RE: New Horizons Ultima Thule Flyby
January 3, 2019 at 12:42 am
(This post was last modified: January 3, 2019 at 12:43 am by Anomalocaris.)
(January 3, 2019 at 12:17 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: If there were a gas giant in interstellar space, it may as well be invisible. Nobody could create an artificial light source big enough to allow us to see what it looks like.
That’s not quite true. Gas giant planets like Jupiter retain so much of its original heat of accretion that they would glow in infrared from their own internal warmth for 10+ billion years without needing any star to shine upon them. We can use IR to detect a Jupiter like gas giant out to well beyond 2 light year if we knew where to look. We could not miss a Jupiter within of half a light year of the sun. As a matter of fact in an effort to determine whether the sun actually has a distant dim red dwarve companion star, we’ve already conducted whole sky IR surveys that directly ruled out the possibility that there is a Jupiter like gas giant plant anywhere in the outer reaches of the solar system out to about 1000 times the distance to Ultima Thule.
