Exoplanet help needed for astronomy club talk

FabFox

F
Hi guys, I'm after some info if anyone can help...

Next weekend I'm doing a short talk at my astronomy club entitled Trip to Eden, about using Elite Horizons to 'virtually' visit actual exoplanets. Elite is, as far as I know, the only game in which you can actually do this. However Eden is not an exact analogue of Proxima Centauri B (since it FD decided that it was close enough and had lots of in-game history), and is also quite an uninteresting planet, being non-landable in Horizons and only having Hutton Orbital around it.

So is there a list anywhere of the real-life exoplanets in the game? Are there any that are landable or particularly interesting in Horizons? Indeed does anyone have any screenshots of on-foot exploration on any exoplanets within Odyssey?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Alistair.
 

marx

marx
TRAPPIST-1 might be a good idea. Many exoplanet findings came well after ED was out, and as such, new catalogues weren't implemented. However, Frontier still tweaked a proc. gen. system that was near to where TRAPPIST-1 was found to be, and tweaked its bodies to better reflect the exoplanets found there. Several of them are landable, and it's interesting that one in the habitable zone turned out to be an Earth-like world with two moons of its own.
 

Maolagin

M
Exoplanet science is a rapidly moving field, so the information Frontier used when building out the ED galaxy is in some ways already obsolete. Many new planetary discoveries, some older discoveries revised or even disproven, that sort of thing. If you're staying near Sol, there are many real systems nearby, and lots of them have planets - it's just a question of whether the planets Frontier put around those stars matches what we know now about those systems!

Take for example Epsilon Eridani. Current data suggests a 300-ish Earth mass planet around 3.5 AU from the star. That planet was announced in the early 2000s, and indeed the system in-game has a gas giant with similar properties - along with a number of smaller planets that we have no astronomical evidence for or against.

You also ask about landings, and there you have to remember that exoplanet detection techniques work better on larger planets - very very few planets small enough to be landable had been discovered by ~2014. If you take a look at this list, you'll notice that the vast majority of the discoveries are quite recent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any landable planets in ED that correspond accurately to known exoplanets. Your best bet would probably have been the pulsar Lich, which we do know has a planet small enough. But the planets there in ED don't reflect the real planets believed to orbit there.
 

Edelgard von Rhein

E
Finding known exoplanets in ED can be done with a search in the Galaxy Map for the name, or at least the catalogue name, e.g. try searching for Kepler and seeing what this leads you to (also try the same search in EDSM). There's no guarantee that any of these planets are landable as it tends to be super-earth or larger worlds that are detected by current instrumentation (some slightly smaller than Earth are known but they are in the minority). No one knows what the atmospheres are really like on these worlds - there is a tenuous detection of methane on one but the error bars are huge. We'll have to wait for the James Webb Space Telescope to get even rough atmospheric compositions for the closest (I think PLATO is also looking for spectra).
ED is a simulation, though, so just as it's no big deal for you to do the equivalent of imagining a moon around one of these worlds (I don't think there are any confirmed exomoons yet) you can hopefully find one suitable for your talk.
 

FabFox

F
Thanks for these replies, I had the impression that FD had added worlds manually after the initial release but what you are all saying is that no worlds ere added or adjusted after, which makes some sense as would potentially mess things up.

That's a good point about moons, I may well look into those, it could be a good screenshot to end on which is what I am after. I'll particularly look around Trappist-1.
 

varonica

varonica
Trappist-1 was added later, however many stars with known transiting objects were included in game from catalogues, the Kepler Objects of Interest for instance, many of those were included.
 

Maolagin

M
FabFox said:
Thanks for these replies, I had the impression that FD had added worlds manually after the initial release but what you are all saying is that no worlds ere added or adjusted after, which makes some sense as would potentially mess things up.
Click to expand...
More than zero worlds have been added after the fact. But from everything we've been told, it's kind of a significant pain to do so, not least because it requires patching the client (i.e. not just a server-side tweak). So it's been rare.

However, after some more searching, I think I did find for you the elusive landable planet that corresponds to a real known exoplanet.

See 82 G. Eridani (82 Eridani in game) - the three rocky planets (the inner two landable) correspond rather nicely to companion bodies c, d, and e. For what it's worth, while the match is fairly good, given the discovery dates I think it's more likely that Stellar Forge succeeded in simulating realistic planets than that Frontier intentionally inserted these.
 

Old_Man_Steve

O
Lacaille 9352 has planets in the game, but they don't quite match what was discovered. Camp Lawrence has a human settlement, which you can use as a landmark to frame your shots.
Ross 128 has a planet but it doesn't match the real-life 128B
Eddb.io and Inara didn't have anything on Gliese 1061, but in real-life it has 3 earth-like worlds but their orbital eccentricity means they're probably rocky in the game.
Luyten's star has lots of the wrong planets, but you could check out Luyten's Star 2 since it has water-based life on a gas giant which kinda corresponds with real-life Luyten's Star.
Eddb.io and Inara didn't have anything on LHS 1140, but in real-life it has a super-earth. The game might have set it up differently.
Eddb.io and Inara didn't have anything on Gliese 667, but 668.1 has a few landable planets that could make for decent analogs to 667cb and cc.
The game seems to have taken some liberties with the Kepler-186 system, but there are few landable planets which could be analogs for Kepler-186f.
Nobody's been to Kepler-174 yet, but in real-life it has a potentially habitable planet.
If you want to make the lesson about the worlds of Kepler, use this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanets_discovered_using_the_Kepler_space_telescope
 

Comandante

Comandante
FabFox said:
Hi guys, I'm after some info if anyone can help...

