Orion Nebula its pointing at Sol

Calaban

Calaban
So, I'm on an exploration kick atm, and.. woa!!

Maybe its old news, or a bug, or an already resolved mystery- but its news to me.

Goto galaxy map, set view to star type. Size off- this makes the stars nice and clear

Then navigation search "Orion Nebula"

My what an.. unusual formation of stars, huh? Its a concentrated LINE of m class stars (red dwarfs). pan around and look where its pointing. at Earth... or away from Earth, towards... something else? hmm.

anyway, because of this thats where I'm heading.

Has anyone figured out what its all about?
 
Last edited:

Zieman

Zieman
2MASS survey got lots of stars with accurate directional position but not so accurate distance estimates - results in interesting star concentrations when mixed with the Stellar Forge.
 
Last edited:

CMDR Alonso

C
There's a much cooler line of stars, just under California Nebula, I think there is a nebula there, NGC 133 or soemthing like that
 

Calaban

Calaban
odd that the line bisects the barnards loop to perfectly too.

Mayyyybe starburst generation in gas clouds caused by the barnards loop supernova shockwave?.. concentrated along the spin axis of the supernova star (where the jets would be strongest)?

Thats MUCH more comforting than the idea of a Type 2 Civilization towing and positioning those STARS into an arrangement on purpose. yikes.

My main side question though: is it real? or game universe specific?
 

Calaban

Calaban
OK, I'm there (didnt take too long, huh?)

Some things can be put away as odd and not really important, some new things are intriguing me. Oh- and pics.

Seen here is the obviously artificial nature of the star formation, specific to the orion nebula.


[URL=http://s14.photobucket.com/user/Calaban/media/Screenshot_0010.png.html][/URL]

and HOLY jump routes as I got near!

I seriously hope its due to the FD guys.. and not these guys:

yup- thats a really, really big spaceship.. that uses an entire STAR for its engine... Type 2 civilizations are beyond mind blowing
.. because THOSE guys give me existential nightmares!

They are all dim type M stars, so their brightness is not enough to be visible as a mass of stars in system- darnit:


view from system in galaxy map


same view in system with mk I eyeball.. dissapointing as all hell, i know.

But I still intend to continue exploring in the directions its pointing- away from sol.

Now, the new interesting stuff: the Orion nebula is a concave bowl shape shown here looking in over the side of the bowl:
.. meaning that it was a dust cloud, impacted by the shockwave of something BIG blowing up.. like a supernova. The blue running man nebula is not quite in the right place to be the cause of the shockwave, so I am looking around for a neutron star/black hole remnant of the "smoking gun". Should be interesting times. for me at least. :)
 
Last edited:

Jesters09

Jesters09
Bitstorm and myself had this same conversation a few days back, there is another line of stars just outside Barnards Loop too.

Got me thinking, if these areas are created based on charts made from actual astronomical observations from Earth, then the the rest of the galaxy should be as dense overall and the estimate of 400 billion stars is out by considerable amount.
So these lines of stars either suffer from some inaccuracies or the rest of the Galaxy does.

I welcome constructive conversation regarding this subject, as something seems quite considerably out of whack somewhere.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
The Two Micron All Sky Survey (known as 2MASS for short) is one of the most comprehensive star-spotting surveys yet undertaken. Between 1997 and 2001, they found 300 million stars (about 0.1% of the total number of stars estimated in the galaxy), mainly red dwarfs (since the survey examined wavelengths around the 2 micron range: infra-red light, at which red dwarfs and brown dwarfs glow best). I don't think every single one of those 300 million stars are catalogued in the game (I think there are "only" about 100,000 "real stars" in the game). I suspect the positions of many of the more remote 2MASS stars are not sufficiently precise to actually use the data in-game. But any star you find in-game with a name beginning with "2MASS" will be one of those real stars. It's position, size and companion stars (if any) will all be as accurate as far as 21st century science can detect. The survey could not detect planets so any planets around such stars are entirely conjectural, random-procedurally generated.

There will be "rays" of 2MASS stars throughout the galaxy, as the survey was not equally powerful nor effective in all directions. These rays will stand out more in those places where the detected stars are thick and the randomly-generated galactic background of stars happens to be thin.

For the TLDR crowd: the "rays" are an artefact of importing the current-knowledge (incomplete) real-world galactic map into the game and superimposing that data onto a randomly-generated synthetic galactic map. They aren't starcluster-sized death rays aimed at Earth.
 

Calaban

Calaban
well, that explains rather nicely why its lined up with Earth.. maybe I can put that particular tinfoil hat away. Maybe.

got me thinking though, if that region is a snapshot of surveyed dim M class stars... if we extrapolated that density data galaxy and universe wide.. would that constitute the missing mass of Dark Matter?

