Astronomy / Space Gaia maps 1 billion Milky Way stars

It will be interesting to note the density and type of stars. I dare say Frontier will be checking how accurate their stellar forge is in deciding the commonality of certain star types. Not that I expect them to change things.

One of the things about Elite that educated me was the lack of knowledge we have had as to the number and accurate location of stars. The fact we only knew the approximate location of less than 200,000 stars is pretty sad when you consider the technology we have to hand for the past couple of decades.

It glad to see that Europe is finally putting such technology to use.

It would not surprise me if it ends up fundamentally changing our view of the galaxy we live in. It may challenge theories such as the big bang and the development of the universe and stellar bodies.
 
I wonder if the ED player base is ahead of them ?

If the player base has so far mapped 'less than 1%' of Elite's Milky Way, as I believe David Braben suggested, then they have, at most, discovered 4 billion systems to date. That's impressive!

It will be interesting to note the density and type of stars. I dare say Frontier will be checking how accurate their stellar forge is in deciding the commonality of certain star types. Not that I expect them to change things.

One of the things about Elite that educated me was the lack of knowledge we have had as to the number and accurate location of stars. The fact we only knew the approximate location of less than 200,000 stars is pretty sad when you consider the technology we have to hand for the past couple of decades.

It glad to see that Europe is finally putting such technology to use.

It would not surprise me if it ends up fundamentally changing our view of the galaxy we live in. It may challenge theories such as the big bang and the development of the universe and stellar bodies.

Indeed this could have some fascinating revelations. There are 400 million previously uncatalogued objects alone :eek:
 
I wonder if 400 billion is an exact number. Most of the time the press articles speak of 100 to 200 billion stars. On Wikipedia, for example, they say 234 billion according to a recent estimation

Almost certainly not. I chose it purely as Elite's magic number!
 
I'd be interested to know Frontier are looking at the Gaia data and figuring out if they can tweak their simulation.
If their stars are out of place by small margins I'm sure no one will mind if they are all pushed into their correct places. I guess the issue would be if the distance between stars changes too much it might impact the number of jumps required - although, I believe there are actually more stars in the Gaia data than we previously thought existed, so actually we could get some new systems added to the game, if Mr Braden OBE wants to keep the game as close to real science as possible.
Maybe a new Poll from the devs - should the current stellar forge be altered to reflect the Gaia findings?
 
I'd be interested to know Frontier are looking at the Gaia data and figuring out if they can tweak their simulation.
If their stars are out of place by small margins I'm sure no one will mind if they are all pushed into their correct places. I guess the issue would be if the distance between stars changes too much it might impact the number of jumps required - although, I believe there are actually more stars in the Gaia data than we previously thought existed, so actually we could get some new systems added to the game, if Mr Braden OBE wants to keep the game as close to real science as possible.
Maybe a new Poll from the devs - should the current stellar forge be altered to reflect the Gaia findings?

I think that David wants that the galaxy of ED is as close as possible of the reality. Even if it will take time
 
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