Real-Universe System TOI-178 Trending; Is It In Elite: Dangerous?

Overkill

Overkill
In real-world news, system TOI-178 is trending the past few days after it wad discovered to have planets in harmonic resonance.

gizmodo.com

Enigmatic Star System Has 5 Planets Locked in Perfect Harmony

A unique planetary system located 200 light-years from Earth hosts five exoplanets with orbits locked together in a repeating pattern, despite their very
gizmodo.com gizmodo.com

Might we have some of our astronomically-inclined players figure out where this system might be in-game? Looking forward to seeing how the game's Stellar Forge might have also predicted this system similar to how it predicted TRAPPIST-1.

Other identifiers for this system are "TIC 251848941", "2MASS J00291228-3027133" and "TYC 6991-00475-1" if that helps narrow down a possible in-game location.
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
As is usually the case, the answer is "no, FD were not psychic and did not know this system was interesting or unusual in any way". THe system is not already in ED. Prior to this discovery, 2MASS J00291228-3027133 was just another 2MASS star, one of the 300 million stars in the 2MASS database, only a tiny fraction of which were added to ED; there's a less than 0.1% chance that a randomly selected 2MASS star will already be in ED.

And just to re-iterate: the "prediction" of TRAPPIST-1 was almost entirely inaccurate. Yes, the game put a brown dwarf in about the correct location for TRAPPIST-1 - but TRAPPIST-1 just happens to be situated in the region of space where the Stellar Forge created the "brown dwarf disc" - an unnaturally high concentration of brown dwarf stars. So it would have been hard for the Stellar Forge to not accidentally create a star approximately where TRAPPIST-1 lurked. And yes, the "correct" number of planets were predicted - but that's because the Stellar Forge almost always puts about 8 planets around brown dwarfs. Stellar Forge created a bunch of iceballs in distant orbits; the system had to be manually edited to bring the planetary orbits closer and their stats into line with TRAPPIST-1 reality.

As I said in this other recent thread, it's unlikely this system with these worlds will be added to ED; it's an awful lot of work for FD to edit a star system, for (in this case) a system that frankly isn't all that interesting. And in this case, at only 200 LY away, that's probably within the Bubble, so well within already-explored space, and any sacrificial system might possibly already be inhabited.
 

pnellesen

pnellesen
Speaking of systems with 5 planets in... unusual... orbits, I'm STILL waiting for the Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds to show up in-game.
(I'm also waiting for all the other worlds of Known Space too. And a pony.)
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Overkill said:
Might we have some of our astronomically-inclined players figure out where this system might be in-game?
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Coordinates are 3 degrees clockwise of Sag A*, 84 degrees down, about 200 LY out.
(High proper motion, so it won't be in exactly the same place now and in 3300 anyway)

Have a look around for a K-class star near 1, -200, 20 ... fringes of Imperial space there, probably.

If there is one, it of course won't have the correct contents, but it might still be interesting.


EDIT: I should add that ED does not simulate planetary motion in enough detail to have orbital resonances actually show up - this is an incredibly complex mathematical problem that would make system generation unacceptably slow. ED uses a system of nested two-body orbits which can be calculated extremely quickly but do generate systems which should have resonances but don't.
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
Yes, IRL (and now in-game) TRAPPIST-1 is an M-class red dwarf - M6v in ED, M8v in real life. This was edited when they created TRAPPIST-1.
 

Starshot_Jigawatts

S
I was pretty let down to discover one of my favorite real life astronomical things, the "Pillars of Creation" M16 Eagle nebula, wasn't in game. And yes I understand why that is, because it no longer exists we're just observing light that's gillions of years old bla bla bla.

Still sad :(
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
Starshot_Jigawatts said:
And yes I understand why that is, because it no longer exists we're just observing light that's gillions of years old bla bla bla.
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You understand incorrectly. ED does not take into account any changes to position or age of real-life galactic objects portrayed in the game; we see them as we would see them from Earth in 2014, not as they would appear up-close in 3300. The Crab Nebula, for example, has probably dispersed entirely by now; if you were to travel to the Crab Pulsar today, you probably wouldn't see any nebula.

