Considering we only know it’s there because it slightly dims the light from its star as it crosses during its orbit, you would be correct. At that distance, we would never see light bouncing off the actual planet. Even the star is basically a single pixel. We can estimate its size and orbit based on how quickly it crosses in front of the star and how much the light dims, and using those two numbers we can estimate its distance from Kepler 452.
I thought they could also see atmospheric composition as it passes in front of the star, no? Having that info and the data you’ve just mentioned they postulate if it’s habitable or not. Obviously not seeing any detail at all about land mass shapes, but perhaps composition? I’m not a spaceologist, so I’m only musing.
Yeah, but it’s still just a single pixel of light from the star. It just changes color slightly when the planet passes in front of it and the atmosphere gases absorb certain characteristic wavelengths.
We can build a telescope to see this by the way. The lens being the gravitational warping of spacetime by the sun. We go waaaay past the orbit of Pluto (I forgot the exact distance) and send probes there. We can have quite nice pictures of planets up to pretty nice distances.
FOCAL would be able to observe only objects that are right behind the Sun from its point of view, which means that for every observed object a new telescope would have to be made.[3]: 33 [5]
Thinking about it this isn’t necessarily true in that moving the FOCAL relatively little could yield new things to observe (even microarcseconds). So you wouldn’t need a new FOCAL to measure each new thing. However each FOCAL would be measuring a miniscule bit of space over its lifetime. Which means for each distinct object that isn’t basically a neighbour in angular terms to a FOCAL sent you’d need a new FOCAL probably. Unless our long term energy generation/harvesting and propulsion in deep space significantly improves technology wise.
lol. All those flyby probes we’ve sent to other planets in the system and we could’ve just pointed our interstellar telescope instead and looked for puddles.
There’s no way in hell we have the resolution to see continents in another star system.
It’s called Project Hail Mary you ding dong! We sent someone there in a last ditch effort to save the Earth!
These are always illustrations based on whatever data we could gather. We almost never “see” the planets themselves.
Considering we only know it’s there because it slightly dims the light from its star as it crosses during its orbit, you would be correct. At that distance, we would never see light bouncing off the actual planet. Even the star is basically a single pixel. We can estimate its size and orbit based on how quickly it crosses in front of the star and how much the light dims, and using those two numbers we can estimate its distance from Kepler 452.
I thought they could also see atmospheric composition as it passes in front of the star, no? Having that info and the data you’ve just mentioned they postulate if it’s habitable or not. Obviously not seeing any detail at all about land mass shapes, but perhaps composition? I’m not a spaceologist, so I’m only musing.
Yeah, but it’s still just a single pixel of light from the star. It just changes color slightly when the planet passes in front of it and the atmosphere gases absorb certain characteristic wavelengths.
We can build a telescope to see this by the way. The lens being the gravitational warping of spacetime by the sun. We go waaaay past the orbit of Pluto (I forgot the exact distance) and send probes there. We can have quite nice pictures of planets up to pretty nice distances.
Easy trip to make; it took the voyagers only about 40 years to pass Pluto?
Depends on your definition of “easy”. Here’s the wiki article about it.
Ah….
Thinking about it this isn’t necessarily true in that moving the FOCAL relatively little could yield new things to observe (even microarcseconds). So you wouldn’t need a new FOCAL to measure each new thing. However each FOCAL would be measuring a miniscule bit of space over its lifetime. Which means for each distinct object that isn’t basically a neighbour in angular terms to a FOCAL sent you’d need a new FOCAL probably. Unless our long term energy generation/harvesting and propulsion in deep space significantly improves technology wise.
Soon, though, using gravitational lensing of the sun. Sometime around 2035 maybe.
lol. All those flyby probes we’ve sent to other planets in the system and we could’ve just pointed our interstellar telescope instead and looked for puddles.
You know that picture we have of the milky way?