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The designation of trillion is ambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion
my understanding is the long scale has largely died out think it is more than permissible to use what is scientifically standard (trillion = 10^12)
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>We can spot the orphan stars at this distance. Can we resolve these individual orphan stars? Or just see the cumulative glow from a lot of them?
Note that there are two different announcements today, and I need to clarify my comment above. • One piece cited viewing 1.5 trillion stars in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, which is 240 million ly distance: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/first-pictures-from-euclid... • The other cited spotted stars in galaxy cluster Abell 2390, which is in the Pegasus constellation, which is 2.7 billion ly away — an order of ma…
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?
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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.
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I suspect in any solar system, the mass of the non-stars are a rounding error compared to the whole system's mass.
The sun accounts for 99.9+% of the solar system mass if I recall correctly
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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…
> 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. Unless of course some of them manage to find ways to preserve information and keep records over those billions of years. The lost galaxies will be known from that.
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The designation of trillion is ambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion
Same for one 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.
Impressive photos from the ESA site: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid...
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?
As I understand, we built much of our picture of the universe on the fact that we can do precise parallax measurements of nearby stars.
Then we used that to see how far the nearby Cepheid variable stars are, and used the patterns those exhibit to measure distant galaxies. Then at some point we could determine the distance to a certain kind of supernova, and now we have a 3D model of the whole observable universe.
But it starts with parallax measurements which are limited in range.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cosmology-standard-candle-not-...