. It’s completely fine to be working on software, witness a huge hardware issue that teams scramble to fix, be proud that they fixed it and happy to be part of the team while simultaneously being happy to not have to deal with that type of stress.
- acyou 2y ago[flagged]
- seanhunter 2y agoCongratulations. That's an amazing project to be a part of, and it looks like some really jawdropping science is going to result.
- cuSetanta 2y agoQuite a small part, but yeah, the science missions are always special to be a part of, even if its small.
- ck_one 2y ago
- PeterCorless 2y agoWe can spot the orphan stars at this distance. However, Euclid needs to turn to closer targets than the Pegasus cluster to spot rogue planets. https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/23/euclid-telescope-rogue-planets-floating-free-milky-way#:~:text=The%20rogue%20planets%20spotted%20by,away%20from%20the%20nearest%20stars https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/23/eucl.... In this case, it found dozens of rogue planets in the Orion nebula, which is only 1,500 ly away. I am presuming there are also going to be great numbers of rogue planets in deep space, not tied to any star or galaxy. But there would be no way for Euclid to spot them at that distance. Stars were hard enough. I presume, in due time, there will be some sort of calculable estimation or projection of orphan stars and rogue planets per cubic parsec or kilosparsec.
- Ringz 2y agoIt would be interesting to calculate how much these stars contribute to the mass deficit of the universe.
- Retric 2y agoNot just stars, it implies there’s a lot of planets, asteroids, etc tossed out there.
- recursive 2y agoI suspect in any solar system, the mass of the non-stars are a rounding error compared to the whole system's mass.
- Retric 2y agoI suspect the current contents of a solar system is a poor proxy for everything that’s been ejected from it. Pluto is 0.0006 light-years from the sun, there’s a great deal of space between stars we don’t know that much about. Further we dramatically underestimated the number of expo planets for decades. Quite reasonably we don’t put a lot of weight on stuff we can’t detect.
- leke 2y agoIt's dead, Jim.
- gcanyon 2y agoThe stars near us in the Milky Way are tens of light years away, and we’ll have to do some incredible science and technology to visit them. How much worse would it be if you were an intelligent life form on a planet orbiting one of those orphans, and the nearest star was a thousand, ten thousand, even a million light years away?
- outworlder 2y agoAt some point, given the universe's expansion, galaxies will be moving away so fast that the observable universe will be just one galaxy. Already, the effective rate from galaxies far away is actually faster than the speed of light. Even at light speeds, we cannot reach 94% of them as we would never catch up if we left today. In cosmic scales of many billions of years, observers on every galaxy will eventually think that their galaxy is the only one that has ever existed. Large distance and time scales are rather gloomy.
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- dumpsterdiver 2y agoIndeed, the only hint they would have that they were not alone would be the "weak" gravitational effects of all other existing matter pulling at the fringes of their visible universe. Perhaps they'll refer to this phenomenon as "dark energy".
- mr_toad 2y agoThe galaxies in our local group are gravitationally bound.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 0xfae 2y agoRight, but isn't the expansion increasing? So if they don't merge into one big galaxy at some point the expansion would out run gravity?
- belter 2y agoImpressive photos from the ESA site: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid/ESA_s_Euclid_celebrates_first_science_with_sparkling_cosmic_views https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid...
- IncreasePosts 2y agoMy God, it's full of stars.
- belter 2y agoJust remember...Attempt no landing in Europa.
- Tepix 2y agoThat's a lot of stars indeed. The human mind cannot even comprehend this number. Not to mention all those planets and moons around those stars
- NKosmatos 2y agoMy favorite reply in similar comments is the reference to the total perspective vortex by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex
- pradeepkatiyar 2y ago[dead]
- darkwater 2y agoI really find hard to believe how people can say "well, maybe it's not that easy to have other forms of life in the Universe". I mean, we have a cluster with thousands of galaxies, which make it for millions of stars, 240 MILLION light years away. Which means that there is a 240 million years window in which we are basically blind. Any communication from there will never reach the human race, most probably. Philosophically we can say there is no life there as we are concerned, because we will never be able to see any proof of it, but that doesn't mean that there was anyway, or there currently is, and maybe in more than one planet.
