Part of the problem here is that there's been a serious error in placing the star in the ED universe. They've put it about ten times further away that it should be - it's about 10,000 LY away from Earth while the best-guess estimates are that it's actually only about 1,000 LY from Earth. Looks like a decimal point transposition to me.
Too late to move it now, of course; dumping a new multiple-solar-mass star down in the general vicinity of Wregoe ZC-H b11-0 would completely disrupt the Stellar Forge calculations for the entire Wregoe sector.
I write about this error in detail in
this post (one of my first posts
)
In a nutshell, the error appears to purely be due to the precision of the Hipparcos data and the way it is implemented in Elite Dangerous. As you well know, precision (in scientific measurement) is often quantified with a standard error range or confidence interval, i.e. those +- values you see next to the reported value. Hipparcos had a precision of around 1 milliarcsecond (mas for short) in their parallax. This is good for most objects within a couple thousand light years of Earth, since their parallax will be several mas or greater. But parallax has an inverse relation, and as the parallax approaches 0 mas, the distance the object is from Earth asymptotically approaches infinity. This is what happens with a few hundred of the stars in the HIP dataset, where their parallax is less than 1 mas.
1 arcsecond is 1 parsec distance or 3.26 ly
100 mas is 10 pc = 32.6 ly
10 mas is 100 pc = 326 ly
1 mas is 1000 pc = 3260 ly.
etc.
Some stars have reported values of nearly 0 mas, with a systematic error of 1 mas due to the limitations of Hipparcos mentioned earlier, but when these stars were imported to ED, they used the exact parallax value. Meaning, if a star had a value of 0.10 +-1 mas in the hipparcos catalog, it would apparently be 32600 ly away! We know in reality that the satellite could have no chance of detecting a perfectly normal star from that far away, so the error range is likely playing a factor, but the stars were imported with this distance nonetheless.
The cutoff for this is 0.07 mas = 46596 ly. Smaller parallax values appear to have been stripped out (or perhaps the developers blacklisted catalog stars further away than 50000 ly). Also note that negative parallax values in the set were completely excluded. In reality, this is just a technicality (the star moved left instead of right during the parallax measurement) and should have no difference, but half the stars in the catalog are not in Elite Dangerous because of this fact!
EDIT: just realized this is a thread from 2019...did not realize I was necroing
