Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System — mentioned by abecedarius

Fri, 18 May 2018 02:31:09 GMT

Not an astronomer, but let's try going by Wikipedia: Neptune has apparent magnitude of about 8. If you displaced it to twice as far, it'd become 16 times as dim (twice the distance, squared). The scale of apparent magnitude is a factor of 2.512 per step, so that'd be a change of about 3, to magnitude 11. The biggest ground-based telescopes can go up to around 24-26, if you dedicate significant observing time. So (26-8)/3=6 doublings: they could detect Neptune at 64 times as far out as it is, if they knew where to look. That's ~1900 AU. But of course Neptune is bigger and likely more…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System · HackerPapers discussions

Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System — mentioned by abecedarius