'Looking at an Alien Sky': New Horizons Probe Sees Stars From a New View (space.com) 56
Long-time Slashdot reader JoeRobe writes: Space.com and other outlets are reporting on new pictures of Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri sent back from New Horizons. The images show clear parallax between the view from Earth and from the spacecraft 6.9 billion km away. In effect, New Horizons is looking up at a visually different star field than we are... NASA has even created stereoscopic pairs to get a 3D view.
"It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said in a statement, according to Space.com: New Horizons captured the imagery on April 22 and April 23, when the probe was more than 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion kilometers) from its home planet. That's so far away that it took 6.5 hours for the data containing the photos, moving at the speed of light, to travel from New Horizons to mission scientists' inboxes... The parallax demonstration was not done for scientific purposes, Stern told Space.com (though he did note that the New Horizons imagery might find its way into textbooks that discuss the parallax effect). Rather, the main goal was public outreach and engagement, and a desire to provide us all with some cosmic poetry and perspective.
We could get more such demonstrations, and much more data, from New Horizons in the coming years. The probe remains in good health and has enough fuel to fly by yet another object in the 2020s, if a suitable target can be found and NASA approves another mission extension, Stern and other team members have said.
On Friday five New Horizons scientists answered questions on Reddit, including New Horizons contributing scientist and astrophysicist Brian May (also a guitarist for the rock group Queen).
The team pointed out they could hypothetically maintain communication with their interplanetary space probe until it's 200 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is. (It's currently just 47 times as far...) "But power will run out before we get that far...somewhere near 100 times."
"It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said in a statement, according to Space.com: New Horizons captured the imagery on April 22 and April 23, when the probe was more than 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion kilometers) from its home planet. That's so far away that it took 6.5 hours for the data containing the photos, moving at the speed of light, to travel from New Horizons to mission scientists' inboxes... The parallax demonstration was not done for scientific purposes, Stern told Space.com (though he did note that the New Horizons imagery might find its way into textbooks that discuss the parallax effect). Rather, the main goal was public outreach and engagement, and a desire to provide us all with some cosmic poetry and perspective.
We could get more such demonstrations, and much more data, from New Horizons in the coming years. The probe remains in good health and has enough fuel to fly by yet another object in the 2020s, if a suitable target can be found and NASA approves another mission extension, Stern and other team members have said.
On Friday five New Horizons scientists answered questions on Reddit, including New Horizons contributing scientist and astrophysicist Brian May (also a guitarist for the rock group Queen).
The team pointed out they could hypothetically maintain communication with their interplanetary space probe until it's 200 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is. (It's currently just 47 times as far...) "But power will run out before we get that far...somewhere near 100 times."
I wonder what the young earth creationists'll say (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: I wonder what the young earth creationists'll (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah, I've heard many ridiculous things from the earth is 6000 years old creationists, including bananas prove god is real, but never once ever heard them say "parallax cannot be proven".
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I've definitely heard them say that the light from distant stars passes through a whole sky full of wormholes, one for each star. That way,the stars can be as distant as we know them to be, but the universe can still be only 6000 years old. If that were true, however, you wouldn't be able to see the stars through those wormholes if you looked at them from a different angle. So, basically, that would mean that any star more than 6000 light years away would vanish if you saw the sky from a different position.
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The YE creationists that I know assert that the apparent fact that the universe is so old is only a construct of how humanity has experienced time since creation. They assert that God made Adam and Eve as fully formed human adults, and there is no reason whatsoever that God could not have made the universe in an already mature state as well, not so much to trick mankind or to test them, as much as what to the best of our understanding would be simple expedience. To argue that it must be older than it mig
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When I've suggested variants of last Thursdayism to creationists as a solution to the massive gaps in their theories, they've always rejected it. The wormholes thing is just one idea I've heard from them. Another is that the speed of light used to be far, far faster and that it's been slowing down since the creation of the world. There are obvious glaring holes in that theory as well, of course. That one didn't really have much to do with parallax, of course. I liked the wormhole one because it represents a
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Sure, we can only know the things that we can know and that are knowable. Go too far down that rabbit hole and you're just a brain in a jar and everyone else is a virtually-created philosophical zombie. If we're not just throwing out all knowledge and understanding of the universe, however, then we have all sorts of observations and measurements of the universe. Some theories fit those measurements and observations and some just don't. We can question the measurements and observations, and we certainly shou
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That might be the case, but it it's quite far from logically incontrovertible.
