
Chart of the Milky Way Includes More Than 1B Stars - artsandsci
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stellar-effort-chart-of-the-milky-way-includes-more-than-1-billion-stars/
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binalpatel
I love thinking about the sheer scale of it all. This is a billion stars of
the ~200-400 billion stars in our galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy (the closest to
us) has ~1 trillion stars.

There's an estimated 100 billion planets in the Milky Way alone, and who knows
how many in the Andromeda galaxy.

There could be another satellite somewhere in this galaxy charting space just
like this and we'd just be a bright dot to them among billions of other bright
dots.

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Nition
Have you seen Hubble's high-res Andromeda image? It's amazing for sense of
scale [1]. Zoom in - every bit of "noise" is a star.

It's also downloadable in full res [2]. Maybe use the torrent option to save
their poor servers.

[1]
[https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable](https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable)

[2]
[https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a](https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a)

~~~
Gravityloss
There could be a google maps for this, like there is
[https://www.google.com/moon/](https://www.google.com/moon/)

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sunsunsunsun
Since the article seemed to neglect actually linking to the data, it is
publicly available here:
[https://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/](https://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/)

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twic
There's an incredible decade-old map that shows space around the centre of
Earth on a logarithmic scale - it's detailed enough to show the core, mantle,
and crust at the bottom, and the Great Walls at the top:

[https://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/](https://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/)

I finally got round to printing a two metre tall version of this to hang in my
hall a couple of weeks ago!

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baxtr
It makes me sooo sad that (whoever) introduced this stupid light speed limit
so we can’t visit those places. Ever. Maybe in the next reality.

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joquarky
If you can invent a way to continuously accelerate at 1G, you can reach
anywhere in the known universe within a human lifetime.

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saagarjha
Within _your_ lifetime, rather than that of an arbitrary human on Earth.

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truculation
Superb stuff. On a more mundane level I hope we'll soon also have a chart of
all the asteroids in our solar system (to the most realistic extent possible).

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bburns_km
Here's a video showing the discovery of 600,000 asteroids in the inner solar
system -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k2vkLEE4ko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k2vkLEE4ko)

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truculation
Thanks! Took me a minute to work out which planet was which (Jupiter being the
one just outside the 'belt').

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jason_slack
This may sound odd, but does anyone know of a public dataset that provides the
positions of stars and their relationship to other stars? I'd be curious to
see this type of data.

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sgt101
I think that there must be many more than 1bn though? The area of the disk is
roughly 3.14^10 light years, and it must be 10K light years thick on average
so 3.14^14 cubic ly... stars seem to be much more densely packed on average
than 1 per cubic ly but if we assume that Sol is the measure then the nearest
star is not in a 16 cubic ly volume - so we could say 3.14^13 ish stars as an
estimate. So I'd be guessing many more than 300 bn stars in the galaxy?

Google says 250 +/\- 150 bn. I think low...

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sjcsjc
"... contains a representative sample of 1 percent of the Milky Way’s orbs
..."

