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We’re pointing the JWT pretty far out, so why wouldn’t we just point a camera at this thing?
by neverokay 2y ago
We’re pointing the JWT pretty far out, so why wouldn’t we just point a camera at this thing?
- dotnet00 2y agoPoint it where? We don't know exactly where to look, and it might be far out enough to be barely visible. Pointing a telescope at it requires a precise location.
- sliken 2y agoOr it might be literally invisible, a small black hole fits the observations. Also it's predicted that a star comes with 1,500 AU of the sun every billion years or so, a star could have thrown things out of whack and left.
- perihelions 2y agoJWST has a field of view of 2.2 arcminutes. Same as a 0.6 millimeter pinhole at a distance of 1 meter. It's not a telescope for blind surveying where you don't know where to look (as is the case here)—there's much more suited telescopes for that.
- SJC_Hacker 2y ago+1 for calling it JWST to avoid confusion with JSON Web Token (JWT)
- ksherlock 2y agoIf you step in a pile of dog doo, that's evidence there's a dog. Now just point your camera at it...
- neverokay 2y agoHey, no stupid questions right? But if you suspect it’s a planet, you know it’s in orbit around the sun. Feels like something we can track.
- jjk166 2y agoSaying a planet in our solar system is in orbit around our sun is like saying a shipwreck is underwater. It doesn't narrow down the search region at all. And worse, we don't know it's in orbit around the sun as we don't even know if it exists.
- arthens 2y agoEvery point in the sky is on a possible orbit (or on infinite orbits?), so you are not really reducing the problem space. Our planets' orbit do tend to be somehow aligned, so you could make the (possibly wrong) assumption that the 9th planet is also somehow aligned. This might reduce the search space by 50%+.... but even then you'd still be several orders of magnitude off by the precision needed to go looking for it.