geni
2018-05-14 21:26:49 UTC
What's making you happy this week?
The Gaia data release 2 data is out. Gaia being an ESA spacecraft thatis measuring the the position of about a billion stars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)
The most straightforward application is you can chuck pretty much any
star in the milky way that we have an article on into the search
function at:
http://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/
And get an accurate distance to it. For example wikipedia says WR 25
is about 7500 lightyears away. Once you've converted through from
milli arcseconds (mas) Gaia says 68500 (divide by a 1000 then divide 1
by that number to get the parsecs distance then multiply by 3.26 to
get lightyears).
Beyond stars the improved Cepheid variable measurements will allow us
to update the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies
article with better data and hopefully get a new study on what is an
isn't in the local group (most of the sources I'm finding for that are
from around 2000 and things have moved on).
--
geni
geni