That's true, in that "How do I know it's true? Because it is!" argument is neither provable nor disprovable.
In other words, it's bullshit.
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I have the strong impression, you do not know what a Creationist is. (Hint: Bible and 6k years have nothing to do with it)
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I have the strong impression, you do not know what a Creationist is. (Hint: Bible and 6k years have nothing to do with it)
Everyone here is referring explicitly to the Young Earth version of creationism,
which asserts that the universe is only 6 thousand years old.
This is very publicly promoted by the Christian fundamentalist organization
"Answers in Genesis" which is led by some Australian twit named Ken Ham.
The vast majority of Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. accept
this as literally "literal truth".
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I've heard both many times.
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Please quote a source!
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100 times as far from the Sun as the Earth?! (Score:5, Funny)
Those are astronomical distances. Why haven't scientists standardized on a convenient unit for measuring interplanetary distances? Having an easily remembered unit for such astronomical distances would make it easy to discuss them.
Maybe we could call it the "mean Earth-Sun distance unit", or Awesomely-big Unit for short.
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"AU" works for me but I'd shorten it to just "Awesome Unit".
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Re:100 times as far from the Sun as the Earth?! (Score:4, Funny)
Your problem seems to be too many pints, not too few....
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The thing is te au is to small so you end op with numbers that quickly become un practical, 1 parsec=~3.2 lightyears=~206KAU so i would say that measuring things on a galactic scale is a lot easier wit parsecs and lightyears than AUs due to the reduction in digits that realy ar insignificant on these scales, we could messure evrything in Km ( that is a relatable enough unit for most of the world population) but then we would quickly need to doncientigic notation 1.210^8 which unfortunatly just confuse a lot of people even more.
And of course, 12 parsecs= 1 SKR (Standard Kessel Run)
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And of course, 12 parsecs= 1 SKR (Standard Kessel Run)
Well, but don’t forget that’s in Imperial units, which have largely fallen out of favor.
Re: 100 times as far from the Sun as the Earth?! (Score:4, Informative)
As previously noted, interplanetary distances are measured in Astronomical Units (AU) which is the distance between earth and sun.
Interstellar distances are measured in Light Years (LY).
A Parsec is another distance measurement and is equal to about 3.26 LY. It is the distance at which the mean radius of the earth.â(TM)a orbit sub tends an angle of one second of arc..
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"As previously noted"? The entire point of my little joke was that neither TFS nor TFA called it an AU.
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It wasn't in response to YOUR comment. It was described by another poster. I simply clarified the units of measure that ARE actually used regardless of your attempt to be funny or not.
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As previously noted, interplanetary distances are measured in Astronomical Units (AU) which is the distance between earth and sun.
Interstellar distances are measured in Light Years (LY).
The Astronomers I know measure everything in meters using scientific notation.
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Wolf 359 (Score:5, Funny)
Any traces of The Borg?
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Damn you, I was about to post "Any signs of cube-shaped objects?"
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The last we heard is the Borg are still partying-hardy with the night crew of the NCC-1701-D.
Thanks NASA! (Score:5, Interesting)
They're right. it doesn't add much to technical science. "The parallax demonstration was not done for scientific purposes".
But having worked with stereo images and having the trick to focus them without a stereoscope, I looked for quite a while. That is a visceraly and emotionally powerful image. Thanks. I feel my tax dollars were well spent.
