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Well, we’ve come about a hundred light years from Sol, and if you’ve read much space-based SF (or works on astronomy), you know that a sphere this size is the merest speck out of the vastness that is our galaxy. Even if we were to go, say, another hundred light years out, we’d be covering a volume of space eight times the one we’ve just gone through (look up the formula for the volume of a sphere if you don’t believe me!).
I hope these entries have shown that with all the information floating around out there, today’s writer of interstellar SF has no excuse to stick with the old standbys of Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti in picking locations, whether for human colony planets or home worlds for alien species. There are plenty of F and G stars just a little further beyond, and just as suitable for these purposes. And if K or M stars are more your thing, well, there are even more of those.
Now, maybe it suits your purposes to locate all your stars within 100 light years of Sol. If so, terrific -- there are plenty of wonderful SF series that take place within that area.
On the other hand, maybe you need data on a star that is farther away. Maybe you want to do a story on the day our peaceful near-Sol confederacy finally makes contact with another civilization based 150 light years away… or 200... or 400. And to keep the science in your story as hard as possible, you want to locate this new civilization around a real star, one that’s farther out than the ones listed on this blog. What to do?
Your starting point is this valuable resource: the Geneva-Copenhagen Survey of the Solar Neighbourhood, which I’ve already mentioned a couple of times. It’s a listing of F and G stars within a few hundred parsecs of Sol, and includes important data such as age and metallicity for many of them.
Let’s try an exercise to show how you can use the database. Here’s the link to the query page, located on the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg website: http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=V/130 . Click on the button that says, “V/130/gcs3” and play around some. Tomorrow I will go through an exercise in using it.
I hope these entries have shown that with all the information floating around out there, today’s writer of interstellar SF has no excuse to stick with the old standbys of Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti in picking locations, whether for human colony planets or home worlds for alien species. There are plenty of F and G stars just a little further beyond, and just as suitable for these purposes. And if K or M stars are more your thing, well, there are even more of those.
Now, maybe it suits your purposes to locate all your stars within 100 light years of Sol. If so, terrific -- there are plenty of wonderful SF series that take place within that area.
On the other hand, maybe you need data on a star that is farther away. Maybe you want to do a story on the day our peaceful near-Sol confederacy finally makes contact with another civilization based 150 light years away… or 200... or 400. And to keep the science in your story as hard as possible, you want to locate this new civilization around a real star, one that’s farther out than the ones listed on this blog. What to do?
Your starting point is this valuable resource: the Geneva-Copenhagen Survey of the Solar Neighbourhood, which I’ve already mentioned a couple of times. It’s a listing of F and G stars within a few hundred parsecs of Sol, and includes important data such as age and metallicity for many of them.
Let’s try an exercise to show how you can use the database. Here’s the link to the query page, located on the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg website: http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=V/130 . Click on the button that says, “V/130/gcs3” and play around some. Tomorrow I will go through an exercise in using it.