Database which anyone could've looked up

He's already co-author of some papers with Prof. Poliakoff about the Periodic Videos

If you're using quotes might as well use the actual words of the professor?

It's clear why YOU aren't a salesman either. They NEVER said it was important - 'they' said it was trivial. The professor said it was important - before saying it wasn't - in the grand scheme of things. Your point was mostly right but you worded it totally wrong.

elevown He might be a "reporter" tho. They tend to do that on purpose! :D

well this is because this is a channel mostly about the messier objects and now they're getting into the boring objects, but also these are professors and they have to teach there classes and do the things that phds have to do like write articles.

Thank you.

Well, scientifically, it has nothing new to mention. It is only important for people doing something with the Messier catalogue. They are mostly amateurs, not the public for ArXive.

Ronald de Rooij your last sentence made no sense....at all

Nuno Monteiro Ha!

One could think about the Kessler run as a navigational challenge, where the goal is to navigate your way through a "maze" in as short a distance as possible :P

rs0n I don't think that writers of Han Solo movie would catch on this idea, unless we make it viral somehow?

Yeah that's probably not going to happen. It doesn'r really fit the narrative of the movie, but it's a nice way to approach it i think, at least for me :)

moonasha I think it is in the ranges of about 8-9 kpc for certain types of stars.

wolfedog99 see 6:25

That is just the conversion to lightyears, it doesn't explain why parsecs are a thing.

I can attempt to explain: When you look at a star a few months apart (as Gaia did) you measure the angular distance the star looks like it moved in the sky. This angle is usually measured in milliarcseconds and you can see it at 6:25 under "parallax (mas)". Now if you draw a right triangle where the base of the triangle are the two spots Gaia was at and the star is the third vertex, then you can find the distance by trigonometry. For convenience we define 1parsec = the distance to an object that has a parallax angle of 1arcsecond, when seen from two points seperated by 1 AU (the radius of earth's orbit). The thing to remember here is just 1pc = 1AU per arcsecond of parallax. parsec = parallax + arcsecond So Gaia reported a parallax of 7.1 milliarcseconds. To find the distance in parsecs you do 1/7.1x10^-3 = 141 pc The reason astronomers like to do it this way is we don't have to muck around with units to find a distance. Because of the way it's defined we know the distance is always just 1 / the parallax angle. Hopefully that made sense. A video wouldn't be a bad idea. There's a lot of nifty and subtle tricks about how coordinates and distances are measured that could seem really weird at first.

What makes the unit Parsec so conceptually tricky is the inverse correlation of measured parallax shift with distance, unlike most other units of measure. Keep in mind that a big parallax shift comes from near objects, and a small shift means the object is far away. So, 1 arc second of shift gives one Parsec, but two arc seconds shift would halve the estimated distance to 0.5 parsecs. To do the conversion from measured parallax shift, it's a simple inverse ratio multiplier. The geometry is elegantly simple if you recall that for small angles, sin(theta) is ~theta in radians, which allows a simple inverse ratio multiplier equation to work. The choice of 6 months is arbitrarily convenient, ignoring confounding factors like orbital eccentricity. Once the measured parallax shift is converted to parsec units, parsecs are then converted to other length measurements like any other unit. So, be careful to read questions carefully to avoid confusion.

ah hell, why didn't they use radians? Would have made this particular formula that much easier.

Yes please!

Because it's usually referred to as a "binary star system." If you had multiple "binary stars," you'd have multiple stars with companion stars orbiting them.

exactly the same

That's what space sounds like.

Matt Parsons brontosaurus

Volume is also very low on top of that. I had a Windows sound trigger when this was on and nearly went deaf!! :-(

Sounds like the video was sped up a bit.. Weird

Not to me. At 8:14 when no one is talking you can quite clearly hear what you can faintly hear in all of the video.

Well they later accepted it, so, yeah. It IS significant.

M Lourson no, this is just your dream.

singlespies Couldn't that be any messier than that?

Neil Wilson now THAT'S insanely trivial.