Learning more about the Cosmos through Elite Dangerous.

[Khavi]

I've always been fascinated with astronomy, but little did I know that a sci-fi game would be more than just a game. Recently I came across a star system that had more than one star. I have heard of binary star systems and trinary, but I had no clue that there were star systems with even more. Yep, some solar systems can have multiple stars(binary being the most common). So after coming across a few systems like this I looked it up to see just how accurate it was. It turns out the game does depict some of these stars systems pretty accurately.

It was this one system though that really sparked my interest. It had a pair of stars near each other(less than an (AU distance apart - in fact extremely close). I expected them to be locked in a high speed dance of spiraling death as they orbited one another. They didn't seem to be moving from my point of view. Turns out some of these binary star systems do not all orbit each other at high speeds even when they are very close. Yes, some can take a mere hour to orbit one another, but there are plenty more that can take 100's if not 100's of thousands of years to make one orbit.

How cool is that?

So this sceenshot of these two stars orbiting each other at a very, very slow rate is accurate, and I have this game to thank for educating me further on the motion of stellar bodies.

 

[Caspar]

It is, frankly, an amazing experience to fly round this Galaxy and see the representation that FD have managed to create. I quite frequently hit Google or Wikipedia for info about a system / star or anomaly I'm about to encounter. For instance, after visiting Sol today, I jumped to Epsilon Indi and checked details about the system on the net. I also got side tracked the other day reading up about Brown Dwarfs.

I wonder if an in game link to Wikipedia would be a good thing (skinned for the ED UI).

 

[Lokes]

TIL motion and speed is relative. Nice screenshot for reference.

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I wonder if an in game link to Wikipedia would be a good thing (skinned for the ED UI).

Sounds like a great addition to the Android/iOS companion app.

 

[Geers]

I am less impressed. But that's probably because I already know all about this stuff.

But hey if the game is creating more active interest in space I'm all for it. Maybe the superpowers can stop wasting money on aircraft carriers and build that ' moon base already.