4 ms·

ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way

248 points by belter 2y ago

leonheld 2y ago
Very cool! A lot of my professors in the credits. Roberto Saito was the one who taught me Maxwell's Laws :-)
bestest 2y ago
an amazing 3d map implementation of the taken images here: https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home
- tpierce89 2y ago
  I have no idea what I'm looking at, but it is neat.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  Uber will one day use this to plot my ride to planet Kepler 23420 1a
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    Spring for the UberX, fellow passengers can get pretty annoying over the decades.
- dylan604 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
  - malfist 2y ago
    It's a mosaic, pretty common tool in astrophotography
    - dylan604 2y ago
      mosaic does not answer the zooming which was the actual question
  - tominspace7 2y ago
    [dead]
falcor84 2y ago
Is it detailed enough for a realistic space flight sim?
- mcejp 2y ago
  Wouldn't you need a fully 3D map for that?
  - falcor84 2y ago
    So I suppose that's part of my question - do we have enough data about the distances of all these celestial bodies from us?
noisy_boy 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
throw0101d 2y ago
> The team is composed of […] A lot of people. Looks like a movie credits roll.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ck2 2y ago
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 2y ago
>“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 2y ago
  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%3D%24fq_database%7D&fq_database=database%3Aastronomy&q=abs%3A((%22VVV%22%20OR%20%22VVVX%22)%20AND%20%22ESO%22)&sort=citation_count%20desc%2C%20bibcode%20desc&p_=0 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3... [1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...532A.131B/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...532A.131B/abs... [2] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...534A...3G/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...534A...3G/abs... [3] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2019A%26A...623A.168S/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2019A%26A...623A.168S/abs... [4] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012AJ....144..127A/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012AJ....144..127A/abstr...
aziaziazi 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  1 Full moon is about 0.5 degree if that helps
tominspace7 2y ago
Part of this dataset (VVV actually) can be explored interactively here: https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-ColorJYZ/?ra=249.960434&dec=-47.0695752&fov=68&hideProperties https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-Co...
jcims 2y ago
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_ 2y ago
  A compelling argument for the galaxy is someone's weed dream theory.
- konstantinua00 2y ago
  so if every star smokes a cigarette, there will be roughly 1 mol (6.02e23) of said particles?
- glenstein 2y ago
  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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rift_(astronomy)
m3kw9 2y ago
This is likely around less than 1% of the Milky Way using stars mapped as a calculation
ur-whale 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  it's very realistic, reality isn't bound by what we can perceive directly
gradientsrneat 2y ago
If this telescope can detect planets not orbiting a star, I wonder if it could improve detection of some planets orbiting stars as well.
Log_out_ 2y ago
Is there also a tracking of temporary vannishing and reappearance of objects.. as in can i have the error map that is a object tracking in the kuiper.

248 points by belter 2y ago

Very cool! A lot of my professors in the credits. Roberto Saito was the one who taught me Maxwell's Laws :-)

an amazing 3d map implementation of the taken images here: https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home

tpierce89 2y ago
I have no idea what I'm looking at, but it is neat.
- dylan604 2y ago
  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 2y ago
Uber will one day use this to plot my ride to planet Kepler 23420 1a
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  Spring for the UberX, fellow passengers can get pretty annoying over the decades.
dylan604 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
- malfist 2y ago
  It's a mosaic, pretty common tool in astrophotography
  - dylan604 2y ago
    mosaic does not answer the zooming which was the actual question
- tominspace7 2y ago
  [dead]

falcor84 2y ago

Is it detailed enough for a realistic space flight sim?

mcejp 2y ago
Wouldn't you need a fully 3D map for that?
- falcor84 2y ago
  So I suppose that's part of my question - do we have enough data about the distances of all these celestial bodies from us?

noisy_boy 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.

throw0101d 2y ago

> The team is composed of […] A lot of people. Looks like a movie credits roll.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ck2 2y ago

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 2y ago

>“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 2y ago
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%3D%24fq_database%7D&fq_database=database%3Aastronomy&q=abs%3A((%22VVV%22%20OR%20%22VVVX%22)%20AND%20%22ESO%22)&sort=citation_count%20desc%2C%20bibcode%20desc&p_=0 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/fq=%7B!type%3Daqp%20v%3... [1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...532A.131B/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...532A.131B/abs... [2] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...534A...3G/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...534A...3G/abs... [3] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2019A%26A...623A.168S/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2019A%26A...623A.168S/abs... [4] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012AJ....144..127A/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012AJ....144..127A/abstr...

aziaziazi 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
1 Full moon is about 0.5 degree if that helps

tominspace7 2y ago

Part of this dataset (VVV actually) can be explored interactively here: https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-ColorJYZ/?ra=249.960434&dec=-47.0695752&fov=68&hideProperties https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-Co...

jcims 2y ago

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_ 2y ago
A compelling argument for the galaxy is someone's weed dream theory.
konstantinua00 2y ago
so if every star smokes a cigarette, there will be roughly 1 mol (6.02e23) of said particles?
glenstein 2y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rift_(astronomy)

m3kw9 2y ago

This is likely around less than 1% of the Milky Way using stars mapped as a calculation

ur-whale 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
it's very realistic, reality isn't bound by what we can perceive directly

gradientsrneat 2y ago

If this telescope can detect planets not orbiting a star, I wonder if it could improve detection of some planets orbiting stars as well.

Log_out_ 2y ago

Is there also a tracking of temporary vannishing and reappearance of objects.. as in can i have the error map that is a object tracking in the kuiper.