Next weekend I'm doing a short talk at my astronomy club entitled Trip to Eden, about using Elite Horizons to 'virtually' visit actual exoplanets. Elite is, as far as I know, the only game in which you can actually do this. However Eden is not an exact analogue of Proxima Centauri B (since it FD decided that it was close enough and had lots of in-game history), and is also quite an uninteresting planet, being non-landable in Horizons and only having Hutton Orbital around it.

So is there a list anywhere of the real-life exoplanets in the game? Are there any that are landable or particularly interesting in Horizons? Indeed does anyone have any screenshots of on-foot exploration on any exoplanets within Odyssey?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Alistair.
Click to expand...
+1, great idea for using E: D for an astronomy club!

While it might not be on your list (for obvious reasons), there are several other things you could do:
  1. Visit each of the Voyager probes and take some screen shots back at Sol - apparently the game programmers moved them to the place they'd be in-game now (3307) (or at least at game start in 3301);
  2. The local star mappings are generally correct as I understand, you could do some 'star map' views looking at Sol, highlighting the tiny little yellow dot that is our sun from several different angles of locally well-known stars;
  3. Visit Proxima Centauri and do the Hutton Run in 'real' time, albeit FTL than light travel - it still takes about 40/45 minutes AFAIK!
  4. Lastly there's the trans-Neptunian objects that (again AFAIK) are very well modeled - you could go land on them in the SRV!
I am sure others would have some other ideas.
 
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FabFox

F
Nice suggestions Comandante and everyone else, thanks. I updated my slides slightly with some of this info but didn't have time for any more actual travel. The end of the talk is a video of me doing the Hutton-run to Eden (fairly close analog of Proxima b), starting from Michail Gorbachov station and obviously skipping forward through most of the long-haul. It seemed to go down really well.
 

SlickPBW

S
Great idea!

maybe consider also:
  • take a stroll through Sol, land on Mars/Mercury, Saturn’s rings
  • Visit Betelgeuse (or other very large stars like UY Scuti)
  • don’t visit an in-game black hole because, you know, rebellion.
  • Jackson’s Lighthouse
  • fly FA-off to demonstrate Newtonian physics.
 

FabFox

F
SlickPBW said:
Great idea!

maybe consider also:
  • take a stroll through Sol, land on Mars/Mercury, Saturn’s rings
  • Visit Betelgeuse (or other very large stars like UY Scuti)
  • don’t visit an in-game black hole because, you know, rebellion.
  • Jackson’s Lighthouse
  • fly FA-off to demonstrate Newtonian physics.
Click to expand...
It went down really well, they were very impressed with the Stellar Forge details and the video at the end.

Your additional suggestions are nice. The non-sol stuff is all good and I think I might do a bit of a tour of real systems at some point in ED. Actually, a tour of sight-seeing locations in Orion could be cool. But for solar system tours and Newtonian physics demos I think the best platform right now has to be Orbiter (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/) rather than Elite Dangerous. I think there is potential for more talks using these platforms with everyone's suggestions.
 

Comandante

Comandante
@FabFox glad it went really well, good on you! If you want to show us your slides or turn it into a youtube video, let us know :)

Since you mentioned it, there's loads of other things that could potentially stir the scientifically-minded, too:

  1. Land on planets with gravitational pulls similar to Earth, Mars, the moon etc. - show the jump difference on such rocky planets - either via foot or (prefer this myself) with the SRV - be sure to include high-G planets!
  2. Do you own Odyssey? If you do, find gas-mixture differences for atmospheric types for sunsets/sunrises - including orbital entry/exit - some of those views are simply astounding, and definitely based on atomic differences between the types of gases they include - I recall seeing Dr. Ross's descriptions of these, and they were awesome (not a scientist myself so cannot confirm, but am suitably impressed either way!). OK, so you don't need actual exo-planets for this one which is the great thing, but there's some beautiful visuals to be shown - especially against a backdrop of starlight...
  3. Sunrise/sunset of different planets - close to and far from the main star - different star types. I saw a sunrise for a low-powered star (think it was a red dwarf, not sure because I know nothing about astronomy) that was real close to the planet I was on, but MAN, the sunrise was awesome when it happened!)
OK, getting ahead of myself here - what I am saying that is although that ED is a game, there's a lot of thought gone into what one would see/experience using physics to come to that conclusion.

Be sure in future to report back here and let us know of your great ideas :)
 
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