Earth's Alien Sky (Score:3)
That is a visceraly and emotionally powerful image.
Really? What NASA seem to have forgotten is that this has already been done with another "spaceship" the planet Earth. The distances to these same nearby stars were measured using the same parallax technique but 6 months apart at opposite points of the Earth's orbit.
Of course, the shift was smaller since the baseline was only 2 AU but it was still noticeable and measurable. Tiny shifts like this are not "alien skies" - they are summer vs winter skies terrestrial skies. Alien skies are when the constella
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Really? What NASA seem to have forgotten is that this has already been done with another "spaceship" the planet Earth. The distances to these same nearby stars were measured using the same parallax technique but 6 months apart at opposite points of the Earth's orbit.
The point is that the observations were made at the same time from that distance apart, not at a 6 month interval.
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Yeah, sure, nothing to see here... sez you.
Over-hyped (Score:2)
Yeah, sure, nothing to see here... sez you.
I did not say that there was nothing to see but calling it a "viscerally and emotionally powerful image" or an "alien sky" when a few nearby stars have shifted imperceptibly as happens every 6 months on Earth is massively overstating it. I agree there is a huge amount of science that you could do with a long baseline provided that the probe has the correct instruments so why not focus on that instead of trying to overhype it into something which is really is not?
Hey you kids, (Score:2)
get off of my stereoscopic baseline!
Re: Earth's Alien Sky (Score:2)
Actually the reason this is interesting is that you can visibly see the parallax in stereoscopic images. Like NASA says, there's no scientific value. There have been other, more precise parallax measurements using telescopes, but they're not clearly discernible using the naked eye the way this is. And this is not the same as "winter sky vs summer sky". Those skies aren't different due to parallax, and the constellations don't change shape.
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Can it be used to verify? (Score:2)
We have a predicted map of the relative (x, y, z) positions of the nearest billion stars, so we know what the view should look like from New Horizons' vantage point.
Could we compare that against observation to see if the map is correct?
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The special purpose parallax measuring instruments / telescopes on earth, and nearby spacecraft are much more accurate,. even though they only have the size of the earth's orbit to work with. . I'm sure they will check that the new horizons measurement matches previous measurements, but it would be very surprising if it did not.
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It would be surprising, but it's always good to verify something using independent data sets if you can and this is about as independent as you can get. I've a lot of trust in the 3D maps the ESA? has produced, but the scientist side of me always likes data validated.
Dayum Brian (Score:4, Funny)
> New Horizons contributing scientist and astrophysicist Brian May (also a guitarist for the rock group Queen).
Keep trying new things, Brian, eventually you'll be successful at something. ;)
I note he is not just "a guitarist" for Queen, but co-founder of the group.
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This isn't new for him, actually. He was working on his phD when Queen exploded. A few decades later he finished his phD, which, because it was started in the 70's actually includes FORTRAN code in it. He was doing research on dust in space IIRC.
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Stereo? (Score:2)
That's neat, but I'll wait for the Dolby Pro Logic II AC-3 5.1 Digital Atmos DTS Thingamajig version.
Wolf (Score:2)
I assume the big star is Wolf 359. If I go crosseyed, the two large nearby stars look closes. But Wolf 359 is one of the closest stars to Earth. Therefore the stereo images are set to be "look through with a thousand yard stare, like those magic pictures.
So you have to flip the orientation.
MORE LIKE THIS PLEASE (Score:2, Informative)
Dear Slashdot Editors,
Please post more stories like this please, and fewer that concern social issues.
Thanks.
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Oh gawd yes!
You know, these social stories wouldn't' be completely bad if these social issue stories has a shred of objectivity and simply reported what happened. Instead they leave out pertinent information so the author/editor/moderator can substantiate her viewpoint, thus they end up as nothing more than an opinionated editorial piece where the author is saying little other than how you should think and feel, often with quotes from random twitter users in a feeble attempt to add validity to her point o
The stereoscopic views are really neat (Score:2)