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Is there any reason, apart from not knowing exactly where to look, that we can't find such a planet by watching for when it passes in front of stars?
by hanoz 10y ago
Is there any reason, apart from not knowing exactly where to look, that we can't find such a planet by watching for when it passes in front of stars?
- KMag 10y agoI'm not an astronomer, but I imagine there are too many small untracked objects, between Mars and Jupiter for instance, that periodically occlude stars. I imagine the signal-to-noise ratio is too high to start a search every time something blocks a star. How many millions of times per day must an asteroid somewhere block a star as visible from Earth? Gravitational perturbations are a smaller signal, but the signal-to-noise ratio is better, I imagine.
- hanoz 10y agoMaybe although I make a 10 times the size of earth planet at 20 times the distance of Neptune equivalent to a 77km wide main belt asteroid, so maybe not all that noisy. Plus the predicted orbit tilt must help a lot. Sounds like a doable big data problem to me.