Why does the NGC 1333 stars point at the bubble?

[Miscellaneous]

I was studying the Perseus Molecular Cloud area and NGC 1333, and pondering it.

Of course it could be as random as why my pen lying on the desk is pointing at me.. but it's really really unlikely at that distance and third dimension; well go to NGC 1833 nebula n the galaxy map and this is from the side slightly for perspective. But I didn't find any info about that. Just curious, I oh did find a 2016 mention of it without conjecture

NGC 1333 Nebula

So I'm currently investigating the long line of stars from NGC 133 Nebula. Has anyone else been out here yet. Strange how the stars appear on a trajectory with the bubble don't you think.

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[metatheurgist]

It's not so strange. Anything viewed from Earth is a straight line pointing at Earth. The ED galaxy consists of fake stars and some real observed ones. Observational bias means that some real ones will look like they point Earth amidst the noise.

 

[varonica]

Observations from Earth when looking at a narrow field of view will detect stars in that narrow field, but while we can easily determine direction, so all the stars look like they are in line, distance is way harder and most of them are estimates, sometimes you get a lot of stars that appear close together like this, combine that with the narrow view and it looks like the stars are pointing at earth. The procedural stars around it will of course be effectively randomly spread, so it will stand out as a pointer when the data is entered for that observation.

 

[Sapyx]

There are small collections of "real world stars" in the ED starmap; the locations of these stars are derived from catalogue data that was available in 2012 when the map was being created.

Whenever you take a "picture" of a spot in the night sky from Earth, it looks like a square, but you're actually looking at a "tube" of space stretching out to the edge of the galaxy. You can't see the "tube" in the picture, but you can generate it if you have reasonably accurate distance data for each star.

The existence of the "star beams" is made more noticeable by the way the Stellar Forge works. Stellar Forge assigns a certain amount of protomatter to each sector and subsector of the galaxy. It uses this protomatter to generate the procedurally-generated stars, but before it does this, it subtracts from the protomatter the mass of the hand-crafted stars that are hand-placed in those sectors. This means that, in areas where there are lots of hand-coded stars, there are even fewer procedurally-generated stars that are made, so the "beams" stand out even more than they otherwise would have.

Many in-game real-universe nebulae have such "star-beams" associated with them. NGC 1333 is noteworthy as having it's beam be particularly long, and be mainly made up of low-mass dim red stars. Some of these beams are made of B and O class stars, and are visible in the skybox from thousands of LYs away.

 

[Greasetrap42]

It might be different, but a couple years ago I also found a very strange line of stars that stretched a large distance, extending away from the bubble. They were all of a certain star type. It was peculiar. I can't remember its location so this is a terrible story. I assumed it was just weirdness in stellar forge galaxy creation, kinda like the big rectangles and triangle groupings of stars near the center of the galaxy.

 

[Sapyx]

It might be different, but a couple years ago I also found a very strange line of stars that stretched a large distance, extending away from the bubble. They were all of a certain star type. It was peculiar. I can't remember its location so this is a terrible story. I assumed it was just weirdness in stellar forge galaxy creation, kinda like the big rectangles and triangle groupings of stars near the center of the galaxy.

"Cubes" are Stellar Forge oddities, because the galaxy is made of a series of nested cubes, or "boxels". "Triangles" are typically truncated cubes. "Lines" and "beams", on the other hand, are most likely caused by a batch of real-world non-procedurally-generated stars. The procedural cubes are rarely small enough to appear as lines or beams, either in the skybox or on the galaxy map. There's only a couple of places where the "brown dwarf disk" squirts up a couple of mass-code-a boxels, and even these look "cubic" rather than "linear". I though I had a screenshot of one of those here, but I can't find it.

And if you found your "line of stars" on the galaxy map rather than the skybox, then chances are you found the same NGC 1333 star-beam the OP found. It's unique, in both its length (several hundred LY) and in its composition (almost exclusively class M and brown dwarf), making it one of the few star-beams you can't actually see in the skybox at all because most of the stars in the beam are too dim to be visible from other star systems.

 

[Miscellaneous]

A sorta similar star "beam" at the Trifid of the North turns out to point at downtown bubble too. --ed. 10/5 So does Cone Nebula with a thicker stream, where I almost visited but it's permit locked, --10/13/22 so does NGC 7822