M16, the Eagle Nebula, is indeed in the game - it's one of the stopover points on the Colonia Road. It does, however, lack the "pillars of creation" subfeature. FD only added a few hand-crafted nebulae into the game, all the rest of the nebula take on one of half-a-dozen generic shapes. The Eagle Nebula is one of the generic ones.

So the Pillars of Creation are not in the game, not for any solid scientific reason, but because FD did not choose to include it.

Fee free to lobby FD to include it. They have edited nebulae in the past to make them more true-to-life - most notably, they changed the Pleiades Nebula from generic red to hand-crafted blue.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
pnellesen said:
Speaking of systems with 5 planets in... unusual... orbits, I'm STILL waiting for the Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds to show up in-game.
(I'm also waiting for all the other worlds of Known Space too. And a pony.)
Click to expand...

Given that the entirety of Known Space lies within the Bubble in the ED universe, and given that both Larry Niven and FD have filled this area of space with known real-universe stars, then the "worlds of known space" are already in-game. The stars are, at any rate. The planets they host are just not the same as their Known Space counterparts.

In the Tau Ceti system, the planet known as Taylor Colony is the analogue of Plateau. In Epsilon Indi, New Africa (the planet Mitterand Hollow orbits around) is where Home should be.

Jinx is in Sirius, which has a gas giant in ED, but no habitable moon orbiting that gas giant. And even if it did, ED doesn;t model tidal stretching, so it wouldn't be Easter-egg-shaped. We Made It orbits Procyon A; in ED, there are no Earth-likes around Procyon A but Procyon B has a record-holding four inhabited Earth-like worlds. And, of course, Wunderland is in Alpha Centauri, which likewise has no ELWs in ED (but does have Eden around Proxima). Canyon is in the p Eridani system, which in ED has no planets. The Kzin homeworld is in 61 Ursae Majoris, which in ED is a mining colony with lots of gas giants and moons, but no ELWs.

The Grog homeworld orbits the fictitious red dwarf star "L5-1668", 12.3 LYs from Earth. Back in Larry Niven's day, they didn't have the tech to reliably detect faint red dwarfs at that range. We do now, and the only known red dwarf at that range is Luyten's Star.
 

pnellesen

pnellesen
Sapyx said:
Given that the entirety of Known Space lies within the Bubble in the ED universe, and given that both Larry Niven and FD have filled this area of space with known real-universe stars, then the "worlds of known space" are already in-game. The stars are, at any rate. The planets they host are just not the same as their Known Space counterparts.

In the Tau Ceti system, the planet known as Taylor Colony is the analogue of Plateau. In Epsilon Indi, New Africa (the planet Mitterand Hollow orbits around) is where Home should be.

Jinx is in Sirius, which has a gas giant in ED, but no habitable moon orbiting that gas giant. And even if it did, ED doesn;t model tidal stretching, so it wouldn't be Easter-egg-shaped. We Made It orbits Procyon A; in ED, there are no Earth-likes around Procyon A but Procyon B has a record-holding four inhabited Earth-like worlds. And, of course, Wunderland is in Alpha Centauri, which likewise has no ELWs in ED (but does have Eden around Proxima). Canyon is in the p Eridani system, which in ED has no planets. The Kzin homeworld is in 61 Ursae Majoris, which in ED is a mining colony with lots of gas giants and moons, but no ELWs.

The Grog homeworld orbits the fictitious red dwarf star "L5-1668", 12.3 LYs from Earth. Back in Larry Niven's day, they didn't have the tech to reliably detect faint red dwarfs at that range. We do now, and the only known red dwarf at that range is Luyten's Star.
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Yeah. And we can't even have the Pak homeworld either :(

I've got an account out at Explorer's Anchorage, and there aren't any nuclear-war ravaged small planets in the region that I'm aware of. Probably a good thing for the rest of the galaxy, though ;)
 
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