KBO encounters |
KBO encounters |
Aug 2 2008, 12:53 PM
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#501
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Newbie Group: Members Posts: 6 Joined: 1-August 08 Member No.: 4280 |
Hi,
I’m regular follower of NH and I’m also interested in the 2nd leg of the mission, i.e the 2016+ KBOs encounters. Does anyone know when operations about this leg (starting with searching objects of interest with HST or some other earth-based means, I suppose) are expected to begin ? |
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Feb 4 2019, 06:59 PM
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#502
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3516 Joined: 4-November 05 From: North Wales Member No.: 542 |
Can you elaborate on the statement 'Individual stars co-align'? Do you mean that we see mutual eclipses of random pairs of stars in these star clouds? I was not aware of this and would find it very surprising if true. My understanding has been that the apparent crowding of stars in images such as the one you post has to do mainly with each star appearing enlarged by diffraction and other effects. As to background illumination from dust and gas, surely a putative KBO a few km across would not be observable in silhouette against this ???
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Feb 4 2019, 10:31 PM
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#503
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
Sorry to be unclear. What I'm referring to showed up in the Kepler analysis, though the specifics were different: Sometimes two stars' alignment will be close enough that they cannot be distinguished, with ground telescopes of any kind, from a single star. Effectively, you have a pixel of a certain brightness and a transit, instead of blacking a star out to zero will diminish the brightness of the pixel from a nonzero value to some lesser nonzero value. In principle, the occultation could become non-boolean: a given observer could see an occultation begin as one star is occulted, then deepen as the second is, then slack off as the first ceases to be occulted. And this could be true of more that two stars – four, six, eight – there is no limit.
In this paradigm, with an unknown astrophysical reality behind the observation, it could be very challenging or even impossible to interpret what observers recorded. Perhaps the KBO could be tracked as it moved from pixel to pixel – but I suspect that signal to noise ratios would make a conclusive interpretation challenging. |
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