That is tremendous, thanks for sharing. Congratulations to all the New Horizons folks! I look forward to our upcoming fly-by of the object that caused the occultation. With five different observations of the occultation I would imagine that they will be able to get some decent information on the size/shape of the object.
I have seen the transit of Venus but to see this a team find an occlusion that only occurs for milliseconds is is awe inspiring! Congrats to the people who made this happen!
> "A primitive solar system object that’s more four billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) away passed in front of a distant star as seen from Earth." Did they forget a "than" after "more" and before "four"? Or is it "a mere"?
should have been "more than". "Mere" does not make sense with a huge figure such as "four billion miles" IMO.
Agreed. Four billion miles could be nothing in space-talk though, as most distances I see are in light-years.
I think "mere" kind of makes sense at these scales?
I mean the nearest known star (Proxima Centauri) is 40,208,000,000,000 km away. (Guess it depends on whether you're using "American" Billions or not...)
Given that you're talking about an object in our solar system, I think almost all astronomers would not use "mere" or parsecs.
Ah, missed the "in our solar system" bit :).
They just fixed it on their article. It is "more than".
What are "American" Billions? I'm an American and AFAIK our 'billions' is the same as anyone else's.
(I can't vouch for the specific wording, but search for "American".)
Reading this I wondered that if NASA's New Horizon's team had actually struck gold, could they use the money in their budget to do more Kuiper Belt probes?
Or would it be diverted to the Shelby Launch System?
For a moment there, I was wondering what NASA was doing prospecting for gold in Argentina.
Can someone explain why they had to set up a temporary telescope in Argentina to get data from a probe? If the article explained it, I missed that part.
They used Earth based telescopes to find a more accurate information about MU69. In order for New Horizons to get good pictures they need to know exactly where it is, how big it is, and how reflective it is.