Strange path in the stars- Prefix 2MASS

Edith_The_Hutt · Jun 19, 2015

I might be late to the party but I just found something weird in the galaxy map. It's a straight line of stars a few LY wide and a few hundred LY long. They all have the Prefix MASS2.

The string is about 1500ly from Imperial Space, slightly behind the California Nebula.

I'm heading out there to take a look myself but I figured some of the more professional explorers might want to take a look too.

Screen shot:

Ripster · Jun 19, 2015

I love your name .... Apologies, not even read your post yet, just wanted to say - GREAT

iain666 · Jun 19, 2015

The galaxy includes a lot of real stars harvested from actual star catalogues where the distances from Sol are reasonably accurate.

Some of those are on lines (because someone's pointed a telescope at a small patch of the sky and taken a detailed survey) and those lines we've looked along in the real galaxy sometimes come up looking like that.

2MASS will be stars from this lot

Ripster · Jun 19, 2015

iain666 said:
The galaxy includes a lot of real stars harvested from actual star catalogues where the distances from Sol are reasonably accurate.

Some of those are on lines (because someone's pointed a telescope at a small patch of the sky and taken a detailed survey) and those lines we've looked along in the real galaxy sometimes come up looking like that.

2MASS will be stars from this lot

Now I have got over your name - I AGREE WITH IAIN 100% *nods*

Zenith · Jun 19, 2015

The map is telling you what it is.

NGC 1333
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_1333
APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140306.html

This is the SIMBAD entry for the stars in the nebula...
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/s...ldren=278&submit=children&hlinksdisplay=h_all

If you cross reference a few of the stars you can see on the map, you'll see them on the list.

Edith_The_Hutt · Jun 20, 2015

Thanks all. Here was me thinking I'd found the secret source of the Thargoids and it turns out to be an artifact of the stellar forge

I'm slowly making my way towards it for the sake of checking it out. I'll post here if it looks cool or unusual up close.

thehairymob · Jun 20, 2015

Just watch for space monsters. They like moving stars about for nesting purposes.

Zulu Romeo · Jun 20, 2015

Yeah, I had a travel down that route a while back. I called it the River of Dreams, as I was having hallucinations about 1.2 at the time...

SplashX2 · Jun 21, 2015

Zion Ravescene said:
Yeah, I had a travel down that route a while back. I called it the River of Dreams, as I was having hallucinations about 1.2 at the time...

Can you recommend a visit? ^^ This "River of Dreams" is quite long... did you come by something worth the visit besides the nebula?

Zulu Romeo · Jun 21, 2015

SplashX2 said:
Can you recommend a visit? ^^ This "River of Dreams" is quite long... did you come by something worth the visit besides the nebula?

I only sped down to the bottom and back. I had forgotten that it was associated with the nebula NGC 1333, but it is rich in red dwarfs and occasional white stars. There are tons of planets there, though: some terraform candidates and even one or two Earth likes. The very bottom has a decent view of the Milky Way and intergalactic space a few hundred light years from the central plane.

drkaii · Jun 23, 2015

Weird I am on my way there now, by coincidence, 2 days after readying this thread. They really do look like a clump of 2MASS data that has been stuck in but not blended in with the procedural stars around it properly. I saw something similar in the Bernards loop area

Zulu Romeo · Jun 23, 2015

drkaii said:
Weird I am on my way there now, by coincidence, 2 days after readying this thread. They really do look like a clump of 2MASS data that has been stuck in but not blended in with the procedural stars around it properly. I saw something similar in the Bernards loop area

Yes, I think that one is the Orion nebula stellar nursery being generated that way.

It could also explain why NGC 7822, the curious line of stars headed out in the other direction, looks the way it does. Possibly coincidence with respect to the current investigations going on out there.

drkaii · Jun 23, 2015

Zion Ravescene said:
Yes, I think that one is the Orion nebula stellar nursery being generated that way.

It could also explain why NGC 7822, the curious line of stars headed out in the other direction, looks the way it does. Possibly coincidence with respect to the current investigations going on out there.

Weird that a stellar nursery is comprised only of M class stars mind you, but yeah, that does seem to be what's going on

Zenith · Jun 23, 2015

You'll find a number of the NGC open star clusters are laid out in a row.
The row also points directly to Sol.

If you were to look at these rows from Earth, you'd simply see a tight star cluster.
NGC 1333, NGC 7822, NGC 6231 ... all rows of stars that relate to clusters seen in the sky.

NGC 6231, you can see it stretching in a row.

Now looking in a direct line between the last star and Sol. It's a tight cluster.

CaptainKremmen · Jun 23, 2015

Pretty sure this is due to real-world measurements of bearing and distance, fed into the game as-is. Everything humans do and see is all from a single point in the galaxy... right here on Earth... for now, at least!

To get a position for a star, we need bearing and distance, as measured by astronomers here on this planet.

If there is a cluster of stars, and a bearing/distance is measured separately for each one, then the error factor of the distance measurement will start to distort the positioning.

If these stars are 1500LY away, and each one's position is assessed with a distance measurement accurate to (say) 99.95%, that means any star could be plotted to within +/-75LY of its true position. Measure 50 such stars in a cluster, and each one could be positioned on something like a bell curve with a 150 LY spread. Please excuse my wild finger-in-the-wind, number-plucking-from-the-air extravagance here.

If the bearing was measured inaccurately too, those stars would be spread out all over the place in their galaxy map plots. But, seeing as these things are all in a tight line, bearing is obviously something we can measure with spectacular precision, and nothing to do with the distance assessment.

Perhaps some "real star" ED galaxy positions could do with gentle massaging from FD, to coax obvious clusters into a sphere...

V'larr · Jul 8, 2016

(totally raising thread this from the dead)

So *that* is what's going on out here.

Shame I didn't think to search about this NGC 1333 tube of stars before I went all the way out to the end of it; I was wondering why everything was already explored and why, at the end of the tube, there were *no more stars* for at least 40-50 ly in any direction....

Qohen Leth · Jul 8, 2016

Edith_The_Hutt said:
Thanks all. Here was me thinking I'd found the secret source of the Thargoids and it turns out to be an artifact of the stellar forge

I'm slowly making my way towards it for the sake of checking it out. I'll post here if it looks cool or unusual up close.

No offense, but it's a pretty huge feature on the map. Many have scrapped the galaxy map for months if not years, before you, so you can be sure something as large as this has been surveyed for a long time. Problem with a playground this large, the later new players (or rather, explorers) come into the research, the more info they had to catch up on, the harder it is for them to know if they found something new or not, the more threads open, saying the same things, asking the same questions...

Not pointing at you, just observing. Been playing for 6 months, so much has been found/seen/written already since i started...

V'larr · Jul 8, 2016

Qohen Leth said:
No offense, but it's a pretty huge feature on the map. Many have scrapped the galaxy map for months if not years, before you, so you can be sure something as large as this has been surveyed for a long time. Problem with a playground this large, the later new players (or rather, explorers) come into the research, the more info they had to catch up on, the harder it is for them to know if they found something new or not, the more threads open, saying the same things, asking the same questions...

Not pointing at you, just observing. Been playing for 6 months, so much has been found/seen/written already since i started...

I'd just like to point out you replied to a post from over a year ago.

My fault for necroing the topic, but it seemed the most appropriate place to comment about the NGC 1333 'tube'.

Qohen Leth · Jul 8, 2016

V'larr said:
I'd just like to point out you replied to a post from over a year ago. My fault for necroing the topic, but it seemed the most appropriate place to comment about the NGC 1333 'tube'.

Oh gawd xD That ONE time I don't check the date xD

Well, still valid for the overall point