4 ms·
Keeping in mind that the star is 1480 light-years avay, the fleet passed across the star about thousand years ago. Or they're still flying toward us...
by jerry40 10y ago
Keeping in mind that the star is 1480 light-years avay, the fleet passed across the star about thousand years ago. Or they're still flying toward us...
- bdavisx 10y agoAnd considering time dilation, it could be 10s or 100s of thousands of years before they would get here anyway (from our point of view).
- pmontra 10y agoOr very close to us, so even a relatively small fleet can dim a star. Not necessarily headed toward us.
- joeclark77 10y agoThey don't have to be right there by the star. They could be small ships just a few million miles away, maybe.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoSpace is, technically speaking, "really big".
- jawilson2 10y agoYou just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
- venomsnake 10y agoAn appropriate HG2G quote gets downvoted on HN ... the younguns have no respect and appreciation for the old masters.
- dalke 10y agoIt's 93 million miles to the Sun and 1/4 million miles to the Moon. "A few million miles away" places it very close by. Even a few billion miles is still inside the solar system. Pluto is about 4 billion miles away. It's difficult for something to stay between the Earth and a star and be nearby. The Earth moves around the Sun - this provides a baseline to measure stellar parallax, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax - and anything close to the Sun is also affected by it gravity. That "close" includes regions well beyond Pluto. "Occultations" are when one object blocks another. For example, detailed observations of when Pluto went by a star gave us clues that Pluto has a very thin atmosphere. Asteroids also cause occultations, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occultation#Occultations_by_asteroids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occultation#Occultations_by_as... . They can be used to figure out the size of an object. That page shows an depiction of a occultation by Makemake, which is 50 AU out (further out than Pluto). Its shadow is on the Earth for only a few minutes, and it's over 1400km across.
- joeclark77 10y agoI just keep hoping they'll get here before November, though, so I can write in Kodos on the ballot.