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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2016, @04:13PM
Why would a telescope detect curvature?
The hypothesis is that the Earth is a convex sphere of 6397 km radius. This is an easily debunked hypothesis, as with the help of a telescope objects can be trivially spotted "behind" this hypothesized curvature. Therefore, the Earth does not have a shape consistent with that of a convex sphere that is 6397 km in radius.
A gyroscope would as well. I would suggest that you set up a gyroscope and detect that spinning.
No, it will not detect any rotation.
You can follow this very sane suggestion of yours and see this for yourself.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 17 2016, @08:38PM
The hypothesis is that the Earth is a convex sphere of 6397 km radius. This is an easily debunked hypothesis, as with the help of a telescope objects can be trivially spotted "behind" this hypothesized curvature. Therefore, the Earth does not have a shape consistent with that of a convex sphere that is 6397 km in radius.
And we already have people who did that observation and came to different conclusions.
No, it will not detect any rotation.
I already did this with a pendulum which works on the same principle. There are several publicly viewable pendulums that swing 24 hours a day and show the motion in question. There are numerous other observations such as time zones and when the Sun is above the horizon, artificial satellites, the shadow of the Earth on the Moon, and of course, direct observation of Earth from space. There's the rotation of the entire sky around Earth.
So when you say you made a few observations and came to different conclusions than other people, including myself have with considerably more data, then I have to conclude that your observations are simply in error or didn't happen at all.