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I mean, we are finding Pluto sized objects right outside our solar system all the time now.
by Cshelton 9y ago
I mean, we are finding Pluto sized objects right outside our solar system all the time now.
- db48x 9y agoYou forget how big space is.
- eesmith 9y agoIt doesn't seem like it's all the time. Pluto is the largest, Eris is close. Haumea, (225088) 2007 OR10 and Makemake are the only others at least 1/2 the diameter of Pluto. We are finding more trans-Neptunian objects. There's about 2,500 of them. But as Adams said, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." Voyager can only be angled a smidgen from it's current path. There's nothing it can reach to do a slingshot. If Voyager could change its path by 0.1 degree (which it can't), and if all of the trans-Neptunian objects were equally distributed around the Sun (which they aren't - and Voyager is going out of the plane of the ecliptic), then that's still only a 0.2% chance of having something in its path. Even if there were, Pluto gave New Horizons about 5-6 m/s boost. That's effectively nothing compared to Voyager's 17 km/s speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm6ga-g9ACU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm6ga-g9ACU via https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10087/did-the-pluto-flyby-give-new-horizons-any-significant-gravitational-boost https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10087/did-the-plut... .