SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The ESA's Gaia spacecraft has created the most detailed map of the Milky Way galaxy. Estimates of the number of stars in our galaxy range from 100-400 billion, compared to about a trillion in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy:
The Milky Way has been mapped in greater detail than ever before. And a first quick look indicates that our home galaxy is larger in extent than scientists had thought before, says Gisella Clementini, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Bologna in Italy.
Today, at the European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the first data from its €750 million Gaia star-mapping mission. The new catalog contains sky positions for 1.1 billion stars, 400 million of which have never been seen before. For many stars, the positional accuracy is 300 microarcseconds—the width of a human hair, seen from a distance of 30 kilometers—positions that will help astronomers better determine the 3D layout of the galaxy. "This is far better than anything we've ever had before," says project scientist Timo Prusti of ESA's science and technology center ESTEC in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. "It's a milestone."
[...] A second data release, planned for late 2017, will include even more accurate positions—in some cases up to 10 microarcseconds, or a human hair at a distance of 1000 kilometers. The second release will also contain distances and motions for all 1.1 billion stars
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 16 2016, @10:48PM
The Earth is flat, but it's OK because the Universe is a simulation [independent.co.uk].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Sunday September 18 2016, @03:55PM
"The universe is a simulation" is equivalent to "The universe is real".
A simulation is a process which determines new states based on some rules. It can be used to model reality because, guess what, it was inspired by it, reality has new states that can be modeled after some rules (we dunno the ultimate rules, and if we did we would not be able to prove them as such)
Reality is simply the simulation of which we are part of. Reality for a chess piece is the configuration of the board. Because the cat paw that messes the board does not mess the system called the game of chess, only messes with its representation. The positions of other pieces affect the piece, that is reality for it.