3 ms·
Yes, but presumably it's paste Neptune. Even if it's between the mass of earth (9mm) and jupyter (3M) we aren't going to be able to notice a direct occultation
by sliken 7y ago
Yes, but presumably it's paste Neptune. Even if it's between the mass of earth (9mm) and jupyter (3M) we aren't going to be able to notice a direct occultation.
However a lensing event seems possible, it greatly increases the effective radius of detection and is much more distinctive. Not sure what the smallest lensing event witnessed is, all the ones I'm aware of were a solar mass or more.
- verytrivial 7y agoThe first paragraph of the article is all over this lensing as a way to explain ultra-short crossing times from the OGLE experiment running in Poland. Reference [6] is titled "Constraints on Earth-mass primordial black holes from OGLE 5-year microlensing events [...]" so there's my weekend reading sorted.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoHow does that work, aren't distant stars point like? I guess the bigger problem is the shadow will be very thin and we're unlikely to correctly guess where it lands.
- sliken 7y agoRight, stars are (effectively) point sources light. But if you take images of stars like the LSST is where you can get the entire sky every few days you'll find anomalous stars that weren't on previous exposures. I don't know the physics enough to know if a small (earth to neptune mass) blackhole could redirect enough star lights to detectable by an earth (or earth orbit) telescope. With a huge database containing the time series of the sky you can start searching for unknown objects that stick out because they are a change from the previous exposures for that part of the sky. With enough data mining of those previous exposures you could find likely candidates and get telescope time to check out where you expect it to be next. This is similar to how things like Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov were found.