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Comment by pc2g4d | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I really feel these sorts of searches could be automated. Given a database of all known objects in space, attempt to infer likely objects that have not yet been observed. Then automatically direct telescopes to make observations at the inferred location. If they find something, then pass it along to a human for assessment.

Piece by piece the database would grow in coverage. As it does, its power to make predictions of unknown objects should grow, until we've reached the limit of our current instruments' ability to observe.

Yeah?

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A piece of this (automated object searches) has already happened, as you may know. For one of several operational implementations, see:

http://crts.caltech.edu/index.html

The original survey was built for near-Earth objects, but the extra-solar-system transients detected (e.g., supernovae) became the subject of many papers.

The supernova catalog that observations like these compiled -- but from other transient-detection networks -- became the basis of the 2011 Nobel Prize for the observational discovery of dark energy: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/20...

You may be seeking after something harder, which is to use orbit anomalies to infer positions of objects - kind of an automation of all the orbital simulation efforts described in the article. That, of course, has not been done.

Though of course this is the method that led to the discovery of Neptune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune

Yes. Refreshing my memory from the link you gave, it seems like the Neptune searchers would have benefited decisively from image-differencing and all-inclusive source databases -- like the ones that are now automated. Because, during their search for Neptune, they observed it twice without noticing it:

"Only after the discovery of Neptune had been announced in Paris and Berlin did it become apparent that Neptune had been observed on August 8 and August 12 but because Challis lacked an up-to-date star-map, it was not recognized as a planet."

> As it does, its power to make predictions of unknown objects should grow, until we've reached the limit of our current instruments' ability to observe.

Well that's kind of the problem already. For the objects that are interesting, we've either discovered them or they are hard (or impossible) to discover with current instruments. For the ones that are merely hard but not impossible, the process of finding them requires human cleverness or significant telescope resources (and human cleverness can be applied to figure out the best way to direct the limited resources). I'm not really sure that automation helps...

Preaching to the choir! .. however getting time on the correct telescopes at the appropriate times to check those inferred locations could be a problem.

I wonder how they go inferring objects we do know about? If we had no knowledge of venus for instance, how much could we infer about it?

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