Many of these stars have planets orbiting them, likely discovered after the author wrote this page. There are some references to planetary systems, but few compared to what has been discovered since. Proxima Centauri has at least one planet orbiting it (in the habitable zone!), for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri
As soon as I opened that page I had a flashback to playing Elite on my ZX Spectrum as a 10-year-old. I had to look twice at the map to check it didn't show Lave and Reidquat.
And that's really weird, because now I look into it, I think there's no way I saw a map like this in that game. Nor Frontier on the Amiga, as far as I can see. But when I look at the map, Elite is all I can think about, somehow I feel certain that's where I've seen it before, even though the evidence suggests I'm wrong. There's some strong association going on there. Weeeeeeird.
Edit: I think it might actually just be that I first saw this page so long ago that it feels the same... As soon as I zoomed out I knew I'd seen it before, but not for a long long time.
The Map Is Not the Territory. Your memory of the mental model of our local neighbors that you'd worked out is overriding the actual memories.
Something similar happens when we remember childhood houses. Spaces where there was a lot of activity seem bigger, because we've mapped those areas extensively.
Interesting. I’m aware of the common feeling that one’s childhood room seems “much smaller than I remembered” when it’s visited in adulthood (especially after a long time away), but I had never heard that feeling tied to level of time/activity done in that space.
is it because you were small when you were child and thats why these spaces are bigger in your memmory than you experience them now. for example for my kids ceiling is 5 times theyr own heigt. that would be huge for adult me to have ceiling 10meter high.
The association you have is not for the local / galactic chart from Elite, but rather the navigational scanner when in flight - used the same 3-D positional rendering for nearby objects. See bottom centre here: https://www.retrogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Elite-...
I think it's that the layout of the map, with flags going above and below a circular plane, looks exactly like (and is perhaps inspired by) the scanner that shows where ships around you in local space are in Elite/Oolite (FOSS Elite 1984 clone, highly recommended).
There are similarities between the scanner and this map, but the in-game map wasn't even close. There's probably an interesting visual memory research to be done into how we make that association.
About 15 years ago, I used the open source program, Celestia. You could move around the solar system and beyond in 3D. It was cool at the time, but I haven't looked at it in a long time.
It also allowed add-on data to be imported.
Hobbyists would create accurate 3D models of weird shaped asteroids using the latest data from NASA, and you could download the data, and view it using the main Celestia program.
Maybe someone has posted updated data in Celestia format somewhere?
You can script it in Lua. I once used that to make a presentation in it for my wife to use in class. Showed the Solar system from above, then visited Sol and each planet in turn, doing a split-screen with Earth and zooming whichever pane had the smaller body to compare sizes, that sort of thing. It was like having a scriptable Magic Schoolbus. Pretty cool.
O7 Commander. I love Elite exactly because it lets me fly to those stars. Since we're still not at the point where we can go there in person, we can at least launch the game and dream about a future whete it's possible.
Wolf 359 has a rather storied history in fiction. I would guess more people are probably familiar with the reference in Star Trek: The Next Generation than in the Elite games. :)
I'm playing right now. Just docked at Morgan's Rock (on the edge of the Sagitarius arm heading back towards Sol) after a ~20kly loopy exploration/POI tourism trip.
Nothing comes close to this game for gaining an understanding of the shape, distances and density (or lack thereof in some areas!) in the Milky Way (you've got an FSD/FTL drive but not a good enough one to leave the galaxy).
I remember arriving on such a system and being a little surprised that I could barely even see the companion star. It was just a much brighter star among all the others.
Exploring the galaxy in Elite is incredible, but just like everything else in the game, it's so damn boring and repetitive. FSD charging, jump, cooldown/fuel scoop. Repeat 1000x.
Was fun zooming out and comparing stars to the cubic area. If it's a sphere, we're at about 250 cubic light years per star at both 12.5 lt yr out, and at 20. It heads to around 900 ly^3 per star when you look at everything within 5000 lt yrs.
Makes sense, given that the Milky Way--while 150-200 kly wide--is only about 2000 light years thick.
Of course, we could rapidly zoom much, much farther out, like in this intergalactic redshift survey:
If you had a suitable form of transport, which of these 33 stars would you visit? Red dwarfs are probably not very interesting places to visit. Sirius or Procyon (which I'd not heard of before) sound the most interesting:
This brilliant white star is the brightest star in the night sky and the most luminous star within 25 light years. Its white dwarf companion was first seen in 1852, the first white dwarf ever seen. The orbital period is 50 years.
A brilliant yellow-white star, and the eighth brightest star in the sky. With twice the diameter of the Sun, Procyon is also the largest star within 25 light years. Procyon is orbited by a white dwarf companion first seen optically in 1896. The orbital period is 41 years.
And Voyager 1, the furthest man made object has already completed 0,0023 lightyears from the 4.3 lightyears to the nearest star Alpha Centauri. But its heading in the wrong direction anyway...