- throwaway765123 2y ago"I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?" -- Contact (1997)
- irrational 2y agoWaste of space seems like a poor phrase. It seems to imply it should be used by intelligent life, and if it isn't, then it's a waste.
- GuB-42 2y agoIf the universe is infinite like we think it is, then there is life somewhere, in fact, there is an infinite number of copies the earth exactly like or own, with a copy of you and me on it. We are just "blinded" by the limits of the observable universe. So, we are almost 100% sure that there is extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe, but if there is no possible causal relationship between us, what's the point? It is also the same reason why "the universe" is often shorthand for "the observable universe". There is probably something beyond it, but we have no way to know what it is, so it might as well not exist.
- shkkmo 2y agoI am not aware of any models of the universe that posit an infinite mass. Edit: Also, "observable universe" is a frequently misunderstood concept. Just because something is now outside the observable universe (the distance between them and us is big enough so that the rate of expansion of the universe between us and them is higher than the speed of light) doesn't mean that we aren't, today, receiving light from a long time ago when the object was closer. If you go far enough back in time you can "see" the entire universe . As time passes, more and more mass moves outside of the observable universe since the size of the sphere is constant relative to the rate of expansion.
- floatrock 2y agoSo an orphan star is one that's been ejected from its galaxy. If one of those stars had a planet with something capable of "gazing up at the night sky", does that mean their sky would be empty compared to our own?
- NKosmatos 2y agoNo, their night sky would be more or less like our own. There would be other stars and galaxies visible, it's just that this planet (along with the other planets of this orphan star) would be outside of a galaxy and they would be travelling the universe in the "void" between galaxies. Being outside a galaxy doesn't mean that you have a black night sky, it just means that you're a little bit further away from other stars and you're moving in the interstellar medium.
- klyrs 2y agoWe can see the Milky Way in clear conditions; with light pollution we can only see the brightest stars. Perhaps an orphan star would have a darker sky, without a clear view of a galactic superstructure without using a telescope?
- floatrock 2y agoSo my understanding is most of the stars that fill our sky are stars inside our milky way and nearby. "The Milky Way" smudge we can see in a dark sky is the collective effort of all the far-off milky way stars. I assume some of the 'stars' we can see with the naked eye are actually galaxies, but I assume that's a small percentage. Our closest galaxy, Andromeda, appears barely as a smudge to the naked eye. I guess my question is more about how far away from their home galaxies are these orphan stars, expressed as a percentage of a hypothetical planet's sky-cover. eg we see the milky way as a band because we're inside the galactic plane... would these orphan planets see their home galaxy as a fainter band because they've been ejected still in the galactic plane? Would they see part of the sky covered and part of the sky blank because they're outside their home galactic plane? Are they still close enough to their home galaxy that they're still surrounded by enough stars to fill the sky, or would the star density in their skies be seasonal? I think it would be fun to speculate on different hypothetical cultural evolutions of different kinds of night sky configurations, like "winter is when our planet's night sees our home galaxy, so winter is when the gods send their nightlumination down on us" etc.
- NKosmatos 2y agoHigh resolution view: https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=49.6809329688%2041.6143703853&hips=PanSTARRS+DR1+color+(i%2C+r%2C+g)&fov=2.528554379046455&cooframe=J2000&sci=false&lang=en&euclid_image=perseus https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=49.6809329688%2041.614370...
- ourmandave 2y agoEuclid is bringing together 14+ countries and damn near every related field. Warms my little nerd heart. Euclid Consortium To date 14 European countries contribute to EC activities (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom). Canada and USA through NASA and few US laboratories as well as few Japanese laboratories are also contributing and members of the Euclid Consortium. In total, more than 2600 members were or are registered in the EC (status early 2023), of which more than 1000 are researchers in astrophysics, cosmology, theoretical physics, and particle physics. More than 200 laboratories covering all fields in astrophysics, cosmology, theoretical physics, high energy, particle physics and space science that are relevant for the Euclid missions are contributing to Euclid. https://www.euclid-ec.org/consortium/about-ec/ https://www.euclid-ec.org/consortium/about-ec/