Discovered: The Most-Distant Solar System Object Ever Observed

1.) police will tell you that eye witnesses are highly inaccurate

2.) psychologists can tell you all about the way people hurt themselves with inaccurate narratives about themselves

3.) human rights activists work constantly against narratives that take a racial category as a first class character, with real and knowable attributes

And those problems arise on Earth. At least since Einstein's Theory Of Relativity we've known that normal human narrative will not extend to space. And yet people want to this to be true. There is a kind of nostalgia that infects most writing about space, a belief that our exploration of space can be like the discovery of the frontier in centuries past. Even intelligent people sometimes talk this way, even though they know it is an inaccurate way to think about the universe.

I suppose this is sort of in the category of "Why do 99% of sci-fi movies act as if there is a gravity on spaceships, or assume a technology that can easily assume that a 1 G warp of the space time continuum does not itself warp the ship into a ball?"

Basically, people don't want their sci-fi stories to be too accurate. And I guess that's fine. Maybe it's all just entertainment. But then we shouldn't take that entertainment and act like any of it can ever be real.

It might be settled by artificial general intelligence either by a giant neural net occupying the resources or smaller AGIs ....

These wouldn't have the limits of humans and the issues of gravity and light and reproduction won't be an issue.

Or we just send replicants...

Planet Nine's orbit, if it exists, takes it somewhat further away from the Sun than Sedna.

If you have a big enough telescope and point it at something long enough, you can almost always resolve it better than just one pixel.

There is one hard physical limit though. Due to the expansion of space, there are in fact objects so far away that their light will never reach Earth---one might say that space is expanding them away from us at faster than the speed of light.

And because this expansion is actually getting faster all objects are actually accelerating away from us. That means all the time, there are objects that speed up from sub-lightspeed to super-lightspeed as they move away from us. Once they cross that lightspeed barrier, their light can never reach us again.

So it's concievable that we might just happen to capture the last photon of some object that will ever reach us. In that sense, then, some objects are indeed so far away that for a brief period of time, any image of them can only hope to be a single pixel, no matter how good your resolution or magnification.

The other thing to consider with distant galaxies is that they are moving away from us very quickly. The further away they are, the faster they are receding, and the more red-shifted their spectrum becomes. This is why JWST has different spectral response from Hubble.

Is there a physical limit on how much magnification is possible?

I had always thought of the solar system ending with the planets with some ambiguity about the ort cloud

But thinking about it as a system influenced by the biggest gravity well makes a lot more sense

And yet, Voyager 1 and 2 have now "left the solar system" and entered interstellar space. It looks to me like the definition of what's part of the solar system is a bit squishy.