Voyager 1 is still functioning, but within 10 years will finally run out of power. That's going to be the limiting factor even for self-repairing systems:
It’s somewhat a very sobering thought that there is no intelligent life in all of solar system. The neighbouring stars are too far away for us to visit in our lifetimes.
The closest I know of to a true "map" you can search for things in, put all of space into any scale, move around in, is SpaceEngine. The VR support is a bit unwieldy but still impressive. You might want to turn off the procedurally generated stars and planets if you want a strict map. The procedurally generated stars are interesting because you can get a sense of density at various scales.
Titans of Space Plus is probably the most educational space VR program I've used. It takes you on a guided tour of our solar system and puts everything into perspective at various scales, including some other stars. But it's not a map of the stars very much. It does the best job of conveying the relative sizes of things.
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
... and it's still kind of sad that we (or anything like us) will actually, realistically never ever venture far enough to even reach the nearest star to us.
I genuinely think it is sad, but it is what it is. Interstellar space is so unimaginably huge (insert HGoG reference or excerpt here). At least you won't be alive to experience the time when the expansion just overtakes everything and leaves "us" a lone galaxy pondering why here is no light from others like us.
Hit #subscribe for more depressing space-facts! :|
Despite understanding how inaccessibly distant alternative potentially habitable planets are, people here on earth seem utterly incapable of living sustainably on what will very likely be the only planet their species will ever comfortably inhabit.
Me neither. But it used to. I was a Star Trek (TOS) kid and grew up assuming I would at least visit planets in adulthood, if not have a modest spacecraft of my own. Also that the Earth's warring tribes would do away with war & poverty in some utopian approximately Federationish style.
I'm not sure which seems sillier now.
What really strikes me as sad is ...people here on earth seem utterly incapable of living sustainably
That was my post Star Trek dreams phase, which probably lasted through much of my 30's.
Beyond that I've come to accept that it was never biologically plausible that a fairly clever social primate species would (magically?) be able to extend its social/cognitive/conative/affective capacities, evolved to negotiate small group survival and interaction, to the competent management of an entire biosphere.
Also consider that we, the Earthbound humans, will probably never live comfortably in space, or low gravity environments. We're just not built for it and there are many physiological issues we'd face.
That of course doesn't mean humans never will, future generations, should they go to space, will adapt and evolve to their new environments, whether naturally or through deliberate selection. You and I, we never will. But our descendants might.
I suspect if our 'civilisation' continued long enough to do serious manned space exploration, low gravity is an issue we'd find a technical fix for. Your guess is as good as mine though.
It's pretty clear however that we're unlikely to make it that far.
> the competent management of an entire biosphere.
I eventually came at peace with the destruction of the environment when I understood it was is unavoidable, just like our individual death. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter. We're just an infinitesimal part of something too big to comprehend.
Well I'd say it does matter somewhat, or at least it matters 'to us' at a local scale, even if it doesn't ultimately (but then perhaps all 'mattering' is local - it's hard to see what does matter sub specie aeternitatis).
I suspect you're right that it was unavoidable, though (unfortunately in my view) we'll never really know, because the attempt to avoid it was never made with any vigour. We bailed out into blinkered nihilism long before we had to.
Star Trek TNG got a lot of my attention in my younger years.
Back then I thought the prime directive kind of ideals, do not interfere or harm, seemed unrealistic and like something that we wouldn't be capable of if we found something that somebody important wanted.
Teleportation seemed like maybe plausible, but quite possibly a bit of a reach.
I guess because the Guinness Book of World Records was very popular at the time and we were always hearing about a new fastest car, plane, or something, I really thought we would be cruising around the cosmos at warp speed whatever pretty soon. Maybe lunch at a different planet every other weekend or something reasonable like that.
I will probably always be a little sad that it's not going to happen in my lifetime or likely ever.
The Star Trek references always generates a bit of wistfulness in me.
I think the expectations run a bit deeper than Guinness Book of Records! Indeed some variation on 'progress' or elevated human 'destiny' has been foundational to modernity (clearly since the Enlightenment, or perhaps the Protestant Reformation; but with even deeper historical roots).
I like to jump in the air when I think of that song and try to visualise how far I actually traveled (wrt centre of the galaxy) in that 1 second or so. One day I'll actually do the math...
But back on topic, I've been looking for a small data set of stars for a little project that I've had in the back on my mind for the last 10 years or so, and this article has one: awesome.
Many years ago I was doing a lot of reading on astronomy and spent some time thinking intently about the scale of things in the solar system.
After a few months of this I woke one morning from a hyper-real dream in which I was in a 'high-Earth' orbit and felt like I was seeing the solar system with a lot more clarity. That was it's own reward and I also think that it shows our minds are much more capable than we let on.
Barnard's star also has a planet, contrary to the claim on the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star#Planetary_sys...