Maybe just Dim Matter?
 

nexxo

N
Jesters09 said:
Bitstorm and myself had this same conversation a few days back, there is another line of stars just outside Barnards Loop too.

Got me thinking, if these areas are created based on charts made from actual astronomical observations from Earth, then the the rest of the galaxy should be as dense overall and the estimate of 400 billion stars is out by considerable amount.
So these lines of stars either suffer from some inaccuracies or the rest of the Galaxy does.

I welcome constructive conversation regarding this subject, as something seems quite considerably out of whack somewhere.
Click to expand...

There has been recent findings (2009) that suggest our galaxy to have 50% more mass than previously presumed, making it comparable to the Andromeda Galaxy.
 

edd

edd
I vaguely recall this coming up before and it was a small specific survey looking at Orion. I have a feeling it used HST. Not got the game handy right now though and I'd need a system name from one of the stars to find it.
 

Jesters09

Jesters09
nexxo said:
There has been recent findings (2009) that suggest our galaxy to have 50% more mass than previously presumed, making it comparable to the Andromeda Galaxy.
Click to expand...


I thought that was due to the theory of "invisible" dark matter making up a good proportion of the galaxy i.e. there being mass between the stars?
I might have interpreted it wrong? Anyway, I still think there appears to be a miscalculation in the amount of stars overall.
 

edd

edd
edd said:
I vaguely recall this coming up before and it was a small specific survey looking at Orion. I have a feeling it used HST. Not got the game handy right now though and I'd need a system name from one of the stars to find it.
Click to expand...

Popped in game and found a few objects. It's a lot harder than I remember to find where the distance information came from.

Anyway, 2MASS is (as the name suggests) all sky, and being infrared it does a pretty good job of going equally in all directions. Not perfectly, but it won't on its own generate selection lines like this. A lot of the objects it sees won't make it in to E:D because it doesn't know how far away the object is.

The actual cause of this line is one of a number of surveys dedicated to the Orion nebula that give extra information (like this one, although quite possibly not exactly that one), but they'll often get named by 2MASS as that survey saw the object first.
 

Commander William Diffin

Commander William Diffin
Whilst the stars of the Orion Nebula may not be in a line pointing at Earth, the massive young stars of the Trapezium Cluster are certainly furiously blowing gas and dust from their corner of the vast Orion Molecular Cloud Complex directly towards us.
 

GraXXoR

GraXXoR
Calaban said:
OK, I'm there (didnt take too long, huh?)

Some things can be put away as odd and not really important, some new things are intriguing me. Oh- and pics.

Seen here is the obviously artificial nature of the star formation, specific to the orion nebula.
[url]http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a323/Calaban/Screenshot_0005_1.png

[url]http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a323/Calaban/Screenshot_0010.png[/URL][/URL]

and HOLY jump routes as I got near!
[url]http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a323/Calaban/Screenshot_0011.png[/URL]

I seriously hope its due to the FD guys.. and not these guys:
[url]http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a323/Calaban/Karashev-Type-2.jpg[/URL]
yup- thats a really, really big spaceship.. that uses an entire STAR for its engine... Type 2 civilizations are beyond mind blowing
.. because THOSE guys give me existential nightmares!

They are all dim type M stars, so their brightness is not enough to be visible as a mass of stars in system- darnit:
[url]http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a323/Calaban/Screenshot_0013.png[/URL]

view from system in galaxy map

[url]http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a323/Calaban/Screenshot_0012.png[/URL]
same view in system with mk I eyeball.. dissapointing as all hell, i know.

But I still intend to continue exploring in the directions its pointing- away from sol.

Now, the new interesting stuff: the Orion nebula is a concave bowl shape shown here looking in over the side of the bowl:
[url]http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a323/Calaban/Screenshot_0014.png[/URL]
.. meaning that it was a dust cloud, impacted by the shockwave of something BIG blowing up.. like a supernova. The blue running man nebula is not quite in the right place to be the cause of the shockwave, so I am looking around for a neutron star/black hole remnant of the "smoking gun". Should be interesting times. for me at least. :)
Click to expand...

I'm seeing pictures of cats.

There are numerous clusters of stars pointing towards earth in ED.

From our point of view they make up a cluster of interest to astronomers who catalogue those stars in a tight "region" of the night sky. Only later astronomical observations determine that although they are almost in the same line of sight as each other (as seen from Earth), they are separated by great distances (depth) from each other.

As it happened, we haven't scanned much of the night sky in the same detail yet, so there are clusters of real data from deep field telescopes (Hubble, for example) that are superimposed onto the Stellar Forge, leading to unusually dense regions.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom