NASA creates alien's eye view of solar system

physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com

32 points·mars··3 comments

Nice video and really like the closed captioning! I was able to get the gist of it with the volume turned all the way down as I usually watch videos when the kids are watching T.V.

So if I understand this correctly, it all boils down to how far the aliens are? If they're too far, there is no way to discern that there are planets around here, but if they're close enough they can detect the presence of a large source of gravity that would potentially intrigue them enough to make a closer look?

Or more to the point, it means our chances of discovering inhabitable exoplanets are next to zero despite there being a near infinite number of such, simply because even when we do discover them, what we really discovered is a planet from thousands or even millions of years ago. Useful!

I'm not sure that was the conclusion at all.

They modeled the dust particles in the solar system at various stages of the solar system's development. They saw that today, Neptune's gravitational pull creates a noticeable footprint in the Kuiper belt (a massive body of dust and rocks forming a ring outside the orbit of Neptune). When looking at other star systems they could potentially see similar footprints, which would imply the presence of Neptune-sized planets.

They also saw that when modelling the young solar system, the result looked very similar to the Fomalhaut system. This system is known to be young and also known to have at least one large planet. So from that the technique could also be used to identify young star systems that may contain planets.

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