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First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

nottingham.ac.uk

41–50 of 129 posts

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#41

Always 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!

Congratulations. That's an amazing project to be a part of, and it looks like some really jawdropping science is going to result.

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#42
post #36
post #2

TFA specifies "more than 1,500 billion". That's more than a _trillion_, not "billions"! Why the reluctance to use the proper number?

The proper unit would be Parsec, imho

Parsec 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

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#43
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Where 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.

[flagged]

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#44
post #39

The 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?

At 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.

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#45

Always 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!

Can you share some insights on what the issues were?

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#46
post #33
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to calculate how much these stars contribute to the mass deficit of the universe.

Not just stars, it implies there’s a lot of planets, asteroids, etc tossed out there.

I suspect in any solar system, the mass of the non-stars are a rounding error compared to the whole system's mass.

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#47
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just stars, it implies there’s a lot of planets, asteroids, etc tossed out there.

I suspect in any solar system, the mass of the non-stars are a rounding error compared to the whole system's mass.

I 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.

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#48
post #39

The 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?

At 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…

[deleted]

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#49
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just stars, it implies there’s a lot of planets, asteroids, etc tossed out there.

I suspect in any solar system, the mass of the non-stars are a rounding error compared to the whole system's mass.

> I suspect in any solar system, the mass of the non-stars are a rounding error compared to the whole system's mass.

A brown dwarf orbiting a red dwarf would beg to differ.

Re: First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars

#50
post #39

The 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?

At 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…

Indeed, 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".
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