VY Canis Majoris

[Erimus Kamzel]

A red hypergiant that is nearly 2 BILLION kilometers in diameter (6.6 AU!!)

I'm wondering how ED will handle such objects? Will this system be a lagfest?

Star Size Comparison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

I think this video has done the rounds on here before but I thought it was worth linking again for anyone who hasn't seen it.

 

[Listeri69]

over 1,000,000,000 times larger than our sun, if it was in our solar system it would reach past Saturn.... at Elite dangerous slow speed flying it would take 200 years to fly around it just once truly mind boggling in size. I hope they do model some of these systems with accuracy. be interesting to see how they do it though...

 

[AtomicHorror]

A red hypergiant that is nearly 2 BILLION kilometers in diameter (6.6 AU!!)

I'm wondering how ED will handle such objects? Will this system be a lagfest?

Star Size Comparison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

I think this video has done the rounds on here before but I thought it was worth linking again for anyone who hasn't seen it.

A sphere is a sphere- the size of it won't make much of a difference to how the game engine handles it. Anyway, when you jump into a system and you see a star- how will you tell the difference between a sphere thats 10 million km across and one thats 2 billion km across? We judge size relative to other objects and no object is ever going to put a star in context for us. The detail level relative to that size will matter more to how the game performs.

 

[Bingo Brewster]

Unfortunately, we here in Spain are not allowed to watch this.

How bloody pathetic! This geotagism really annoys me sometimes

 

[Jenner]

I'm thrilled that some of the folks behind ED are big astronomy nuts. I'm an amateur astronomy of a sort myself, so I'm really curious to see how they handle stuff like this.

 

[laforge]

Interesting questions, especially because there may be a couple of commanders (like me) who are trying to take a look at supergiant stars

Another challenging - perhaps even more - object is the central black hole of our milky way. It has several stars in orbit

and the black hole itself has a radius of approximately 6.25 light hours = 45 AU. In comparison the orbit of Neptune is at around 30 AU. Black holes will also disturb the background starfield by gravity effects.

For example, the picture below shows how a black hole would look with a single saturn-shaped orange ring (an accretion disk may look a bit different, this ring starts and stops at definitive radii). You see another copy of the same ring in the vicinity. However i think the starfield is not calculated correctly in this image.

 

[Patrick_68000]

A red hypergiant that is nearly 2 BILLION kilometers in diameter (6.6 AU!!)

1 AU = 149,597,871 km - (6.6 AU) seems a little short or am I wrong?

:S

 

[laforge]

1 AU = 149,597,871 km - (6.6 AU) seems a little short or am I wrong?

:S

Short? no lol, 1 AU = distance between sun and earth. So the radius of such an object is more than 6x the orbit of the earth around the sun. By the way, i think that some numbers are not correct. The radius of VY Canis Majoris should be at around 10 AU to include the orbit of Saturn.

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

Unfortunately, we here in Spain are not allowed to watch this.

How bloody pathetic! This geotagism really annoys me sometimes

Here you go Bingo..

My mockup of that video (the ultra short version that basically boils down to this)

Now all you need is to play the music from Disneys Black Hole and you've got the sound too.

Screw Youtube!

 

[Patrick_68000]

Short? no lol, 1 AU = distance between sun and earth. So the radius of such an object is more than 6x the orbit of the earth around the sun.

The radius, changes everything

 

[laforge]

I updated my first post in this topic by a picture showing the various orbits of stars around the central black hole. This pic is taken from wikipedia

 

[Sterlino]

I knew that sooner or later someone would have pulled off this discussion


ghehehe...

Canis Majoris, i would really like to see such monster in game.

 

[Flavio]

over 1,000,000,000 times larger than our sun, if it was in our solar system it would reach past Saturn.... at Elite dangerous slow speed flying it would take 200 years to fly around it just once truly mind boggling in size. I hope they do model some of these systems with accuracy. be interesting to see how they do it though...

There might not be any ports around this star so the only reason that you visit it is if you misjump or stop off to scoop some fuel and jump elsewhere in which case you may not realise its size, as long as it does appear on the star map and you can see it in the night sky.

 

[Sterlino]

Now all you need is to play the music from Disneys Black Hole and you've got the sound too.

Screw Youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJaypC51Dds

or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2kAhUFccSg

edit now : ^sorry guys, i totally missed the video in the first post of this thread


you choose

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

A sphere is a sphere- the size of it won't make much of a difference to how the game engine handles it. Anyway, when you jump into a system and you see a star- how will you tell the difference between a sphere thats 10 million km across and one thats 2 billion km across? We judge size relative to other objects and no object is ever going to put a star in context for us. The detail level relative to that size will matter more to how the game performs.

That's true, but I was thinking about how the game will handle the surface features of something that size. I assume stars in Elite will have a lot of activity going on on the surface and corona etc and not just be featureless objects. It'll be interesting to see if something that size can have just as much animation going on without it effecting the performance of the game while you're in that system.

 

[Slythe]

A sphere is a sphere- the size of it won't make much of a difference to how the game engine handles it. Anyway, when you jump into a system and you see a star- how will you tell the difference between a sphere thats 10 million km across and one thats 2 billion km across? We judge size relative to other objects and no object is ever going to put a star in context for us. The detail level relative to that size will matter more to how the game performs.

As I understand it VY Canis Majoris probably isn't really a simple sphere at all. It's very, very diffuse with a poorly defined edge, more like a big bright fuzzy ball than a neat and tidy sphere.

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

As I understand it VY Canis Majoris probably isn't really a simple sphere at all. It's very, very diffuse with a poorly defined edge, more like a big bright fuzzy ball than a neat and tidy sphere.

Yeah its "surface" (if you could call it that) would probably be more akin to how a nebulae would look than how something as granular and as active as a much more compact star like our own is, but I'd still wonder if there is a lot of motion going on despite the diffuseness. Its sheer size would probably give you the sense that you're in some endless tenuous gas cloud if you were able to skim through its outer reaches in your ship. If its outer reaches are perceived as a motionless gassy/plasma feature then I guess the game won't have any laggy issues with it.

Its one of those places in ED I'd love to visit early on - just to see how FD have envisioned how something like that is represented in game :smilie:

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

Interesting questions, especially because there may be a couple of commanders (like me) who are trying to take a look at supergiant stars

Another challenging - perhaps even more - object is the central black hole of our milky way.

I've set myself a personal goal in Elite Dangerous, being an explorer and all, to someday reach the centre of the galaxy and check out the black hole if FD have included it.

 

[Fluke]

A red hypergiant that is nearly 2 BILLION kilometers in diameter (6.6 AU!!)

I'm wondering how ED will handle such objects? Will this system be a lagfest?

Star Size Comparison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

I think this video has done the rounds on here before but I thought it was worth linking again for anyone who hasn't seen it.

If you get a chance to try an Oculus Rift, have a go on Titans of Space. Several stars including Vy Canis Majoris are shown in relative size next to each other. They're only rendered at 1 millionth of their actual sizes, but even so, with a Rift, the scale is absolutely staggering.

Rift video here (star size comparisons start at around the 19min mark), but you really do have to try it yourself to appreciate it.

 

[Flavio]

I've set myself a personal goal in Elite Dangerous, being an explorer and all, to someday reach the centre of the galaxy and check out the black hole if FD have included it.

I bet that the starmap or the part of the galaxy that you can visit will be more like a torus type shape as the gravity is too strong and you will not be allowed to get closer than a certain point and obviously in the other directions, you get to the edge of the galaxy hence my prediction.