https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-Co...
>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?
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%3... [1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...532A.131B/abs... [2] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2011A%26A...534A...3G/abs... [3] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2019A%26A...623A.168S/abs... [4] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012AJ....144..127A/abstr...
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.
What proportion of the celestial vault or sphere is that? Napkin calcul appreciated :)
So this data set covers 6.6% of the night sky.
someday
the search engine unfortunately does not appear to properly support multiple keywords with AND/OR logic
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.
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.
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.
And on top of everything, stopping is a huge question when you’re going that fast so how are you achieving that? Is that fuel you had to accelerate as well? And remember - that’s 150x average speed faster than peak so your actual peak to achieve a speed up followed by a slowdown would need to be even faster.
As for voyager, that craft is barely operational in some sense. At 10% and at significantly further distances than ever achieved it would be even harder to keep it operational I think.
Let’s be optimistic but let’s live in reality and not unrealistic sci-fi.
But that's only the start, any advancements in making sattelites on a chip could massively reduce the weight and therefore power requirements. Even with all losses accounted for. I believe this could be doable in the next 50 years. You just need to build the most powerful laser anyone has every built and power it for as long as you can.
> we'll expect people to live hundreds of years by the time we can send a ship to alpha centauri.
Even hundreds of years is not a realistic life expectancy to reach the nearest star and requires not just an enormous overabundance of energy, the fuel source has to be available at the midway point so that you can decelerate. Humans at another star without discovery of faster than light travel mechanisms (mainly wormholes) seems purely in the realm of science fiction.
For comparison, Voyager would need to travel 1666x further in the same time frame. It’s not nihilistic to suggest that 3 orders of magnitude improvement in our lifetime isn’t likely. Oh and Voyager is basically on life support having shut down most systems.
I didn’t say it’s outright impossible or not worth pursuing. Just that believing it’ll happen in our lifetime is unrealistic precisely because of the currently known laws of physics and the orders of magnitude of technological achievement necessary to attain more than 10% the speed of light for anything that has any mass (and again assuming all you want to accomplish is a flyby at relativistic speeds).
The idea is to not use self powered rockets, but launch a thousand small solar sail based probes. These would launched into orbit traditionally, then accelerated individually from a massive earth based laser array, solving the rocket equation problem while introducing a host of its own.
Many probes will not make the trip, but the hope is enough would survive to do a fly by.
And Wikipedia captures my critique of it accurately:
> According to The Economist, at least a dozen off-the-shelf technologies will need to improve by orders of magnitude
That’s about right. That kind of orders of magnitude improvement within a lifetime requires novel scientific theories (eg similar to quantum mechanics and the impact it had). Without that growth is drastically slower. And consider that even computational and communication capabilities have basically been maxed out at our current tech level - we’re no longer growing them exponentially due to thermal and physics constraints.
It’s an ambitious goal worth doing because of the “if you aim for the moon and miss you still hit the stars” kind of effect. And there’s plenty of directed research that needs to be funded. Thinking any of this happens in our lifetimes is ambitious and spaceships carrying humans going to the stars is fantasy*
* as always, completely new physics that upend our knowledge of what’s possible changes the calculus. But those come very rarely and there’s no reason to believe the next revolution will be as impactful as quantum mechanics in terms of impact on our technological capabilities.
Even that is a real stretch.
Wild stuff!
Is it a live project? Their news section is dishearteningly quiet [1]. They still talk about 2018 in the present tense [2].
I feel like we're bumping up against the edges of the lifespan that we can reasonably achieve without figuring out how to actually stop or reverse aging.
Possibly there's a world where we figure out how to dramatically slow it without stopping it, because there's some entropic principle regarding our ability to reliably lengthen telomeres where we can't replace lost data but we can reduce the rate of loss, but my money's that we don't break 150 until we actually solve aging on a fundamental level.
Beyond that, no real settling, just some probes that will take tens of millenia to come back (or send signal back).
Think about all the stuff and beauty we have now, to experience and explore it on our pale blue dot, trivially reachable considering our recent past, and all that will be almost inevitably lost to future generations. Compared to what we have here, stuff in cold hard vacuum or some illusions of beauty pale in comparison (and that comes from a guy who loves astronomy). You can experience it now, in its original form and not some crappy re-creation of good ol' days. Trust me, future generations will be wishing for many reasons to be able to live now (at least those healthy).
I don't believe we will find some magic above-c transport in Star trek style. Sure, its a nice fantasy and we would love for it being true, but thats not how reality works. Same as some beardy old dude in the clouds fantasy, having for some reason very strict bronze-age morals yet letting billions innocents suffer immeasurably without a care in the world(universe). But of course there is magical wonderland after its over here, pure magic in D&D style with alternate realities/planes/universes or whatever those folks who wrote it up thought made sense back then.
(assuming you live in the US)
You can get similar amazement here on earth, normally within 1-day drive of where most people live, by just visiting a National Park.
We take for granted the beauty of Earth, and so much is still undiscovered here at home.
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!
A lot of people. Looks like a movie credits roll.