dcarrera
Member
No. Our "jupiter mass object" blocks the light from 1000's of stars.
By that argument, my thumb can block the entire sky... I expected you to understand that when I say "A Jupiter-mass planet blocks about 1% of the light from a Sun-like star", I am referring to a Jupiter-mass planet that is orbiting said star.
How big does an object have to be to blot out visible stars
if it were in OUR orbit in the Ort cloud?
Just use the formula I posted. Let's put the Oort cloud object at 10,000 AU (as an example) and make the star a Sun-like star at 10 pc. So we want:
R / 10,000 AU = 1 R_Sun / 10pc
That works out to 50% the radius of the Earth. If you put the object at 100,000 AU, then it has to be 5x Earth's radius. So, in principle a gas giant (i.e. Jupiter or Saturn) would be more than enough; provided that you were lucky enough to be looking at the right star when it crossed.
But lets answer another question, are such objects directly visible? Yup
Plenty of dwarf planets hide out beyond Pluto, perhaps steered by something much bigger.
So all the poo poo math goes in the toilet anyway.
Dude. Did you even read that article? Please, actually read it. It has nothing to do with what you are trying to claim. (1) It does not say anything about "plenty of dwarf planets", it is talking about *ONE* dwarf planet. (2) Dwarf planets are in the Kuiper belt; much closer than the Oort cloud. (3) The actual point of the article is the speculation that there might be an Earth-size icy body somewhere out there.
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